Hearthside

I haven't been a Heathen very long, comparatively. I have been fairly successful at learning quickly because once I found Heathenry I threw myself head long into it. I read anything I could get my hands on, I learned to read in Old Norse, and most importantly, I talked to other Heathens. That is always the fastest way to learn. You can absorb all the knowledge others already learned much faster through a discussion. We need to encourage more discussions in Heathenry, and help them to flourish. Discussions can get heated without being debates. The thrill is the depth, not being right. That was what drew me into my Kindred, I was willing to challenge ideas, but be polite about it. I wasn't going to follow blindly, but I could accept being wrong. And I have been wrong a lot over the years.  I recently had the opportunity to go home, to where my family lives in British Columbia. In 2017, I moved back with my mom. I had been a shut in for 3 years at that point, after teaching up nor...

I was recently talking to someone in the USA about how they were trying to find the meaning in American holidays from a Heathen perspective. They were trying to be mindful of the colonial history of America and working to moving past that. It got me thinking about how that might look in Canada. Holidays about belonging to a nation or group of people, but how do we feel that sense of belonging when we are ourselves outside of the over-culture? How do we reconcile our shared colonial history as modern inclusive Heathens in Canada? If you are not familiar with Canadian Holidays, there are very few, and even less which are actually days off of work. Some days are provincially recognized only or have different names in different provinces even if they fall on the same day. The majority of days are either Christian or colonial in origin. So let’s take a look: Remembrance Day - November 11th This is a day to honour those who died in war, and honour veterans. What some people may not know is t...

Below is the transcript for an interview with Heathen Children's Author, Joy Page. Her book would be excellent as a Halloween/Samhain gift or for someone on your Yule list this year! --- Michelle: Hi there, and welcome to Hearthside. My name is Michelle. I'm the author on the blog, and today we're doing something a little bit different. Instead of starting with our blog and making the accessible copy, what we are doing is I am interviewing Joy here, and then I will make the transcript as the blog entry. Michelle: So for those of you who don't know Joy, this is Joy Page and she's one of my Kyn. And something really cool that Joy has just done is released a children's book. The book is called The Witch’s Family. So we have hard copies and paperback editions and I'll give you all the information at the end. So this is written by Joy and the illustrator is Penny Nicoles, and yeah, so I'm really excited about breaking our routine, doing the YouTube version fi...