Lately, I’ve been contemplating my offerings and their rituals. I don’t tend toward anything fancy. I have a small wooden bowl atop my altar into which I place dried fruit, bread, pastries, and other small morsels. Next to it—or in its stead—is a small wooden cup into which I pour libations now and again. Sometimes my libations are as simple as a can of soda, and I let that be enough. I stand or kneel, depending on the formality of the occasion, and, offering in hand, say something along the lines of:
“To the gods—the Aesir and the Vanir, the Tuatha Dé Danann—the land spirits and the ancestors. To the winds and the rains, the fog and the snow. To the mountains and the seas, the plains and the hills, the rivers and the lakes and the streams that feed them. Thank you.”
Sometimes there’s more to it, often much less. Even a small, single acknowledgment is enough—whether directed to a particular deity or simply to my ancestors alone. I give not only food but also incense, most often as a general offering, since burning nine sticks at once is both expensive and overwhelmingly potent. However, sometimes an offering to a singular deity, or a small handful, can be made in such a way. I hand-pick the incense based on the deity and what I think they would appreciate, and I burn the sticks while reciting who they are destined for.
At the end, I bow my head and give thanks, thinking of the gods, the spirits, and the ancestors, and acknowledging the land.
This is the core of my practice: gratitude toward nature, for that is what we truly worship. I see Thor in the thunder and lightning, Njörðr in the raging seas, Freyja in the glades and open fields, Skadi in the mountains and the cold, dark winter. Giving thanks to these elements and acknowledging them is, in my mind, part of being pagan. We are animists at heart if we truly follow the old ways as our forebearers did. All things carry the essence of the divine—a soul, if you will. Though that’s a messy topic to get into (what even is a soul, really?).
All this leads to the question: what does one do with offerings once they’ve been given? Do you throw them away, eat them, bury them, or leave them out for wild animals to devour? Perhaps all of the above? I think the answer rests primarily in the practice you adhere to. As a Norse-Gaelic pagan, the customs are somewhat fuzzy. A consistent voice says not to consume them. Once they’ve been given up, they must be rendered inedible or disposed of altogether. In some Celtic circles, eating an offering is said to bring a curse upon you. Among the Norse or heathens, ideally, you throw it in a bog or bury it. But how do we, 21st-century pagans living in a modern world—often surrounded by concrete jungles or, in my case, unable to leave food out for fear of attracting bears in southcentral Alaska—handle this? Do we simply throw it in the trash, letting it wastefully fall into a landfill to decompose and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions? That doesn’t feel right, as a pagan.
For my own practice, the answer appeared one day when my brazen border collie jumped up—without shame or pause for my lingering presence—and stole food right out of my offering bowl. She has done it multiple times since, and no amount of correction has deterred her. So, there it was. I don’t go so far as to say this was the gods answering my question, but you could, if you squinted just a little, see it that way. These days, every now and again, I take whatever I’ve placed in my offering bowl that is safe for my dogs to eat, and I give it to them. But how does this hold up historically? Am I cursing my dogs? Will this anger the gods? I don’t think so. The essence of the offering has already been given to the gods. Just as offerings were rendered unusable by burying them, throwing them in bogs, burning them, or leaving them outdoors, the offering no longer benefits me—unless you count how my dogs feel about me afterward. By not simply throwing it away, I’m giving it back to nature, to the spirits of the land, and to the gods.
PAGAN NOMAD 
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