Eostre or Ostara? Celebrating Spring

When we view Eostre from this perspective, to me she starts to make much more sense and feel more like a representation of the qualities of the changing season that we are invited to notice for ourselves.

When seasonal celebrations become named and fixed in the calendar, we often miss their original purpose. Nature-based practices were never going to be about scripted rituals or any doctrines or marketing, or about buying the ‘correct’ altar decorations. Something much older, simpler, subtler and more important is lost when we forget our living relationship with land and the sky and replace our own experience with prescription, instruction or consumerism, or when we only follow what we are told we ‘should’ be celebrating…

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Samhain: Nature’s teaching on transformation and rebirth

Because death is still very much a taboo in the western world, we can miss some of the significance of Samhain and therefore miss the opportunity to explore our own fears, feelings, emotions and concepts around death. When we talk of the ‘veil thinning’ and ancestral worship, we think of those who have gone before us, but we don’t tend to use it as an opportunity for contemplating our own mortality, the cycle of life or to learn the mysteries by examining natures displays.

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