Books I'm Currently Reading

While other people are enjoying spring, here in Minnesota we still have days like today when the rain can't decide if it wants to be in its liquid or semi-solid state. There's just something about seeing snowflakes outside my window (when it's almost April!) that makes me want to curl up with a good book.

Several months ago, I checked out a book from the library that really blew the top off my witchy-head. It's a book by Patricia Monghan called Red-Haired Girl from the Bog. I can't recommend this book enough. It's part memoir, part travelogue of Ireland, part Goddess history and mythology. It really opened up a kind of reality-shifting perspective for me, where I began to see the land itself is the body of the Great Mother... even though my own back yard is in Minnesota, not Ireland.

Ever since then, I've been searching for something just as profound, you know?

I thought maybe it was the Irish spirtuality that I wanted more of, so I tried out Tom Cowan's Yearning for the Wind. I enjoyed his book, but, while he's nature-focused, he's much more willing to talk about the Christian god than I'm always comfortable with (I can roll with some talk of Jesus, but not too much, you know?)

The next book I tried came off my to-be-read shelf at home. Since I thought maybe what I wanted was more about the Goddess, I picked up The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor. As you can see by my profile, I spent many of my formative Wiccan years as an eclectic Dianic Witch, but even so there was a bit too much "patriarchy bad!" in here for me. I gave up after a hundred or so pages.

Currently, I'm trying a bunch of different books -- though I'm still not entirely satisfied. I'm flipping among:

Chiron and the Healing Journey: An Astrological and Psychological P... by Melanie Reinhart,

Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess by Demetra George, and (brick of a book called):

The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford.