Yvonne Aburrow's Blog, page 53

Yes!

And now, having mentioned the things I don’t do, let’s talk about the things I do.

Mostly because they enhance my life in some way.

Making curry on a Friday night. I love cooking, but since I work forty hours a week, I don’t seem to have much energy for it at the moment. But we have created a new thing of me making a different curry every Friday night.

Gardening. Sadly not enough of this either, but I love doing it, especially my herb garden.

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My garden when we lived in Oxford, UK

Tidying. I have recently discovered that I actuall...

Inclusive Wicca on Zazzle

I have created some new products for the inclusive Wicca shop on Zazzle. All profits will go to the First Nations Family and Children’s Caring Society.

View All Products (Canada) View All Products (USA) View All Products (UK)

(be sure to change the link to your own country to get the best deals on shipping and postage)

This calendar contains 12 photos by me.

Each month has a photo that was actually taken in that month.

The inclusive Wicca Calendar 2020

$29.20 CAD 50% Off with code 50OFFGIFTS4U [image error] Cards Snow scene – Merry Yule Holiday Card $4...

Nope

Nimue Brown shared a list of all the stuff she doesn’t do, after reading a list of stuff that Holly Wainwright, an Australian blogger, doesn’t do.

With the overwhelming amounts of lifestyle advice available, it is a wonder that we don’t all just give up and hide under a duvet.

Holly Wainwright writes:

Superwoman Syndrome has shaken off its shoulder pads, pulled on its activewear leggings and buddied up with Hustle Culture to provide you a continual feed of All The Ways You Could Be Better.  If you’re a woman w...

Books I read in October

Three adventures of very different sorts this month: Yiddish for Pirates, Walking to Mercury, and The Fifth Sacred Thing.

Yiddish for Pirates, by Gary Barwin

A novel exploring the events surrounding the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain. Slightly oddly, the hero is an Ashkenazi Jew from Eastern Europe whose shtetl was destroyed. That would explain why the title is Yiddish for Pirates instead of “Ladino for Pirates”. Some of the Sephardic Jews expelle...

Don’t tell me to relax

Does anyone else get that thing where someone tells you to relax and it just makes you feel incredibly tense? Because usually they’re telling you to relax when you’re justifiably tense about something. It’s tantamount to sweeping your fear or frustration or anger under the carpet.

My motto used to be “please don’t tell me to relax, it’s only my tension that’s holding me together”.

People would tell me to relax and I had no idea what ‘relaxed’ felt like. Until I discovered this relaxation technique: starting...

Time and tide

It’s sad to see certain parts of the world abolishing regular time in favour of permanent Daylight Savings Time.

Natural time (hereinafter referred simply to as time for brevity’s sake) is the rising and setting of the sun, and the changing of the seasons, which are caused by the Earth’s axial tilt. In a system that reflects natural time, noon is when the sun is overhead.

Time isn’t a modern invention — people have always measured time.

One likely reason why people built stone circles was to measure time and the s...

New Discord group

Delete Facebook is trending on Twitter after Zuckerberg held a secret meeting with right wing politicians to try to prevent the breakup of Facebook as a monopoly.

I left Facebook last year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It’s been a very good experience for me. Admittedly I haven’t quite quit the Facebook universe as I’m still on Instagram and WhatsApp.

With all that in mind, I thought it might be a good time to try another app for discussion about inclusive Wicca.

So I’ve created a sp...

Ithilien after the war

On being trans in Middle Earth

After the wedding of Faramir and Éowyn, when they had cleansed Ithilien of its hurts, and the land was fair and green once more, Éowyn and Faramir went to the hidden cave behind the waterfall which Faramir had used in the War of the Ring.

And Éowyn bethought her of the time when she had ridden as Dernhelm, and slain the lord of the Nazgûl.

“Chainmail I wore then, and armour, and britches,” she said to Faramir as they lay in bed, watching the green light filteri...

A Gardnerian Statement on Consent & Abuse

An important statement from some members of the Gardnerian Wicca community:

— Read A Gardnerian Statement on Consent & Abuse

I affirm and agree to the above statement.

Yvonne Aburrow

Magical fires

I remember watching driftwood burning in my grandparents’ fireplace as a kid — there would be all sorts of colours in the flames from the salt. Green and blue and turquoise flames.

There’s a great tradition of magical fire making. In The Sea Priestess, Dion Fortune describes the making of a Fire of Azrael:

The fire is laid of Juniper, Cedar, and Sandal. After the flames die down, it produces a clear, glowing ash which is used in clairvoyance, much as a gazing crystal is, to induce as vision,...