Life at the Ravenstead offers quieter pieces - essays, reflections, and experiential writing that inhabit the world rather than analyze it.
These entries are grounded in lived tone and atmosphere.
Not every entry is instructional. Not every post is an announcement.
Here the world is simply lived in - through small rituals, seasonal rhythms, personal reflections, and moments of daily magic. These writings sit closer to the hearth than the lectern.
This is the inhabited side of Ravenwood.
As a Ravenwood Associate we encourage you, should you be so inclined and have mastered the needed mental disciplines, to visit Planet Thale! You can reach us, for instance, by way of the Elemental Realm of Earth. The new Guardian there, the little Brownie called...
She won’t go near the house – I guess by now it smells too much of dogs and the other cats – but a few months back while I was working here in the office trailer she came in, maybe curious about the sound of my typing on this rattly old keyboard. She wouldn’t come to me, not then, but I started putting food out and installed a cat door so she could come and go as she pleased…
Set up your Circle boundary (indoors or out) and gather all the bits and pieces I listed in my last post on your Altar. Set the twelve birthday candles in a ring on the fireproof plate. You may hold them in place with the soft wax, modeling clay, or simply with a...
So “the year’s great Wheel keeps turning ‘round, and the Earth beneath the sky.” The Summer Solstice, by some called Litha, is almost upon us, falling this year on Sunday, June 21. Now the sun beams down in force. The days approach their maximum length, the nights grow short, and the weather is torrid, punctuated by sudden thunderstorms.
Here’s a quick and simple Midsummer ritual (Part 1 of 2). You may do it alone or with a close friend or two.
A short walk separates the house from my office There is a small trailer out behind the house. It was on the Ravenstead land when we bought it, a two-wheel ParkWay camper probably built in the 1940s, half hidden among the new-growth pines and scrub oak that have...
Working out in the trailer office I've spent most of my days this past week out in the trailer office, creating images for the Honor Roll on the new website. The refurbished trailer sits about a hundred feet from the house, just far enough away that the walk out there...
Uploading images from the trailer office The Ravenstead sits where the tide of civilization, at least for now, has ebbed. Cotton farms once prospered here, but a century of that ruined the soil and much of it, abandoned, went back to woods. Now urbanization is...
Rendering an image on the old computer often begins with a sound. The fan starts first. It spins up slowly and then settles into a steady whir that fills the little trailer office. Not loud, exactly, but persistent. Like a small mechanical insect that has decided to...
Suzanne and I, we’d agreed, would remain downstairs, so apart from the living room, laundry and kitchen, this floor would be ours. The walls were in much better shape down here than they’d been upstairs, but we still decided to modernize the wiring and outlets. A new...
Last night we celebrated Midsummer, the Summer Solstice. Melusine reminded us how her coven in the 1840s would spend the full night outside to greet the Sun as it rose again, and since the forecast showed clear warm weather was coming we agreed to do the same…
Some stories are simply lived.
