Seasons of a Magical Life

A Pagan Path of Living

De: H. Byron Ballard

Narrado por: Christine Kiphart

This audiobook looks at the agricultural year as a starting space for a deepening of earth-centered spirituality. It gives a set of backstories to ease listeners into a time between the pre-industrial era and the modern one, into a place where the fast-moving stress of American life can be affected by a better connection not only to the natural world, but also to the elegant expression of the year as expressed through seasonal festivals and celebrations.

The chapters are broken into four seasons, with the quarter days a highlight within each, and feature simple skills that accompany each marker in the year. Author H. Byron Ballard offers advice on spiritual and physical immersion into the seasons that applies to listeners from all areas: rural, urban, and suburban.

This is also a deeply practical book, including insights into the following:

• Farming and gardening: composting, manure, soil preparation, pests, seed-saving
• Food: cooking, preserving, foraging, the summer kitchen, mushrooms, and mycelium
• Fiber arts: knitting, crocheting, spinning, weaving, decorative cut-work, and embroidery
• Sewing: treadle machines, electric machines, hand sewing
• Household crafts: candle-making, soap-making, broom-making, sharpening tools
• Health: medicines, tending the dying, death, and death rituals

©2021 H. Byron Ballard (P)2021 Red Wheel Weiser

Too Christian

I wish somewhere in the description, it was stated that this book was heavily Christian based. I am enjoying the stories, and the information within, which is why I gave three stars. And I will finish listening to completion (i am writing this about two hours in). But the fact it opens with a bible verse, and has an entire monologue on Eve and the Garden of Eden really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Paganism, by definition, is pre-christian. I know there as christian pagans out there, and thats totally fine! But if your book doesn’t disclose that, it feels misleading. The book description talks about being with nature, and learning how to appreciate the wheel of the year. So it feels just so disheartening and misleading to have to sit through bible stories of a religion I am not a part of, being told to me as if it were fact.

I am leaving this review with the purpose of educating those who may get this in the future. Its so important, especially to a pagan community which many have religious trauma, to disclose if your book is christian-based.