I want to do some thinking out loud here. Nothing new, since I do it frequently. But it’s an experiment with a more specific kind of thinking I share less often here, because for many people, negative experiences with Christianity raise painful associations and memories that make even a mention of Jesus or the long, rich, varied and potentially very useful Christian tradition anathema to them. So if you’re still deeply allergic and over-sensitized to some of the more toxic forms of religion, well, here’s your red flag. But if you choose to go forward, simply treat the following as another kind of practice, like tai chi or dancing when no one’s watching, or waving at the moon.
Try it out for what it’s worth, without preconceptions. If you need a prod, here’s one: “I can’t dance” doesn’t cut it. Everybody moves, and everybody can move rhythmically. That’s all that’s needed. The rest is mere practice and polish.
As a Druid I feel almost a compulsion to follow wherever the light leads. I’ve rarely been disappointed, which is why I keep doing it.
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One legacy of my Christian upbringing is a fascination with “wisdom from the borders.” Unlike my more fundamentalist cousins, my mother was drawn to Christian Science with its focus on healing, and my World War II vet father was a member of the “God made the world, I farm a small piece of it, I’m grateful for its seasons and gifts, and that’s already enough for me” school of deism. From that initial gift of my parents’ openness to possibility, I learned and grew the most, before I took other paths, through insights from the periphery, or even outside the official “party line,” of Evangelical Christianity, or “EC.”
EC is, after all, just one sub-branch of one faith, but it’s a sub-branch that sometimes gets a bad name for its often unreflective adherence to dogma, especially in the face of good counter-evidence. Because of that, it also gets a lot of press from agnostic and atheist strands in contemporary thought and journalism. One of the regrettable but understandable consequences of the debate is that many people write off a whole religion because one or two particular flavors of it that they happen to know or have experienced just make them gag. It’s a “baby with the bathwater” thang.
One of the EC dogmas that bothered me the most, from about the age of 8 or 9 onward, and that has set many other people’s teeth on edge as well, is what’s more recently been called “damnationism” — the apparent and deeply problematic need to condemn whole swaths of humanity to eternal torment because they don’t happen to believe the right things required by one stream of orthodoxy, all so we can hang with the sheep and not with the goats for the rest of time. Finally, some writers are even starting to call that out for what it is: a blasphemous perversion of an original truth.**
Hell, MI, 48169 — an actual place, population approx. 260, located 15 miles NW of Ann Arbor.
One of my favorite writers within the universalist stream of Christianity, which doesn’t clutch a self-righteous need to condemn everyone else but Christians to hell, is Thomas Talbott. Universalism can be conveniently summed up in just two words: love wins.
Talbott’s insights do come cloaked in evangelical language, because that’s his particular upbringing. But he looks far beyond the surface, like I hope you will, and like most people learn to do when they realize either a pretty or ugly face is often the least interesting and important part of a person.
Here’s an excerpt I want to work with, from Talbott’s fine book* The Inescapable Love of God:
In fact, our bad choices almost never get us what we really want; this is part of what makes them bad, and also one reason why God is able to bring redemptive good out of them. When we make a mess of our lives and our misery becomes more and more unbearable, the hell we thereby create for ourselves will in the end resolve the very ambiguity and shatter the very illusions that made the bad choices possible in the first place. That is how God works with us as created rational agents. He permits us to choose freely in the ambiguous contexts in which we first emerge as self-aware beings, and he then requires us to learn from experience the hard lessons we sometimes need to learn. So in that way, the consequences of our free choices, both the good ones and the bad ones, are a source of revelation; they reveal sooner or later — in the next life, if not in this one — both the horror of separation from God and the bliss of union with him. And that is why the end is foreordained: all paths finally lead to the same destination, the end is reconciliation, though some are longer, windier, and a lot more painful than others.
When I read sound insights from the Wise working in other traditions that may ring notes that jar a little, I like to try out alternate versions, to see how they work when clothed in other terminology. How much of the wisdom survives the change? How much of the difficulty is merely semantics? Here are Talbott’s words again, re-garbed in non-theist language:
In fact, our bad choices almost never get us what we really want; this is part of what makes them bad for us, and also one reason why our subsequent experiences are able to bring good out of them. When we make a mess of our lives and our misery becomes more and more unbearable, the hell we thereby create for ourselves can eventually resolve the very ambiguity and shatter the very illusions that made the bad choices possible in the first place. That is how the patterns of the universe often respond to us as rational agents. They permit us to choose freely in the ambiguous contexts in which we first emerge as self-aware beings, and then let us learn from experience the hard lessons we sometimes need to learn in order to gain wisdom. So in that way, the consequences of our free choices, both the good ones and the bad ones, are a potential source of growth and discovery; they reveal both the suffering of separation from our own highest good and the bliss of heeding its shaping pattern.
That’s interesting to me. How much did I change? Well, “God” gets replaced with patterns that inhere in lived experience, and “redemption” becomes growth and increased insight. The universe becomes aware of itself in us and in other beings. Is that “true”? Well, let’s be Druidic about it and test it, for years if necessary, rather than bothering with any belief or disbelief about it before we even have a foundation of experience to reflect on. Whether the patterns of the universe tend towards love is an experiential question, and really not a matter that mere belief can adequately resolve either way. And for how many other questions like it is this also true?
These insights issue from what used to be called the “perennial tradition,” or the philosophia perennis, a well of wisdom common to the depths of all valid traditions, part of the heritage of humanity rather than the exclusive possession of any one culture or tradition. It’s also part of folk wisdom in the West that emerges in sayings like “what goes around comes around” and “what you do comes back to you.” The added insight here points to the value of “bad” experiences, just as useful — or misleading! — as the good ones. For ease and comfort can mislead us about the pain and suffering in the world, just as our own pain and suffering can blind us to the beauty and wonder and possibility around us. From all I’ve seen, life, fortunately, is bigger than either.
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One of the streams from the early days of the Druid revival and the writings of Iolo Morgannwg*** runs with a Welsh version of such wisdom, offering a vision of a cosmos in which all things move toward growth and increasing consciousness, over countless eons, through every imaginable form, and in every imaginable experience. In this conception, the universe is a flow of energies, and its current sweeps us/we ride it from Annwn (ah-noon) and Abred (ah-bred) to Gwynfyd (gwin-vid) and ultimately on to Ceugant (kye-gahnt), a kind of infinity. Eventually we all experience everything.
Unlike the Christian sense of redemption or heaven, you’ll note, these are simply points along the flow. Another way to see it: the mouth of the river as it enters the sea is not superior to its source in the springs on a distant hillside. All is flow. Things may slow down or speed up as they move along the river, adjusting to the current, to the shore, and to each other.
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I had the privilege this last Saturday to take part in an open discussion on the topic “Have You Had a Spiritual Experience?” Those who attended were mostly older than me. Graying or white hair framed almost every face as I looked around the circle of the dozen or so of us who attended. But when the question arose about how many of us kept to some kind of spiritual practice, every hand went up. I found this wonderfully inspiring.
The point that everyone wanted to tackle: what’s next? How do we work with spiritual truths, with the patterns of life we’ve all encountered, and continue to grow in wisdom and love?
Those questions also continue to drive me on my own path and underlie my explorations on this blog. Thank you to all who read this blog for joining me for a few minutes each week and for considering these things, too.
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*Talbott, Thomas. The Inescapable Love of God. 2nd ed. Cascade Books, 2014.
**Favager, David. Hell to Pay?: The Blasphemous Absurdity of Damnationism. Amazon Digital/Kindle, 2015.
***Iolo Morgannwg — from the foreword to the Sacred Text Archive to Morgannwg’s collection Barddas:
However, this is one of those visionary texts which is worth reading for its own merits, irrespective of whether it is ‘genuine’ or not. Taken at face value, the Barddas remains a fascinating text. It has resonances with the Upanishads, Kabbalah, and Freemasonry. The Bardic alphabet presented in the ‘Symbol’ section is completely invented, based on Runic and Ogham, and has utility as a magical alphabet. However it is about as genuine as the alphabets of J.R.R. Tolkien. The ‘Theology’ section appears to be based on Iolo’s peculiar Christian views (he described himself as a Unitarian Quaker). ‘Theology’ also contains a great number of Triads, some of which may be from authentic ancient Bardic lore. The ‘Wisdom’ section has a great deal of mythopoetic information, some of which is authentic, some not. The Barddas is great reading if you are at all interested in the ancient Druids, as long as you keep in mind the background of its creation.
The second Tarot card focuses on the discovery of power the Fool makes after taking that first step (off the cliff).
The “trick or treat” of this post’s title refers partly to the use we make of the power of the Mage. The image appears second in the sequence of the Greater Arcana. We can take the hint and profitably pair it with the Fool. Even as we set forth “wide-eyed and bushy-tailed” into the world of experience and polarities, we emerge flush with powers and abilities that we haven’t a clue about.
However we act in our initial steps into manifestation, inevitably we set forces in motion that entangle us in conflict. It’s the nature of whatever equilibrium we find ourselves in that we human beings are potential vehicles for its recalibration and movement to a new set-point. “Not choosing to act” is clearly also another choice, a shift in the energies of the equilibrium that feed its movement. Everything gives feedback.
If we do not trick ourselves with the powers in our hands, we may find out how to treat (in all senses of the word) this dimension of ourselves as well as those around us in magical ways. The Mage image itself is a kind of trick, the suggestion that we are special, set apart, potent with craft and technique, secret knowledge and spell and charm that can blow life wide-open and deliver us the lover, bank account, lifestyle or heaven we always thought we wanted. But after the hundredth spree, orgy, yacht and mansion, the excess palls. Is that all there is? Yes, but only if I accept another’s (i)magery. The challenge here, the trick and treat both, is to keep on seeking.
Buffy as Magician
[In 2008 Dark Horse Comics commissioned — and unfortunately subsequently cancelled — a Slayer Tarot inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A few images survive from its initial conception, which was in the capable hands of tarot expert and author Rachel Pollack and Buffy comics artist Paul Lee. To the left is Buffy as Magician. This new-old and potent archetype can be helpful if you’re longing for a change from the masculine cloak of traditional Magician imagery. Try a Google search for female Tarot magician and see what others catch your attention. We all mediate both energies, but we also need and seek rebalancing and recalibration where we can find it. It does not do merely to dismiss it as political correctness. But, as always, don’t take my word on this or bother arguing — test it for yourself.]
You can, if you like, see this early stage in the Fool’s journey as adolescence — that time of exploding awareness of polarity, of self-and-other, of gender and orientation, biochemistry and culture all playing havoc with the delightful androgeny of the Fool. It’s the stormfront approaching that can make you want to warn and shelter kids in their single-digit years, they’re often so appealing, uncomplicated, creative and free. Watch out!
But this necessary initiation equips us for so much to come. It can manifest in the amazing self-involvement of the teen. No surprise, since the peculiar discovery that “I-am-a-person, I’m-me. So-what’s-that? What-do-I-do-with-it? Help! Now what? OK, try this” derives in part from the number of Magician or Mage: 1. “I’m the first, the one and only to feel and do and think and discover all this. Except not. A whole world of us. Oh, sh*t!”
You can also understand the image in terms of what we’re all capable of, each of us an altar of power cascading outward from our choices, our habits, our goals, our fears and desires. Gaze into the eyes of another being long enough and you may catch a glimpse of that lightning in a bottle we all are.
The Mage calls it forth, poised between heaven and earth, a conduit of possibility. The hands of the Mage illustrate the pathway of this divine electricity: right or dominant hand upward, often holding a tool of power toward the heavens, left hand downward, earthing the force, with the Mage square in the middle of the circuit, locus of transformation, fuse that can blow with carelessness.
For the holy energies do change us all: no one gets out unmarked, unscathed. Every face we meet is a map of what power does. In some the frown lines cut deep. In others, there’s a kind of light and joy, and the same lines that furrow the face outline a grin you’ll see if you stick around and make the person’s acquaintance. Time is the only way power can manifest in worlds of matter. All-at-once spells quick incineration, so usually we tamely sip and sample power instead. (Once in a while, though, if we reeeely insist and push too hard, we can find out what it’s like to fry.)
Sometimes life just rips into us, and our anger at our painful powerlessness makes for an even more painful knowledge. Early in her high fantasy novel AWizard of Earthsea, author U. K. LeGuin captures this twinned suffering and awakening succinctly as she describes Ged, her young Mage protagonist, when he first confronts his inability to effect change: “he raged at his weakness, for he knew his strength.”
Adolescent rebellion in part can also be a search for something true in the face of cultural limitations and “necessary deceptions,” a way to reconcile our power with the fences, chains and boundaries any culture insists on. Cultures generally do not care about individuals or their happiness, but about stability, about the group identity, about self-perpetuation, and — yes — about punishing anyone who defies their rules too blatantly. And so sometimes we earth our power too soon, knuckling under to the demands of our culture, because we’re unwilling to pay the price of defiance — if we even realize a price exists, or just what it might entail.
Harmonics and spirals of the Magician’s power and deeds ripple through the Tarot. We encounter the same gesture the Magician makes in several later cards, most especially with the Devil. The Left Hand Path makes use of the same energies available to everyone — a truth that goes some way to explaining how the mystical “Force” of the Star Wars universe with its light and dark sides has captured the modern imagination, mirroring long-standing traditions of spiritual and magical tutelage. Nothing is ever lost forever, but it may go underground for ages until the time rolls round again for its germination and re-emergence.
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IMAGES: Magician from a public domain source on Wikipedia; Buffy as Magician; Devil from a public domain source on Wikipedia.
The Tarot Fool — a fitting symbol as we pick our way slowly from this time of greatest dark right after the Solstice and into the slowly growing light. Blessed fools, all of us, lost and stumbling where angels often fear to tread (is that because, unlike us, they can actually see where they’re going?!). A time for gestation, if we can grab a few moments in the modern restless energy to fill every moment of this season, a time that, if we listen, calls us inward, to introspection and nurturing, to brooding on the new life in us that seeks birth and is always possible. So we run away instead with busy-ness. Almost successful in drowning out the possibility of transformation. Almost. How valuable our failure is to us becomes clear only later.
It’s still dark, though by minutes each day the time of light grows longer. But if the skies are cloudy, you may take a lot of convincing. Looks just like yesterday to me.
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“The card,” writes A. E. Waite, “which bears no number passes through all the numbered cards and is changed in each.”*
A little shiver at that. Like it or not, if we’re alive we’re changing. Un-numbered and free at the outset, I soon enough get counted, numbered, labelled, weighed, boxed and mailed to an unknown address. I get unboxed by others, or I unbox myself. I keep arriving, but never quite get there. But then that means the situations themselves are static, and the trajectories we follow are shaped by the initial energies we manifested when we set out. We are what we started out as, and we build as we go from there. Action, reaction. Source of traction to be able to walk at all.
The Fool isn’t looking at the drop right in front of him. White dog at his heels (I say “he” and “him” because I’m personalizing things here — the fool quite rightly looks androgenous in many decks — it’s the Every Person card. Rewrite any pronouns to fit — it’s your story here), the Fool is intent on the journey, that first inhale, the animal spirits of hound and flower and golden sun urging him forward.
Of course, the path’s still unclear, the picture has a frame, we haven’t seen what’s up next. The Fool hasn’t even set out yet, or — inevitably — fallen, or opened up that pack on a stick that holds food, a map, a key to a lock it doesn’t fit, a phone number, a debit card with an initial balance. A roll of the dice. A lotto number. With clothes still clean, no grime from the trail, or wrinkles on the complexion, the Fool is unscarred, untried, fearless. Zen calls it Beginner’s Mind. Jesus says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”** Yup, know that, been there. Weak and not even recognizing it. No grace to be seen — because it’s dark, because grace manifests not as a separate thing in this case, not as something I can see or sense, but as the nature of the Fool itself.
Swept clean, rebooted, upgraded, ready to take the world by storm, found that dot-com, make a million before you’re 30, met your soul-mate, have the 2.2 kids and the photo-shopped life that the Fates and your parents conspired to deprive you of, and so on. Or simply in love with life, not yet hard-boiled and cynical, jaded and sarcastic, still full of yearnings and dreams. Not yet beaten down. Not just with eyes on the horizon, but above it, in the clouds. “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them,” says Thoreau.
Or the Fool is in fact immensely powerful and full of potential, but wholly blind to it. Dragon energy curls and flames in us. No mystery (all mystery) that one symbol for Britain and for things Celtic is a yin-yang, a Western mandala of two dragons, white and red.
In this card, the awful gulf below means nothing to one with the power of flight — but will I, will you or any of us, realize it in time? Instead I look back, I turn away from the chance to fly, I long for the comfort of the past.
Stephen Batchelor writes in his book Living with the Devil: “Without the devil to obstruct it, one could not create a path. For a path is kept open by overcoming the hindrances that prevent freedom of movement along it.”***
The devil is in the details, and the devil, or the details, are me — I custom-make the circumstances of my life from which I can learn the most. That’s one view. Everything is feedback, and therefore useful. Another view. “I do not believe in God any more than I believe in Hamlet,” says Batchelor elsewhere, “but this does not mean that either God or Hamlet has nothing of value to say.”
Back to square one, that first step, the dawn, the new day, the Fool’s setting forth. It’s summer, it’s winter, it’s summer again. “The wheels on the bus go round and round.” The wheel of the year takes us again and again through the great cycle of death and life and mortal beauty.
“We dance round in a ring and suppose, while the Secret sits in center and knows,” says sly old master Robert Frost.
“Knows what?” asks the Fool, and insists there’s an answer, never mind what anyone says.
“The Fool who persists in his folly will become wise,” says William Blake.
And the Fool, the blessed Fool, takes the next step.
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*Waite, A. E. “The Soul’s Progress.” Manual of Cartomancy. Reprinted as The Complete Manual of Occult Divination, Vol. 1. University Books, 1972.
**2 Corinthians 12:9.
***Batchelor, Stephen. Living with the Devil. New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2004.
One of the glories of repetition is enchantment. We can enchant ourselves into another space and place with repetition. Mindless repetition, no. But eager, delighted repetition, inviting the change, welcoming it as you sense it begin to steal over you — that’s a very different thing. Things do, after all, “come true.” Bringing feeling into it enlivens the charm, animates it with a spark of our own energy. Who after all tires of the ocean, though one wave follows another?
Verbal magic is one of the first magics we learn. Perhaps you’ve heard a child repeat a word endlessly, exploring the taste of it in the mouth, the joy in the rhythm of it. Maybe with a tuneless little tune accompanying it. And maybe, if you’re blessed (and you are), you’ve caught yourself with just such a tune on your lips, engaged in some repetitive task, or doing “nothing,” which is often a chance to do a very great something, a spelling of oneself into an Else-where and Else-when, a door opening to wonder.
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Now feel the change when you read these next words. You’ve heard them, some version of them, maybe said them to yourself or another, even in jest. Bitter words we hear far too often. Loser. Nobody. Waste of space. And “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” Some variation of this very evil charm that drags on people’s vision of themselves and their world and steals away possibility. Verbal magic, alas (and also thank the powers), is very real.
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Now that you’ve had a small glimpse of the two magics contrasted (which is really the same magic, used for uplifting and destructive purposes), let me offer a restorative charm that deserves loving repetition. A charm for transforming the “I.” A spell to memorize, to whisper to oneself at need. A blessing to say over your children each night as they fall asleep. A charm to recite gazing into the eyes of an animal or human you love and who loves you. A charm to recite at dawn or sunset, the light looking into us and saying its silent word. A charm to remember what the ecstatic I is made of, a charm for the music that is the awen vibrating in us all:
I am the luck of every joy,
I am the light of the sun’s beams,
I am the door of lordly welcome,
I am the pole star of guidance,
I am the step of the deer on the height,
Mine is the step of the white-faced mare,
Mine is the grace of the swimming swan,
I am the jewel in each mystery.
Nine waves around me,
Nine winds above me,
Nine paths within me,
Nine fires about me,
Nine wells beneath me,
Nine wisdoms given me,
Nine gifts bestowed on me,
Nine skills awoken within me,
Ninefold the blessing in either hand.*
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*adapted from Matthews, Caitlin. A Celtic Devotional. Gloucester, MA: Fair Winds Press, 2004, pgs. 138-139.
In a 15 Feb 2008 post “Taboo Your Words,” Eliezer Yudkowsky writes:
The illusion of unity across religions can be dispelled by making the term “God” taboo, and asking them to say what it is they believe in; or making the word “faith” taboo, and asking them why they believe it … When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don’t use a single handle, whatever that handle may be.
There’s a truly breathtaking number of assumptions I could examine in this short excerpt. To name only a few: that any unity across religions is or isn’t an “illusion”; that any such unity hinges on either “God” or belief; that the only acceptable kinds of evidence are “outward observables and interior mechanisms”; that arguments or philosophical defenses establish truth; and that language, let alone philosophical discussion, is even possible without “handles,” which is what all words are. (In the beginning was the Word …)
But let’s set those issues aside — because we can. I recommend taking on this challenge for what it can teach you. Take an hour and get down in words what it is you actually believe, and why. Whatever else is calling to you online, including this blog, can wait.
For Druids, the word to make temporarily taboo is definitely “nature.”
After all, we use it as shorthand for an enormous range of referents: an object of our reverence; a source of our metaphors; the set of patterns, relationships and movements of energies that we claim accounts for all life, including the workings of human consciousness; the antithesis to human excess and imbalance, often symbolized by urban blight; a kind of deity or pantheon of deities; a characteristic quality that is the opposite of the word “artificial”; everything that exists, including those human activities that produce counter-currents and eddies in its ever-flowing stream; an impersonal force or being, and so on.
So I’ll take on Yudkowsky’s challenge: what is it that I believe, and why?
I believe that to be alive is a chance, if I take it, to be part of something vastly larger than my own body, emotions, and thoughts (or if I’ve learned any empathy, possibly also the bodies, emotions and thoughts of people I care about). These things have their place, but they are not all.
I believe this because when I pay attention to the plants and animals, air, sky, water and the whole wordless living environment in and around me, I am lifted out of the small circle of my personal concerns and into a deeper kinship I want to celebrate. I discover this sense of connection and relationship is itself celebration. Because of these experiences, I believe further that if I focus only on my own body, emotions, and thoughts, I’ve missed most of my life and its possibilities. Ecstasy is ec-stasis, standing outside. Ecstatic experiences lift us out of the narrowness of the life that advertisers tell us should be our focus and into a world of beauty and harmony and wisdom.
I believe likewise that the physicality of this world is something to learn deeply from. The most physical experiences we know, eating and hurting, being ill and making love, dying and being born, all root us in our bodies and focus our attention on now. They take us to wordless places where we know beyond language. Even to witness these things can be a great teacher.
I believe in other worlds than this one because, like all of us, I’ve been in them, in dream, reverie, imagination and memory, to name only a few altered states. I believe that our ability to live and love and die and return to many worlds is what keeps us sane, and that the truly insane are those who insist this world is the only one, that imagination is dangerous, metaphor is diabolical, dream is delusion, memory is mistaken, and love? — love, they tell us, is merely a matter of chemical responses.
I believe that humans, like all things, are souls and have bodies, not the other way around — that the whole universe is animate, that all things vibrate and pulse with energy, as science is just beginning to discover, and that we are (or can be) at home everywhere because we are a part of all that is.
I believe these things because human consciousness, like the human body, is marvelously equipped for living in this universe, because of all its amazing capacities that we can see working themselves out for bad and good in headlines and history. In art and music and literature, in the deceptions and clarities, cruelties and compassions we practice on ourselves and each other, we test and try out our power.
Some three weeks away, now, there’s a Full Moon on Christmas Day, at 6:11 am, Eastern Standard Time (U.S.). It will set less than an hour later where I live, so I won’t obsess over exact astronomical details or feel any need to rouse myself on a dark winter morning to witness it, but instead enjoy it the evenings before and after.
The Solstice, however, is different, and merits a different welcome. While I’m not sure I’ll keep the traditional night-long vigil through the longest night to greet the dawn, I will be up late, laying one last charge of wood in the woodstove, and contemplating the coming new year. And the afternoon before and after I’ll take part in a Solstice ritual in two different towns.
Why? Do the seasonal festivals really matter?
Yes, this is a pile of sticks and small branches in an old orchard and pasture near where I live. You can see the long shadows of the tree-trunks — it’s late afternoon in November, a week ago. The owner cut a dying tree from the treeline that stands to the left, outside the picture. He’s already chopped, split and picked up the firewood, and gathered the remainder here.
Is it useful? No. It’s just brush. Burn it or dump it in a gully.
Is it useful? Yes. It’s kindling for a whole winter, and twigs for wreathes and crafts.
Is it useful? Who knows? That depends on how someone uses it.
Sometimes I find you have to ask the same question at least three times to get enough answers to work with.
Follow through on each answer and you get a different outcome. Is one of them the “right” answer? Who is asking?
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One of the suggestions for solitary celebration of the Winter Solstice that I’ve adapted and adopted from OBOD is this simple rite:
On the longest night, go through the house and turn off all lights. Spend time feeling and acknowledging the darkness. Then light a single candle, and go from room to room, lighting a candle in each one. Say what feels right for you to say.
With a dramatic title like that, this post really has to deliver! But all I mean by it are the usually small ways we destroy, unmake, sabotage, undermine and discourage … ourselves.
Successful psychic attacks by others are remarkably rare. Those we work against ourselves are all too common. I can’t. I shouldn’t. I don’t. I won’t. And of course, let’s not discount the low-level psychic garbage of much contemporary media, with its insistence that it knows better than we do what the truth is about the world, its prospects, our futures in it, the roots of our safety and happiness, and so on. You can almost feel “know, dare, will, be silent” seeping out of you and spinning down the drain. “If it bleeds, it leads” may sell advertising space and draw viewers and readers, but it’s less than optimal energy to nourish ourselves with, to try to live on.
One of Best Buy’s holiday logos
The solution isn’t merely to surround ourselves with a silver shield, though that’s often a good starting visualization. Whatever comes at you that you don’t want or need reflects off and away. Such a technique works well in traffic, in public places with a stew of emotions, like airports, bus stations — and any Black Friday shopping you’re daredevil enough to attempt. You can read the mindset already in place with advertising from sources like Best Buy and AARP that proclaim “Win the Holidays.” Can we make this season any more stressful?! Yes, but we don’t have to. This too is a choice we make.
And the desire I’ve witnessed in myself and many others from time to time, to retreat, withdraw, barricade the gates, is all too hobbit-like in its naivete. “The wide world is all about you,” Gandalf reminds Frodo. “You can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.” The Survivalist mentality is understandable, but wrong-headed. What to do?
elemental laundry magic — water, earth, air, fire
Sometimes the best magic there is to practice a simple shift of attention. Instead of someone else controlling what I will think and image and focus on, I can choose, if I wish. We all surrender this power of choice much too often, and daily. Does any advertizer, for instance, really have my best interests at heart?! But love purifies the market of the heart.
One of the most soothing of day-to-day tasks for me is laundry, especially when I can hang it outdoors and it comes in later, dry and sun-spiced — for free.
Laundry?, you say, more than a little outraged, perhaps. Consider the sly admonition of the Tao Te Ching, chap. 8:
The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao. In dwelling, be close to the land. In meditation, go deep in the heart. In dealing with others, be gentle and kind. In speech, be true. In ruling, be just. In business, be competent. In action, watch the timing. No fight: No blame.
We reject what can be most helpful, because it is simple. It doesn’t appeal to our vanity, to our sense that our problems must be large and important, because we are, so we may dismiss it.
Some of these recent sunny November days have seen our backyard with laundry magic at work, bowing in a cool breeze. But even the drying racks near the woodstove work their own charm. Elemental powers, I have summoned you, and you have served me well. I thank you for your gifts of earth, water, air and fire. Both the laundry basket and my heart come away lighter, cleaner. Hail, and farewell.
Such daily magic has more power than we suspect. I smile even as I write about this, and you may too, scoffing at my innocence or simple-mindedness. But in fact simplicity can be another most potent magic. The clear, simple task, with its attainable objective, is one key to using energy well. Breaking down more complex challenges into simpler tasks is good practice, as any successful efficiency expert, organizational consultant, psychologist, trainer, businessperson, housekeeper — and magician — knows.
When we reclaim such small spaces for ourselves, we witness small successes. Of such small successes and satisfactions is a good day built, and then a week, a month, a life. I don’t need to “win” any holiday. The spaces for love and celebration are always open for us, gifts we can then give to ourselves and each other, possibilities to reclaim in the small but cumulative and thereby powerful ways that magic usually works. To end on a final Tolkienian note and paraphrase Gildor Inglorion’s words to Frodo, “Joy (like courage) is found in unlikely places.”
In the Pagan calendar the north quarter is the direction of winter and earth. We’re already both in it and going deeper. Darkness falls before it’s even 5:00 pm. I imagine my ancestors in their hut, rushlights burning. Firelight flickers on the walls, and a cauldron — a practical one, nothing magic except the daily magical tranformation of cooking — a cauldron hangs over the flames, full of stew, roots and grains and berries, and whatever meat the hunters may bring in. Despite its hardships, winter can taste umami, rich and dark and all earth-savory. Like no other season, it can return us to awareness of our mortal, imperfect, stubborn bodies.
Though we haven’t yet hit the Solstice and the official start of Winter, you feel it in the temperatures as you shiver each time the door opens. You see it in the look of the mostly barren trees — and see it denied by the green mosses which apparently have no problem with these nightly hard frosts and bright chill days.
We’re here partly to witness everything. And our doings and our not-doings are also part of what we witness.
Witness. Martyr, in Greek, revealing one problem of witnessing dangerous things.
There are many safer witnessings, of course. I like Japanese Buddhist kinhin, “walking meditation,” with the literal meaning, from the Chinese it comes from (I discover, courtesy of my magical familiar, Wikipedia), of “going through like the thread in a loom.” A back-and-forth that produces a fabric, a weaving of disparate threads into a whole.
My weaver wife’s out of state visiting relatives, and I make a note to share this small discovery with her when she gets back at the end of the week. Practitioners of Zen do kinhin in alternation with periods of sitting meditation, which is what za-zen or Zen means. I encountered kinhin in Japan, and tried it a few times, the slow version, a deliberate, meditative pace. For the typical American, it can of course drive you absolutely mad — and revealing that irritation is very much part of the point.
“It’s all meditation,” I can imagine them saying, though much of the discipline is paying attention, which generally means not talking. A wonderful, terrible commentary on our whole political scene.
There’s another version of kinhin that offers a brisk almost-jog, and that’s the version I prefer, this time of year at least, to get the blood flowing and keep this middle-aged body busy enough that the mind quiets and the world joins me as a companion, rather than standing off at a distance as a mere object for thinking.
So what’s the goal of such mindfulness? Attention, the shutting down of the chatter that too often fills our heads, that gets overfed by the social media we know we’re addicted to. A balance or equilibrium with everything that feels astonishingly wonderful when we slip into it, because we mostly stand outside of it the rest of the time. Yes, to continue an image that meditators sometimes use, prolonged practice endows your awareness with a kind of fragrance you start to carry around with you the rest of the time. You can be more mindful in everything you do.
And for me there’s a key. Mindfulness by itself is another tool, not an Answer. It can help me act more effectively. Otherwise, the water flows, the sun rises and sets all by itself, good things, surely — and moss covers me, also as surely as it does a stone set in the right balance of light and moisture. Compared with the stone, moss darts across the surfaces of things, greening them and slowly grinding them into dirt. Dirt — the end result of billions of years of animal life. We all come from the Mother, and to Her we all return. Sing it, brothers and sisters!
Except that’s not the whole story. Our human capacity for doing, so fraught with bad decisions, holds immense power for whatever we choose. Mindfulness can too easily become just another addiction, a way of blissed-out watching while the majority of humans slowly murder each other and erase themselves from the planet. The earth doesn’t need saving, but we do, and the plain evidence of millennia is that nobody else is gonna do it for us.
Renunciation of my power leaves the rest with power over me. One ring, old J. R. R. Tolkien, one ring does rightfully belong to me. I”ve worn it since birth, I’ll wear it till I die. The chance to become more fully who and what I am. And what is that? That’s the walking meditation I strive to practice, that’s the trick of time and space, to figure it out for ourselves in all the years we have. Not an Answer, not a Final Solution (we know how well that worked), but a tool for living.
In the meantime, the mosses watch and (g)listen.
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IMAGES: mosses — both shots — me, from yesterday afternoon’s walk; kinhin.
“Three reasons for supplicating the Mighty Ones: because it is a pleasure to you, because you wish to be a friend of the Wise, because your soul is immortal” — traditional.
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Like many I revere Brigid. This time of year it’s easy in our house — the fire in our woodstove reminds me of one of her domains, and the lovely orange and blue flames of well-seasoned wood could wake any heart to poetry. I honor her in thought whenever I recall her, I honor her in action by lighting the fire, a daily practice this time of year. To see the wood take flame, to feel the house temperature begin to rise each morning once a good burn gets going and I can close the flue — how could these not be a pleasure, a cause for celebration?
I love that none of the usual default reasons that our monotheistic culture provides for supplication or prayer come up in this Triad: to save your soul, or to avoid hell, or to please a god or God, or to make up for some human weakness. No, the reasons here are splendidly other, and the first — the first! — is pleasure. Ask yourself, “Do I actually like the company of the Divine? If not, why spend time pretending I do? But if I do … ‘Can I have some more, please?'”
Or perhaps I don’t know either way. So why not find out? One reason to revere and honor and supplicate — lovely old word! — the Mighty Ones is find out what happens if I do.
And to be a friend of the Wise? For me that means I value wisdom, value those who aspire to it, and aspire to it myself. It’s a measure of our times that wisdom isn’t a word we hear very much. Maybe because it’s fallen out of favor. Maybe because many have abandoned it for cheaper thrills online and off. The company and friendship of the Wise! This, too, is a pleasure I hope you’ve had.
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Yesterday out of a mix of nostalgia and procrastination at improving my Nanowrimo word-count, I was skimming through James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, which gave us the fabulous Shangri-La. (I first read the novel in high school, at the insistence of an English teacher who also pulled us through Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. You can practically determine my age to within a few years just by those details, if you happen to follow — or yourself suffered through — trends in U.S. secondary education. You can find Hilton’s work online at Project Gutenberg Australia here.)
Hilton gives us the following wonderful exchange between Roberta Brinklow, a British missionary, one of a number of Westerners stranded in the Himalayas at the monastery of Shangri-La, and the English-speaking Chinese monk Chang, who is the principal go-between for the little band of Brits and the Tibetan natives.
“What do the lamas do?” she continued.
“They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom.”
“But that isn’t DOING anything.”
“Then, madam, they do nothing.”
“I thought as much.” She found occasion to sum up. “Well, Mr. Chang, it’s a pleasure being shown all these things, I’m sure, but you won’t convince me that a place like this does any real good. I prefer something more practical.”
“Perhaps you would like to take tea?”
I don’t know about you, but I enjoy stories that deal with the meeting of cultures and the delightful misunderstandings that inevitably result. Of course, my sympathies in this instance lie where Hilton’s also appear to — with the long-suffering Chang.
What good does wisdom do?! Oh darlin’, if you have to ask …
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And the best reason of all which the Triad gives us (if like us the Celts saved the best for last)? Because we recognize the gods are our kin — because what is immortal in us answers the call of what is immortal in them.
I don’t need to have any belief about this either way (“More slackness!” as Hilton’s Miss Brinklow might have said). I can experiment instead. Am I immortal? Let’s see if I can actually get some inkling either way. Do the gods have something worth my learning, something that may touch on just this issue? Why not supplicate them and find out for myself? Could there be a connection between an experience of the divine and a greater understanding of what it is to be human?
Wherever did we begin to imagine that such questions ought to be matters of belief rather than personal experience?! As if we were asked about the taste of fresh berries and cream on the basis of our knowledge of somebody else’s report, rather than the bowl of them sitting right in front of us! Here’s a spoon. Dig in …
If I ask what? then I’m alone in a world of things, none of which says anything to me, though I may listen as long as I like. After all, why ask a thing?! Trying too hard, I can almost believe I’m just another thing myself.
But let me ask who? and then the world wakes to wonder. Atoms like me, earthed like me, kindred, sky-breathed like me this November afternoon. Yes, sparked like me, too, being here, in this place, now. Oh, let me lose no more songs that greet and open! You carry them, clouds — water too, and day gray on the hills.
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If I ask who, this stone
whirling with its billion atoms
mostly empty space they say (though
touching it you’d never believe)
its presence, its jacket of moss
this stone talks, not loud
if anyone listens.
Talks to itself, hasn’t yet
heard hey! from anyone else
through a skin thick
against weatherdance and stormscrape
I believe a free hand
on its rough cool reaches,
I begin to learn its witness
slow offshear in wind and heat,
flake and shard and century chip.
Stone long alone will not yield soon
but with a palm against a sunside flank
you can feel it heed sun nonetheless
warming at the distant inquiry of light.
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Who? is a song that wakes worlds. I wake you, you wake me, we rouse together singing.
The questions matter, though they’re one half of it. Mouth and ear, at the proportion of one to two, right for wisdom when the oak lets fall its hard fruit. Earth, you know. Who says so? A sapling, in a spring or two.
“Stop thinning your hair for good!” promises the spam in my inbox.
OK then, my inner imp says. I’ll start thinning my hair for evil.
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Because sometimes you can just tell it’s going to be one of those days …
I depart for a job interview in a neighboring town with about 15 minutes extra time built in, and I hit a traffic delay. I’ve Google-mapped the location — twice — but when I arrive, can I find it? I cannot. I have an older cell phone, one of the flip-phones that’s so last century. I tenderly call it my “stupidphone” because I’m too cheap to pay what still seem to me exorbitant data plan rates for smartphones. When I call the number for the interviewer, what I get is the immediately recognizable beep-and-squeal of a fax line. I call the other number I have for them and the line’s busy. Some days you’re just not meant to do what you set out to do.
The god aren’t so much crazy as determined to make you pay attention to your goals. Is this really what you want? How badly will you work for it? They ask. You check in with your goals and intentions and practice and find, yes, there’s a place that needed your love and energy. Or you’ve paid it too much attention already. Sometimes I’m the thing that makes the line busy, that re-routes all traffic to dead ahead in front of me. Sometimes the universe puts up road blocks just to get me to wake up a little more to my part in it all. We can never be wholly detached, apart, because we’re each a part. No man is an island, entire of itself, sings John Donne (Meditation XVII). Each man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. O American, proud of your illusory independence, crying in your loneliness, it never occurs to you the two are connected, and so you stand on your own two feet, oblivious to the earth beneath them holding you up.
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Not that I’m allowed to stay oblivious forever.
“I want to know what love is,” sings Foreigner. “I want you to show me.” Well, I think. No use waiting around for that to happen. Love can start here, with me. Even the smallest bit can be kindling for a fire. Once lit, it surprises me how well it keeps burning. Yet by doing my part, I realize love was pouring through all the while. I just couldn’t see it until I returned it. The circuit wasn’t complete until I stepped into it. I was the missing piece. Each of us is part of a circuit, self and Spirit that is the other pole, the thing that lets self be self. We know it when the circuit’s complete, when we’re plugged in, and also how desperately we need that completion, how it feels when it’s turned off. You know what love is, the trees sing, even without their leaves. We constantly show you.
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If there were a Druid agenda it would start in the silence of a November dawn. It would pour from the sky like rain or light or possibility, it would skip from leaf to stone like the chipmunk that scavenges beneath the bird feeder in the front yard, then sits up and gazes at me as long as I make no sudden movements. Sometimes beauty, truth, they’re shy creatures.
“You meet with things dying, I with things newborn,” says the old shepherd in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. Isn’t it always “Scene Three, Bohemia, a desert country near the sea”? That’s where we find ourselves, that is the tale of winter, a time of encounter with death and life on a Sunday afternoon. What, my life asked me today, is your Druidry not about? What doesn’t it touch on? Have you kept yourself from yourself, held a piece of you in reserve, not spent it all on this precious life? What is it you’re waiting for?!
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“Whatever gets the words on the page is right,” says one of the pep talks Nanowrimo offers on its site for this month. Please take that out of context, says my inner imp, running with it like a mad dog with a bone. The perfect defense for pretty much anything I do wrong. Just getting the words on the page is all …
My novel this year involves a gang called the Red Fists, the Chenek Duz, incarcerated on the prison planet of Resken. A few days ago their names came through in a rush, and all in Gelem, a language I’ve invented just enough of for the story so far. The ringleader is Lodzat Moy, scarred from radiation burns and missing one eye from an assassination gone awry. With him is young and innocent-seeming Am Hezel, tech genius Dinshir Gagek, the thief Soknu Munt and the black-tempered, murderous Yar Fen. They get thrown together, through unlikely circumstances I’m struggling to make more likely, with a circle of artsy freshmen studying at the College of St. Swithins. I’m still working out the hows and whys. It’s fun to see it unfold. A kidnapping, a dream thief, a case of wrongful imprisonment, and bad love. What more could a writer ask for?
Our lean-to, with wood drying for next winter, ’16-’17.
After a long absence, Wadin Tohangu stopped by again to talk. The old Druid grinned broadly at my surprise in seeing him. Though I shouldn’t have been so surprised, I know. Usually, if I’ve been thinking about him, he appears sooner or later.
The unseasonably warm November weather in the 70s over the last few days made it a perfect time to be outdoors. I was carrying log lengths of willow to our woodpile after some trimming and pruning work by a tree service company we’d hired a few weeks ago. Willow is a soft wood and isn’t all that suitable for burning. It doesn’t provide much heat, but it can be useful to work with for other purposes. Some of it might form the edging for a new compost pile, and rot back into the earth itself.
Without any preamble, Wadin got to the point. “You’ve been doing some firming up of your understanding. I can see changes in you.”
“That’s … interesting,” I said, letting an armful of logs fall to stack later. “I feel less certain about a lot of things I thought I knew. Like what love is, and what my purpose or focus should be, for instance. You’re sure you’re not seeing doubt and uncertainty instead?”
He chuckled, and pushed a log into a firmer position between two others. “Part of deepening understanding can mean you rely less on ready verbal formulas and definitions, and in their place you turn more to any wisdom you’ve earned. It may feel less certain, because you can’t summon it in quite such a convenient mental form, or immediately rattle it off if someone asks. Do you do any cooking?”
“Um, yes,” I said, still surprised sometimes by Wadin’s quick shifts as he developed a point. “Mostly baking, actually.” I turned to walk back to the pile of fresh-cut willow lengths. The wheelbarrow I’d normally use to make quicker work of this had a flat tire. But I didn’t mind. The weather was just too splendid to miss.
“Well,” said Wadin, keeping pace beside me, “if you bake bread, for instance, you know at several points that familiarity with the process lets you make decisions about timing that you learn best by practice, not by rule.”
“True,” I said, grabbing an armful of logs. Wadin did the same. “Bread dough that’s going to rise well has a certain feel to it. And up to a point, there are tricks and back-ups you can do with a batch that’s not turning out so well.”
“But,” he said, shifting the logs into a more comfortable position, “that feeling and those tricks aren’t easy to put directly into words, even though you know them well.”
“True,” I said.
“People often treat understanding the same way. They may say, ‘I want answers,’ but they could find that a tool might be more useful to them in the end than any answer.” He dropped the logs and brushed his hands.
“Would you explain that a little more?” I asked him.
“Answers tend to have a compact form,” he replied. “Someone else has done at least part of the thinking, so when we ask a question, the answer arrives with a definite shape and size, and maybe even drags with it some definitions, or some do’s or don’t’s attached to it. It may not fit our needs and awareness. It can be like a key in a lock. Sometimes the key just doesn’t fit. Nothing turns. Even though that key may open plenty of other useful doors, it doesn’t open this one.”
“I guess I understand what you mean. So what about tools?” I picked up three more smaller logs. Wadin grabbed the last couple of strays.
“A tool isn’t meant to provide a final conclusion,” he said. “It simply helps with a particular step, or with a set of steps. It’s part of an open-ended process. A screwdriver applies force, or rather torque, in a way that the human hand unaided cannot. It doesn’t do this by itself — a human hand must wield it. But a screwdriver allows us to open or close things with screws, or do some light prying of covers, perhaps. The screwdriver goes back in its slot (at least in a neat work-area) until you need it again.”
“O.K.” I said, thinking.
“An answer, though, often implies a close, an ending.” He dropped his armful on the pile. “A tool keeps things moving. One helpful strategy is to practice seeing all your answers as tools. There’s nothing final about them, and neither is there anything wrong with that. They’re exactly what they’re supposed to be. They just help move you to the next step you need to take. Put them away when they don’t achieve that, keep them all in good condition, and find another tool that will do what you need at that moment.”
“So you’re talking about a kind of flexibility.” I leaned against a woodshed post.
“Yes,” he said. “The same tools are generally available to everybody, but in the hands of a master craftsman, the right tool saves time, accomplishes the task smoothly, and contributes to the flow of work. The master doesn’t curse his tools, or despair when the tool he insists on using doesn’t do what he wants it to. He knows what each tool can do, just as he knows how each tool feels when he uses it. Part of his mastery is knowing from the feel of the tool in his hand whether it can accomplish what he intends.”
“And part of the joy of mastery is knowing there’s always more to learn. What would it mean, after all, if there was nothing more to aspire to? If you truly knew it all, you’d get bored. What’s the point? The beauty of mastery is its delight in always learning something new, not being discouraged by it, but inspired instead by endless possibility. Sharing what you have learned, communicating that delight simply by doing, and marveling how each person develops an individual style. All right. That’s enough for today.” He smiled and turned toward the afternoon sunlight. I blinked, and he was gone.
If I asked “Is he real?” or “Was he really here?” any answer I received probably wouldn’t be as useful as what I learned. His gift wasn’t some kind of proof that he “existed,” but simply a few more tools he left for me to work with. Answer, tool. A useful distinction. I sent out gratitude, confident it would reach its destination.
Ah, Samhain, you’re here again. This solemn time to honor our dead and acknowledge the things that have passed from our lives. This joyous time to celebrate the harvest and the warmth of friends and loved ones to carry us through the dark half of the year. This reminder of the balance inherent in all transient things. Our work, if we choose, with the earth.
Halloween-time, to carve a pumpkin, set out the candy for the trick-or-treaters, remember to put the car in the garage the previous evening so next morning the windows aren’t all frosted over. Time for mulled cider, fallen leaves, bonfires, the possible gift of a few more mild, bright days before the snow comes. As a friend remarked yesterday, Halloween is the true start of our winter, here in the Northeastern U.S. where I live. The earth doing its thing. Earth-work.
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Ushtogaysky Square, Kazakhstan — immense millennia-old earthworks make headlines …
NASA photo at the New York Times link above
X marks the spot of a different kind of earth-work. (We’re always at the center.) I jump from this macrocosmic image to the microcosm of my personal work on earth. After you’ve finished groaning, come with me, to see whether whatever I can mine from it has any value for you, for this blog. Here goes …
Over the past several days a virus has been racking my joints and muscles and leaving me achy, feverish, weak. In other words, no gift to take along with me to an early Samhain celebration an OBOD friend was hosting last night. He lives “across the water” in New Hampshire, and the dozen or so folks he expected to join him included out-of-towners bringing kids and planning to sleep over. (The Samhain ritual took place later in the evening, after a typical Halloween party for the younger set).
So I stayed home instead, built up the fire, hydrated myself with tea and soups, and slept. Sometimes what we leave behind gets pried from us through mild (or great) suffering. Sometimes, of course, we can leave it more willingly. And we can try to make something of it, if there’s anything left of us in the moment, and turn to old spiritual technologies like fasting that may have slipped out of fashion but have never lost their worth.
We already fast when we refuse to accept the memes of fear and despair and business-as-usual of too much modern life. We purge. We deny some negative shard a foothold, most effectively by replacing it with a positive alternative. If you’re interested in anything, why not start where it’s actually already a part of your life? In my life, if I look around, this seems to be true of many more things than I’d ever believed possible. How many access-points and footholds and innate spiritual “flux-capacitors” (courtesy of the Back to the Future wiki) we have for almost anything we can imagine. Transform, transform, whispers the cosmos.
Many people think fasting belongs to Christianity. No meat — fish is fine! — on Fridays. Look Medieval, and maybe skeletal monks and nuns come to mind. Ascetics whipping themselves with a cat of nine tails.
There’s the Yom Kippur fast. Or, if you have a Muslim co-worker or friend, you’ve possibly heard them talk about keeping the fast for the month of Ramadan. Not to pick on Muslims, as the ubiquitous Gene Wilder memes like the one to the left would wrongly imply: anyone can be obnoxious and obvious about such practices, which is one reason they go through cycles and fall out of favor for a while. Mirror, mirror on the wall.
For about a decade I fasted once a week. This was a significant practice of the other spiritual path I follow. Like many disciplines, fasting’s less daunting after you actually do it a few times. You learn how your body reacts, how to ease into it the day before, how to come off a fast, what food and drink work best for your own particular circumstances and body chemistry and goal. Partial fast, water or juice fast, complete fast. (Ooh, you’re hardcore.)
Headaches from dehydration? Sure. Greater susceptibility to cold, since you’re not stoking the furnace several times during the day? Yep. Bad breath? Perfectly possible. Absolute joy at breaking a fast — how delicious almost any decent (or indecent) food tastes, how much the fast may have subtly reset some of your programming, how your dream recall can be improved, how an old habit may loosen its hold, how you have more faith in and less fear of your own body? Check, check, check.
A fast can be difficult, sure. But not, I usually found, because of hunger. That comes and goes, and it’s often the least challenging aspect of fasting. No, to many others besides just me, one of the truly interesting parts of a fast is what it may reveal about attitudes, attachments and mindsets that deserve a careful look. And it’s just the scrutiny they don’t usually get in the scramble to ingest the daily three squares, plus the obligatory snacking an overfed Westerner like me makes sure to practice as faithfully as any religious devotee. Food Yoga, anyone? Follow the Calorie Sutra? Junk-food Gita? The venerable Maha-salsa-and-chips? Down with that.
A physical fast also begins to open up unforeseen and potential valuable energies for other things than preparing, consuming and digesting food. Plenty of books and other resources address those advantages.
And for clarity and vision-questing around Samhain, a fast can offer one more valuable tool to those who want to look beyond the usual boundaries and curtains over our awareness.
As I’ve aged, and as accumulated physical issues make a food-fast a cause of more problems than benefits, I’ve turned more to mental fasts. (This could be one alternative to people struggling with food issues like bulimia and anorexia.) In addition to its purpose as a ritual offering, a devotion which deserves its own post, keeping the attention on a chosen object, image, mantra, deity, etc., for a twenty-four hour period drops all kinds of issues front and center stage. Lacking things to work on? Feeling like I fully qualify for Ancient Honorable Thrice-Sanctified Adeptus XI? Nothing quite like a fast to reveal my crap-of-the-day and put me in my place.
So I take inventory every hour and return, return, return the attention to its focus. Technology helps. (Got the latest fast-app?! A simple e-timer can help a lot. Try a “tasteful chime,” as one friend calls it.)
How good is my concentration? Is my chosen focus for the day even worthwhile? What is devotion, anyhow? What distracts me the most? What claims to be more important, or insists it’s a valid priority? How do I respond to others who ask why I may seem a little absent-minded or distracted today? Do I listen carefully enough to perceive who really wants to know, and who — if I tell them — may mock what they don’t understand? How much of this particular fast is just an exercise of ego or will-power, and how much is meaningful devotion?
OK, you get the idea. Illness can provide a natural push toward a mental fast. You can’t jump into your normal routine, you may find yourself in bed, and rather than relying on cable, Netflix, Hulu, net-surfing or some other drug of choice to fill every single minute you’re not moaning for sympathy, soaking in warm water to soothe your unhappy bone-house*, tossing and turning because you can’t sleep, or downing pills, extracts, roots, powders, potions or elixirs, why not use even a fraction of the time to experiment … on yourself? Best laboratory ever! No? Still not convinced?
I’m a sucker for squeezing every experience for what I can gain from it. (At least that’s what I tell myself. Some future fast will without a doubt show me where that’s no longer true, or never was.)
Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to a holiday fest this evening with some friends and neighbors. Just the four of us. A mostly veggie potluck meal, because that’s what’s come from our gardens. A short blessing (probably the one that opens my About page) in lieu of a longer ritual. And the fasting I did yesterday, imperfect, illness-prodded, leaves me grateful to today to be feeling better. No small thing.
Here for your delectation is a short Youtube clip from the 2014 Edinburgh Samhuinn Fire Festival:
You can find out more about Clarissa Pinkola Estés here.
In part, the doors Estés refers to are a matter of human time. Live long enough and you’ll very likely wear such scars, carry such stories, cherish such loves. One way to find common ground with others is to focus on these doors. And one of the best ways to access them is by careful listening to ourselves and to each other.
Often enough, we may fear such a world and such a self as much as we yearn for it. A doorway means change. Even if it just opens onto another room, it’s not the room we were in a moment ago. Fears can outline such a door, too — including fear of a door itself. If you’re anything like me, you know or have been someone who at one time or another has walked into a cage and exulted as it clanged shut behind you, reassured that at least you wouldn’t have to walk through yet another damned door.
How to recapture the sense of the preciousness of these doors, as Estes calls it? For in the end our own longing compels us to find them and walk through. Ritual is one way, though by no means the only. By defining boundaries in ritual we can make a door easier to see and peek through. If the past is difficult country for me, I can approach it with safeguards in place. Ritual can help with its prescribed beginnings and endings, its containers of energy and wisdom we can safely draw on at need for balance and perspective and protection. A holiday like the upcoming Samhain, like Hallowe’en, a holy evening for remembering who and what has passed from our lives, offers a safe space to honor and to say farewell to what is gone. Sometimes all that is needed is for us to agree that we can finally let go.
One of the most moving Samhain celebrations I’ve ever experienced was organized by a high-school student — I’ll call her C. — who during her senior year led the Alternative Spiritualities group I advised while teaching at my former school. C. was an atheist who deeply understood the power of ritual theater. Under her leadership, our meetings often were focused discussions about perception and consciousness. Ritual, however, happened just once.
Interior of a Protestant church, looking from the altar toward the rear entrance.
Halloween fell on a Saturday that fall, as it does this weekend. Just after sundown a group of perhaps a dozen students and I gathered in our school chapel with its old, austere New England style, opened the windows — it was a mild October evening — and lit incense and candles. You take, and make, doors where you find them.
C. briefly explained what we’d be doing, then gathered us in a circle, led us in a simple chant and circle dance, and at length asked us to recall someone or something we wanted to say goodbye to. Any script C. had was entirely in her head. The ritual flowed smoothly because everyone knew its purpose and no one was worried about making mistakes. After all, you couldn’t go off-script. Both tears and laughter fit any moment of that evening.
We each wrote the name of this person or thing on a slip of paper and folded it tightly. One person collected them, and then ceremonially burnt them in a large bucket of sand in the center of our circle on the chapel floor. We chanted as the smoke rose, and I saw several students crying quietly. We cleaned up and sat on the altar steps for candy and snacks and soda, sugaring ourselves into a lighter mood. Many students said at our next meeting the following week how meaningful the experience was for them.
Reclaiming the wild self is work we’re all doing. Much of what I try to write about here is an attempt to document my journey to do just that, along with my sidesteps, mishaps, meanderings and insights along the way. We may call this spiritual objective by different names, but the deep yearning in us is the same, if we stop and talk with and listen to each other. We can if we wish walk part of the way in each other’s company.
May you find such doorways on your own journey, and may they be blessings.
When we stand in Circle (and whatever circles we stand in, we all stand in at least one circle together), we don’t all need to face the same direction to face a common center. Ritual gives us a common language.
“Trickle-out economics” is my favorite kind: not up or down, but outward — from one person to others. We let someone in line, we hold a door, we do our best, we make someone else’s path a little easier, not for thanks but because the action itself builds, because what goes around comes around, not in some strict accounting where I’ve gotta be sure I get my share, but because we all drink the water and breathe the air. The Commons may not be a very popular idea right now, but it still exists nevertheless. And it exists every day, in ways I impact with my actions right now. Include the psychic spaces we live in and it’s very large and very accessible to the influence of each of us.
Fear is rarely productive of positive action. Whatever I can do to reduce fear in my life will help me make better decisions right now. It also makes life more fun. Whether it’s cutting back on media like endless news about political disfunction that doesn’t help me live well, or turning to media like good music that does, focusing on areas and ways I can act will keep me from squandering my energy and attention worrying about what everybody else is doing and thinking. Less fear in me also calms others around me.
Anything above .300 is a commendable batting average. We don’t need to be perfect. In fact, it’s usually easier to get better when we don’t aim for perfect but for improved. Meatloaf sings that “two out of three ain’t bad” but baseball says “one out of three is already pretty good.” Most things have a rule of thumb. Life mostly consists not of bending the rules in our favor but in finding rules that actually work often enough to be useful guides.
The natural world is a pretty good teacher. Its functions and systems have been in place longer than human civilizations, so they’re honed and refined to a high degree for fulfilling their own purposes and needs. Watching birds, clouds, water, trees, bugs and beasts go about their patterns and habits and lives teaches us valuable things because we’re part of the same system, built on a similar pattern, designed to function in comparable ways. Watching nature is also some of the best therapy you can get for free. There’s a reason for that fishtank in the doctor’s or dentist’s office.
Solwom wesutai syet — “may it be for the good of the whole” in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European* — ain’t a bad mantra at all. I use it in my own practice, and it helps keep me balanced. It doesn’t always fit every particular situation, but when it does, it connects me with a human life-way that’s proved its value over millennia.
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*sohl-wohm weh-soo-tie syeht. solwom — genitive plural of solwos “all, whole, entire”; wesutai — dative singular of wesuta good (abstract noun formed from wesu, su- “good”); syet — optative form of the verb esti “is” — “may it be.” “Of-all for-the-good may-it-be” — may it be for the good of all.
One of the EC dogmas that bothered me the most, from about the age of 8 or 9 onward, and that has set many other people’s teeth on edge as well, is what’s more recently been called “damnationism” — the apparent and deeply problematic need to condemn whole swaths of humanity to eternal torment because they don’t happen to believe the right things required by one stream of orthodoxy, all so we can hang with the sheep and not with the goats for the rest of time. Finally, some writers are even starting to call that out for what it is: a blasphemous perversion of an original truth.**
One of the streams from the early days of the Druid revival and the writings of Iolo Morgannwg*** runs with a Welsh version of such wisdom, offering a vision of a cosmos in which all things move toward growth and increasing consciousness, over countless eons, through every imaginable form, and in every imaginable experience. In this conception, the universe is a flow of energies, and its current sweeps us/we ride it from Annwn (ah-noon) and Abred (ah-bred) to Gwynfyd (gwin-vid) and ultimately on to Ceugant (kye-gahnt), a kind of infinity. Eventually we all experience everything.
A Druid Way 
