 my name is Danny and welcome to Esoteric Moment. Today I have a book review for you that's fitting for October. It is The Journey Into Spirit by Christopher Hughes. So it's a Pagan's perspective on death, dying, and bereavement. This is an interesting take on death for a couple of reasons. So the author is someone who has actually worked in a morgue and mortuary. His whole professional life is about grief and how we deal with death and decay and the natural ending of a human's life, which is not a perspective that we often get in culture, let alone from a Pagan's perspective. So that alone made this a very fascinating read to me. This book is also different in the sense that a bit more of a memoir feel to the book, which is interesting. It works really well for some people, not so well for other people. But it also includes some things that we expect, like ideas about ritual and reflections. So the book starts by explaining how the author came to be so involved in death and how they became basically a midwife to that phase of life. The author also takes some time to talk about kind of the myth and theology in Paganism of spirit, the other world, and there's some reflections, personal reflections on like his dad dying and you know, stories that he encountered while being a professional dealing with death. At the end, there are also some really powerful reflections on ritual ideas, both like in the dying process and after death, ideas about preparing the body and how Pagans might you know, interact with the process of death. This is not as thick and needy of a book as Starhawk's book of Pagan living and dying. But I do think it's a really good resource and I'm thrilled that we have another resource in the Pagan world that looks at normalizing death and encouraging Pagans and non-Pagans alike to not fear death and to work with the natural process rather than bearing it or fighting against it. It's a really balanced perspective and I think it's written exquisitely well. The author's voice is pretty casual, warm, and welcoming, which makes the topic of death very easy to read about even though it is not fiction and it's not exactly a page-turner, but it doesn't take that long to get through either. This book is not for someone who's looking for a how-to or a quick fix or even as just planning a ritual. This is really more of a book for someone who's working through the grief process or is looking to understand that cycle. Perhaps you felt a call to be a midwife to the dying process yourself or you're starting to work in a healthcare situation or you know you have older parents or siblings or children that perhaps face an illness where death is a little bit more likely. This is a book where if you have time and space to reflect and work with the author it's it's a fabulous read. The author includes a lot of reflections in italic paragraphs after each chapter or section. Some of these are interesting, some of these are the generic boring questions. Since I read a lot of books that are done by pagan authors for pagans I can sometimes get a little tired of the reflections and like review parts of books and I would say that this is this is almost at the point where I'm good with it. It's a little too often or just too generic but there are some reflections in those italic sections that are very powerful so take it or leave it. I do want to read kind of an interesting paragraph of the book so that you can get a feel for the author's tone which is unique and also because I think it's a really valid point especially around Samhain and on YouTube where this gets talked about all the time. So this is in the chapter called Being Spirit and the author says the knee-jerk reaction to a ghost or ghostly happenings is to fight or flee and so often people of the New Age may rush to banish such things without first attempting to understand it. Memories are complex things the matrix of which can be trapped in our atmosphere and replayed over and over we may encounter these as troublesome or frightful and may seek ways to eliminate them but pause and stop while in their presence push away your fears they are generally illogical and arise only from misunderstanding so when in the presence of a ghost reach out to it with your own spirit with emotion and empathy the results may surprise you. Of course there's so much more in the book and that is just a small little taste. The author is a Druid himself he doesn't talk about Druidry specifically he often when referring to his own personal practice will call it a Celtic tradition but he does a pretty good job of kind of representing the paganism enigma whole community. If you're looking to dive deeper into the season of death and that process during Salon I really think this would be a lovely read for you but thanks for watching and as always may you find peace in the sacred grove. So when I'm talking about preserving harvest I mean literally how we put away our vegetables and fruits for the rest of the year so that we can make homemade meals as often as possible and I just wanted to share some of the basic techniques that I use and hopefully it will inspire you to put away a little bit of food yourself whether you grow that food yourself or if you're purchasing it at a farmer's market.