Boo

Let's be honest, religion and consistent practice can be HARD, especially when you're chronically ill, disabled, mentally ill or neurodivergent. This is a list of lower energy practices you can do to connect with your Gods when you're having a rough day.

Pray. You don't have to say the prayer. You don't have to do the full cleansing and offering. Just think about the prayer. It could be as simple as "'Deity Name', thank you. I'm thinking of you and appreciate you."

Dedicate any self care you do to the Gods. You've got to take meds? awesome. it's now a devotional activity.

If you can, light a tea light candle. You can think about who you're dedicating it to as you're lighting it.

Tell them about your day. Have a simple conversation with them (again, this can be in your head if needed).

Offer some water! Water is a great offering if you don’t have the energy to cook, collect or buy something.

Incense is also a great offering because you can light it then forget about it and your house won’t burn down (if you follow regular safety measures). 

Resting. Your deities want you to be okay. Dedicating your rest to your deities is especially great if you feel guilty for allowing yourself time to heal.

Turn on a video of someone reading mythos! 

Put on a deity playlist. There are plenty of pre-made ones on Spotify. 

Veil or bind your hair! Whenever I’m low energy I’ll throw my hair in a ponytail and bind it that way. It doesn’t have to be extravagant. 

Make a Pinterest board for them!

Post on a digital altar! There are plenty of discord servers that have digital altars and temples. You could also make a devotional Tumblr blog. 

Change your phone lock/home screen to something that reminds you of your Deity.

In Ancient Greece, Athena was apparently the goddess of crafts, which is a bit vague. Hephaestus was the god of sculpting, but that’s not right either.

In Ancient Egypt, I found Khnum who made the other gods and humankind on his potter’s wheel.

I found two gods of pottery in Southeast Asian cultures, Lianaotabi and Panthoibi.

they're little sculptural critters that potters make and leave on or around their kiln for good luck. a lot of them have to do with fire or are holding pottery (Calcifer from Howl's Moving Castle is one I've seen multiple times) but a kiln god can be anything

I share a kiln so I don't want to take up space on or near the kiln, so I just put a kiln god through with every batch of pottery

here's a selection of mine (all holding pottery)

wadding is a material glaze doesn't stick too, and it's used to prop up pieces in a wood fire kiln because otherwise the wood ash would weld them to the shelves.

everyone has to make a little wood fire idol out of wadding and place them on top of the kiln

and unlike a gas or electric kiln that can be programmed and then left alone aside from a few checks, a wood fire kiln needs to be babysat for the full 2-3 day fire (for our size kiln anyway).

cool thing is there's an external pit where we burn thin pieces of wood to get a good ash layer on the pieces, and you can cook in said pit while you're watching. but our prof required us to throw a little bit of whatever we cooked into the main fire as ordering

the kiln can finish our work

and make them functional

or it can destroy it all

so we make offerings

and protectors

and pray

they want an easy mode with only straight pieces😠😡

ethically sourced from tumblr post under the cut

Work best for:

Air drying works best for low-moisture like marjoram, oregano, rosemary and dill.

What to do:

Trim fresh herbs at an angle to protect the rest of the plant. Put the bundle of herbs, stem-side up.

Hang or over a week, ideally in a cool, dark place.

Storage:

Herbs are best stored in airtight glass containers. They're uses range from cooking, tea, tincture, even decoration.

Drying:

This started out as an experiment and has now grown into a pretty large project, as I've found out that most of these plants actually survive and thrive. I have at least 120 plants in pots that are thriving now (after culling the non-natives) and I've planted still more in the back yard.

Now I can identify so many native plants, especially trees, as seedlings, and...they're everywhere. There are dozens and dozens of plant species in a lawn that isn't constantly laced with herbicide, and many of them are beautiful flowering plants that just never get a chance to bloom because people keep mowing them down.

Furthermore, common "weedy" species proliferate largely because of constant, destructive human management. Most "weeds" are just plants that take over destroyed areas and get them habitable for other species. "Weed" isn't a real category of Evil Plant, but it isn't an arbitrary descriptor either—"weed" is a job.

When a swath of forest burns or is felled by a tornado or something, somebody has to stop erosion from stealing all the topsoil, give the creatures a place to hide, attract birds and mammals that will spread new seeds, and keep the ground shady and moist. And that somebody has to be a quick, aggressive grower. That's where "weeds" come in.

So by intensively and indiscriminately weeding and mowing, humans keep their yards and gardens in a constant state of "oh shit, emergency," and the weeds try to take over because....that's what they're supposed to do.

So people see a "weedy" lawn with two months' overgrowth and think, "this is terrible, we can't have this, look at all this thick grass and weeds, it is full of ticks" and decide that the Only way is to keep mowing the whole stretch of land constantly, forever, instead of recognizing that the weedy overgrown lawn is 1) an early developmental stage of something else and 2) 40% invasive species that you put there

I don't know where I'm going with this. I'm just generally frustrated that it's not common knowledge how nature reclaims land.

Most online quips about "guerrilla gardening" show a fundamental lack of understanding about this natural process. If you try to plant something else on a golf course, it will get killed with herbicides and/or mowed down. Those are the ONLY things stopping the golf course from becoming a prairie or forest or whatever it was before.

I think people really want edgy illegal action to be the answer but the answer is actually "talk to people, educate them, and give them the resources to do better." I'm realizing also that the average person knows nothing, nothing, about plants or native species or ecosystems, and people appear to not care because they don't know.

"Water usage! Conservation! Biodiversity!" all that stuff is meaningless squawks to people that can't put it in context. People will generally pretend to know the importance of words like this even if they don't. It's a social thing.

But most people aren't even motivated by property values per se; they're motivated by their own ability to enjoy their property.

The state of general knowledge about gardening is in Hell right now. The easiest to find information on gardening online comes from landscaping websites which often spread straight up misinformation. People don't know that you can plant trees close together or in shade. They don't know that a stand of trees will essentially manage itself. They don't know that a garden with native plants, when it's properly populated, will require very little maintenance.

It's fixed in people's minds that mowing a lawn is the easiest way to manage the land, when if anything it's one of the MOST high maintenance uses for land.

Growing flowers and trees is popularly viewed as difficult and only for a select few that have a "green thumb." This is because so much info comes from websites that are trying to sell you shit.

This is exactly the vital point I want other people to be able to learn about—nature is incredibly resilient and adaptable, and restoring the land starts here and now, not with a hypothetical blank slate

Like right now I'm involved with a local nature center where I'm going to be doing an educational panel on identifying tree seedlings (among other things) and giving away free trees. I have, last I counted, around 115 plants thriving in makeshift pots out on my back porch right now. They are native species that I literally pulled from cracks in pavement, roadsides, and gravel. I've planted about a dozen in my back yard already. I'm going to give some to my neighbors.

The first important point is that trees take time to grow. And we're talking organisms that can live hundreds of years. I'm not going to wait until every golf course is shut down, I'm planting the trees now.

The second important point is that for a lot of homeowners, the main barrier is lack of knowledge—if they could recognize tree saplings and flowers growing in their lawn, they'd keep 'em. If they knew that native flower gardens could be lower maintenance than lawns and how exactly to manage such a garden, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

One thing I hope to do is get rid of the financial barrier. Trees can be like, $150 apiece at a nursery. Here, have a free tree. There you go.

Third important point is that every restored bit of habitat helps. Patch of dirt next to a parking lot? Turn it into native flowers, the world is better for it. One-acre lot? Plant a few dozen trees in clusters and fill the rest with shrubs and flowers, there will be thousands more creatures of a hundred species in the world because of it.

I encourage you to look up pasture succession, because there's a domino effect to plants growing in a disused field. When a tree grows, it attracts squirrels. Squirrels plant more trees. Birds like to sit in trees, and when they poop it plants more trees. But everything in nature is connected this way. If you plant a crap ton of native wildflowers, your neighbors' lawns are going to have them popping up all over the place.

Perhaps most significantly, if people know the name of a plant, they can learn how and why it's important. They can care about it as their neighbor. And that is the beginning of ecological awareness. With that comes the desire to protect.

as promised, the transplanting tutorial

most sources make transplanting sound incredibly difficult, but transplanting young seedlings from areas with sparse dirt, like a driveway or roadside, is actually incredibly easy and can get you some great stuff. Once I worked out the method, i've had a very high survival rate

it took me like a month of trial and error to figure this out so you don't have to.

I...tried to make a meme and got carried away and made A Thing that is like partially unfinished because i spent like 3 hours on it and then got tired.

I think this is mostly scientifically accurate but truth be told, there seems to be relatively little research on succession in regards to lawns specifically (as opposed to like, pastures). I am not exaggerating how bad they are for biodiversity though—recent research has referred to them as "ecological deserts."