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this has been a catch-up post for the pagan blog project!

I was all set to write about “Doing What Works” (aka Pragmatism), but I got sidelined by kismet when I browsed through my blogroll this morning…

Now, places, of course, need priestesses and priests. Places need Witches. Places need Druids, and Magicians, and Heathens who practice the old ways of honor, and home, and hearth. Places need magic and places need listening attention. Places need people who live within, and can help to turn, the Wheel of the Year.

~Hecate Demeter, in her ongoing blog-story “A Place Without a Witch”

If you don’t follow her (you should) and if you haven’t read this particular series of posts (your really ought to), you can find all of them (in reverse order, so find Chapter 1 and start there) here.

Places need people that see the Nature in nature, that find the Divine in the Soil and the Sun and the Sky and the Sea.  Places need people that worship Gods of those Places, of those Powers, particularly as we become more technological, and more removed from Place.  Places need Pagans, particularly earth-based Pagans that know what it means to stick your hands in the dirt and actually get dirty.  Places need people that aren’t afraid to get sweaty and mosquito bit and to teach their children to do the same.  Places need us to get up off our collective asses and ya know, get shit done.  (And I thought this wasn’t going to be about pragmatism after all, lol…)

Places need us to do what works.  And what works isn’t the current paradigm.  Places need us to learn about them, to learn about their history, to learn about their present, to hear and see and feel what they need to be restored to their glory in a way that we can all co-exist sustainably.  Places need us to spend our time and our energy in them, to play in them, to work in them, to live in them.  Places need us to give a shit and to minimize our footprint so that Places can recover from our apathy, our ignorance, our deliberate pilfering for convenience. Places don’t need this for themselves, without us, they would go back to being places…changed, to be sure, but still a Place.

We need Places.  We need them to feed us, to clean our water, to clothe us.  We need them to shelter us, to enrich us.  We need Places to Root ourselves, to expand our minds and stretch our branches.  We need Places to exist, to co-exist, to pray, to rest, to sing, to love, to hope, to dream, to create, to write, to mourn, to teach us to be human.  

Places need witches, but witches need Places even more.  And not just witches.

People need Places.  Whether they are Pagan or not.  But, since (most) Pagans (tend to be) are closer to Places than not, Pagans need to lead the way to caring for their Places.  Lead the way by example and action, not just words on a screen or in the air.

Its just pragmatic.

 

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