Bryn Colvin's Blog

Intuition

Western culture prizes logic, reason and being able to explain how you worked something out. It's hammered into us through school maths and science from an early age. On the plus side, reason is, by its very nature, easy to explain to others so they can make their own decisions. Reason does not require trust. [...]

What's wrong with being a witch?

I don't know what angered me more—that tea party candidate Christine O'Donnell trashed witchcraft or that people have a problem with a Wiccan running for political office. I wasn't the only pagan upset about this. When I first saw the video with O'Donnell admitting to dabbling in witchcraft, I thought she was a nut ball [...]

Gratitude

It's very easy to get overwhelmed by the things that aren't right in life. The small setbacks can loom out of all proportion sometimes, while bigger challenges can entirely take over. It's all too easy to get a 'doom and gloom' mentality. There is always something to be glad about, and thankful for. However awful, [...]

Ambition

Some people find it easy to be content with what they have and are able to do. Others are so hungry for something else, that they are driven to achieve and will do anything to meet their goals. Plenty of people fall out somewhere in between. Ambition can be born of many different things – [...]

An Interview with R. Phillip Prince, author.

As a publisher of Pagan/Heathen eBooks via Wyrdwood Publications, I have the pleasure of publishing the children's author R. Phillip Prince. In his eBook, The Mouse in the Viking's Beard, he writes in the style of the old story tellers and brings to the children of today, a wonderful mixture of magic and mayhem. For [...]

Violence in Stories

One of the egroups I'm on (Worlds of Fantasy) got into a debate yesterday about violence in entertainment and in society. Whether or not violence in entertainment has increased was poked around as a notion. We were able to agree that on the whole, humans in western civilizations are not as violent as they used [...]

Wounding and Healing

Last spring at a poetry slam, I listened to a lot of young people expressing a great deal of pain. Much of it clearly came from their relationships with their peers. I remember being a teen all too well – the confusion, hunger and need it created, coupled with no idea how to do relationship. [...]

What Women Want/What Men Need: Listen To Me! by Rie McGaha

After a summer, um, *clears throat* and fall, hiatus due to our house fire in June and then procrastination and trying to get back in the swing of things, I am back to my monthly articles. I've been thinking about what to post for my first month back and I thought about my own relationship [...]

Beyond a Joke

Recently in the UK a man has been found guilty of threatening behaviour (or something of that ilk, I can't quote the precise details, forgive me!) because he tweeted a comment about blowing up an airport. It's created a storm of protest on Twitter, with many people re-tweeting the remark with #iamspartacus as a gesture [...]

Props and costumes

How much gear do you need for ritual? What do you need to wear? Having kit that sets ritual time apart from regular life helps some people move from being in their mundane routines, into a more pagan space. Having dramatic, theatrical items to work with – swords, brooms, cauldrons etc helps bring the experience [...]