You hear a lot about “top-down” and “bottom-up” initiatives. Start from the grass-roots. Or identify good leaders and let the growth come from their inspired guidance through hard times. But I’d claim that most of our best ventures build and grow from the center outwards. We’re all involved in this kind of initiative, and as a result we instinctively know what to do, even if we tell ourselves — or others have convinced us — otherwise. So the center is a good place to start.
Whether it’s an embryo, a crystal, a sapling, a story idea, a garden, a relationship, a ritual, a company or a nation, there’s a core, a center from which energy, ideas, blood all flow. This center — and this is an important key — also replicates itself everywhere, establishing new centers of activity and growth. Some — many — are within us. A tree sends out roots, plants send out runners, healing occurs and spreads from re-energized tissues and bones, and human nudges and hunches and gut feelings point us toward inner and outward changes. All living things seed themselves, passing on their dynamic potential to another generation, on multiple levels.
Druid attention to the ancestors, if it’s prudent, never seeks to excuse poor choices, bad parenting, or painful and difficult legacies passed down through generations. Each living thing is awash in a sea of tendencies that pair up with inherent directions and characteristics in its environment. I won’t ever have the body or metabolism of a long-distance runner, but that’s not really the issue: I can keep the body I do have as fit as possible, starting from the center of where I already live each day. The small daily changes I make are ones I’m more likely to stick with, even as the small changes my body makes as it ages prompt me, if I’m paying attention, to make adjustments for strength, endurance, energy and so on. Then when larger shifts and changes occur, I can better adapt to them. The same holds true for my inner bodies, emotion and thought and vision, memory and intuition.
Partly this comes out of practice with the small changes first, and partly out of stores and reserves put in place by going with the flow rather than fighting every single direction that living in a physical realm urges on us all. Electric cars coast downhill and save energy for the next climb. Hibernating species store up resources against the hard times. So, if I’m paying attention, can I, both physically and spiritually, prepare myself for each turn of the spiral. The “how” becomes part of my practice, if I let it, and the next challenge I face becomes my chance at re-calibration. Quite simply, is it working? Even to ask that question at all opens many doors.
Out of our sometimes violent human history and its consequent long conditioning, we may fall back on military metaphors, which don’t always yield the optimal mindset. You have to pick your battles, we say. No general wins on every front. More helpful is a range of metaphors, a rich gathering of stories to tell and learn from.
If it seems that spiritual laws swallow up individuality in statements about general tendencies, groups and patterns larger than one human life, it’s important to remember that it was humans who first noticed these principles, studied them, plumbed their potentials. And humans have always chosen either to disregard them or to work consciously with them. Intention is powerful. Animals largely follow an instinctive path. Humans have wider choices. Conscious and creative cooperation with the spiritual principles of existence is a powerful key to our individual human fulfillment. Through such means, we can manifest what has not yet been seen or experienced or even imagined, in forms of power and beauty and usefulness, for others as well as for ourselves.
As we become ancestors ourselves to our descendants of blood and spirit, passing along this “connective tissue” of life-giving thoughts and actions to succeeding generations, that’s one deep way to repay the gifts we’ve been given. It will then be their task to choose what works best for them, to honor and build on what they’ve received, and add their own stamp and color and flavor to the lives they live.
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A Druid Way 