Reflections from the Garden - Community
My coven has two ordained ritual priestesses, myself and one of the founders. This year, however, we are doing a year-long coven study of ritualcraft with each member crafting and facilitating a ritual for a holiday of their choice. We just had the first one (Ostara) which went swimmingly. The project has freed up a good deal of creative time and mental space for me, which I thought would be dedicated to blogging, but as Spring has sprung in my neck of the Florida 'burbs, I have been gravitating toward more tactile activities: crocheting, knitting, watercolor painting, birdwatching, gardening, and reading books. All of these activities, gardening especially, have been a wonderfully grounding antidote to the madness of the world and the feeling of futility brought on by calling my MAGA-hardliner congresspeople to demand they vote against cruelty, destruction, and death, knowing they will vote for it anyway.
Our yard contains a small butterfly garden that my partner and I planted last year. At some point in the psychological onslaught of 2025, we became overwhelmed by the project, and the garden, along with the rest of our yard became overrun with weeds. We were heartened that at least our giant milkweed was going strong and would still be available to feed the caterpillars come Spring. Then, over the winter, we experienced an uncharacteristically hard frost, which seemed to kill the last survivors, our milkweed with it. We scraped the branches to see if any green life remained, only to find grey, inert wood. Saddened, we set out to finally clear out the weeds and tear up the dead stumps of our once-flourishing plants. Imagine our surprise, delight, wonder, awe when we discovered fresh green sprouts growing from dead-seeming roots! We cried with joy and got to work with new resolve. We cut back and tore up the weeds, channeling our anger and frustration at the systems of power and patriarchy wreaking so much havoc and were heartened and grounded by the visible progress of the work of our hands. We bought a variety of native plants to welcome the bees and the butterflies on their Spring journeys.
This morning, there are bees buzzing among the flowers, and we've spotted a hummingbird or two by the feeder.
I have had the topic of community on my mind (perhaps, more accurately, on my heart) since November 6, 2024. I have been struggling to put those thoughts into shareable words -- they feel fragmentary, like stars appearing in the gloaming, the full constellation not quite visible. Community is at the forefront of my mind at this time of year in particular. The main work of my coven's annual Ostara ritual centers on reaffirming our bonds of community as the Maiden is reborn into the web of life. The magic of us all gathered together in the candle light is a beautiful moment each year, and I won't describe it in any more detail than that because it simply won't convey the mystery of the experience. I don't want to give the impression that our group is perfect: we sometimes irritate each other, step on each others' toes, miscommunicate, and unintentionally hurt feelings as any group of humans is bound to do from time to time, but we share a commitment to work through those issues when they arise.
In the final chapter of The Spiral Dance, titled "Creating Religion: Toward the future," Starhawk writes
"The task of feminist religion is to help us learn those things that seem so simple, yet are far more demanding than the most extreme patriarchal disciplines. It is easier to be celibate than to be fully alive sexually. It is easier to withdraw from the world than to live in it; easier to be a hermit than to raise a child; easier to repress emotions than to feel them and express them; easier to meditate in solitude than to communicate in a group; easier to submit to another's authority than to place trust in oneself… In order to truly transform our culture, we need that orientation toward life, toward the body, toward sexuality, ego, will, toward all the muckiness and adventure of being human."
(20th Anniv. Edition, p. 226)
In the notes of the 20th anniversary edition, she notes that she has been critiqued for this passage, but it rings true to me now more than ever. Perhaps "easy" is reductive -- it is not easy for a human to live in isolation, but in this capitalistic culture designed to push us toward increasingly isolated, fractured, lonely existences, it is the path of least resistance. The messy, magical work of growing and tending community is vital work in these Tower Times.
Tower Times is term coined by Byron Ballard to describe these times of upheaval we are living through. I've had the pleasure of meeting Byron a few times and attending her workshops at festivals -- she's the real deal, and if you ever have the chance to do likewise or to visit Mother Grove Goddess Temple in Asheville, NC, I would highly recommend it. Her 2021 book, Seasons of Magical Life, was one of the books I've been reading to avoid spending my wild and precious life doomscrolling. The book centers on deepening one's connection with the seasons and the land through the lens of what Ballard calls acknowledged kinship -- the perspective that all beings, human and non-human, are enspirited and connected in the great Web of Life, the family of all things, not just known in an intellectual capacity, but as lived-in embodied, felt reality. It is a perspective shift that is vital, not only for healing our relationship with the non-human web of life around us but each other. The more isolated we are the easier it is to convince scores of people that they aren't us and that the world is just so many objects to be used by us. In that worldview, it is okay to act carelessly, cruelly, callously toward them and it because they are separate from us. But that disconnection is an illusion, and its best antidote is to embed oneself in community and a worldview of kinship: talk to your neighbors, notice the birds and bugs (those persistent ambassadors of the wild even in the most urban settings), if you have say over some outdoor space -- get your hands dirty making it more hospitable to those winged kin, gather in circle with likeminded folks. In making local, in-person community in this way, be it spiritual, civic, or ecological, these "circles on the ground," as Ballard calls them, are how we move from the time of the Tower to the Star.
There is another passage in the final chapter of the Spiral Dance where Starhawk relays a vision for the future that continues to inspire me. Your mileage may vary regarding the details (the vision of the "unschooling" style of education appeals to me much less now than it did when I first read it as a college kid), but the foundation of the vision still sings to me
"It is the night of the Winter Solstice. In San Francisco, there are bonfires everywhere: strung along the beaches, blazing on Twin Peaks, on all the high places. In the parks and on rooftops, small groups gather around cauldrons. There are no mass meetings, only circles… Through the long night, they chant each other's names. They sing hymns to the newborn sun, to the eternally revolving Goddess. They pour libations and give thanks -- especially the very old ones who remember when it was different:
'I am thankful that in this city, no one goes hungry.'
'I am thankful that in this city, no one is left to die alone.'
'I give thanks that I can walk the dark streets without fearing violence.'
'I give thanks that the air is clean, that life has returned to the waters of the bay, that we are at peace.'
'I give thanks that everyone has work to do.'
In the morning, there are parades down Market Street, and the neighborhood groups and unions present their elaborate floats, the creation of the city's finest artists…"
(20th Anniv. Edition, p.228)
Periodically, in the Pagan community there is handwringing about our lack of infrastructure and longing for physical Pagan temples and the ability to have expansive charities to rival those of churches. I myself have longed for such spaces from time to time, and frankly, loathe the dominance Christianity in services to the unhoused and hungry. But, John Beckett has begun calling this "Protestant envy," and I must agree. When we are surrounded by one dominant model of religion, it can be difficult to imagine alternative systems. The solution to Christian dominance in community-service spaces is not creating one-to-one Pagan equivalents (which we do not have the numbers for), but supporting secular alternatives and ultimately, most importantly, striving to craft a society where such services are not needed. And while I would love to see public, Pagan spaces as our communities grow, I believe trying to craft church-like communities of 50+ people would be a mistake. I believe the closeness of connection allowed by the circle structure is one of our greatest strengths and just what we need to overcome the present moment and grow into a more sustainable future, a future where small circles knit together weave a web of community with land and each other. We need to be able to dream such futures in order to work toward them, like looking at an expanse of useless grass and dreaming of a butterfly garden. There may be trial and error, circles may part, weeds may overtake the garden, but the work is still worthwhile. The Wheel will turn, lessons of the past used to form new, stronger circles, the weeds pulled back to reveal new spring shoots. It is time to get to this messy, vital work that we may welcome the future Maiden into a circle woven with life and love.
So mote it be.
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