Digital Altar to the Gods

So here's my advice

- check if there's legislation around litter picking in your area [yes sometimes that's a thing] especially if you're planning to do more then just a trash bag a go or doing this as a group!

- make sure there's a place to dispose of the trash you picked up before you start!

- set a rule to yourself to not touch anything duiring litter picking with your hands get a litter picker or some really good gloves [if using gloves don't touch yourself w those]

- duiring litter picking i adhear to the idea that there is only trash and nature there is no shiny things you want to take home even if thst thing you found is really cool.

- fruit cores, fruit peels ect that do not appear naturally in the area you're cleaning are considered trash as well.

-i like to stick to places where i know a lot of people come and go, major paths the enterence of a park ect litter picking for me is spent inna different part of nature then when i go into nature for my own walks. I want to prevent the trash that gets discarded here from finding it's way further into the forest where it will be harder to clean later.

- stick to it! Stick to it in the same area and slowly expand that area it took me 20 minutes to fill up my first trash bag now it takes me over an hour in that same area!

Yes i'm aware most of this is probably considered common sense by a lot of people , but i want to see it be spoken about more so here i am screaming into the well

You can usually find books on witchcraft, yes, but there’s also field guides on local foraging and wildlife, cookbooks, books that teach you how to craft and DIY, books about environmental protection and stewardship, books on how to use herbs medicinally, books about other religions, cultures, and spiritual practices. My favorite local library even has a seed swapping program and fantastic resources to research your own family history!

Here's a list of some common fruits (at least here in my corner of the USA) and their most commonly practiced properties.

Apple: Love, success, healing, happiness, joy, peace

Apricot: Lust, love, peace, affection

Banana: Spirituality, fertility, luck, love, prosperity

Blackberry: Lust, protection, healing, prosperity

Blueberry: Protection, peace, calmness

Cherry: Joy, love

Cranberry: Protection

Grape: Dreaming, prosperity, fertility

Grapefruit: Cleansing, healing, purification (eat with caution if you're on meds!)

Lemon: Purification, cleansing, removing blockages, energy

Lime: Love, peace, protection, cleansing, purification

Mango: Protection, lust, affection, love

Melon: Purification, healing

Nectarine: Love, affection, intimacy

Orange: Purification, healing, luck, love, prosperity

Peach: Longevity, wisdom, joy, fertility, love

Pear: Longevity, lust, love, prosperity, luck

Pineapple: Love, lust, protection, prosperity

Plum: Protection, love, lust

Pomegranate: Creativity, luck, prosperity, wishes

Raspberry: Energy, joy, love, protection

Strawberry: Success, romance, love, luck

Watermelon: Healing

Remember, everyone, always dig a little deeper if you're struggling and never accept the first answer you find as ultimate truth! Knowledge is power, and power is control. Safe practicing and blessed be!

This is likely an oversimplification, but I think that we can break down correspondences into three main categories:

Cultural Correspondences - these are often heavily steeped in the mythology and folklore of a particular region. They are often but not always correspondences of items found in that region. This is where correspondences become the most varied because, despite what you may have read in Those Bad Witchcraft Books, culture is not universal. A great example of this is that most Western cultures associate the color black with Death and Mourning but a lot of non-Western cultures have the same association with the color white. It stands to reason that this type of correspondence will work the best for you if you are sticking as close to the correspondences of the bioregion that you grew up in as possible (1) and that they will be most effective when used magically on somebody else from that bioregion (2).

Material Correspondences - these correspondences are based on the physical properties of the item in question. Some plants are edible, some medicinal, and some poisonous. Things with thorns can hurt you when you touch them. Quartz has high levels of electric conductivity. The idea here is that if Rosemary repels insects, it can be used in a banishment spell to repel that unwanted "insect" from your life. These are, in my opinion, the immutable correspondences - the item you are using will ALWAYS carry its physical characteristics with it into your magic. Spicy peppers will always be Hot and Burning, so-called "Weeds" will always grow tenaciously, and Sugar will always be Sweet. It is worth keeping in mind here that when using plants, the part of the plant may affect whether it carries that correspondence. Sometimes only one part of the plant carries a particular property - consider the difference between the sweet scent of rose petals that we use in love spells versus the sharp thorn that would be better used for protection. 3. Sympathetic Correspondences - The base concept behind sympathy is that two things that are alike in some way share a connection with one another that can be harnessed magically. The more alike that two things are, the deeper the connection. There are many ways that this is used in magic. A lot of herbal correspondences involve sympathy through the Doctrine of Signatures. This is the thought process that anything shaped like an ear can be used to affect ears/hearing magically. The Doctrine of Signatures gets rolled in a little bit with Cultural Correspondences as it is heavily rooted in Western herbalism, but it deserves a mention on its own. Another way that sympathetic magic makes its way into correspondences is the idea that an object from a particular place carries some of the energy of that place which can be harvested for magical intent. You see this in the use of bank dirt in money spells or cemetery dirt in baneful magic. This is also where Holy water, moon water, and stormwater come into play - here we are assuming that something that has been done to the water (being blessed by a priest, charged in the moon, or collected during a storm) carries an inherent energy that can be then transferred to your spell. Depending on your viewpoint, you may or may not agree with the concepts of sympathetic magic.

And that's the whole point of this. Witchcraft, as a whole, isn't the sort of path where you are supposed to proceed based entirely on blind faith. If you're flipping to a certain page in Scott Cunningham's infamous Green Book and finding the first money herb you come across to use in a spell, you are probably doing yourself a disservice. I suggest that you look closer. Not only will the physical correspondence change how your spell manifests (I've written about this before) but you may find that you don't even BELIEVE or AGREE with that correspondence at all. And maybe that's not important to you (but if that's true, why are you even reading this?). But I suggest that it should be. That understanding of a correspondence deepens your connection with the energy of the item you are looking to use. Moreover, exploring it further may give you all sorts of juicy ideas for spellwork to augment that energy.

Looking into the What and Why of correspondences is both an excellent critical thinking exercise and a good way to get a better idea of both the history of witchcraft and how magical systems work. Also, let me highlight this quote, because it sums up the matter rather elegantly:

And maybe that's not important to you (but if that's true, why are you even reading this?). But I suggest that it should be.

Because Google is totally useless and won't help you with ANYTHING

iNaturalist: Take photos of living things you see, post them, and the community will identify them for you. Data from iNaturalist is used in scientific research.

Wildflower.org Plant Database: Enter search criteria and find some plants. Very useful if you're looking for plants with specific qualities or know what you have in mind.

Native Plant Finder: This website is still in beta and is a work in progress, but it will show you plants for your area ranked by the number of butterflies that use them for their caterpillars.

WildflowerSearch: AMAZING resource for identification and for learning about new plants. Shows you where plants are native/not native, TONS of search filters.

Native Plant Trust: A New England organization, but probably useful to anyone.

Northern Forest Atlas: Great images and identification resources for trees; has good pictures of bark, seeds, buds, leaves.

FloraFinder: Another plant database site that's being slowly built up by a passionate nerd.

MonarchWatch milkweed by USA ecoregion: Tells you what milkweed species you should plant for monarch butterflies.

Native Beeology: Not plants, but a closely related subject.

Home is Behind, the World Ahead

Home: Where you are now

The Path: How to choose which path to tread

Through Shadow: Challenges you may meet

Edge of Night: How to face those challenges

Stars Alight: What you’ll accomplish/learn

You're stuck in the decision-making process and want help thinking through it from a different angle.

You need to sort out your thoughts. Divination is good for breaking out of a circular thought process and approaching it in a different way.

You want something to focus and reflect on for the coming day/month/chapter in your life.

You need a second opinion on something spiritual.

You want something to aid your planning process by suggesting steps and strategies

You want advice for how to tackle a situation.

When NOT to Consult Divination

You're fishing for a specific answer and just want something to validate you. Your bias WILL get in the way of the truth.

You want very specific details about a future that hasn't happened yet. (What will my husband be like? When will I meet him? How many kids will I have?)

You want to know what someone is thinking/feeling/hiding. Literally just communicate with them.

may you feel them as the wind rustles the leaves

may they be heard in the trickle of water from the roof after the rain

may you find them in the dirt as you plant your garden

sometimes reverence for land starts very simply:

learning the names of local plants. noticing where water gathers. thanking a tree before taking from it. picking up trash. leaving a place better than you found it. sitting quietly long enough to feel the mood of the land.

animism is not always spectacle.

But understanding things like spirituality, spirit-work, and magic isn't done through logic, data, facts, and figures. Hell, it's not even done through faith or belief.

Our logical ways of thinking live in the left side of the brain, which deals with facts and figures. It understands the world through frameworks like "Tom is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore Tom is mortal," or "1+1=2," or "B is the second letter in the alphabet." It's also the part of the brain that thinks using language.

Then there's the right side of the brain, which deals with holistic thinking. It understands the world through feeling—not "feelings" as in emotions, per se, but "feelings" as in "anything felt." This includes spatial perception, movement, direction, distance, velocity, and any other measurement of change.

It feels these things by mirroring the sensation of them in the body.

This is also how we know what someone's feeling when they don't tell us. We mirror their emotional state. It's also how we experience abstract movements such as "the pacing of conversations," or "the emotional distance between people," or "the weight of a given situation."

And—if I were to be so bold as to say this—it's also how we know when we're talking to deities and spirits. This mirroring has certain dynamics when it interacts with intelligent beings.

If you try to find art or statues or information, it's almost completely just that; Hard ass war general.

Wise wanderer is treated as an after thought,

And trickster and god of madness is completely ignored. (And that's not all the roles and titles, I promise)

Maybe I'm just salty cause I'm not dying on a battlefield and instead have my nose in a book and head in the clouds, but seeing the other depictions get ignored is low-key annoying.