The need for ritual is a basic human instinct, as real, as urgent and as raw as our need for food, shelter and love. And it is every bit as crucial to our survival. A compelling urge to merge with the infinite, ritual reminds us of a larger, archetypal reality...

Spring festivities have long been held in honor of trees and their mistresses, the virgin vegetation goddesses. Mid spring was celebrated as Floralia by the Romans, Walpurgisnacht by the Teutons and Beltane by the Celts, romantic devotions for Flora, Walpurga and Maia, for whom this month is named.

The...

Spring is Mother Nature's wakeup call. She sounds her bugle for reveille and the sun comes running back to us with light and warmth on its heels. "Rise and shine," she orders. And it does.

The Earth awakens in the solar radiance. The living energy, which has stayed hidden underground...

"I've drowned seventy ants in a pool
I've burned down five rooms of the school
I've stolen six pies
And told terrible lies
But they'll never catch this April Fool." -- Ann Story

The foolish tendencies of humanity have been portrayed since Paleolithic times by sacred tricksters whose job it is to mimic social...

Because eggs symbolize fertility, birth, growth, possibility, potential, and life itself, they are widely associated with spring. The egg was the centerpiece of the spring festivals celebrated by the old tribes of Northern Europe in honor of Eostre, the Teutonic-Anglo-Saxon Goddess of the Eastern Dawn. She is the new awakening,...

Regular sex, according to medical research, has the same benefits as regular exercise. It increases the flow of certain chemicals that naturally boost and strengthen the immune system, improves cholesterol levels, stimulates circulation, invigorates the heart, diminishes the intensity of pain -- especially in...

In Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and With Encouragement for President Barack Obama

We have been inundated lately on all fronts -- economic, political, geophysical, meteorological, astrological, and spiritual -- with threats of terror and trauma. These are indeed very scary times.

What is at stake is our...

I don't know about you, but I am so glad and relieved that we are finally in 2013. And just in time, is all I can say. The house-of-cards-culture of deception, cynical exploitation, excess and greed that has prevailed for the past decades is collapsing under the weight of its...

Aging and changing might be inevitable, but they ain't easy. They precipitate in us a great uncertainty. The myriad dramatic disturbances of modern middle life -- menopause, health concerns, career shifts, the empty nest, divorce and death -- create an overwhelming crisis of identity and purpose for each of us....

The Golden Rule teaches that we should treat others as we, ourselves, would wish to be treated. This basic ethic is repeated in a multitude of variations in the texts of all the great religions of the world.

And, really, what else is there to say?

...

I was 10 years old when the moon first beckoned to me. The call came in the guise of a homework assignment. Miss Lusk, my much-loved fourth grade teacher, told us one propitious day to go home and compose a poem. Even as she was speaking, it came to me...

This July was the hottest on record. And it is estimated that 2012 is on track to be the hottest year ever. I could have told you that! Even my poor puppy was completely flattened by the excessive heat.

Of all the projected nightmare scenario effects...

For many millennia, the moon reigned supreme and was worshipped as divine. Although the sun has been venerated to some degree in practically every culture in the world, a highly developed worship of the sun is comparatively rare. Solar cults flourished only in civilizations with vast civil structures and intricate...

Get ready. Here comes Friday the 13th again. This makes three in 2012 -- January and April and July, oh my! The paraskevidekatriaphobes among us are not happy campers. Nor are the triskaidekaphobes.

Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13. Paraskevidekatriaphobia is the more specific fear of Friday...

In the period around the summer solstice, the sun radiates its most powerful energy. But the seasonal ascendance of light and temperature is not -- despite popular belief -- due to our distance from the sun, but rather to the degree of directness of its rays.

It would be...

The circle of time, the celestial cycles, the round of the seasons, surrounds us and encompasses us. All there is, was, and will be exists within its spinning circumference.

Consider the cycles of the systems: the celestial revolutions, rotations, and orbits, which collaboratively choreograph the complex ballet of the...

It is promulgated in some paleontological circles that all of humankind is the offspring of a single lady who lived in Africa, or some say Asia, a very long time ago. The geometrically multiplied generations of her darling daughters and sons have since become geographically dispersed and ethnically diverse. Over...

May Day is the halfway point, or cross-quarter Day, of spring. By mid-spring, Nature has dug in Her roots and taken hold. Once-tentative buds have unfolded and flourished, spread green with the surging effervescent, aphrodisiac substance of life. The sap, the shoot, the root, the bud, the bark, the branch,...

Fear of the number 13 is the most prevalent superstition in the Western world. We even have a name for it: triskaidekaphobia. It is quite common for even the most ordinarily rational and otherwise exemplary person -- Winston Churchill, for example -- to refuse to sit in row 13 in...

I am mad. No, that doesn't begin to describe it. I am pissed. I am angry. I am irate. I am incensed. I am enraged. I am livid. I am FURIOUS.

"All men are created equal," states the Declaration of Independence. From the very beginning, women were...