With a nor’easter building to the south of New England, and a forecast of several nights with temperatures in the single digits, I turn to Thecu Stormbringer. It feels like a good point to draw from today, because while the solstices (like the weather) are objective physical events anyone in the world can observe, celebrate, or ignore as they choose, one person’s subjective experiences, like mine of a goddess, simply aren’t. Even after you read my posts about Thecu, you may think nothing more about the matter. But enter “solstice” in a search engine and you’ll get a range of sites, some offering “all you need to know”. Inviting as that may sound, I tend to shy away. If I can find out everything I need to know from a website, why pay any attention to the actual event? But “knowing about” and “knowing” are two different things. One’s a head experience, the other we feel in our bones and blood.
One link between the objective and the subjective is awen, inspiration, the flow of spirit, which lets us evoke in others an echo of our original experience. Let the echo be strong enough, let our understanding of this thing called being human, and our skill in working with it, run equal to the task, and music, image, voice, story, object of craft can all serve to unite us in the experience of mystery. An echo from outside awakens a resonance within us.
Many things can open to the awen. Our inner awareness hums in sympathy with it, and the skill of our hands, the deep yearning of our hearts, rise to answer its call. Mystery, unlike mere obfuscation, only deepens as we explore it. We don’t exhaust the “meaning” of a forest by walking through it once or twice, any more than we do with a piece of music. Yes, I can obsess over a person or a fiction or a place, and in doing so lose much of the freshness which was so inviting at the outset that my obsession took shape there. But that doesn’t “use up” all mystery, merely one piece of it I’ve temporarily drunk dry. Time-walkers, awen-workers, we’re given capacities we’ve just begun to explore.
Solstice is one interval when can hear the original, after the echo has drawn us closer. Many religions offer a rule, or rules, for this. Initially the rules seemed designed to help this happen, to catalyze a connection. What I love about Druidry is that it sets out a rhythm, a melody, instead. Hear that Song, feel its rhythms as you move to them, and you’ll begin to follow it back to its source, to yearn for more of the original music.
The late Medievalist, theologian and fantasy author C. S. Lewis delivered a series of radio broadcasts and included a chapter in at least one of his books titled (more or less) “Right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe”. At least as interesting and significant, to my mind, is relationship as a clue to the meaning of the universe. Right and wrong ultimately serve relationships, rather than the other way around. The former are means, the latter’s the goal. Hear the Song, learn how to work in increasing harmony with it, and these things start to fall in place with less struggle and effort. What we are relating to, and that music “on the edge of things”, begin to converge. Praise the Mystery!
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“We are wise”, John Beckett writes about the process of discernment,
to focus our attention on our actions rather than on our beliefs. But our actions generate experiences, and in our attempt to interpret and understand our experiences we form beliefs. Our experiences may be so strong or so frequent we are certain our beliefs about them must be right, but if we are honest with ourselves, we can never be completely sure they are right.
But we can ask ourselves if our beliefs work, if they conform to known facts, and if they help us lead better lives. If we can answer yes to these three questions, we can be confident that they are as right as they can be.
So I return to experience, to relationship, to that Song behind all things.
A Druid Way 