[Updated 23 Aug 2019]
With a name like *Wantastiquet …
Already you can tell the post is Druidy. Beyond the obviousness of “Druid” in the title, there’s a symbolic number involved. If not Seven, then Three. Yes, definitely Three.
hack (from Dictionary.com)
- a cut, gash, or notch
- a piece of code that modifies a computer program in a skillful or clever way OR breaking into a network, computer, file, etc., usually with malicious intent
- a tip, trick, or efficient method for doing or managing something
Question: Wait … are these hacks to become a Druid, or to practice Druidry more effectively?
Answer: yes.
“Guard the mysteries. Constantly reveal them”.
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ONE: Explore a habit — a piece of the human psychological code.
With the three definitions of hack available to suggest strategies, (a) cut, gash or notch the habit. That is, interrupt it in some way and see what happens and how it feels. If I favor one hand, try the other. Is it merely training that makes one easier or harder, or some other factor? (b) modify the habit in a skillful or clever way. See what else it can do. Or attack it with “malicious” intent. Sabotage my own habit. (c) Develop a new habit or modify an existing one as a strategy for managing something more efficiently.
To give a personal example, in breaking an undesirable habit, every time I felt a craving, I used the desire as a prompt to do a short meditative or imaginative practice. Not necessarily with the aim or replacing the habit, but borrowing its energy to launch a new one. Though in more than one case, the new practice became more interesting than the original habit, which eventually dried up.
This is just the beginning. Such exploration can reveal a great deal that was formerly half-conscious. And that can be useful — how much do I let myself be programmed unconsciously? Turns out quite a lot.
I make a set of “habit” cards, letting connections to the Tarot develop as I go. Turns out this is a much deeper practice than I’d anticipated. More on this in later posts.
TWO: Down with a pulled muscle in my back these last few days, I’ve had time to focus on what needs my attention next. And what kind of attention. Can I give love to aspects of my life I’ve labeled *bad*? Can I find reasons to stop liking something I now like? How much of *me* is merely whim, attraction and dislike. Is that *all* I am? No wonder people have a hard time understanding and experiencing immortality before they die, if they expect a self consisting of labels and whims to endure beyond physical death. Trees (most of them, anyway) drop their leaves each fall. What lesson is there in that for me? Hold on, then let go. Pulse. Rhythm. Cycle. Tree ritual: gather a handful of brown leaves in a basket. These are my “temporarily usefuls”. I drop them, one by one, back to the ground where I gathered them. A gust of wind whirls a bunch of them from the basket. Soon it’s empty. I bless the basket — it’s lighter now — then sit in meditation for an interval. When I get up, my back reminds me it needs love, too.
THREE: What’s on my altar right now? It doesn’t matter if I have a formal altar or not. (In a recent fit of cleaning and organizing, I don’t.) In fact, I’ve probably got more things on *invisible* altars than on *visible* ones. A prompt for meditation all its own.
Can I move one thing off an altar that doesn’t need to be there? Can I set one thing there that deserves a place of its own? Once it’s there, let me acknowledge and honor it in a short ritual. My wife, here is your presence on my altar, as in my life. A piece of quartz from a walk, for a start. Then under it, a card. What do I write on it? How will I decorate it? How often will I move, replace, re-dedicate it? Will the object take on a different symbolic form? Sea shell found on a beach walk together? Photograph? A note that *she* wrote to *me*?
FOUR: I had and have no idea beyond the title “Druid hack” where this post would and will go. I still don’t. Each new hack comes with some reflection and meditation after I finish the previous one. Here at Four, the midpoint of Seven, I still find myself disliking the word “hack”. For me it’s still too colored by its computer associations — a hacker is a vandal or thief. A “life hack” sounds like a cheap trick, a shoddy excuse for a valid strategy. Such an association is on me to work with.
For very different reasons I’ve resisted learning the ogham, though it’s a valid part of many Druid traditions. But piece by piece, quite literally — ogham sticks handed out in rituals, the most recent being saille ᚄ “willow” at the Spring Equinox — my resistance is wearing down. Where else am I resisting? Is it a productive resistance? By the slow magic of time, the self can change less traumatically than through abrupt shifts that can do needless violence to our lives. Brew my slow magic with me, o my days.
I find myself thinking of the variety of trees that live in the neighborhood that I can visit, ask for the gift of a twig, and offer a gift in return. That I can charge my ogham with meditations about the specific trees that contributed. Not merely ash, but this ash. That the use of ogham can be a conversation between a group of trees and the student of the ogham, of tree wisdom. What *IS* tree wisdom? I’m just beginning to learn. (Hence the long journey of the Ovate that many experience.) Willow ogham, gift in hand from the Equinox ritual, I begin again with the willow in the backyard, long a companion already.
FIVE: Creativity is messy. Manifestation in particular. Think baby being born, think art project, think carving, smelting, painting, sculpting, gardening. Think soul-making. I’m doing a month of daily writing as I work on a Nanowrimo novel that needs further work. 333 words a day is small enough I can manage that much even with the groans and delays of my Great Procrastinator, a bad back, and still the same household tasks as always. My wife’s off to a job interview; I stare at the computer screen. Window to magic.
Because creativity is messy, where can I celebrate my next mess of creation? In a novel that’s “about” two worlds meeting, among other things, where else are worlds meeting in my life already, without strain or struggle? Where and how can I celebrate that fact? (This Pagan says ritual! and gets all tingly at the thought.)
A poet friend performs a simple ritual each time he sits down to write. Invoking the Muse isn’t merely a metaphor, he says. I rise to build up the fire on this spring morning, a whispered acknowledgment to Brighid. Even the thought of gratitude can be invocation.
SIX: Where else can I dance? Turns out, everywhere. I hadn’t danced for twenty years — until I danced at a ritual around a fire, and enjoyed it. I look forward in a month to Beltane for this reason, among so many others. But I’m certainly not waiting that long. I’m learning to dance more often, and in places and ways I’d overlooked for a long time. I have a desk covered with papers, bank statements to file, notes to organize, pamphlets, copies of Green Living, old newspapers ready for transfer to the kindling box. There’s barely room for the computer where I write this. But I’m dancing as I clean, and it feels … different. No hurry, a rhythm inherent in the action itself, a song accompanying, a song that says things without words, and sometimes with them, without any need for meaning. Cleaning for me is always a matter of “more than before”. And the dance carries over to the writing, dancing with words. Because the words are already dancing. I match my rhythm to them, and they flow more easily. (Dancing, it turns out, also helps loosen up my back. It’s sitting still that doesn’t help me stay loose. Funny, though, that lying still, on an ice-pack, is just fine. “Chill before moving” is excellent advice in a number of human endeavors.)
SEVEN: Combine what’s isolated and separate what’s together. This can apply concretely to things like composting and recycling, of course. Not mere polarizing perversity, this. I look at the previous six hacks and consider how dancing a habit and its changes can reveal a unique rhythm, a song of power that can accompany the experimental shifting and play with habits. Consciousness itself is a series of settings we play with all day long, with food, stimulants, activity, rest, conversation, daydream, reading, work, listening to music, sleep, exercise, and so on. I can distinguish at least ten distinct states of consciousness in just an average day, without any particular attempt to shift. What about you? How effectively can I deploy the possibilities of one setting to accomplish something another setting cannot? Rather than butt my head against energetic barriers, shift the consciousness. A whole laboratory waiting for me to explore it.
The hack of creating new hacks is one of the most remarkable things humans do. It’s recursive — it loops onto itself, in a fractal kind of way, making patterns that can teach us things unknown before they take shape.
So there you have them — seven Druid hacks: exploring a habit (and the habit-making mechanism) and then Tarot-izing it, doing a tree-leaf ritual, “altar-izing” something not there before, trying out and consulting tree wisdom, welcoming the mess of creativity, dancing more than before, and playing with consciousness-settings.
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*Wantastiquet: “the language belongs to the land“
A Druid Way 