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Walking with the Seasons, by Alice Peck

Walking with the Seasons: The Wonder of Being in Step with Nature, by Alice Peck
CICO Books, 9781800652958, 128 pages, February 2024

Now that spring is here, I was really interested in learning more about how to get in tune with the cycles of nature. In her book Walking with the Seasons, Alice Peck provides lots of activities and suggestions for getting out in nature. As I flipped through the book and saw the beautiful photographs and different practices that she shares, I was excited to learn more!

Peck is a writer and editor, having written more than six books on herbs, trees, and meditation, including Tree Wisdom.  She has also edited numerous books on various metaphysical and meditation topics. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, New York, and photos of New York City figure prominently in this work. You may follow her on Instagram @BeMoreTree.

What I love most about Walking with the Seasons is the structure, which makes it easy to navigate. It’s like a calendar to a year of walking. She starts the book in the Spring, which is the beginning of the astrological New Year and devotes a chapter to each season. The Table of Contents shares the nuggets in each chapter, making it easy to retrace your steps and find the practices or activities that you might want to enjoy later.

I decided to jump right into the chapter on Spring–both the verbiage and the photos had me craving more of the green in nature that is starting to bud and bloom in my area. Peck reminds us that we don’t have to find anything special in nature to benefit from a walk:

“A green space doesn’t have to be a forest or a hiking trail. Seek out the unexpected–even in cities you can find “secret” green spaces like church yards, botanic gardens, or areas near train stations.”1

Did you know that walking in nature for about an hour and a half can lessen depression, stress, and anxiety, as well as quieting negative mind chatter? She goes on to share that a research team from Stanford University confirmed this, as well as stating that spending the same amount of time in areas with concrete and traffic had no impact on depression.2

For one of the exercises in this chapter, Peck invites the reader to walk outdoors for at least 15 minutes a day “in the greenest place you have access to.”3 Do this every day for a week and monitor the changes in your mood.

She also includes what she calls a “Joyful Walking Meditation” and the value of walking with your dog. I particularly enjoyed how she shared the “5 ways of liberation” from the Buddhist path and how dogs embody these qualities: perfect faith, energy or persistence, mindfulness or memory, stillness or concentration, and wisdom. She invites us to “walk with your dog, just as you walk with the seasons.”4

Peck weaves beautiful quotes from thought leaders, athletes, and other dignitaries into the prose and photos, such as this one on trees:

“Trees are literally greater than ourselves … trees connect us directly to the life of more than human nature. -Rupert Sheldrake, Science and Spiritual Practices”5 

Eager to learn more about walking in nature, I turned to the next chapter on Summer. Here I was treated to beautiful photos of beaches, rivers, lakes and ponds, in addition to hiking trails and mountain vistas. The practice that caught my eye utilized the concept of “nowscape.”

“Everything then unfolds, unfolds now and so might be said to unfold in the nowscape. Psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn incorporates the nowscape into a practice he teaches called choiceless awareness or the state of unpremeditated, complete presence without preference, judgment, effort, or compulsion. We can apply this understanding of the nowscape to walking with the seasons. As you wander do not just be with the place you are walking –be the walk itself…. Abide fully in the nowscape.”6

In the chapter on Autumn, I found what may be my favorite story or passage, which was one on grief.  A woman had lost her lover and best friend of 18 years. She was encouraged to go on a hike in the Catskills with a group of people and a grief doula. She shared this about her experience:

“The biggest tragedy of my life had led me to one of the most beautiful days I’d ever experienced. It felt healing, it felt like something positive. Gave me the strength to go on. The forest and the mountains welcome you; they hear you and if you let them in, they can help to heal you, too. – Danielle Davis”7

I was so encouraged by this story and the healing power of nature that I plan to add the suggestion of this practice to my grief work with clients. In fact, this book contains many helpful and healing exercises that I plan to incorporate in my coaching practice.

I love great bibliographies and Peck does not disappoint! She includes four full pages of her reference material for everything from “How much sunshine do I need for enough Vitamin D?” to “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know.”8 She follows the bibliography with a two-page index, which further helps the reader to find information, such as a passage on calorie burning, forest bathing or wishing stones.

She also includes photo credits for all of the beautiful images in the book. I love the flaps she included in this paperback version. The flaps make it easy to mark your place, as you read the prose or peruse the beautiful photos. The book is a nice size to tuck into a handbag or backpack and I can see myself keeping it in the car to re-read while waiting for my granddaughter to get out of school.  Here’s another one of my favorite passages, where she talks about the meaning of walking a labyrinth:

“The labyrinth is a metaphor for the journey of life… a path of self-discovery, a journey into the center of our own hearts. – John Mitchell, Sacred England”

Walking with the Seasons would be enjoyed by just about everyone. I can see someone who is new to meditation benefiting from the practices and tips, as well as a more seasoned meditator.  I can also envision someone who is a gardener or hiker or birdwatcher picking up this book. By utilizing the tips and practices, this person may add another layer to their enjoyment of the great outdoors.

Fortuna, by Nigel Pennick

Fortuna: The Sacred & Profane Faces of Luck, by Nigel Pennick
Destiny Books, 1644116472, 144 pages, January 2024

Luck is a mysterious and capricious supernatural force thought to bring about success or failure by apparently random chance. While belief in luck may be relegated to gamblers and the superstitious, the concept is deeply embedded in Western culture. Luck was personified by the ancient Greeks as Tyche, and the ancient Romans knew her as Fortuna, the fickle and fearsome goddess of fortune and fate. “O Fortuna,” a Latin poem derived from the medieval manuscript Carmina Burana, which laments the vicissitudes of fate, was set to music by German composer Carl Orff in 1936, and the epic cantata has since appeared in several films, television shows, and commercials. Fortuna’s Wheel of Fortune appears in both the tarot and the syndicated game show of the same name, which holds the record as the longest-running game show in the United States.1

While Fortuna’s indiscriminate giving and taking is often perceived as mercurial and even cruel, her lighter and brighter side is known today as Lady Luck, and she is still alive and well in contemporary culture, from the four leaf clover marshmallows in Lucky Charms cereal to Felix Felicis, the alchemical Liquid Luck elixir Harry Potter downed in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Luck can simply mean being in the right place at the right time. But beyond the superficial veneer of pop culture, who is she, really?

In Fortuna: The Sacred & Profane Faces of Luck, Nigel Pennick, the prolific author of over sixty books, including Elemental Magic (2020), Magic in the Landscape (2020), The Ancestral Power of Amulets, Talismans, and Mascots (2021), and Runes and Astrology (2023), explores the origins and evolution of the concept of luck, from divination to gambling. This slim volume is a quick read, with just a little over a hundred pages, but it is packed with fascinating insights.

Contemporary consciousness tends to rationalize changes in fortune as nothing more than random occurrences, but, as Pennick says in the Introduction, “in the ancient worldview nothing happens by chance but is the manifestation of an act of divine will.”2 Feeling subject to the whims of the gods, ancient people sought to discern the divine will by interpreting signs and omens, which led to the rise of divination with various systems, involving objects with numeric values, such as dice and cowrie shells.

In the absence of the concept of mathematical probability, everything was believed to have been preordained by the divine. The belief in predestination was ripe for abuse, as it could be used to validate the unjust actions of people in positions of authority. “Many religions view the Creator in the form of an angry Bronze Age law-making warlord who decides how the natural world must behave and who issues the laws that define those behaviors,”3 Pennick says. The real power behind the scenes, however, was the goddess of fortune and fate.

In Chapter 2, titled “Lady Luck and the Goddess Fortuna,” Pennick explores the history of the Roman goddess Fortuna’s worship. Today, we tend to simplify her as the personification of luck, chance, and good fortune, but Pennick does her honor by fleshing her out as a complex goddess associated with many facets of life. She had a plethora of epithets, such as Fortuna Plebis, “of the People,”4 for she determined the fates of individuals. Many epithets include types of people and social classes, such as Fortuna Muliebris (“Women”), Fortuna Patricia (“Noble”), and Fortuna Equestris (“Horseback Riding”), which brings to mind knights in shining armor astride dashing steeds. The one that struck me as the most interesting was Fortuna Aucupium, meaning “Bird of Prey.”5 Although she was sometimes depicted as blind, this avian title seems to imply keen powers of perception and a shrewd eye for swooping down and snatching good fortune at a crucial moment.

“In Rome, the emperor Trajan (98-117 CE) dedicated a major temple to each aspect of the goddess, and on every January 1, offerings were made at the temples to ensure good luck and success for the coming year,”6 Pennick says. Fortuna’s accoutrements included a cornucopia, or horn of plenty, aligning her with the goddess Abundantia, the Roman goddess of prosperity; a ship’s rudder, which signifies her steering the fates of all mortals; and the vertically spinning wheel of fortune. On occasion, Fortuna appeared with wings, like Nortia, the Etruscan goddess of fate.

There were oracular shrines devoted to Fortuna in ancient Rome, which were located at Antium and Praeneste, in the modern day city of Palestrina. I was most intrigued by the Praenestine oracle of Fortuna, which is believed to have operated underground in a cave called “Antro delle Sorti” in Italian, which means “the Cavern of the Fates.”7 The oracle was thought to have been founded by an Egyptian priestess of the goddess Isis, and incorporated the use of wooden dice inscribed with letters, which may have been derived from Etruscan divinatory practices, and Pennick believes this oracle might have influenced the development of runic divination.

“The cubes were thrown into a silver bowl and drawn out one by one to produce a sequence of letters that were taken as the first letters of words,” Pennick says. “Interpretative skill depended upon determining what the sequence of letters stood for with regard to the question asked or the person asking it.”8 The Praenestine oracle had a revival in nineteenth century France, “when it was claimed that Charles Le Clerc used the oracle to attain prophecies for Napoleon Bonaparte.”9

Pennick then explores the history of dice as a form of divination in ancient Europe, which were originally made from the knuckle bones of sheep. He writes about the practice of gambling in ancient Rome and presents a table depicting the names and measurements of Roman dice. Chapter 4 is devoted to dice divination, complete with a chart of the divinatory meanings of possible throws.

One of my favorite chapters is on “Divinatory Geomancy,” in which Pennick gives a concise explanation of how to perform a geomantic reading and presents different methods for generating geomantic figures. Geomancy, which means “earth divination,” is a binary method of generating four-lined figures using odd or even numbers that traditionally involves making marks in the earth, although modern practitioners of the art may choose to throw dice or coins. There are a total of sixteen possible geomantic figures, and each has a Latin name with an oracular meaning and an astrological association.10

“An East Anglian technique for generating odd and even sequences uses potatoes,”11 Pennick writes. Using root vegetables sounds like the perfect way to perform an earth divination! I personally use a simple homemade deck of geomancy cards I created with blank index cards, on which I drew the geomantic figures with markers, but I love the idea of using potatoes to generate geometric figures.

“Each potato is different, for each has an indeterminate number of eyes, the places from which new growth takes place,” Pennick says. “To generate a geomantic figure, one must take four potatoes at random and count the eyes on each one.”12 A full reading requires sixteen spuds, so this might be a fun method to try if you have a sack of potatoes handy. 

The latter half of the book explores how the sacred art of divination devolved into the profane practice of gambling and became associated with the Devil. “Perhaps the ancient Jewish prohibition of divination, which was taken up wholesale and unthinkingly into the Christian religion when Christianity split off from Judaism, accelerated the desacralization of divination into gambling,”13 Pennick says. He believes that “the association of cards with the Devil is likely to be a cultural leftover from the centuries of religious fulmination against games and the religiously motivated laws that prohibited all forms of play and gambling for so many centuries.”14

I was fascinated to learn that, in medieval England, “Christmas was deemed to be the only time that games were allowed, and playing at other times was forbidden by law.”15 Hearkening back to the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, “the connection of gambling with misrule is overt in writings about carnivals and mythical lands, such as the Land of Cokaygne.”16

Pennick also reveals how fortune-telling and luck-drawing magic have intersected with gambling superstitions and dice cheat rolls. “Ancient crooked dice” might have been used for gambling cheats, “but they may well have been used at oracular shrines to skew the readings of those who came to ask questions.”17 This may have been a matter of self-preservation, especially when the interpreters of omens “had to deal with ruthless tyrants and a wrong answer might mean torture and death.”18

The stakes are high in illegal gambling as well, and the sacred caves where the ancients once consulted Fortuna for spiritual guidance were traded in for the Underworld gambling dens of organized crime, which were crowded with the lost souls suffering from addiction to these illicit practices. Since such risky behavior is a flirtation with death, it’s no wonder that many gambling charms incorporate images of human skulls to represent luck in the face of adversity.

“When we dice with Death, we can be sure that Death has the dice in a special grip and throws all the shots, and the dice are probably loaded,”19 Pennick writes.

Pennick’s impeccable scholarship and concise historical survey of divination and gambling has transformed my perspective of Lady Fortuna and the relationship between her sacred and profane arts. Whether you are a practitioner of divination and magic or a gambler hoping to boost your luck, Fortuna: The Sacred & Profane Faces of Luck will inspire your practice and be a boon to your personal library. Besides, with St. Patrick’s Day being just around the corner, it’s a great read for the month of March. May the luck of the Irish be with you!

Censored Angels, by Zara West

Censored Angel: Anthony Comstock’s Nemesis, by Zara West
Tidal Waters Press, 1959318128, 350 pages, June 2023

Censored Angel: Anthony Comstock’s Nemesis by Zara West, the second book in her Forgotten Women series, is a historical fiction novel about the life of Ida Craddock, a mystical marriage counselor and advocate for free speech. West tells Craddock’s tale in first-person narrative form, opening a doorway for reader’s to enter Craddock’s fascinating inner world.

The story begins with Craddock as a teenager in 1875, highlighting her trying relationship with her mother, who continually undermines her career ambition and spiritual pursuits. Craddock’s one place of peace is her Quaker school where she excels academically. Upon learning her beloved teacher has passed away, after she had come to Craddock for advice about the pain she feels during material relations, Craddock is devastated. She was too late to save her teacher, but is now determined to help other women in similar situations.

This sets her on a path of study focused on the religious history of sex worship, along the way gaining knowledge from doctors, activists, and spiritualists who share her mission. She also has the divine support of her angels, most notably her spirit husband Soph, who guides her in the art of heavenly love. Her rebellious, unconventional ways continue to put Craddock at odds with her mother, who is a staunch Christian temperance member.

Craddock yearns to gain some independence. Working as a typist and escaping her mother’s roof, she begins to cultivate her own dreams. Even though Craddock had dreams of becoming a scholar, to stay afloat, she resorts to publishing her instruction manuals about human sexuality and the correct way to have appropriate, respectful sexual relations between husband and wife. Her most famous works include Heavenly Bridegrooms, Psychic Wedlock, Spiritual Joys, Letter To A Prospective Bride, The Wedding Night, and Right Marital Living. These publications soon become the focus of Anthony Comstock, the notorious Anti-Obscenity PostMaster General known for his staunch laws about what was and was not appropriate to send through the mail.

Craddock’s continual effort to prove herself as an intellectual comes up against sexism, censorship, and ill-will from Comstock who see her as a deviant. But she doesn’t allow her mother or Comstock to stand in her way. Pinching pennies to pursue her path, she moves from city to city to have the freedom to continue her studies. The book covers her time in England, California, Chicago, and her home city of Philadelphia. Finally, in New York City, Craddock stands her ground against Comstock. She advertises her services as a marriage counselor and proclaims herself High Priestess of the Church of Yoga. She openly sees clients and hands out her work, baiting Comstock to come after her.

Eventually, Comstock does bring charges against her. And this time, unlike her previous arrest where she took a plea deal, Craddock refuses to back down and uses the trials as an opportunity to take a stand for what she believes in. With the assistance of other open-minded reformers and activists, Craddock used her publicity to advocate for free speech. Ultimately though, facing serious jail time, Craddock decided to end her life as a free woman, writing in a letter to her mother, “I maintain my right to die as I have lived, a free woman, not cowed into silence by any other human being.”

Personally, I absolutely loved this book and think Kosher did an incredible job of portraying Craddock. I first learned about Craddock when reading the work of Emma Goldman, who really looked up to Craddock and sung her praises. I then read The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age when it was released in 2021. That book gave me insight into Craddock’s significant role in advocating for women’s rights and free speech.

However, even with all this information I had read about Craddock, she never really became someone I connected with personally until West’s writing in Censored Angels. Kosher drew from Craddock’s letters, diaries, published work, as well as first hand material such as newspaper and magazine articles and court records to create this narrative. Even though this book is historical fiction, the way Kosher weaves in actual quotes provides the readers with insight into Craddock’s inner world.

Kosher also does a very good job of setting readers within the time and place of Craddock’s life. Small details about the way people dressed or the current trends ground readers in the historical period of Craddock’s life, further situating the significance of her work in comparison to the repressed Victorian values that dominated the Gilded Age.

I also was simply blown away by how well Kosher seemed to understand Craddock. The level of commitment she must have put into this research, the time truly contemplating Craddock’s motives and what she was trying to do, along with respect for her spiritual truth, most notably her angelic husband Soph, demonstrate considerable talent on West’s part. It’s one thing to write a biography, it’s a whole other thing to tell the fictional autobiography through a first-person narrative and make it feel so real.

All in all, I highly recommend Censored Angel to those interested in spiritualism and feminism. Craddock is not given enough recognition for her life’s work, which truly paved the way for others to advocate for women’s rights to have knowledge about their own bodies and agency over their sexual and marital affairs. West’s writing is sure to keep you amused (I was hooked from the first chapter!) and make you feel admiration for the sacrifices Craddock made to share her divine wisdom with the general public to ensure Americans maintained their freedom of speech.