Our second edition is now available and free to all! Click the red text to view in your browser or click the download button to keep a copy for yourself.
We’ve been working hard on this as a team since Yule 2018 and it is incredibly exciting to see Aether come to life and become a real thing after all this time and energy.
I became the manager for this the Families team in October 2018 and it was clear right at the beginning of that time, that there was a lot of work needing to be done for our members and their families. As an organisation, the PF does a lot for its members but naturally, a lot of that work is very much behind the scenes. We needed new ways to reach out and connect with them so they can find out about the help we can provide and support we have available for them. Of course, we already have the always amazing quarterly journal, Pagan Dawn, but I still felt something extra was needed to supplement it that focused on that most common and intimate of communities – the family.
Aether is one part of the plan to do just that, to connect with you and support your needs as Pagans with families to care for. It has threefold purpose. The first is to provide ideas and information for parents and carers of children who follow a Pagan path. As parents and carers of children ourselves, we know that it can be incredibly difficult to know where to start for ourselves let alone how to make some aspects child appropriate and access resources to help you along the way.
The second is to include items that are for the children to learn from and enjoy doing. Here we bring together an eclectic mix of activities, stories and information aimed directly at our little people that help them to explore their own path safely yet still creatively and best of all, full of fun.
The third is to celebrate the talents and efforts of the community we are reaching out to with this publication. We’re lucky to be part of a tribe that has many creative people within it, and we wanted to give them a place they can shine a light on their work.
It is a part of my job as Children and Families Manager to identify and solve the barriers pagan families face as they practice their faith. It is my hope that through Aether we can begin to do that work, to bring people together for conversation, to find ways to solve problems they are facing and support them when needed.
With this in mind, I would like to ask you to see this publication as yours. Please tell us if there’s things you would like to see in Aether or that we should be doing as a team for our members. Likewise, tell us if we’re doing a good job. Above all, enjoy wandering along this new path now available to our community.
I would like to take a moment before I bid you farewell to say a huge thank you to our editor, Debi. Without her this would still be a thought in my head or an item on my “to-do eventually” list. I would also like to thank my team for the ideas and contributions that have made our first edition what it is. They are a small but very motivated and dedicated team, and I love them all dearly.
Lastly, thank YOU for giving Aether a chance and I hope you’ll enjoy reading Aether as much as we enjoyed creating it!