Full Moon & Herbology Yesterday

With our little group, things don't always go as planned, but we adjust and adapt and move on.  One of our group got sick.  She tried very hard to hang in there but ended up having to go home early.

We did not do ritual but we did another practice altar set up with plenty of time for Q&A about the altar, why we set it the way we do, and what the different items on the altar are for and what they symbolize.  We did our Herb Fairies study, but to our surprise we did not have chickweed nearby.  We may have to go on a bit of a hunt at new moon.  We did a walk around the yard at the covenstead and found several different herbs and talked about the differences between some that look very similar to others.  There was some talking about native vs non-native plants.  We dug into our books and researched those herbs as well as the ones we used in our cooking.  It ended up being very educational and fun for all of us! 

And as always, a delicious feast!  With the lemon garlic chicken, lime oregano broccolini and brussels sprouts.  We ate our trad cakes for dessert and OMG they are amazing with those little cinnamon chips added to them!  

Gotta go plan for Pagan Movie Night!  

All the best, 

Lapis

Weekend Update with Lapis

It's been a pretty busy week.  Miel is off at the Basilica Block Party, enjoying the music of Delta Rae, Michael Franti, Ingrid Michaelson and more.  I"m jealous but really, I'm not one for big crowds.  

We got together Tuesday and went over the materials for Herb Fairies for tomorrow.  We're pretty excited.  We are going to gather at her house and go through the beginning parts of it then take our journal pages down to the park and see if we can find some chickweed.  If we do, we'll make one of the recipes that is included in the materials.  I'm thinking that I'll also bring my fave herb book The Master Book of Herbalism by Paul Beyerl.  (Clearly, I'm going to have to figure out how to underline text here.)  I really like his book because it is so easy to use, has multiple reference pages and indexes, and has the medicinal and magical uses for common herbs.    

I got all the things to make lemon garlic chicken for feast tomorrow.  It's pretty easy and very tasty.  All you need is a whole chicken, some lemons, lemon juice, garlic and onions.  I got four lemons.  I'm going to slice two of them in half and put them on the bottom of the crockpot.  Then slice one into rings and the other into quarters.  The one in quarters will go in the chicken along with some onion and some garlic.  The sliced lemon will go on the chicken itself.  Then add a little lemon juice and cook on low all day.  The chicken is super tender and juicy.  I think I'll add some rosemary and thyme.  We can look them up in the Master Herbalism book and talk about the properties of the herbs.  Food is magic!  And feast is super important in Blue Star and Wellspring.

I also am working on things for The Blue Star Foundation.  I'm on the Board of Directors and we are putting together different projects we want to work on to help support the Trad.  One of the things we are getting ready to launch is our virtual lending library utilizing Library Thing.  We've been adding our books out there so that others can search and borrow them from each other as needed.  

I guess the last thing that I wanted to touch on was the SUPER MOON.  It seems that every full moon lately is A Thing.  Well, this one is supposed to be another Super Moon.  That means simply enough that in the orbital path that the Moon takes around the Earth, this is one of the times when it will be very close to us.  It will look really big and is likely to be more intensely felt -- higher tides, more lunacy, etc.  For my sister, it means a serious lack of sleep.  She always gets pretty serious insomnia around the full moon but this one is being particularly rough on her.  

Hope you've all had a great week.  

All the best, 

Lapis