living eye to eye with ancient wisdom
Image credit :: Cropped detail of Ink Masterpieces Album, Song Dynasty, Zhao Mengjian's "Three Friends of Winter" painting. National Palace Museum, Taipei, CC BY 4.0 @ www.npm.gov.tw
Everyone needs a friend. Some prefer the furry or feathered kind and some favour mankind, but have you ever considered the Plant Kingdom as your friend? In Chinese plantlore a specific group of three plants are called the Three Friends of Winter.
Michela Simmoncini via Flickr CC BY 2.0
Halloween or 'Samhain' (pronounced SOW-win) as Celts called it, was first and foremost a celebration of the end of harvest time and the beginning of a dark half of the calendar year. Naive Irish speakers will know that the calendar months of May and November are called Beltaine and Samhain respectively (oh and August is called Lunasa). These are three of the four Cross Quarter days on the Wheel of the Year, Imbolc in spring completes the quartet. Witches know these markers as Great Sabbats. These power points are Midpoints or Culminating points of a given season - Samhain occurs between the Fall Equinox and Yule (Winter Solstice).
Read moreHow many times have you pressed the Apple command key today?
Well if you're sitting in your office and thought you'd escaped Halloween then think again. Because apart from the humble fruits ties to the festival, so too unbeknownst to most Mac users has Apple's ⌘ Command symbol.
Read moreDepending on your persuasion, the wheel of the year is prefixed by many names — Celtic, Druid, Pagan or Wicca. The familiar graphic has near cult status, bedecking the walls, altars and journals of devotees of the cosmos. In more recent times the ubiquitous image has expanded and morphed into a mystical symbol shrouded in layers of occult, spiritual and religious mystery. Freed from the shackles of cultural and metaphysical associations the Eightfold wheel is more universally appropriate and immediately demystified as sun’s celestial journey mirrored via seasonal cycles.
Read morePhoto by Humphrey Muleba on StockSnap. CC0
The 15 day long Chinese Lunar New Year festivities will draw to a close, with the Annual Lantern Festival - Yuanxiao Festival - heralding the first Full Moon of the Chinese New Year, in the Year of the Snake.
Read moreThe aftermath of last weeks Cyclone Kirrily is omnipresent; as I write folks in QLD, Australia are bracing as a third cyclone looms! Following my retrospective of 2023 Weather predictions; I’m sharing some 2024 weather prophecies and another weather metric — Dragon’s role.
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