The nature of sunrise is to be unrealistically bright, full of promise and always recurring

Gray light seeps into the darkness. Ice glistens at the coldest hour of the day.

A breath--too cold but bringing a whisper of freedom.

Then a ribbon of brilliance along the horizon.

Creative Commons image by Nicolas Gent

A quickened heartbeat.

Finally color--first pink, then peach and gold, spilling ever more rapidly, like cascading joyful music, like the chatter of children and birds, like waterfalls. The sky lights up.

Ice crystals glitter and sparkle. Every branch is outlined in light, the earth bright and crackling. Frozen mist curls in the low places, painting pictures of another world. The first footprints are precious but also a desecration. There's an urge to dance but cold muscles refuse.

This is sunrise in winter. The night is long and the sun is unnaturally, painfully bright. The nature of sunrise is to be too bright.

It is also its nature to be full of promise. There is a sense at the hour of daybreak that all things are possible. Goodwill and hope come swiftly, especially if there's coffee. 

We promise ourselves that things will go well today. We plan work and play, eager to cram in more than can possibly be accomplished in the hours ahead. Like New Year's resolutions, the plans of dawn are full of conviction and vigor before the lazy slug-a-beds of duties and troubles reawaken a little later.

This moment of fresh enthusiasm is necessary to the day, just as it is necessary to the year.

In some circles, it has become fashionable to ridicule New Year's resolutions. "We're all adults here after all. We know that people don't really improve their habits. They start but they don't last." 

It's the nature of sunrise to be too bright, too enthusiastic and ultimately illusive. 

And yet, there is one thing that "us grown-ups" tend to forget. It is also the nature of sunrise to be endlessly recurring. Sunrise may be just one moment and it's hope may be fleeting.

But it always comes back. And that is not fleeting.

That endures.

People don't improve their habits in one sunrise or one New Year's resolution. But they do in a hundred sunrises or a thousand. 

Five years ago, I started to change my habits. I got up early to do spiritual practice and meditation. At first it only happened sometimes. I tried to get up too early and greedily get many other things done before the children woke up and the lack of sleep brought me to my knees. 

I sprinted and faltered--for months at a time. I started again and again.

Now I have been getting up just a half hour early for three years. I've missed a few days due to acute illnesses but I can count those on my fingers.

These past three years have been among the hardest I've lived through, due to circumstances beyond my control. I don't know how I would have made it this far without those early morning moments of peace. 

I am deeply thankful for sunrises, particularly that they reliably return and never abandon me. 

Spring Equinox blessings from the crafty kitchen

Let the rain rain and the wind blow

An end comes to the the reign of snow.

Bright hues take from the drawer.

Life's new chance knocks at the door.

If your spirit sometimes feels a bit bruised these days, you're not alone. There are not a lot of good fixes that will harden our spirits without closing us down. But there is solace. 

For me, one solace is creating useful items that are also beautiful in connection with the natural world. It can be difficult to find the time, but well worth it when you do. 

Carve out a little time, brew some tea, light a candle and get out supplies. I have several crafts here to suit the materials on hand. Each one helps to ground and renew the spirit. 

These crafts are inspirations for Ostara/Spring Equinox/Easter crafts that are not actually made with an egg shell for a change. These are easy crafts individually and can be handled by a frazzled mom and kids, at least by this one, or by those without a ton of craft experience. And yet they are real crafts with tangible and useful results.

I include crafts in my blogs because I am often frustrated by the craft sites online that seem to give no thought to how hard it is to fit these things into everyday life, especially when you have little ones. I include here both realistic instructions and my own learning experiences in hopes that others may be saved the hassle.

Easy Equinox Spring-in-your-step Soap

This is from an easy melt-and-pour soap recipe but can be used even if you're making your own lye soap. I used a moisturizing, clear glycerin soap base. I was frustrated with the soap we buy at the store that dries our skin and doesn't smell all that great. Also my daughter is always begging to buy expensive colorful soap and this is healthy, quick, easy and cheap.

1. Cut a block of soap base into small cubes or quarter-inch thick slices with a sharp knife
2. Heat in a pot devoted to soap and candle making on a low heat.
3. Prepare a box (plastic or paper lined with plastic) or soap molds if you have them. I used a paper handkerchief box lined with wax paper.
4. When the soap has thoroughly melted in the pot, add a few drops of food coloring. Just a few! Mine came out a very rich color and that was probably only three drops. (We used purple for luck, independence and psychic connection and because my daughter wanted purple. Other great spring colors are green (for prosperity and success), yellow (for happiness and imagination) and light blue (for peace and tranquility).
5. Add 20 to 40 drops of essential oils (depending on your sensitivity to fragrances). We used mint (for happiness and spring renewal), pine (for healing, protection and fertility), geranium (for spring love and joy, as well as not incidentally an excellent repellent for tick season) and a touch of lavender (to dispel any lingering winter doldrums). This is what I call the spring-in-your-step soap fragrance.
6. Add a handful of ground or finely chopped and crushed herbs. I use lavender flowers, which are pretty so I don't entirely grind them up. They give the soap a nice scratchy, scrubby texture which helps clean off the dead skin that accumulates over the winter (defoliation). And it adds lovely natural beauty. Stir the herbs in well.
7. Pour the melted soap into your prepared box or molds.
8. Let it sit for at least three hours or overnight. Remove it from the molds. It slides right out. Then, if you have used a box like I did, cut the soap into bars. I recommend making smaller bars than you would normally buy in the store because glycerin soap, which is healthier than the stuff you usually buy in the store, softens faster in damp conditions in the bathroom. A smaller bar will end up wasting less soap and you'll replace it more often.
9. Wrap the bars in plastic wrap to store. The one mistake I made in this process the first time around was not wrapping up my soap. It dried out and cracked a little over time. It was still quite usable but not as pretty. Plastic or wax paper will work better. Paper often sticks to the soap. 

Time for a luxurious spring bath!

Salt-dough egg decor

This is a craft for my kids who love painting. It makes beautiful home decor, something to put on the wall above the table or in place of a wreath on the front door for spring. And it's a very forgiving craft. Even a toddler can make a beautiful spring egg if given bright colors and an egg shape.

1. Mix salt dough (A cup of flour, a cup of salt, 2./3 cup hot water, a table spoon of oil)  and roll out thin.
2. Use a large shape cutter or a knife to cut an egg shape about as big as your outstretched hand.
3. Use small cookie cutters to cut out shapes from the inside (butterfly and flower cookie cutters are great but small circles and diamonds are fine too).
4. Save the cutouts to glue on in other places on the egg shape.
5. Bake on low heat or air dry for several days. 
6. Paint with bright and pastel colors.
7. Use glue or a glue gun to place the cutout shapes on the egg.
8. Hang as a spring decoration

Equinox candle magic

I'm crazy about candles in general and celebrating the Wheel of the Year I love to have candles specifically designed for various occasions. One way to do that is with color and scents. But I also wanted to find a way to make candles in various shapes. 

I am also a cookie-cutter enthusiast, so I figured I could make candles in cookie cutters one way or another. So I started experimenting. 

As you can imagine, the first experiments resulted in a lot of wax running all over the table. I suggest using paraffin wax, not beeswax for these candles. Beeswax will stick in small crevices of cookie cutters and be hard to remove without breaking the candle. Beeswax is also harder to remove from your table. With paraffin wax the old adage your mother probably told you really does apply:  Don't touch it until it's cool and it will come right off. 

After several more experiments I found that if you place a piece of wax paper over several layers of soft paper towels, you have a slick and wax-proof surface that is also slightly soft. When you go to pour your melted wax, you press down hard on the cookie cutter and it cuts into the soft surface, trapping the wax inside. Pour only a quarter-inch of wax and then wait and blow on the surface of the wax. You should be able to release it without the wax spilling after 30 to 60 seconds, depending on how much wax you have poured.

Let that candle sit and move on to your other cookie cutters or molds until the thin layer of wax in the bottom of the cookie cutter has more thoroughly cooled. Then position a wick in the middle of your candle and pour in a little more wax. Hold down the cookie cutter and wait a bit, holding the wick in place. The cooled wax at the bottom will remelt somewhat so if you bump the cookie cutter, you could have it all spill out. But it will only melt a little and mostly it should stay. 

Once you have your candle half full and slightly congealed, you've won. With that candle at least. Top off the candle as high as you can go and making sure the wick stays central and upright. 

Hints and tips:

Grease your cookie cutters with cooking oil before use. I haven't had much trouble getting candles out of the cookie cutters but a little oil helps it slide. 

Don't worry if your cookie cutter molds leak. Just don't lift them up. Let spilled wax cool and keep pouring. The leaked part will serve as a dike and eventually your candle will get full. Then peel the spilled wax off the wax paper and put it back in the pan to remelt. No harm done. Just keep hot wax off your clothes and skin. 

Step-by-step cookie-cutter candle-making instructions: 

1. Set grated or cut paraffin wax in a pot on low heat to melt.
2. Select theme-appropriate cookie cutters as molds and grease them with a little cooking oil. Deep cookie cutters are better but even a very short candle will burn and look pretty.
3. Lay down three or four layers of paper towels and cover with a sheet of wax paper. Place cookie cutters on the wax paper.
4. Ready short pieces of wick about an inch longer than the depth of your cookie cutters.
5. When the wax is fully melted add essential oils for fragrance. For spring I enjoy lemongrass and rosewood. And add wax colors, if you have them. Do not use liquid food coloring. I actually tried it and it does not work at all. 
6. Hold a cookie cutter down firmly. Pour a quarter inch of hot wax into the bottom. Continue to hold for 30 to 60 seconds. Then release and repeat with remaining cookie cutters. 
7. Return to the first cookie cutter and place a short piece of wick upright in the center. With some luck it will simply stick into the congealing wax and stand up without being held in place. Repeat with remaining cookie cutters.
8. Once the wax is visibly congealing, pour in more wax little by little to allow time for the wax to congeal.
9. Hold wicks in place as you wait for the wax to cool.
10. Top off the cookie cutters as much as possible. There is no need to leave room at the top. The wax slightly contracts. 
11. As the wax cools, peel off spilled wax and return it to the pot for reheating. 

You can use this method to make themed candles for many holidays. My favorites are sun, star and moon shaped candles, leaves, eggs and flowers for the spring, fruit and animals for the summer, acorns and deer (reindeer from Christmas cookie-cutter sets work great) for the fall, and trees, stars and suns for winter.

I hope these craft ideas are helpful or at least inspiring. Please share this post with interested friends.

You may also enjoy the children's chapter book with illustrations by Julie Freel that I have for Ostara. It is a story for kids ages six to twelve that centers around the Spring Equinox and deals with the difficulties of new beginnings, friendship and learning about diverse cultures. It is primarily a fun book for kids and my kids won't put it down, but it also contains ideas for natural egg dyes and other spring celebration plans.

Blessings of spring renewal to all! 

The spirit of Ostara: the cycles of the earth as a guide to good living

Sometimes I am asked why I celebrate the Pagan Wheel of the Year with my family, even when there isn't a fun community event to attend.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

Why do you need special words for season celebrations? Why do you need to complicate the dates of school holidays for your kids? There isn't definitive proof of the ancient origins of celebrating eight solar holidays, so isn't it partly made up?

As with most things connected to spirituality, there are several levels to my answer.. On the surface, the answer is simply that these celebrations ring true to me deep inside. And second, I want honesty in practice, I suppose.

Growing up in an earth-centered family that didn't use the Wheel of the Year, calling our celebration "Christmas," while  acknowledging that we were really celebrating the Winter Solstice, I always felt a disconnect. If we're "really" celebrating the winter solstice and we know historically that Jesus Christ probably wasn't born on December 25 and he isn't our main focus anyway, then why don't we just celebrate the Winter Solstice and cut out the middle man? 

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

I felt like kids in real Christian families had it better because they had a tradition, something meaningful in their celebration. And ours felt truncated, damaged... even, yes, stolen. This was not an intellectual thing. I was too young at the time to know the history but that was how I felt.

And I wanted a sense of authenticity for my kids.

That was essentially my motivation in the beginning for celebrating the Wheel of the Year. But lets's face it, it's a hard thing to keep up year after year--a holiday every six weeks or so, that begs for specific preparation, attention and connection. If it were only a matter of principle, I might not have lasted thirteen years and counting. Many people don't.

What keeps me strong and passionate about celebrating the Wheel of the Year is it's practical usefulness. 

Yes, practical, real benefits. Let me explain.

We all tend to get stuck at some point in our lives, either in depression or being a workaholic, being young and isolated form what isn't in our generation or being old and feeling like our life is over. There are many places to get stuck and those stuck places can last years.

And that is a large cause of misery. 

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

The Wheel of the Year essentially ensures that I don't get stuck. The celebrations in are in alignment with nature and thus objectively "true" or "real." Even deep depression eventually has to at least acknowledge the fact that spring came again. 

And better yet, the Wheel of the Year is a spiritual teaching in a nutshell. Within it there is pretty much all you need to meditate on spiritually. Each celebration calls up specific important values and themes and taken all together they are a code of spiritual being. 

People sometimes ask how I teach my children about Pagan beliefs and rituals. The primary answer is that I celebrate the Wheel of the Year with them. There are other things, like learning herbcraft, grounding meditation, prayers of gratitude for food and a little simple candle magic, but mostly it's about the Wheel of the Year for my kids. The earth is our textbook and the Wheel of the Year is our lesson plan.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

It isn't just as simple as learning the cycles of the seasons though. Okay, sure, everything dies in the fall and is reborn in the spring here, but in some climates that isn't entirely true. That isn't really the point anyway. Each celebration has particular themes that feel connected to the earth and sun at that time and therefore are easily understood at that point in our journey around the sun.

At Imbolc we go within and delve into dreams and intuition. It is the time in the belly, before the birth of new plans, activities and projects. At Litha (the summer solstice) we are full of life, bounty, energy, pride and expression. We are often hard at work and celebration comes amid many other activities. At Samhain, we are drawn back to the earth, there is a feeling of old sorrow, of things coming to necessary ends and a tendency toward memory. It is the natural time to be reminded to honor our ancestors. 

If you celebrate Imbolc, you will not go a whole year without remembering to focus on your inner world. If you celebrate Litha, you will not go a whole year without expressing yourself with energy and pride. If you celebrate Samhain, you will not go a whole year without honoring ancestors.

And each celebration has a similarly crucial point. I will be writing more posts about the spirit of each celebration, but the celebration at hand is Ostara, so I'll start with that.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

Ostara

Ostara is the European Pagan term for the spring equinox and it is celebrated much like Easter. The appropriate symbols are eggs, sprouting plants, rabbits, hares and babies of all kinds. The obvious themes are renewal, rebirth, the beginning of life and expression, new beginnings in general and children. 

As a mother, it is very important to me that my children have a lovely time at Ostara. It is a time to honor and delight in them. They are the future, our new beginning as a species. Their joy in the springtime is a blessed and righteous thing. So, more than any other time they get to eat a lot of candy. They fully enjoy scouring the yard and back woods for treats and eggs. We make pretty colorful crafts, many of them egg-related. 

But when I started to contemplate exactly how to convey the concept of rebirth and new beginnings to young children, I realized that the spirit of Ostara goes much deeper than that. If this is a celebration that also honors children, that necessarily implies the protection and valuing of that which is vulnerable. New life is inherently vulnerable and we can see that protection of vulnerability in all of the ancient symbols of this celebration--particularly the egg.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

We know that in our modern world the worst abuses of human rights are suffered by children. Children are more likely than adults to live in poverty or to be in need of basic necessities like food, water and shelter. Children are often the first to suffer when societal racism or other prejudices rear their ugly heads. There are obvious reasons why the protection of children is connected to human rights in general. 

The protection of new life extends, of course to the protection of the vulnerable among other species. The concept of both biological and cultural diversity is implied in the rainbow colors of Ostara. This is not only a celebration of one rebirth but of all the colors and miraculous diversity of life--human and otherwise. 

This realization has deepened my experience of Ostara. This celebration of renewal can be a great help in overcoming a stuck place in myself. If there is some lingering depression, hurt, resentment or stagnation, the return of light to our northern latitude does wonders for it. The necessity of getting outside and tending vigorously to the spring needs of our urban homestead is invaluable in getting past blocks. 

But more than that, the celebration of rebirth, color, diversity and the protection of the vulnerable is what the heart needs at such times. It is a shot of clear-eyed idealism., regardless of how bleak things may seem in the outside world.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

This year, many of us are exhausted from a long winter that did not seem to be as restful as it should have been. We have been struggling to retain the way of life we and our ancestors fought for--the rights and freedoms that often came at great cost. We are also contemplating that now when we should be working primarily for a sustainable future, environmental concerns have taken a back seat to the immediate needs of vulnerable people in our society.

Plenty of us are already experiencing outrage fatigue. And it is just early days yet.

And here is Ostara, the celebration of renewal, a time to warm your heart and think of fluffy and bright colored things. It may be hard to grasp when things are hard, but this is what we actually need right now. 

Stop a moment, ground yourself in the earth. Remember that the earth's rhythm does matter. Let the energy of renewal and new life flow into you. Focus your energies on protecting those most vulnerable, both human and non-human. Celebrate the rainbow of diversity in languages, cultures, colors and species.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

Break free.

 In my quest to teach my children these values of eternally resilient life and hope, I wrote the Ostara story Shanna and the Pentacle. This is a story for all earth-centered, goddess-oriented and vaguely Pagan families. It isn't a "teachy" book, but rather a story that grabs kids' attention, especially if they are growing up as a religious minority.

In this story about new beginnings, eleven-year-old Shanna and her eight-year-old brother Rye move to a new school. At first, that seems like challenge enough. New beginnings are exciting but not always easy. Amid budding flowers and preparations for their Ostara celebration, Shanna runs into a real problem. Her teacher and some of the kids at her new school object to a pentacle necklace that her best friend gave her.

When her family moved Shanna had to leave her best friend behind and that is part of the difficulty of this new beginning. When her teacher demands that Shanna stop wearing her pentacle to school and the principal confiscates it as a suspected "gang symbol," the young girl feels the sting of prejudice. 

Shanna is at the same time learning to accept others who are different from her. One of the new things about her new school is the greater cultural and racial diversity of this urban school over her previous one. Shanna soon discovers that friends come in many varieties and it is through a surprising friendship that Shanna gains the courage to stand up for her own identity as a Pagan girl. 

This story not only embodies the crucial messages of Ostara, but it is also filled with beautiful paintings by Julie Freel that evoke the season and the story. This is a story for Ostara, though one that will show that new beginnings aren't always easy. It emphasizes the importance of standing up for one's own identity, the great advantages of diversity and the need to protect the young and vulnerable. With this story, these values are not forced on children but delivered in a way that makes them as natural as the fact that the sun rises earlier every day in the spring. 

I hope you'll enjoy this story and share its fun and themes with children in your life. Many people have asked when there will be more stories in the Children's Wheel of the Year series and I am delighted to tell you that the Beltane book is very nearly ready to be printed and will be out well ahead of the holiday.

I hope you will support our endeavor--which is still non-profit due to the costs of the illustrations, materials and books--and share these stories with others. If you are eager for more stories about the natural themes and values of the Wheel of the Year, spreading the word about these stories is a significant help in our efforts to keep them coming. 

Happy reading and blessed Ostara to all!