Banners should be roughly 900 to 1000 pixels by 200 to 300 pixels in size.

Leave room for the website title in the banner, or put “Walking the Hedge” on it yourself. Slogans can also be added such as “A Hedge for all Witches” or “Where the wildwoods and the urban jungle meet” or “The Hedge that borders the crooked path” or whatever you think would be awesome.

Once we get a few entries, we will have a poll and you guys can pick your favourite one and I will make a theme to match it (and maybe the runner up as well). Footers to match your banner will also be accepted and should be roughly the same size as a banner.

Send the image to juniper@walkingthehedge.net

Related posts:

1. The Walking the Hedge 2010 Calendar
2. Wordless Wednesday: Catching Up
3. Also, This Buys Me Some Time

I purchased a devotional-style candle and then made the image for it

I used water color pencils on Kozogami paper.

Related posts:

1. Wordless Wednesday: Devotional
2. Wordless Wednesday: Afghans
3. Wordless Wednesday: The New Cat

I am planning a small ritual for Hecate’s Night with a friend of mine.

I am reading To Fly by Night: The Craft of the Hedgewitch. Yep, that’s right my contributor copies have arrived. YAY!

Also, I have been having fun using MS Paint. A member of the Hedge is writing an article and asked for an illustration or two to help her article make sense. I am also adding a few suggestions and ideas to the article. Here’s peek at two of the graphics:

Related posts:

1. Wordless Wednesday
2. Horned God Devotional
3. To Fly By Night

Like a great wave

I am proud of you, people

Like an oak tree

Drawing up the ancestors

Like a well spring

Singing softly to old gods

Like smoke on the breeze

Bringing change upon the world

Like a great wave

Arms reaching to the rising sun

Like an oak tree

Quenching a mighty thirst

Like a well spring

Dancing to the drumming

Like smoke on the breeze

I believe in you, people

Like a great wave

I believe

Like a great wave

Related posts:

1. Horned God Devotional
2. Children
3. Unity Chant

*

To Pan and the Dryads here

I dedicate my hunting spear,

My dog, the bag that holds my store;

I am too poor to offer more!

*

Nay, but my dog I cannot spare!

He must return my crusts to share,

My daily rambles to attend,

My little comrade and my friend.

*

Macedonius, 6th century A.D.

Related posts:

1. Horned God Devotional
2. The Walking the Hedge 2010 Calendar
3. To Fly By Night

“The sun is rising behind the Stonehenge monument in England, during the summer solstice shortly after 04:52 am, early Monday, June 21, 2010. Druids, pagans and partygoers crammed into the mystic stone circle to cheer, bang drums and shake tambourines in an effort to greet the sun on the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice.” ~ The Associated Press

Drums and drumming have been on my mind a lot these last few months. This is due to a few different events in my life.

An old friend of Brendan’s visited a while ago and was surprised and disappointed that I don’t play an instrument. It seems “everyone in the old coven was musical and artistic”. Le sigh, sometimes it’s not worth trying to explain to people that graphic design, web design, modelling, and arts & crafts count as artistic. Did I mention I’m a poet … even if most of my poetry is about dogs (hehehe)

Bren of course plays a variety of instruments and has done so since the age of 5. So I am now surrounded by music and musical talent.

A friend of mine recently built a lovely new hand drum and I was thrilled to be among the first people to hear its voice.

Also I have simply been thinking for some time now about shamanic drums. However just as using my prayer shawl (which is about halfway finished) as a shamanic costume, it just wouldn’t be right for me to have the stereotypical drum. The shamanic drum that immediately comes into mind is too sombre, too serious and too deep sounding for me. I am an ecstatic ritualist, a trance dancer, a shamanic witch and mystic, and a little bit silly. I was a punk rocker in high school and I am something of a hippie chick. My practice is based on the pure joy of living and having fun. I’ve wanted a drum that reflects this.

So first I had to go through a kind of process of elimination.

First of all I knew things like djembe and the bongo were out, they are played two handed which I decided was too much for this poorly coordinated and clumsy Witch. I wanted something I could dance with and play in ritual without having to strap myself into it as well.

The First Nations (Native American) hand drum is an amazing instrument. It comes in many sizes and the skins can be very beautiful on their own or painted. They have a (usually) deep tone and resonate in your ribcage. They have a going straight for the heart kind of voice. They are not terribly difficult to learn to play and once you develop some skill with them you can really make them sing. I love having them in a ritual or around the fire pit to dance to or chant with. They are obviously used by many shamanic practitioners and mystics. These drums, along with the djembe, are probably the most commonly found drums in Pagan ritual from what I’ve seen.

I know that you can learn other cultures traditions with care and respect and I know many people who do exactly that. Also learning about other traditions can help you to gain a kind of understanding that you wouldn’t otherwise. While I would never judge another white girl for choosing to play a drum obviously from another culture (unless she was being very disrespectful of it), this white girl would rather not.

It might be due to the fact that  many of my childhood friends lived in Native Reserves, it might be because I was raised to be very proud of my English and Scottish heritage, and it might be my Celtic Reconstructionist leanings. It’s probably all of the above. For these reasons and more I don’t want to play an African or Native American drum.

I am a firm believer that when you lose touch with your own roots, it becomes all too easy to cut down someone else’s tree. Those of us of European decent, especially in the New World, often feel they have no heritage no roots. You will meet white folks at First Nations’ Pow Wows complaining that they must learn Native traditions because we have nothing like that of our own. A friend of the Okanagan tribe once asked me why this is so, I said “You know what 200+ years of Christianity and cultural suppression can do to a people, imagine what 2,000+ years can do”

I want a drum that is part of the Western Tradition.

I looked at the bodhran but it is difficult to learn to play and even cheap ones are rather expensive for my blood.

Surely there is a drum that someone with my lack of musical ability could still play, something fun, cheerful, colourful and still spiritual? What if I decided I didn’t want a drum after playing for a while? What if I was really, really bad at it? What if I broke the thing? Surely I could get something … but get a decent little starter version for cheap?

I mentioned to Brendan a little while back, mostly in jest, that I should get a tambourine. It was funny at the time but the idea stuck with me and I carried it around for months. Somehow it slowly bloomed in my mind that the kind of drums typically played by my fellow Pagans are not for me, but a tambourine just might be.

A tambourine is played while dancing, it has been used in worship for many centuries, it has been played in Europe and its colonies for centuries, and it’s bright, loud and fun. Did I mention the fact that it can have colourful streamers attached? Combined with the fact that a tambourine also just happens to be one of the easiest instruments to play and that my favourite genre of music is good old Rock n’ Roll, a genre that often features the tambourine. I grew up listening to Stevie Nicks!

The Tambourine Girl by John William Godward (1906)

The tambourine is one of the most commonly played and popular instruments in the world. One of the reasons for this is that it is fairly easy to learn to play. Most small children are given toy tambourines right along with other toy instrument such as rattles and xylophones. (hehehehe remember your rainbow coloured xylophone on wheels?)

It turns out that the tambourine, and other drums like it, has a very long and interesting history. It has a deeper spiritual significance than you might think while singing along to a Stevie Nicks album too. This will be the first post following my research into the story of the tambourine and learning to play the damned thing without making an ass of myself. (I’m not going to promise when the next post will be, next week sometime I think.)

The tambourine is a type of frame drum. Frame drums can be played either with your hand or with a stick, such as the tipper used with the bohdran. Most frame drums are held by the frame though there are exceptions such as the bohdran which often has wooden handles built into the frame or the more Native American style which has the skin stretched over the frame and then woven into strings or ties that are held.

To be a frame drum the circumference of the skin or drum head should be greater than the depth of the frame it is stretched across. Frame drums come in many sizes and a few different shapes. While most are round some have multiple sides, such as hexagonal or octagonal.

Frame drums can be as simple as animal skin stretched over a wooden frame or elaborately decorated with a painted skin and pearl, gem stones and carvings on the frame. Ribbons, scarves, feathers and other objects may be hung from them and some people place item inside their drums as well. I have seen sweetgrass bundles, poppets, small crystals and feathers placed inside frame drums.

There is a whole variety of frame drums that have bells, jingles, clackers or zils attached to them. Tambourines are one such kind of frame drum.

“I have eaten from the tambourine, I have drunk from the cymbal, I have become a mystic of Attis.” ~ Phrygian hymn

Related Posts & Articles: The Shawl, The Shaman’s Rattle and the Silver Branch

Related posts:

1. Sassy the Tambourine
2. Chop Wood, Carry Water
3. To Fly By Night