Autumn came creeping quietly this year.  Her scent wafted in on the Westerlies in late August, now her colors begin to show in the sumacs and maples.  She spreads her fruit-laden mantle across the land. The oaks and white pines breath sighs of relief at a chance to rest and recover from the relentless onslaught…

Yesterday a crow followed me home from the allotment, it flew low over my head and landed on the guttering of the bungalow, not five feet from my door, apparently to take a drink. I thought he would fly off as soon as I went to open door, but no, he watched me approach, cocked…

September is one of my favourite months. Here in the UK, the frenetic growth of spring and summer has eased and a mellow fullness has taken its place; the sunlight has both a clarity and golden softness to it and never fails to elicit joy and hope. It draws from me a certain type of…

It was January and I was sitting in my meditation lodge as the rain battered down on the roof and the wind howled in the trees. I was journeying to the sound of my drum, flying high seeking the answer to a question that had been troubling me for some time…

by James Nichol, a repost from his Blog, Contemplative Inquiry. This post looks at Animism as the guiding principal of my Druidry. The term itself comes from nineteenth century anthropology, and is somewhat problematic. Scholars from European and North American backgrounds , formed by a mix of Christian and secular ideas, were studying, and labelling,…

We heard the sad news that Jamie Reid, artist, revolutionary, and druid has just died.
His great uncle was the founder of the Ancient Druid Order. OBOD awarded Jamie an Honorary Bardship in 2016.
Here you can see the presentation Jamie’s gallerist and friend John Marchant gave for us at the OBOD Summer Gathering in Glastonbury in 2016.

Streatham’s Rookery (1) is a formal garden within Streatham Common, one of south London’s many remarkable green spaces. I made a connection with it in 1992 when living close by. About a year before I discovered OBOD Druidry, I was working with R. J. Stewart’s The Way of Merlin (2). This taught me, first of all, about…

Hello, my friends. Yes me and Cerri have launched a new YouTube channel. It’s been a while in the making and the first video was uploaded yesterday. If you are a regular reader of my blog you will have already seen some of my thoughts about what I’ve been calling the ‘Green Grimoire’ ie, the Book…

The fallow deer stags have shed their antlers on the heath and in the forest in the last few weeks. As I found one atop a small rise next to ancient Celtic tumuli (burial mounds), dropped on the grassy tuft of a half sunken oak stump, I was gifted with this beautiful reminder that we…

I live near a tourist town with a monthly free paper promoting dozens of occult/self-development courses. Depending on your point of view, it’s either a treasure-store of magical opportunities or an ad hoc market – an esoteric version of the ancient and much loved pre-ebay mag, ‘Exchange and Mart’, whose discerning reader kept firmly in…

David’s post on magical tools got me thinking about what I use in my own work. Animism is at the heart of my world view, so in my interactions with objects, I don’t tend to think of them as tools so much as I think of them as friends…

It was Lughnasadh/Lammas 1995 and I was at a Wiccan camp. I wasn’t initiated into a Coven but had been invited to help by the organisers and I jumped at the chance. It was a fabulous opportunity to meet a whole lot of Witches and absorb the energy of the camp and community…

I have just had the pleasure of spending my birthday in Glastonbury – always a joy to find myself in this place again; I have so many magical memories of it and have been blessed with some powerfully transformative times here over the years…

You might find this a surprising heading for a blog about Druidry and the natural world but in fact Falling in Love, is what so often happens. Some of you may have seen the article in The Guardian on the 3rd April 2023 entitled A New Start After 60, which featured what happened to me after a rather…

I am a self confessed modern day druid, many people over the years try to tell me and others like me,  that I can not be a druid as I do not know what they did, there is no book of rules to follow so how do I know that I am doing is authentic…

The Irish name for May is Bealtaine. Linguistically at least, the May Day festival sets the scene for a calendar month. As I experience the wheel of the year in my own life, this feels right. May, the merry month, has always been special to me. Born towards the end of the month in 1949,…

‘The altar’ can be a term to make hackles rise. We can find a difficulty in divorcing the term from its primary cultural association, embedded in mainstream religion. It’s good to get over this, though, as an altar is a wonderful tool for anyone on a spiritual path. Let’s unpack its uses…

For many years I was dissatisfied with many Beltane celebrations I had attended. Now, I realise I am a bit odd generally, but, when it comes to Beltane I am odder still. I have always found the over emphasis on giving a human face to the fecundity of nature makes me uncomfortable…

I’ve been truly feeling the energies of Beltane this year. It is a joyous festival that celebrates love and passion; the natural world explodes into life; the greening and blossoming cracking open our senses…

Was the skald who first recited Beowulf a poet or a storyteller? The answer of course, is both. It was only later that story and poetry separated out, like the various liquids in an apothecary’s jar. In our over compartmentalised and reductionist world, poems are one thing, stories another, and yet it has always been…

“How do you feel more magic all the time?” I’m writing Wednesday blog posts for a particular person, who has jumped in with a question this week. It’s a good question and one that raises a lot of other questions. Most of us don’t feel more magical, we struggle with banality, with things that grind…

Finding courage and inner resilience seems to be the order of the day for so many people around me at the moment, myself included. The Goddess as She-Bear has always held great attraction for me. In modern Paganism some have come to call her Arta or Artio. As Goddess, the She-Bear is our primal mother…

Grounding is a strategy that many Pagans use after magic and ritual, or simply as an everyday practice. The idea is to come back into your body, connect with the ground, the physical, your roots etc. Over on facebook recently my friend Tre raised issues about what you do if your body is a place…

Let us consider the warming earth beneath our feet at the vernal equinox – a time of rising energy and joy!