She was Druid. When she needed to know things, a way would open. She was learning to trust it. Sometimes an opening way asked for patience, and that took work, still. Waiting rarely looked hard when others did it, but she’d done enough herself to know better. A song made it easier, and when she listened a certain way, now and again songs came, tinkling on the air, or roaring out of someplace she didn’t know she’d gone to till she returned with a start, the phone ringing, or her cat Halfpint curled in her lap and kneading one thigh with paws tipped with needle claws. Often the words came later, the melody already running ahead of her, in and around her attention till she got a version down on paper or on her music program.
She was Druid, she knew. It was a long time coming, that knowledge. Sometimes she’d resisted, convinced she was done with paths, and seeking and god-stuff, anything like that. But through it all the gifts kept arriving. Hard ones, and easy ones too. Often enough it meant whatever the land gave her at the moment. For proof, all she had to do was look at her house, filled with stones, bird bones, animal skulls, pressed flowers, carved branches, vervain and basil and mint, garlic and St. John’s Wort and other herbs she was learning as she went. After Jack left with his secretary, she got the little ramshackle two-bedroom house and the six acres of pasture they’d planned to farm, and slowly the once-empty rooms filled with links to the green world outside the door. Inside, too. Spiders in the corners, mice in the walls, squirrels skittering across the tin roof, crows caucusing in the back yard.
Jack. One of the hard gifts. He left, and for a while the emptiness threatened to eat her alive. A big hole she had to stop looking into. No bottom, but walls dark with bitterness. So she stayed busy volunteering and running the food pantry and substituting at the local elementary school, until one day a boy complained about the smell of incense that seemed to follow her wherever she went. “Witch” was the real reason, she heard from a sympathetic colleague. Parents complaining about “that teacher.” Though when the principal called her in “for a little chat,” what he said was they just couldn’t rely on her to be on time. All she knew then was that her morning ritual had just cost her one needed source of income. Hard gift.
A month of therapy, and “you’re stuck in a box labelled ‘wife,'” until she knew she could give herself better advice, and cheaper. When the box is the whole world, then I’m Druid in a box, she thought. And thinking inside the box is a great place to start. Hardly anybody else is in here. They’re all outside, because that’s where they’ve been told they should be. That’s where the clever ones are, the ones who want to be ahead of the curve. Mostly people do what they’re told. But almost always something held her back from doing what everybody else did, shoved her or kicked her sideways. A kind of resistance, a suspicion, a compass set in her belly and spinning her some other way. Ahead of the curve? It was more than enough to be the curve, bird’s wing in the air, crescent moon, arc of water coursing over a falls. The backyard junipers and oaks and one old willow bowing at the sky.
Then it was October, her birth month, and in spite of turning 30 in a few more days, her mood lightened. She could feel a shift coming, something new trying to find her, a little blind, and maybe needing help. She could help it. Listen, she reminded herself. It was one thing she’d finally gotten good at.
To be continued …
A Druid Way 