About: Laura Miller
Posts by Laura Miller:
Blessed Beltane! Invitation to the Greenfire Dance.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Apr 30, 2013 I’ve understood Beltane in regards to fairies. I’ve understood Beltane in regards to sex. What I never understood was its nature of fire. The pagan Wheel of the Year has eight holidays: four that correspond to the stations of the Sun: the Solstices and the Equinoxes. The other four are called Cross-Quarter days, the great Celtic Fire Festivals of Beltane, [...] 650 views |
Spring Equinox: Ride It With Trust.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Mar 19, 2013 I woke on the eve of the Spring Equinox wanting a riot of light, and crocuses and daffodils like I am ‘supposed’ to get—instead, I received a world blanketed with a solemn and secretive snow. I wanted a straight line, a fingerpost pointing the way to ‘Spring!’ I got a sigh of resignation of [...] 1,298 views |
Imbolc: Tapping the Dream Tree.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Jan 31, 2013 In New England, February’s the start of sugaring season. As you drive the forest roads, you start to see the signs of it—the first insistent signs of Spring, even though there might be snow on the ground. Silver buckets, clinging like cicadas to the sides of trees, capillary networks of tubes draining the excess of [...] 526 views |
Because I Could Not Stop for Bach: Chaconne for a Fallen World.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Jan 10, 2013 … 672 views |
Winter Solstice: Spark the Dark!by Laura Marjorie Miller on Dec 20, 2012 Bastian: Why is it so dark? Empress: In the beginning, it is always dark. ~ The NeverEnding Story, 1984 Fairy wrens sing to their embryos in their eggs before they hatch. In the darkness of the egg, the little ones hear their parents’ songs: secret passwords and all secrets of wrens that can be thus imparted, that [...] 2,181 views |
Melting Yourself Free of a Magical Grudge.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Dec 13, 2012 Source: google.com via Theresa on Pinterest This contemplation started as I was cleaning out my freezer. As I stuck my hand in the ice bucket, I found something I had long forgotten about: a name frozen in water, in a plastic bag. Years ago, some friends of mine and I learned from a local mama [...] 551 views |
Hallowe’en Season: The Unbecoming.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Oct 30, 2012 The veil between the worlds is everything being stirred out. We are all in the mix together, all the worlds, ghost and human and faerie all alike. And as we get churned, we can see each other. 1,420 views |
You Are Where You Eat: Road Food is Real Magic.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Oct 9, 2012 … 1,273 views |
Autumn: The Equinox Mysteries.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Sep 20, 2012 Life Under the Leaves: Autumn is a time of seeds and shells. My friend Suzanne recently visited St Catherine’s chamber in Siena. She said you could feel the warm radiant aura of the saint in the room. Her teacher told her that when a saint leaves the earth, sometimes they leave behind a ‘shell’ of [...] 2,490 views |
Gossip, Girl! A Contemplation of the Value of Telling Tales.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Aug 20, 2012 This is my first confession, one of two this article will make: I love gossip. I swim in gossip like an otter. I eat it up like alphabet soup. I try to tell it colorfully, and when someone tells it to me, I respond animatedly: “Oh no he didn’t!”; “What kind of person does that?” [...] 473 views |
August & Everything After: A Lammas Blessing on Adulthood.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Aug 1, 2012 … 905 views |
To Cast No Shadow: An Invocation for the Summer Solstice.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Jun 19, 2012 Happy Midsummer! It’s a holiday as old as earth, celebrated as long as there have been people. It’s a day of purna sun: the most effulgent saturation of sunlight where, in the northernmost latitudes, there is not even night, just a stretch of day without ending. In Russia, it’s White Nights all in daylight. This [...] 1,299 views |
Blessed Beltane: Let the World Be Your Lover!by Laura Marjorie Miller on May 1, 2012 What do you do when you find yourself alone on the year’s biggest fertility holiday? I love Beltane. Nothing is more alive-ly green than the forest in May: the canopy of the leaves is a chlorophyll cathedral, staining the light a green that glows so bright you can hardly look at it. It’s past the fresh [...] 819 views |
Happy Birth-day, Yogin: Surya Namaskar on the Solar Return.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Apr 19, 2012 I’m not sure exactly where or when I received the idea that it is a tradition for yogis on their birth-days to do as many Sun Salutations as they are years old. It was many birth-days ago. 355 views |
Why do a Spring Ritual?by Laura Marjorie Miller on Mar 21, 2012 And in the natural realm, rituals also reconnect us with the cycles of the stars and the land. They invite our participation in the landscape, assert that we are a part of these cycles, that they affect us and are affected by us. They give a sense of precious weight and meaning. 725 views |
Imbolc in the Forge: A Threefold Meditation.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Feb 2, 2012 Happy Imbolc, everybody! Sunlight is spreading like butter at the edges of the day. For now is the beautiful, melting, promising drive through the first week of February. Imbolc is the proto-Spring, the tide that destabilizes the frozen lockdown and stillness of winter. Now is the time when things, quickening from their deep rest, begin [...] 573 views |
Star of Wonder! A Solstice Homecoming.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Dec 21, 2011 Solstice is a star holiday. And all the crazy beautiful ways we celebrate it are remembrances of what it feels like to be a star. I just had coffee with a new friend from Latvia, who humored me when I peppered her with questions about her country’s pagan folk traditions, especially about their Solstice celebrations, [...] 1,401 views |
John Steinbeck on the Occupy movement.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Nov 22, 2011 Know Yourselves. We’ve been here before. “And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of [...] 1,161 views |
All Souls Day: A Feast for the Brave.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Nov 2, 2011 I just moved to New England, and right across the street from my house is the signature old cemetery, with graves from the 18th century, replete with inscriptions carved with long descending esses (‘God helps thoſe who help themfelves’) and soul effigies. Soul effigies are those odd-looking carvings of faces at the tops of graves, [...] 638 views |
To Be Forgiven: A Meditation on New Karma.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Oct 14, 2011 Our practices focus so much on forgiveness, but usually from the point of view of the forgiver. What happens when you are the one who needs to be forgiven? 1,118 views |
It’s Harvest Time: A Celebration of the Inward Equinox.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Sep 22, 2011 There are processes at work beyond what we know, causal streams that we can influence but also, once we have done the best we can do, have to trust in. 2,047 views |
Into the Fields of Magic: A Lammas Creation.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Aug 1, 2011 We celebrate the start of the harvest, knowing that work is still far from done. We don’t get to rest, yet, or feast fully. So we bake ourselves some bread and munch a handful of berries and keep going. 640 views |
Cure Your Summer Solstice Blues.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Jun 21, 2011 Success is being in the stage of growth that you are! Celebrate that, and the energy of the larger community of life. 856 views |
A Ballad for Beltane: the First of May.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Apr 29, 2011 The third road, perplexing as it is, is for those who would fully be human. You have to find your own way. There is no ordered cosmology here, only magic which you don’t always understand. 1,230 views |
Laid-Off & Ghostly: A Modern Yogi’s Abhinivesha.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Apr 13, 2011 The deep magic is this: if they saw me too clearly, in a category, I would never be released. I would never be able to do my next thing. 944 views |
An Equinoctal Regeneration.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Mar 18, 2011 Even when we don’t know what is happening: we are put on this Earth to help one another, to call even the Sun out of hiding when she seems she has hid herself forever. Whatever happens, hold to that. 746 views |
Positive Pratyahara: The Kindness of Pulling In Your Senses.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Mar 3, 2011 All of that tremendous energy, spent and expressed in relationship to the outer world, flows inward to light up your inner world, to feed your inner life, your heart. 585 views |
Dhyana at Imbolc: Melting the Edges.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Feb 1, 2011 Dhyana is about true sympathy, which is intermediate, like the nature of Imbolc: the relenting of one season that lets the next arrive. When we melt our edges, we make it possible for someone else to come in. 792 views |
Be a Waterman of Your Breathriver: A Meditation on Navigationby Laura Marjorie Miller on Jan 12, 2011 Observe your breath as a boatman observes the water. Know how to anticipate, how to create, how to respond. When to resist, and when to yield. 201 views |
What’s Your Yoga Origin Story?by Laura Marjorie Miller on Jan 5, 2011 Yoga is both a door and a mirror. To really go through it, you have to look at what brought you to it, because that will begin the answer to the riddle that your Yoga was put in your life to solve. 776 views |
Dreaming in the Solstice Eclipse: A Ghost Story of Christmasby Laura Marjorie Miller on Dec 20, 2010 Last week I was driving at evening through Nashville listening to Annie Lennox’s grand new recording of ‘The First Nowell’ and singing along, roaring at the top of my lungs as I do in the car, and I exploded into tears. Which doesn’t make any sense, because I am pagan. 560 views |
Against Holiday Shopping Judgment.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Nov 23, 2010 Black Friday & the Consumption of Christmas. Against Holiday Judgement. ‘This commercial dog is not gonna ruin my Christmas.’ ~ A Charlie Brown Christmas, 1965 If you are looking for quiet this season, remember that quiet can be sought in your heart. It comes best from releasing judgement about how other people do their Yuletide: [...] 1,126 views |
Happy Hallowe’en!: It’s a Dead Man’s Party.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Oct 31, 2010 In the final harvest, you let everything go that you can’t take with you; but what is left is not your sorrow. What is left is your joy. 402 views |
Yoga and Christianity: An Ongoing Spiritual Autobiography.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Oct 11, 2010 Should any Christian risk becoming spiritually polyglot? Hell, YES! 970 views |
Gliese 581g: An Exoplanetary Riff.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Sep 30, 2010 The discovery of a new world is lyrical and strange. It could be terrifying to some people. It will be enlarging if we meet it. It will be an end, and a beginning. 361 views |
The Beautiful Sadness of Autumn: An Equinoctal Magic.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Sep 21, 2010 Goddess of Failure, part of my harvest is my mistakes. I offer you what I broke, and I offer you all the lessons I learned from it. 1,389 views |
Lower Broadway Boogie-Woogie: A Nashville Meditationby Laura Marjorie Miller on Sep 10, 2010 Years ago I heard a commonplace that no Nashville local goes ‘below Eighth Avenue’ once they know better. 444 views |
Why I Don’t Say Thank You.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Aug 21, 2010 Mind your matrika. Make what you say mindful and purposeful, truthful and appropriate. Don’t say ‘Thank you’ when you don’t mean it. Hear yourself when you speak. Hear what you say, really. Be sincere. Be creative, expressive, original, fresh, intelligent, and new. 1,553 views |
Watering the Fields at Lammas.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Jul 31, 2010 At Lammas, the harvest is not all in; it is only beginning. There is a tenuousness to it, and much still depends on the good graces of nature, of sunshine and sweet rain. Much depends also on the good graces of our own nature. Love—because attention is love, listening is love, asking is love—is a great liberator, both of others and of ourselves. 636 views |
Solstice Gulf.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Jun 21, 2010 Solstice 2010: Shadows and Oil Coney Island Mermaid Parade is where I want to be on the Summer Solstice. Every year the Mermaid Parade opens the swimming season on the island, and Queen Mermaid and King Neptune throw offerings of fruit into the water to ask for a peaceful sea. The Summer Solstice is a [...] 5,840 views |
Happy Spring Equinox, Everyone!by Laura Marjorie Miller on Mar 19, 2010 The Spring Equinox, also known as Ostara, seems to me to be the pagan high day that requires the least amount of explanation. I really don’t have to tell you about it, for you already feel its purposes: that deep, itchy and feverish stirring. Every hour something else is in blossom and bud. The birds are [...] 2,159 views |
Smoking is Dirty Pranayama.by Laura Marjorie Miller on Feb 19, 2010 And, how Pranayama can help Smokers to Quit Smoking—and Keep Breathing. Last year, the medical center of the university where I work recently instituted a “no-smoking-on-the-grounds” policy, which had the effect of pushing all the smokers to a public sidewalk on the edge of a main thoroughfare. At any time of day, a drive-by reveals [...] 4,949 views |
 The ‘Bri’ of Brigid: An Imbolc Icebreakerby Laura Marjorie Miller on Feb 2, 2010 To-day is Imbolc, the ancient feast of the Celtic goddess Brigid! In Nashville, the ice-carapaced snow of this week-end’s blizzard is now running wet in clear bright currents of shining water. Now begins the proto-Spring, the pre-Spring, on this day that marks the beginning of the stirring of the earth under layers of frost, and [...] 849 views |
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