Best 15 quotes of John Halstead on MyQuotes

An Atheopagan Prayer by Mark Green Praise to the wide spinning world Unfolding each of all the destined tales compressed In the moment of your catastrophic birth Wide to the fluid expanse, blowing outward Kindling in stars and galaxies, in bright pools Of Christmas-colored gas; cohering in marbles hot And cold, ringed, round, gray and red and gold and dun And blue Pure blue, the eye of a child, spinning in a veil of air, Warm island, home to us, kind beyond measure: the stones And trees, the round river flowing sky to deepest chasm, salt And sweet. Praise to Time, enormous and precious, And we with so little, seeing our world go as it will Ruing, cheering, the treasured fading, precious arriving, Fear and wonder, Fear and wonder always. Praise O black expanse of mostly nothing Though you do not hear, you have no ear nor mind to hear Praise O inevitable, O mysterious, praise Praise and thanks be a wave Expanding from this tiny temporary mouth this tiny dot Of world a bubble Going out forever meeting everything as it goes All the great and infinitesimal Gracious and terrible All the works of blessed Being. May it be so. May it be so. May our hearts sing to say it is so.

For the natural polytheist who finds her gods in the rivers and mountains, in the deep-rooted giants looming above the canopy and in the tiny creatures that move beneath them, ecology gives us a glimpse into a kind of living anatomy of the divine, a theology of physical as well as spiritual life. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God

For the natural polytheist, whose gods arise in and from the natural material world ... Our gods not only have transcendent eyes and metaphysical hands. They have antlers and feathers, hooves and scales, fangs and horns and wings and fins and claws. They are in the lands we strip for veins of precious ore. They are in the waters we poison. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God

I see the gods—the names, images, stories—as the poetic encapsulation of our human experience, our relationship with the ineffable forces that shape human life. While this makes the gods no thing, it does not make them nothing. I see the gods as representing very real, powerful, even dangerous forces. I believe the gods are real. It doesn’t matter what we call them or don’t call them. They are real and dangerous, and we will contend with them. This for me is the message of the Bacchae. - M. J. Lee, "Being Human When Surrounded by Greek Gods

I sing to you of many more gods, gods of wind and water, gods of each mineral and the events that created them. I sing to you of the gods of protons, of quarks, of atomic forces binding and holding. I sing to you of the god of the dust that flies off the ice-burned comet, and the god of the spaces in between. I sing to you of the god that twists like a serpent at the center of every sun and is found again coiled within every electron, shared by both and worshiped by each in its own way. I sing to you of the god that collects asteroids together in mockeries of his sister’s solar systems, jealous of his elder sibling’s power. I sing to you of all these, and many, many more." - Lupa, "The Forgotten Gods of Nature

I sing to you of the deities of the Dictyostelidal slime molds, sexless and strange, at once a thousand voices and one song united. I sing to you of hard times when the wood has rotted away and the sun bakes the earth, and while as individuals we die, together we thrive. The divinities ask for sacrifice, the thousand voices demand it. Those who die to give life to the others, who raise up the new generation so that they may spread far and wide—these become a part of that sacred host, their voices immortalized not in cells but in spirit." - Lupa, "The Forgotten Gods of Nature

It is the distinction between transpersonal and interpersonal relationships with deities which sets naturalistic polytheism apart from neopolytheism. Interpersonal relationships are between two or more persons and are focused upon individual perspectives. A transpersonal relationship extends beyond the individual perspective, transcending the distinctions of ego and personality. For example: A neopolytheist has a close personal relationship with a modernized personification of Thor, to whom she prays to daily. A naturalistic polytheist practices breathing as a sacrament which allows her to focus on life’s connection to the atmosphere, altering her perception of separateness, resulting in viewing the at-mosphere as a deity." - Glen Gordon, "Naturalism and the Gods

Natural polytheism embraces the science of ecology as a basic metaphor for theological inquiry. In other words, natural polytheism seeks to understand our relationship with the gods as an aspect of interrelated systems of being, consciousness and meaning. Its focus is, first and foremost, on the wildernesses that defy our carefully mapped boundary lines, that penetrate even the most civilized cultural centers and underlie our most cherished notions of what it means to be human." - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Natural Theology: Polytheism Beyond the Pale

Salt Marsh Goddess by Michelle Joers "You may need a super-human super-hero super-natural god/dess, hammer or harp in hand, horse-bodied or jackal-headed, Lady of the Lake or Lord of the Seas.* But I have the deep, deep ocean and strong winds driving waves upon the shore driving me to my knees for absolution driving me to oblivion; I have a sun that warms tender shoots, crooning them from the loamy body of a Living Earth; The caress of the Willow branch as I lie beneath her roots, book in hand, and squirmy child in lap. The Salt Marsh Goddess speaks to me in ringing tones, as clear as any god of myth does for you & she speaks in a thousand tongues— Spartina, Juniperus, Myrica, Sesarma, Uca, Littorina, Malaclemys, Ardea, Alligator …just to name a few. I have prayed at her temple as the tide pours into my boots And divined my future with her bones I have bled for her | I have tasted her flesh And drank of her blood | And given her mine While you argue over how to resurrect gods of long passed cultures, I’ll be the one covered in mud and dancing with the rushes, celebrating a goddess born of glaciers.

So yes, I worship nature. I worship a blind Goddess. For me, she is the only worthy object of worship. She will never care that I worship her. She will never answer a single prayer. But she is always with me… shaping me as I shape her. I will struggle with her to the last gasp of my life. And in the end, in my final act of devotion, I will yield to her. - John Halstead, "I Worship the Blind Goddess

…stand at the foot of a mountain and you may be impressed by how much greater it is than you in degree, how alien it is from you in kind. Climb that mountain and confront limits of endurance beyond which you thought yourself incapable, feel the relation between yourself and the mountain’s flora and fauna as part of one interdependent ecosystem, and discover how the experience of the mountain becomes part of you and changes who you are—then you may draw close to something like transcendence.” - B. T. Newberg

The heron must be used to people, and yet it never lets you get too close. Draw parallel to it with the width of one of the marsh’s holding ponds between you, and it will duck its head, eyeing you with suspicion, then fly. I cannot approach the heron, certainly could never touch it; I can only look for it, entranced. This is how I understand the divine, and why I continue to seek it in the resolutely non-human world, with which we nonetheless recognize a numinous kinship. Sometimes, it will turn and lock eyes with you, lifting you out of yourself, changing everything. Other times, it will give you the side-eye and swoop away, leaving you longing for retreating beauty. You might not see it every single time you go looking, or where you expect to find it. No matter how common the experience, every time you stumble across mystery, or independent wild being, it is a surprise and a miracle. And every day, you can look." - Sara Amis, "A Daily Heron

The multiplicity of human identity is not just a spiritual principle, it’s a biological fact—a basic ecological reality. ... only 10% of the cells in your body belong to you. The rest are the cells of bacteria and microorganisms that call your body home, and without these symbionts living on and within your physical self, you would be unable to digest and process the nutrients necessary to keep you alive. Your physical body is teeming with a microscopic diversity of life that rivals a rainforest. The insight of the Gaia Theory—that “the Earth system behaves as a single self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components”—is as much a statement about our own physical bodies as it is about the planet. If we imagine the Earth as the body of a goddess, we can also imagine our own bodies as a sacred home to an ecologically complex and diverse array of microscopic life." -- Alison Leigh Lilly, "Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective

We can name this river, here and now—but we cannot name the water itself. We can name our gods and we can name ourselves, but we cannot name the essence of sacred identity that flows through both, that connects us and sanctifies us." - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective

While the ethnic paganisms have important things to teach us concerning the necessity of cultural authenticity, at their worst they become purist ghettos of nostalgia-driven re-enactors. We must never forget our Received Tradition or fail to learn from it; without it, we have no solid basis by which to evaluate our own experience. But ultimately the ways of our ancestors cannot teach us what we most need to know: how to be honestly pagan for our own time and place. That understand-ing can come only from our own encounter with the very sources that inspired these ethnic traditions in the first place. We must drink from the original wellspring itself." - Steven Posch, "Lost Gods of the Witches: A User’s Guide to Post-Ragnarok Paganism