Time for a Blog Makeover?

I’ve been blogging here almost four and a half years. When I started out, I was using the very plain blue theme. I spent several days looking at available WP themes and after a few weeks of blogging, I went with a grey concrete streetscape with autumn leaves blowing in the gutter. It was November, [...]

A Witch in Peoria

I began this blog in October 2007 in response to Mike Miller’s “Faith & Value” column in the Saturday Journal Star. It was the first thing I read every Saturday, and Mike Miller usually gave me plenty of incentive to talk about Pagan Faith & Values. –Then in one of their cost-cutting sweeps, PJS dropped [...]

Finished: The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary

Three cheers for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. After 90 years, the 21 volume Chicago Assyrian Dictionary has been completed. According to Sharon Cohen, an AP reporter, the multi-volume work is “more encyclopedia than glossary, offering a window into the ancient society of Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq, through every conceivable form of [...]

Harvest Home 2009

The Wheel of the Year rolls on. This is Harvest Home, also called Mabon, the second of three harvest festivals. Lammas or Lughnasa is the first one at the beginning of August. It’s the Festival of First Fruits. For me, as I said in “Lammas 2009″, Lammas is fair season: gigantic vegetables, prize-winning pies, truck-pulls, [...]

The Multiverse & The Blogosphere

International Pagan Blogging Month has introduced me to a multiverse of other Pagan bloggers. While several CIPS members are set up on Facebook, MySpace, or PaganSpace, nobody admits to blogging. Through Chrysalis’s site, however, I have been following a daisy-chain of Pagan contributors. How to chose? Do I want to read Witches and Scientists? How [...]

Contemplating the Long Now

In The Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand provides a diagram of the pace of change within the layers of civilization. The top layer, “Fashion,” changes rapidly. “Commerce,” the next layer down, changes a little less quickly. “Infrastructure” and “Goverance” are slower yet. “Culture” is conservative and tends to change slowly. “Nature” is the [...]

Calling All Devas: It’s time to “Build the Block.”

The Riverfront Museum is “on”! Maybe. The referendum to raise $40 million (through a .25% increase in the Peoria County sales tax) has passed by the skin of its teeth, and it wouldn’t surprise me if opponents called for a recount. If this museum is going to be built, Build the Block supporters need to [...]

A Witch in the City

I have not yet introduced myself.. I’m Sophie Gale, novice blogger, Pagan, and Witch. “Merry Meet,” as we say. I’ve not been practicing for a while, and I hope in these posts to rekindle a spark of magic in my life. –Or Magick, if you prefer. So, why, you may ask, all the concrete? [This [...]