I want to pray to my local library, for being a haven for me since before I knew how to read.

I want to pray to the trees in my backyard, that lead into the woods my mother and I used to make regular pilgrimages through.

I want to give offerings to the little demon poppet I made, and kiss the top of his little head to thank him for making me feel less lonely.

I want to pray to my apartment building, my water heater, for keeping me safe and warm.

I want to pray to my body, myself, for making it this far.

If you're a pagan who has little to no tolerance for secular pagans, Wiccans, Christo-Pagans, eclectic pagans, or, in general, you're intolerant of all kinds of pagan practices that are different from your own for petty and ridiculous reasons - then you have no right to complain about the judgmental attitude of monotheists toward paganism... And beyond that, if you encounter that kind of judgment, you absolutely deserve it.

Hard to see but there WAS a 456 over there. 💀

Throughout my life I've heard the word "energy" used, viewed and treated in the spiritual sphere as some ethereal, supernatural force. I even saw a TikTok the other day claiming that secular and atheist witches do not believe in energy work. I'm not sure where this treatment of the term "energy" started, but it likely has a lot to do with some more "woo" practices like Reiki and crystal healing.

I think we need to remove this stigma from the term "energy" in the Craft because 1) energy is an objectively real, observable material and 2) the benefits of working with and understanding energy shouldn't be packaged and branded as a medium for the "mystics only" club. This was something really meaningful that I took from Psychic Witch, where Mat Auryn explains energy in more scientifically observable terms.

Rather than defining energy as a mystical force, he explains that reality is, in fact, entirely composed of energy. The majority of us don't really think about reality this way, but anyone who has taken a physics class can tell you that this is a fact. Reality is energy--this is not a mystical perspective; it is a fact of the laws of physics. The scientific method has shown us that even things that appear solid, (diamonds, skeletons, my coffee mug, for example) are merely energies vibrating at a slower rate. Everything is made of particles perpetually in motion.

Still with me? Okay, so--Auryn breaks this down further by stating that the five senses are just various ways that we perceive energy. So in a sense, we are achieving a rudimentary form of energy work just by perceiving the world around us. Put in this context, many other animals are superior to humans with certain types of energy work (I wonder if this is part of why animals are so sacred to us witches). Dolphins and bats can legitimately use echolocation to experience sound waves as a form of sight. Indeed, we humans are far from superior when it comes to energy perception--it's almost as if humans were not created to rule over the rest of the earth (such a crazy concept).

Some examples of energy that our bodies cannot perceive include magnetic fields, radiation, wireless signals, and ultraviolet light.