Wildcrafting Druidry and the Wheel of the Year Challenge

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Hi everyone!

Its time for my monthly AODA-themed blog post. This month, I tackle the wheel of the year and consider ways and methods for building a more region-specific wheel. I offer both a general practice of a year of observation (the wheel challenge) as well as reflections on my own observation experience (wherein I discovered that we in Western PA have a 12-fold wheel and not an 8-fold wheel!)

Here are the instructions for the Wheel of the Year challenge if anyone wants to try it:

The Wheel Challenge: Your Ecosystem for Year

How you develop a holistic and realistic wheel of the year that makes sense for you and your situation? I would suggest rooting it in observation and interaction with the living earth–hence the “wheel challenge.” Here’s the basic practice:

–Spend time in nature or with nature as close to where you live as possible (e.g if you have a daily hiking trail in a local park, use that trail. If you have a backyard, use that backyard). The goal here is to get you as close to nature at your own home as possible.
–Try to observe nature at least twice a week for 10-20 minutes.
–Keep some kind of record of your observations: photographs, videos, sketches, journal entries.
–n observing, note anything that changes: bloom times, snow melting, fogs rolling in, etc. the goal is to document what is happening in your ecosystem so that you can identify any “seasonal shifts” that occur with regularity.
–Try to disavow yourself of the regular notions of “seasonality” e.g it is spring so these things happen and instead, simply observe

This approach doesn’t require much of a daily investment and can be built into existing spiritual practices (like spending regular time in nature, daily meditation, etc). But for me, this approach reaped extremely rich rewards.

I spent the last year doing this the above challenge. I took daily walks on my landscape, I documented bloom times, took photographs, and so forth. I also noted any time that I could really sense a “major shift” in my landscape (for me, this was first light frost and first freeze, budding of the trees, first snow, the first summer storm, etc). At the end of the year of observation (this past Samhain), I asked: Which observations or events led to major shifts in the landscape? What seasonal markers seemed present? What is their timing? This led to rich rewards :).

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I’ve actually been thinking about doing this for awhile now. My ecosystem is so much more different than “normal” Druid lore.

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I hope to accomplish this in the next few months. I have been keeping a daily log since May of the things that I notice while out and about. I don’t do it as faithfully as I want since returning to work, but I am working on it.
I really enjoy your blog posts.

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I love this! I’m in. :grin:

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If you want to commit to the idea for a year, we could create a thread where we share observations, maybe weekly, and compare notes? I am thinking maybe I will take a photograph from the same spot once a week and share that.

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That’s a great idea. I think I’ll take pictures of the same area as well!

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I love this!! I was planning on drawing the local flora in my area as part of my candidacy and this works wonderfully with it. I can put my notes in the margins of each drawing! :star_struck:

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I think a thread would be great.

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This would be amazing to do. Because of my work with healers/herbalists in this area (Taos), I was thinking about doing this anyway. The seasons and micro-climates up here make the general WOTY more than a little hard to follow. I’d be in for working in a thread/group of folks who are doing this together.

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Is there a particular start date we should aim for?

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Sorry for my delay, folks! Here’s the thread and we can start posting: https://forum.aoda.org/t/wheel-of-the-year-challenge-thread/4016

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I am ‘all in’ for the year commitment.

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My year commitment will start at Yule, as we will have moved to our new home then :blush: And it will tie in nicely with my ovate work in planning my own garden, for which I want to observe the local flora to know what does well in our particular conditions!

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