Little Druid on the Prairie

This week was challenging. I did my morning practice every day, which went well. Also, as per “Murphy’s Law of Wells”, I now have a NEW well for my altar. This one is a sage green, blue, and brown glazed clay bowl, and it’s both pretty and won’t crack from having water in it all week. Which, yay, no more panicked mornings with water all over the place.

I’m finding, though, that daily practice has changed how I view ADF and my responsibilities to it. This week was also the week of the Solstice, which was the first ritual I’ve written for our Protogrove, and that was challenging as well. I didn’t get a lot of direction on what kind of rituals they usually do, but then when I sent the ritual around, they had a good bit of input on what traditions they typically did. Fortunately the ritual itself went very well. The Study Group ritual went brilliantly as well, and was perhaps our best ritual to date. The omens were appropriately fantastic at both rituals too, which was nice.

For my own practice, I made cornbread and left some out as an offering on the Solstice, but with two group rituals to run in two days (the 20^th and 21^st) one of which I drove almost 2 hours for (the PG ritual was on a beach some distance from here), I didn’t do much in the way of a home practice for the actual day of. I see the sunrise every day right now, which is nice, but it didn’t make the actual solstice feel very different than any other morning.

I talked to my husband about seeing if he wanted to do any of these practices with me, and he said no. He is still marginally Christian (though he has no interest in going to church), but he’s supportive of my work with ADF. He does get frustrated on these busy weeks though, when I spend more time on ADF stuff (ritual rehearsals, study group, gone all day on the Solstice for ritual) than I do on spending time with him.

Overall I’m finding that this week felt like there was “too much” ADF going on – between daily practices, working on meal blessings (more on that in another entry), working on my prairie godmothers practice, ritual practices, study group ritual, and protogrove ritual, ADF consumed my entire week. I think in the future I’ll need to give myself more space on weeks where there are lots of ADF responsibilities.