Category Archives: About This Blog

Announcing NaturalPagans.com!

Happy Monday, all!

I wanted to let you know about a new endeavor I’m a part of. Naturalpagans.com is officially launching today; it’s a blog aggregation site bringing together posts from a variety of naturalist pagan writers.

What is a naturalist pagan? Whereas many pagans believe in the supernatural, we look to strictly natural explanations for the wonders of this world. We celebrate nature and its cycles and value the contributions of science to our understanding of the world. The magic in our world consists of amazing phenomena like photosynthesis and plate tectonics, evolution and the hydrologic cycle. Our nature religion begins with the very physical soil and stone and the air all around us.

I invite you to check out NaturalPagans.com! And if you happen to be a naturalist pagan blogger, we’re always looking for new folks to join us–email b at rox dot com to find out more.

Website Updates

Hey, folks! I’ve updated the Green Wolf website, in particular:

—An updated list of my past and current art exhibitions, found on my About page (along with my bio and artist’s statement!)

An updated portfolio featuring some of the best of my work over the past couple of years, with new additions!

So if you’ve mainly been checking out my blog, consider this an invitation to check out the rest of the site, too 🙂

A Brief PSA on Accessing This Site

If you visit the Green Wolf front page today, you’ll notice that, over in the right upper corner, there’s a little popup. It’s not an ad or a virus–it’s a message. Today, September 10, is the Internet Slowdown, a protest against the major American ISPs that want to make some sites load more slowly if they don’t pay an extra fee. Right now, every site loads at the same rate–with variation according to their own servers, how much stuff is on the page loading, etc., but they still get the same amount of juice from your ISP. If Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner and AT&T get their way, only the sites that pay extortion fees will have fast loading times. The rest? Well, remember when everything was on dial-up?

So what do you do? When you see that popup, don’t close it–click on it. Or head straight to Battle For the Net for more information on what you can do to preserve internet neutrality. After all, you wouldn’t accept your cable company giving you cut-rate access to television channels that didn’t pay their extortion fees, so why should you accept less than the best internet access for your money?

A Fresh Start

As you can see, this is a brand-new blog. I am not, however, a brand-new blogger. You may consider A Sense of Natural Wonder here at the Green Wolf to be the progeny of my previous blog, Therioshamanism.

When I overhauled my website, it gave me an opportunity to think about whether Therioshamanism was still a good fit for where I am in life now. I began in in September of 2007, six and a half years ago, which is a respectable age for a blog. Its birth was in a desire to create a more formalized neoshamanic path for myself; however, over time my spirituality took a turn in the opposite direction, away from rituals and journeys and toward a more integrated nature spirituality. You can read more about that transformation here.

The title for this new blog is inspired by the subtitle quote which was a recent addition to Therioshamanism: “All spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and nature is a window into that wonder” (Richard Louv). Where six years ago I focused heavily on shamanic journeying and spirit work, trying to consciously (perhaps too consciously) create a path, today I find myself inspired primarily by wonder, especially (though not exclusively) via the non-human natural world. My spirituality has become so deeply intertwined with my art and writing and other elements of my life that it’s more a complete synthesis than a series of parts. Perhaps that’s where I needed to be all along; I can say for sure that I’m much more comfortable now than I was in 2007.

So is this still (neo)shamanism? I suppose that all depends on your definition. If you take a strict definition in which shamanism requires journeying and traditional animistic spirit work, then no, my path wandered away from that a while ago. But if you take a more meta look at the shaman in the context of their culture, being an intermediary between their community and some other force (another community, nature, spirits, their own psyches) then perhaps this is a sort of shamanism yet. I’m less concerned with labels, so I’m not going to belabor the point any further.

It is definitely still paganism, and nature spirituality too. And I intend to continue writing the sorts of things I’ve written most recently at Therioshamanism, so don’t expect a drastic shift. I’ve just changed locations, and otherwise my writing will continue to evolve at its organic pace. Thank you for following me here.