Every year at Rites of Spring, we weave the web of community. It centers on our maypole, which joins the earth and sky. We stretch out spokes of rope and hold them to show our commitment. We weave yarn between them, connecting our strands to the whole, and we join our voices in song.

We wish every single one of you could be with us every year on the mountain as we honor our connections to stone and river, green ones and flying ones, stars and sun, the sacred earth and each other. Since you can’t, we hope you will join us in this virtual space to weave a different kind of web of community: through words and photos, pixels and electrons, sparks of electricity and ripples of understanding.

EarthSpirit’s tagline is “remembering the Earth as sacred.” I love this. It immediately reminds me of some of the places where it’s easy for me to find that connection to the sacred: my family’s camp on the Saint Lawrence Seaway, the river near my office where I walk, the land at Glenwood. But it also reminds me to seek out connection in less-obvious places. The Charles River is no less sacred where it flows by my city apartment than in the quiet places it eddies near my office, and the land where my food is grown is as special as a majestic wilderness.

The contemporary Pagan movement is a wide and beautiful spectrum of people, most of whom, like me, find their most sacred connections in the world around us. From Twilight Covening to Rites of Spring, EarthSpirit focuses particularly on the natural world, holding an animistic perspective that can complement many other traditions or form a strong practice all on its own, and on building a culture and community that support the earth and our deep relationships with it.

In order to build those relationships, we rely on our ability to listen: to engage in communion with the world around us and to perceive the sacred directly through it. In a sense, we give voice to the rivers and trees, the stones and stars, the earth itself. We look forward to sharing the fruits of that listening and those relationships with you in this space, and we hope that you’ll add your voice to the conversation.
Welcome to the new EarthSpirit Voices.
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Sarah Twichell has been staffing events, teaching, and facilitating ritual with EarthSpirit for ten years, and is delighted to be the new editor for EarthSpirit Voices.