Sophia Bonnie Wodin

She senses a stirring deep within the Earth that rouses her and calls her name, “Brid….. Brid!” She roams frozen meadows, over hills; through fields lying dormant; traverses streams barely trickling amidst patches of ice.  She spies a clump of snowdrops sending up their tiny shoots at the edge of the forest. Eventually She encounters the Old One, The Calliach, weary from Her labours of winter, Her tending to the mountains and dales, the boulders and very stones beneath our feet: weary from long nights of stories around the never-ending fires. The Calliach looks up, “The time has come. You have arrived!” “Yes Grandmother, I have come once again, as I must. The Earth calls, the year turns, I have come to tend the springs and wells, the fires of the forge, the lifting up of hearts and minds towards the spring that comes!” “You have come in good time, beloved one!” “Yes, Grandmother. It is time. Go to your rest. Your labours of winter are complete. The time has come to welcome th

This teaching was back in the 1990’s. I lived in Western Massachusetts, worked landscaping and was up to my eyeballs in magical training.   A friend had connected with a curriculum put together by an earth-entered tradition somewhere in the mid-western US. Several of us formed a Goddess study group and gathered in her loft on a regular basis to work our way through the lessons. We had little sense of where this might lead. The adage, “Where angels fear to tread…” comes to mind. At the time this anecdote recounts, my day job was at the home of an elderly couple. They had recently taken down a mature maple in front of their house that had been hit by lightening. My task was to turn the debris into a flower garden that would grace the top of their driveway: a 60th anniversary gift from husband to wife. It was a small-ish job so my crew worked on other job sites while the husband worked alongside of me.   On this particular day I had recently met with the Goddess study group. We were l

I was packing to leave my daughter’s home.   We had arrived the evening before having dodged two blizzards.  It’s a drive of about 10 - 12 hours. But soon after we arrived one of us felt ill. And then tested positive for COVID.  (FYI: We had blessedly mild cases.) As I re-packed, hoping to leave before we infected the household, a thought appeared: “This is what love looks like today…” Since then I have been looking at my life and actions from the point of view of: What does love look like now? Picture this….. It’s the holiday season. Your preparations are complete. The larder is filled to overflowing (who knew a fridge could hold so much?). Friends and relatives come and go. Like the tides.  Now.  Drop a snowstorm into the scene. Everyone’s plans have gone poof! Dissolved as Naomi Shahib Nye said, “like salt in a weakened broth…” But not ours. We had planned to stay home. A beloved arrived by train and Uber, the only methods of transportation still running, albeit

  I was whirling around the house the other week, both focused and madly whizzing through my To Do list in preparation for leaving on a greatly hoped-for vacation. Oh! The to-do list was long.  But it was still November and here in SW Ontario while we had had a few hard frosts, in our protected micro-climate of a yard, there were still a few snapdragons and strawflowers and a splendid out-of-season blue iris.  I allowed myself to become distracted. The flowers had called and heeding their call, I cut and arranged them to grace the many household altars and honour our household deities. As I cut and arranged and placed, I thought about each altar honouring a deity or an aspect of our lives. Here’s Lakshmi , the Hindu Goddess of abundance in Her place of honour over the fireplace. A small statue of Her stands near one of the doors. Tara , shows up in both the Buddhist and Hindu pantheon. Another version of Her shows up in Irish stories. She of the Seat of Power. She’s here t

Recently, I was struggling to write about an incident, a pivotal incident, in my life. I had already offered up a (very) rough version to one of my Writer’s Circles. It had been decisively rejected. “Sophia, you can write better than this! If this is a ‘magical’ piece, use magical language! Let your lyrical style to amaze us!”” Was the response. I had to admit that it was a very rough draft. Just get the main points down on the page. Get the flow of events. You’ll fill it in later, I had told myself. But when later came, I continued to struggle, not with the memory, but with the language.  As I wrote, filling in the details of my, admittedly sketchy draft, my mind continued to stray into the mundane character of each aspect of the story. Humph, I thought, this wants ordinary language. Grandiose language won’t make it any more important, it’ll just distract from the actual magic of the story. Describe it simply and the story will amaze by itself… ‘Sometimes magic done well looks