Spirit Writer

Graphic credit: Trish Deneen I recently came across an excellent documentary exploring the shift of thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the minds of some young Jewish people. I've seen it inexplicably called anti-semitic in some X feeds, which is just ludicrous. It mainly follows two young American Jews, Simone Rimmon Zimmerman and Eitan, and others as they go from blindly supporting Zionism to questioning the views they were raised with. It then touches on the larger community and others who believe they've been mislead. They were very respectful throughout the film, so the accusations of anti-semitism seem unwarranted to me. It brings to my mind the exvangelical movement. People have been leaving evangelicism for a long time. I left in the '80s, but there was a large, more recent wave of exvies, as they're called, who left coinciding with the evangelical support for Donald Trump. It's neither anti-Christian or anti-semitic for either group of young peo...

I'm honored to share with you my participation in the revival of the Black Stone Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is the brainchild of essayist Danica Swanson whose work appeared in the first of its kind anthology, Polytheistic Monasticism: Voices from Pagan Cloisters . From Danica's intro to the space : "The Sanctuary is a dark monastic incubation space inspired by animist pre-Christian Nordic and Germanic religious and folk traditions." When Danica moved to the web3 social media platform Farcaster , I followed her to keep up with her work as she had retired much of her Sanctuary material. After several discussions, we found that we shared a love of web3 and the Sanctuary (for her as a full-time living goal, for me with a retreat or sabbatical space in mind). This developed into a renewed interest to bring her work onchain . For now, this is a virtual Santuary where we are publishing Danica's previous and new work as well as accompanying art and videos. Danica's reca...

I'm currently working on a healer's bio of sorts as a personal archive that may be of interest to others who've traveled a similar path, which I hope to publish here in the next few months. It'll include my experience going from an evangelical belief system to the New-Age toxic positivity movement and how they're often two sides of the same coin. In the meantime, I came across a fascinating bit of "channeled" info. I haven't completely let go of my woo-girl days that I'll be covering in the bio. I've noticed a strange phenomenon in the lightworker community. People actually think Donald Trump is a lightworker. Maybe it's not so strange. I've seen people, especially women, treat abusers as victims in New Age and Pagan circles. From what I observed in the '90s and early aughts, these abusers have to start out by using performance progressivism to get women to fall for it. While I don't think Trump has any loyalty to a party, he...

Smoky quartz, one of my favorite grounding stones. Credit: Parent Géry, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons I've created a new meditation video for my Northland Hearth channel in support of my article at Hubpages titled, Crystals for Grounding and Healing the Root Chakra . My goal is to add more audio and video media to my existing blog posts and articles across the web, as well as create new written content and support it with videos. This will include a range from what some might consider "woo" to hard polytheist journeys. Why should AI have all the fun, eh? I hope you enjoy.

A sacrifice to Thor. Credit: Johan Ludwig Lund, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons I've been designing prayer/gift cards for my crafting business efforts. This is the poem I wrote for Thor to use with one of my designs. I hope you enjoy it. Prayer to Thor Hail to Thor, Mighty God of Thunder! Rugged wielder of Mjolnir,  Guardian of Asgard, Warrior, I praise you. Devoted to family,  good friend of humanity, Grant me your gifts of courage,  loyalty, and fierce truth so that my words and deeds  may always honor you. Hail Defender of Midgard! Hail Thor!  Prayer to Thor by Trish Deneen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

 Image by  Gerd Altmann  from  Pixabay   Just a quick note to share this excellent video by Canadian Heathen blogger Michelle Wyn aka Hearthside on YouTube . Firstly, she's taking on the task of making her blog posts more accessible by creating videos for them. Secondly, in this video, she discusses what she calls shame culture in Heathenry, especially in online spaces. She says: "In our fast-paced modern world it is becoming more and more easy to publicly shame someone in a moment of anger, but unlike the shaming of Heathen culture historically, this sort of shaming can have a permanent effect on someone’s life with no room for recovery...Beyond this, public shaming on the internet does not cause people to change their behaviours. It may even have the inverse effect." I would expand this to all of internet Paganism and Occultism. I find it ironic how quickly the metaphorical pitchforks are reached for by people historically concerned with being persecuted by pi...