by Susan Foster
susanjfosterphd@gmail.com
FAULTY TOWERS
Byron Ballard’s latest book gives a prophetic warning … It can mean anything from total calamity to change on such a drastic level that there feels no way to either stop it or modify it.” The book has been 10 years in the making, she says, but “it’s been a lot of thought and gnashing of teeth and wondering about my own sanity and wondering why I can’t drink enough Irish whiskey to just stop thinking about it — but I couldn’t.” When Ballard started writing the book, she says, she wasn’t thinking about Tower Time (a term she coined) but “more about sustainable community and weaving webs, especially within my spiritual world, across boundaries.” The book, whose original title was Earth Works: Eight Ceremonies for a Changing Planet, was intended primarily as a book of rituals and ceremonies for Earth religionists to use in their communities, she notes. The second part of the book fulfills that promise, containing ceremonies for honoring the Earth, marking life transi-
tions and observing seasonal changes. Ballard calls these ceremonies “Earth Works” because, like the bank-andditch berms of Neolithic Europe, often used for defense, they serve as a bulwark against perceived destructive forces at work in the culture and give people a place to rest and gather energy to go on. But the book morphed into its current form, Ballard explains, as she felt increasingly compelled to write about the changes she was seeing in the larger culture, “like Cassandra or John the Baptist crying in the wilderness.” After establishing herself in social media five years ago, she received “a kind of consensus from a lot of different kinds of people, all the way from Catholic priests to atheists … that the American empire is at the end of its days, but also that we’re seeing something larger than that.” With that kind of validation, she
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THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’: “We’re at the end of the great American experiment,” says Byron Ballard, known as Asheville’s village witch. In her latest book, Earth Works: Ceremonies in Tower Time, she offers practical and spiritual advice for navigating the turbulent times and surviving with resilience. Photos courtesy of Ballard H. Byron Ballad exhorts readers of her new book, Earth Works: Ceremonies in Tower Time, not to succumb to fear in this turbulent time of transition we are living in as the hierarchical, topdown system of patriarchy collapses. The book reads as a compendium of practical strategies for surviving the death throes of an ancient and toxic system that “will die as it has lived — in violence and oppression and injustice and death,” the local rootworker, energy consultant and author writes. On Friday, Aug. 17, at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe, Ballard will read from
her book and discuss the process of writing it, including working with an indie press. A question-and-answer session and book signing will follow. Ballard, who is a ritualist and teacher for Mother Grove Goddess Temple and is known as Asheville’s village witch, has been reading tarot cards for nearly 50 years. She says she used the imagery of the Tower card for the book because it is so familiar to her. Unlike some of the other tarot cards that look scary but have manageable meanings, such as Death or the Devil, she explains, the Tower card “should draw you up short. MOUNTAINX.COM
AUG. 15 - 21, 2018
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