Participants

Meical abAwen is a geologist and environmental scientist. He has worked in 11 countries in the Americas and has firsthand knowledge of the impact of uncontrolled industry on the environment. Meical has also seen the pragmatic ways that people in less developed countries create and maintain sustainable lifestyles, and hopes to apply some of those lessons in the US. He is a coven member of the public teaching circle Blackberry Circle, located in Southeast Texas , and is published in creative nonfiction, poetry and short fiction. Meical is working on his Bardic grade as a member of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. He hosts an occasional podcast at www.daear.net and is working on a web-based television channel for Blackberry Circle. Meical is bi-lingual English/Spanish and welcomes comments and emails in Spanish.

Meical’s posts on No Unsacred Place.

John Beckett grew up in Tennessee with the woods right outside his back door. Wandering through them gave him a sense of connection to Nature and a love for hills and trees. Since leaving home many years ago, John has lived in one suburb after another. Although he still returns to the woods whenever he can, he’s learned that you can find the sacred in suburbia — you just have to look a little deeper.

John is a Druid in the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and serves as Coordinating Officer for the Denton, Texas Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. He lives in the Dallas – Fort Worth area and earns his keep as an engineer. John writes about his spiritual journey on his blog Under the Ancient Oaks.

John’s posts on No Unsacred Place.

Pagan since the late ’80s, Cat Chapin-Bishop has also been Quaker since 2001. Cat is the former Chair of Cherry Hill Seminary’s Pastoral Counseling Department, and her essays have appeared in Laura Wildman’s Celebrating the Pagan Soul, The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies, the Covenant of the Goddess newsletter, and at The Wild Hunt blog.

In addition to exploring her concern for living in balance with the planet, Cat writes about the connections between Pagan and Quaker practice at her own blog, Quaker Pagan Reflections. Cat lives with her husband and two dogs in Western Massachusetts, where she attempts to find peace in the midst of chaos.

Cat’s posts on No Unsacred Place.

Eli Effinger-Weintraub practices naturalistic Reclaiming-tradition hearthcraft in the Twin Cities watershed. She plants her beliefs and practices in the Earth and her butt on a bicycle saddle. She writes plays, essays, and short fiction (especially of the steampunk variety) and is attempting to wrestle a novel into submission. Previous works have appeared in Witches & Pagans Magazine, Circle Magazine, and Steampunk Tales, as well as at the Clarion Foundation blog, I’m From Driftwood, and Humanistic Paganism. Eli earns her daily bread as a comma wrangler. She shares her life and art with her wife, visual artist Leora Effinger-Weintraub, and two buffalo disguised as cats. Check out Eli’s corner of the Internet: Back Booth.

Eli’s posts on No Unsacred Place.

Born and raised in suburban Boston, Howling Hill calls New Hampshire home. A Girl Scout from 1st grade to 12th, she learned the importance of being active in the community from her girl scout leaders and the organization. From ages 6-17 she camped every weekend of every summer (rain or shine) in a small campground in New Hampshire thus learning to appreciate the woods and the creatures great and small who inhabit it.

As a small child Howling Hill helped her paternal grandfather, Papa, in his vegetable garden. There she learned how to plant tomato seeds, nourish eggplants, and ground to Mother Earth. Gardening became her central way of communicating with Mother Earth once she moved to her own home in 2002. She learned the importance of chemical free and GMO free gardening from her beloved Mother Earth.

Earth-Centered Pagan is the best way to describe Howling Hill’s faith. She is a liberal peace activist, anti-GMO, pro-choice, Caucasian European-Statesian all of which fuel her faith as her faith fuels her political and social beliefs.

You can find Howling Hill all over the internet. She blogs at Howling Hill (farm, garden, etc), Path to Witchstead (faith), and The Greenists. Find her on Twitter and Facebook. She also has an Etsy shop.

Howling Hills’s posts on No Unsacred Place.

Juniper Jeni is a proud Canadian who comes from farm folk and grew up in “the dog world.” Raised by outdoorsmen and animal lovers; Juniper was truly a wild child. Today she has experience in homesteading, wildcrafting, bush craft, back country exploring, hunting and subsistence farming. As well as various bohemian lifestyles such as wandering North America like a gypsy in an RV. This is one woman who doesn’t need running water or electricity to be happy and comfortable. She has worked in kennels, stables, pet stores, and in animal rescue. Not to mention a few gigs at the local metaphysical shop wherever she might have found herself at the time. Having been raised in a non-religious but Pagan friendly family, Juniper never found Paganism as to her mind: it was always there. She has been practicing since her mid teens, which means she has been a Witch and Pagan for half her life. Juniper usually identifies as a Hedgewitch and a freestyle Pagan of a Celtic and Anglo-Saxon bent. She runs the Walking the Hedge website, which among other things contains a blog and a forum. Juniper co-hosts the Standing Stone and Garden Gate Podcast with Brendan Myers. She is currently taking various certifications in the animal welfare and wellness field and is studying Animal Welfare through Thompson Rivers University at home. When asked, Juniper describes herself as “a messy little Hedgewitch who speaks my mind.”

Juniper’s posts on No Unsacred Place.

Alison Leigh Lilly was not always a Druid, but she’s been a tree-hugging dirt-worshipper for as long as she can remember. She grew up a shy Irish Catholic hippie girl, exploring the woods and fields surrounding her childhood home with the same curiosity and enthusiasm she would later bring to her studies of mysticism and nature spirituality. Seeking the spiritual heritage of her Celtic ancestors, she discovered poetry and story, mud and blood mingled with the scent of peat fires and damp stone.

She now resides in the lovely, thrice-rivered city of Pittsburgh, where she lives on the edge of a wooded park with her partner, her cat, her pet frogs and her houseplants. A member of DOTR and AODA, she devotes her time to cultivating a spiritual life founded on peace, poesis, and attentive engagement with the inner and outer landscapes of wildness, wilderness and nature. She explores these themes through essays, articles and poetry, and her work has appeared in publications such as Stirring, The God Particle and Sky Earth Sea, as well as online at Patheos.com, The Wild Hunt, PaganPages.org and The Witches’ Voice. She writes regularly in her blog, Meadowsweet & Myrrh.

Alison’s posts on No Unsacred Place.

Lupa is a (neo)shaman, pagan author, dead critter artist, and wannabe polymath living in Portland, OR. When she isn’t immersed in creativity-fueled self-employment, she’s either hiding in the woods somewhere, figuring out how to use her MA in Counseling Psychology for the forces of good, or indulging in Nintendo-circa-1985. She’s all over the place online, including The Green Wolf, Pagan Book Reviews, and Antler Runes.

Lupa’s posts on No Unsacred Place.

Retired Staff

S.C. Amis holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Georgia and edits the literary magazine Dead, Mad, or a Poet. Her interests include sustainable living/right livelihood from a Pagan perspective, ecology, and the convergence of the pragmatic with the mystical.

S.C. Amis’s posts on No Unsacred Place.

Heather is a solitary Pagan and student currently living in British Columbia, Canada. She has nearly completed her Bachelor’s degree in natural resource science, a program that draws together many scientific disciplines, from plant and animal physiology to ecology, and, for a couple of years, she also studied physics. For nearly as long as she can remember, she has been in love with the natural world, from trees and rivers to atoms and galaxies. She is intrigued by the ways in which science, religion, and spirituality interact, and can sometimes be found blogging about these and related topics over at her blog, Say the Trees Have Ears.

Heather’s posts on No Unsacred Place.

Ruby Sara is a member of the Chicago performance collective Terra Mysterium, a regular columnist for Witches and Pagans magazine, and the author of the blog Pagan Godspell. Together with co-ritualist Johnny Rapture, she writes and leads ecstatic, earth-centered seasonal rituals in several local communities. Ruby holds a Masters degree in Theological Studies, and has academic interests in poetry, ecotheology, storytelling, and liturgics. She is eternally and ecstatically dedicated to her Beloved Dionysos, to the exquisite perfection of the purple hyacinth, and, of course, to the Mama, that mossy stone upon which we rock and roll. Ruby lives in the pretty-damn-wild urban midwest with her intrepid spouse and their demon-monkey-cat, Pinky.