Druids In Cars, Going To Festivals

Episode 84 - Living a Pagan Lifestyle (Part 1 of 2)

This week, we chat about a commonly-requested topic: how we live our lives as Pagans, and what the lifestyle looks like to us. Part of that is just how we live our lives, and the decisions that we make that seem quite mundane: how we speak to and rear our children, how we interact with the world around us, and even how we travel. We talk about our visits to the Nashville Parthenon, and about a map of publicly accessible Pagan statues all throughout the US that resides on the Three Cranes Google account.

Also, get a load of us, practicing our own advice when a surprise thought leads us down a different road than expected, quite literally... making this Part One of a two-part episode all of a sudden. Tune in next week for our escapade on our detour!

Find us on Facebook, check us out at Threecranes.org/Podcast, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

Episode 83 - Reflections on Hybrid Ritual (and: On The Road Again!)

We're back on the road, going to a festival, meaning that your friendly, chatty Druids are back in the full swing of the work. We recorded enough episodes to finish out the rest of the season on our way to Harvest Nights, and to provide a head start into next season as well, so get ready for regular episodes to return starting this week until the break!

This week, we're talking about what it's been like to do hybrid rituals (partially private and in-person, partially public and over web conferencing software). Back in Episode 70, we described what we thought it would be like, and this seemed an opportune time to think about the experience and reflect a bit together on it.

So many thanks to Charter Oak Grove, ADF, in Connecticut for putting together such a wonderful weekend in person. It was amazing.

Find us on Facebook, check us out on threecranes.org/podcast, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

Episode 82 - Kindling Sparks: An Interview With Rev. Avende

Did you know that one of our co-hosts, Rev. Avende, has published a children's education book? They did! It's called Kindling Sparks: A Religious Education Program for Young Pagans, and it's been available for a bit now through Rev. Avende's Patreon, and it's now been released as a book!

Today, we interview Rev. Avende and talk about the process of bringing this program to life; it's development in early 2020 through today, and the path it's taken through testing and community work.

You can pick up a copy of Kindling Sparks through Garanus Publishing on Lulu, at The Magical Druid, or wherever fine books are sold!

You can also find their first book, The Spiraling Sun: A Winter Solstice Liturgy at The Magical Druid.

Find us on Facebook, check us out at ThreeCranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org!

Episode 81 - Magical Work-Life Balance

Finally on our way to and from a festival, even it it was virtual, Revs. Avende and Dangler are on their way out to the site of our broadcasted Summerland Unity Rite for a Druid Moon, and they spend some time discussing how they balance the religious and magical lives they lead with their mundane lives.

They also get stuck in traffic at a tomato festival, because, well, what's life without a little unplanned weirdness.

Summerland was great, though all online. If you're interested in a great online festival experience, we'll recommend Beyond the Gates, a festival happening over Labor Day weekend, and you can still register and see their presenters!

Our next in-person festival, if everything works out, will be Charter Oak's Harvest Nights. It would be really great if we could see you there, probably masked, but we're anxious to have it be in person again.

Check us out on Facebook, find us at ThreeCranes.org/Podcast, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

Episode 80 - Travel Spirits, Stopovers, and the Spirit of Couch Surfing

We sit down to discuss the sorts of things we seek out when we travel: the weird religious sites, the haunted tunnels, and the wonderful hospitality of our friends.

And, of course, there's an off-the-cuff prayer to the Spirit of Couch Surfing, a solid contestant for patron of this podcast.

We recorded this not in cars, but during a local, non-Pagan travel event we were both involved in. But there's way more to come.

So, find us on Facebook, check us out at Threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

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For those curious, Rev. Avende's prayer, "Upon Encountering the Murder Ghost" from the #PrayerADay Project, Nov. 9, 2018:

Hermes Diactorus, Guide of Souls,
As we traveled tonight through the dark,
Sleet bouncing off the windshield, 
Reflectors marking the road few and far between,
I thank you for traveling alongside us. 

Hermes Diactorus, Guide of Souls,
For holding the ghosts at bay as the fog rose about us,
For keeping the shades back as we sped beneath the underpass,
For maintaining the boundary and keeping us safe from those spirits who wish us harm,
I thank you for traveling alongside us. 

Hermes Diactorus, Guide of Souls,
Carry those spirits onward to peace,
Remove them and their malevolent intentions from this world. 
Hermes, I thank you for your important work. 

Episode 79 - Spirituality and Religion

Today, we took a listener question from an OBOD listener who wanted to know our take on the differences between spirituality and religion. We start with some dictionary definitions and work our way through our own experiences.

This discussion sort of takes off from some of the ideas about orthopraxy in our previous episode, so you might be interested to tune in there as well, though this episode certainly stands alone.

If you want to hear more about this idea that "Practice Begets Belief," you can find a 2012 podcast MJD did with BT Newberg over at Naturalistic Paganism. (Fun historical note: this was MJD's first experience on a podcast.)

Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

Episode 78 - Orthodoxy, Orthopraxy, and Orthoskhesis

Today, we get a new vocabulary word in "orthoskhesis," a word meaning "right relationship" (versus "right belief" with orthodoxy, or "right practice" with orthopraxy). We talk a bit about how we might use this in the way we think about Druidry and Paganism in general, and about how we can be not only in a right relationship, but also in a wrong relationship (spoiler alert: it's mostly "can I set healthy boundaries?").

If you're interested in the Greekies mentioned toward the end of the discussion, you can get a look at them at The Magical Druid.

Find us on Facebook, check us out at Threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org!

Episode 77 -The Sensory Experience of Ritual

Two weeks ago, in Episode 75 (s4Ep8), we spoke a bit about the sensory experiences of our work as it related directly to our stoles, sickles, and other physical items we work with; last week, we went through a Dairy Queen drive-thru and had a tasty episode. Today, we wanted to dive deeper into how we experience ritual in a very physical, sensory way.

We walk through the Five Senses we learned as kids in school (touch, hearing, seeing, taste, and smell), and then we also talk about three additional senses that are less well-known: our vestibular, interoceptive, and proprioceptive senses. To help us in our discussion, Rev. Dangler's wife, Maggie, joins us as our in-house expert to help us build a language around our experiences.

Tonight, we're Druids in Lawn Chairs Sitting Adjacent to a Fire (no new theme songs this week, though), with a longer-than-usual podcast episode (48 minutes!), but we really had a good time on this one, and had some great experiences coming around to new understandings on our topic. We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did. And maybe you'll hear the owl in the background, too.

Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

Episode 76 - Retaining Sanity and Practice In a Pandemic

Today, we take a special break and do a special trip suggested by one of our listeners, and we talk about how we retained our sanity and practice in a global pandemic. There's a lot of chat about tech, ritual and work, and building physical connections in the absence of physical presence. We even talk about some of our favorite Patreons, like DandelionLady, Firesighted, and TheLatestKate (and of course you can also check out Rev. Avende's and Rev. Dangler's as well).

We also talk about how we've navigated the reopening process as a Grove and as individuals.

If you're interested in the set of Reopening Workings from MJD that he sent out, you can find them on his Patreon.

You can also check out the trailer and the stream of Rev. Avende's Animal Crossing Rite and see how we managed that.

Special thanks to Mike Bierschenk for our re-written theme for this specific episode.

Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org!

Episode 75 - Drawing Out the Voice of the Folk

We took a week off and (virtually) attended Wellspring last weekend, and we had a good time. But we're back!

Learn the secret of the Stoles of the Priests of ADF, and why we do the weird things we do with them in ritual when a new priest is ordained. Then, hear us absolutely fail to recall some prayers we speak before every right because we don't have our stoles with us.

We talk a little bit about how our physical actions inform our religious work and expression, and about what it's like to work with a sickle as a Druid.

You can watch Rev. Avende, Rev. Castner, and Rev. Crawford receive their stoles, along with the toning process, on our YouTube channel to get a feeling of what the ceremony looks like.

Find us on Facebook, check out threecranes.org/podcast for more Druids in Cars, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.