 Hi Pagan perspective and welcome to my esoteric moment here on the interwebs. My name is Danny and I'm 25 years old. I live in Madison, Wisconsin and work a pretty typical 8-5 Monday through Friday job. On the weekends I love to head home and help my parents out on their farm. I also do a ton of community garden work. You can see that a great deal of my blog esotericmoment.com focuses on the farm and garden work I do. It's a great passion of mine. I was raised Irish Catholic by a long line of Irish farmers with a few teachers sprinkled here and there. While my family could be considered devout Catholics, it was upbringing enriched by many family traditions and stories that most would consider to be pretty Pagan. It was also a very agrarian focused life. Celebrating the seasons and staying in tune with the landscape was as spiritual and important as attending church on Sunday. I did a lot of exploring and discovering in middle school like many individuals about faith and religion. Paganism spoke to me then. I remained a Catholic though until I went to college which was ironically a Catholic university. The Catholic Church has undergone a lot of political and spiritual changes in the last decade. I felt that the Catholic Church no longer reflected my personal relationship with divinity. So I went searching again. I found a lot of the standard beginning Pagan books and resources. My first steps as a Pagan were very wicca-esque and kept to myself. Eventually I found Druidry through Philip Cargum's books. It was like coming home fully. Druidry is a path that allows one the independence of free thought and critical philosophical analysis while embracing the mystical nature around us. For me this means cultivating a personal relationship with divinity or the goddess through a connection to the natural world. It calls me to be an activist for the environment and civil rights. It calls me to find balance in the world and to live a simple meaningful life. It is a practical, messy, muddy, immensely joyous and creative path. I've practiced as a solitary Druid until this year. I'm currently working through the bardic course of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids or O-Bod link in the doobly-do. The community and resources found in this course and organization have been tremendously helpful. I'm enjoying the process a great deal. My practice still combines a few elements of wicca into it. This is often called Druidcraft. I usually just call myself a Druid, although sometimes I'll still use witch as I practice a bit of magic. While my personal channel is fairly new, I have been an active subscriber, commenter, and community member of YouTube for many years. I just finally have the time and resources to devote to regular video making. I've been a long time fan of pagan perspective and love the discussions that occur on the channel. Joining the collab would allow me to give back to a resource that I greatly value and allow me to engage in the online pagan community in a richer way. I also know that it's been a while since you've had a druid on the channel. I believe that my different path and my rural perspective will help bring a little bit more diversity to the channel. Thanks for considering my audition to pagan perspective. If you want to see me on Twitter or Instagram, social media of any type, there are links down below and I look forward to hearing all the new voices on the collab channel in 2015.