Wife Swap seeking Pagan or Wiccan families

I received the following email this week:

Hello,

I hope you are doing well! I am a casting producer for ABC's "Wife Swap" and we
are looking to feature a Wiccan or Pagan family on the show. If you are
interested or know someone that might be interested in the following
opportunity, I'd love to hear from you. Please review the announcement below for
more info :)

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and I look forward to hearing
from you!


Best,

Jessica Jorgensen
Casting Associate Producer
RDF Media USA
100 6th Avenue, 3rd floor, Suite 3-29
NY, NY 10013
P: 646.747.7947


So, there you have it, If you or someone you know is interested in this opportunity, feel free to forward this contact information to them. I've seen at least one episode of this with a pagan family and it was fascinating, to say the least.

Blessings of the New Moon and Solstice

It's been hard to connect with the solstice energy to an extent, because it's been so cloudy and rainy for weeks now. I haven't posted here much lately, but have been doing a lot of online writing in various other places. My dear friend Hannah came to visit for the weekend, and we got lots of work done on our four different book proposals. We also had a wee solstice toast in the backyard with some nice rose wine and lit a candle and left some wee glasses of wine for the fey folk.

The new moon energy does feel palpable today. We sent off our proposal to a publisher on solstice day and that seemed a powerful day to start a new venture. Now I'm trying to think of something I can do to celebrate this new moon. It's in Cancer, and that always means food preparation to me. I made a great dinner of baked chicken, mashed potatoes and green salad, and baked a batch of brownies that I'll be selling at the farmer's market tomorrow. Tomorrow morning I'l make cookies and cupcakes for the market.

Maybe it's time to search for some freelance writing gigs online and send off some queries. The new moon is good for new ventures. Oh, and for fasting! But I may be too late for that today after that filling dinner.

Hope everyone has had a powerful solstice and new moon week. Oh, and a Happy Father's day. That is still sad to me since losing my dad three years ago.I like to think he's there, still enjoying the change of seasons and the food and garden traditions he loved so much. My love of these ways helps him live on in me.

Apple Blossom Day!

From the UK, the Wildlife Volunteers Blog reports on a delightful day long event at the King's Lane Community Orchard, in celebration of the orchard in blossom, with music, games and traditional spring festivities. The BBC filmed the event as part of a program known as "Homes Under the Hammer!" which follows properties in danger of being developed. The community orchard has been opened as open public space and the community will be holding this event every year for the foreseeable future. Well done! This should ideally have been included in the Festival of the Tress, except that the event had not happened yet!

Festival of The Trees! Flowering and Blossoming Trees Edition

(my own photo from Brushwood, May 2008)

Today, May 1st, I celebrate the festival of Beltane, an ancient holiday originating in Europe. Its name means "fires of Bel" who is a sun god. We welcome the return of the sun's heat and light, reflected in the many blossoms and flowers around us. I am happy to say I am headed to my summer camping spot, the Brushwood Folklore Center, later today, to get my camp set up for summer and celebrate the holiday with friends, with a maypole, a bonfire, feasting and fun! (photo by Peg, 2008)

Beltane was originally a fertility festival, and what better inspiration for love and romance than a trees festooned in delicate, fragrant blossoms? These lovers in Kashmir, India have the right idea:
(originally at nimg.sulekha.com)

Brushwood is blessed with many wild apple trees, and they all blossom in spring, with that fleeting, heavenly scent that simply can't be bottled and is all the more precious for being so temporary. (more beautiful Brushwood apple blossoms captured by me!)

I hope you will be able to see a blossoming orchard in your area this spring; it's always a heartening and magical sight to me. I saw hundreds upon hundreds of blossoming old apple trees as I was riding through the Hudson River Valley earlier today. Here closer to home, of course, are the wondrous orchards of Indian Ladders. The owner is planning to offer some heirloom varieties this year, like Fameuse, Old Smokehouse, and Chenango Strawberry, in addition to their bounty of Yellow Delicious, Jonathan, Empire, Mcintosh, Mutsu, and others.
(photo taken in spring 2007)

My partner and I ordered an heirloom apple tree (Summer Rose) from the mail order grower Trees of Antiquity that has been planted at Brushwood this month, near the spot where we got married last summer. We look forward to seeing that apple tree grow and blossom in many springs to come.

(another one I took in 2008)


To begin, we acknowledge the passing of winter. It was a long, cold one, followed here in the Northeast by several recents days in the high 80s and 90s, very unusual for April! Fortunately, though some gardens have seen their flowers get a bit crisp in the sun, the blossoming deciduous trees are right on schedule and lighting up the parks, mountains and forests with their graceful sprays of pink, white, yellow and purple.

This is a fascinating piece on conifers: the great giants that rule the winter landscape with green. They bless us with color until spring's blossoms invigorate the landscape with subtle and then brighter and brighter color. More conifers are featured here in the Walking Prescott blog. Evergreen trees give us a much needed reminder of vibrant life in the plant world while we wait for the ice and snow and freezing temperatures to leave us for another year.

Despite being welcome, spring briefly brought somewhat unwelcome surprises in the form of high temperatures, setting records in many areas. The local blog Cold Climate Gardening looks at the statistical information that reminds us climate change is an ongoing issue.



From Brambleberries in the Rain, one of the prettiest blogs in my blogroll, here is a lovely early spring nature walk including colorful flowering trees (one of them is pictured above).

This is a fascinating article on the evolution of aphids, and research done on apple trees, at the Agricultural Biodiversity blog.

From Riverside Rambles, some beautiful images of flowering trees!

From Rock Paper Lizard some finches frolic amid blossoms!

The Via Negativa blog has this unusual and excellent post combining blossoming tree imagery and a poem called "In Shadblow Time."

This recent post from osage + orange outlines the plight of the disappearing Ghost Oaks of Chicago.

Yearning for more exotic locales? Travelogged features this tour of the hanging bridges of Costa Rica. This adorable photo was taken in Kasmir, India in March:

(originally appeared at newshopper.sulekha.com)

From southern England, Somerset Seasons offers a quick, excited peek at flowering trees and shrubs in a Dorset garden. This blog post explores flowering trees in autumn in Lima, from Gunnar Engblom. And below is a stunning photo taken this March in Iran:

(from payvand.com)

I wish you all a colorful, sensuous, fragrant and colorful spring!

Busy and travelling!

I returned from New Orleans last week and feel like it's been hard getting caught up on everything. I have posted some photos on Facebook, but here is one, taken at Marie Laveau's tomb.

We had a wonderful time seeing the city, and made some good contacts with publishers and other academics at the Popular Culture conference. But the event was so big we didn't feel badly about missing much of it; besides with such good weather, who wouldn't be tempted outdoors? We ate lots of good food, visited the Voodoo Temple and chatted with Priestess Miriam, visited the Garden District and basically had a wonderful time. Then came back to cold windy weather in Boston!

Spring has finally arrived in the Northeast, however. I've been working in the garden, trying to get caught up on everything. Just finished a book editing project and now on to other writing activities. I hope to keep this blog up a bit better now that I'm around again.

Excalibur or Mists of Avalon fans?

Hello, friends. I've been very busy and not posting to this blog very often.

I am off to New Orleans this week to present a paper at the Popular Culture Association annual conference. My talk is on the influence the film Excalibur and the novel The Mists of Avalon have had on the contemporary pagan community. I'd absolutely love to hear any anecdotes from any of you who care to weigh in. This research will go beyond this paper and be applied towards two books I am working on.

I am particularly interested in any references to these works in rituals or other magical events, or the way they may have inspired your own or others' personal beliefs or practices. Cheesy as well as profound anecdotes welcome!

Post here or email me at albion.peg@gmail.com. I appreciate any responses.

A great herbal resource

I found this blog recently and am very impressed. The author also owns and runs a mail order business crafting herbal incenses and oils and supplying all kinds of raw materials; the website is here. Big plus: he works and lives in my hometown of Elmira, New York!

So if you're like me and enjoy an old-fashioned and very artful approach to herbal magic, check out Alchemy Works. This makes me want to go back to my hobby of crafting herbal incenses, which I did well before the age of the internet took over!


(Image from the Flickr stream of HaggisVitae)