Women and death, particularly the role women are currently playing in the death positive movement and as death professionals made frequent headlines this year.

Here is a recap of what 2015 had to offer.

Fusion‘s The Death Midwife: Women Were the Original Undertakers,  exhumes (see what we did there?) death care history, offering a fascinating—and very feminist—exploration of death, funerals, and burials, and their impact on culture, economics, and the environment.

“For me, working with dead bodies is almost like a feminist act.” Mortician and death positive activist, Caitlin Doughty was featured in The New Yorker article Our Bodies, Ourselves.

The sobering and heartbreaking reality of what it is like being a black mother is examined in New York Times piece, The Condition Of Black Life Is One Of Mourning.

Death & the Maiden Co-Founder and death scholar, Lucy Talbot provided a beautiful, death positive piece on…

The Yule Goat, Yule Boar and Yule Cat

Today, one of Sweden’s most traditional Yule symbols, is that of the yule buck or yule goat, which features prominently in the tale of Jultomten. In antiquity the common animal sacrifices included horses, cattle, boar, and goats. In Sweden in particular we see goats sacrificed. Once Christianity had taken over, many laws were passed that forbade the sacrificing of animals for ‘pagan rituals’. From this void, we see the real animal, begin to be replaced by a person in a goat costume that becomes a symbolic ritual offering and slaying. The use of costumes or masks for ritual, is not alone, as we also see it in another yuletide festival as previously mentioned with the Goddess Perchta.

Just as our pagan cousins celebrate the eight major sabbats that comprise the Wheel of the Year, for those of us in the Northern Tradition we too have somewhat similar key celebrations that we call holy tides (from the Old Norsehátíðir). Some of these celebrations are more significant and special than others, and these especially important holy-days are known as high holy tides: such as Ostara, Winter Nights, and Yule which is now upon us.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the move from the city to the country, as most of us do who follow this path. For me, I feel completely drained living in the city. I have lost any vitality and crave for something quieter, cleaner and with fewer people. The truth is, the cities preserve the integrity of our world – they save the planet and the fragile ecosystem from extinction.

Now hear me out, there are some very valid points to this. During a discussion with another who follows the path, he put forward a good argument that I would like to share with you.

The benefit of nature is that it recharges us, makes us whole again so that we can go on living in the city. However, it has been shown statistically that the cities with their skyscrapers and their malls are in fact better for…

Odin was my first breath, and owns my last. He is the wild wind, the insatiable hunger for wisdom and experience. He is beserker rage, instigation and poetry. He is inspiration and strategy, treachery and seduction, generosity and victory. He gathers the glorious dead into armies to fight back the powers of entropy and chaos. He is my love and my darkness, and I am one of his many hands in this world. All hail Odin, who rides the night sky shrieking

On reading a post by River Devora, she ended with this which  summarises to me my relationship with Allfather.  I couldn’t say it any better or be more truthful.