Archive for the ‘Druidry’ Category
Henry David Thoreau wrote in his manifesto, Walden, that he wished to follow “the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment.” Let’s suspend belief about the “every moment” part for now. Most of us slack off; we’re not up to full time bent-ness. But I suspect every genius is “bent” by the time it emerges, after the intense discoveries and trials of childhood and adolescence. It is, after all, a time when we each face a personal apocalypse which — apart from recent 2012 apocalypse kerfluffle (a profoundly scientific and precise term), itself only the most recent instance of a few millenia’s worth of end-times hysterias* — is at root not a disaster per se, but an unveiling, a revealing.
That’s why the Biblical apocalypsis, a Greek word, gets translated “Revelations.”** A revelation needn’t be a disaster. We may seek from many sources for revelation or insight into our lives and situations. But as far as adolescence goes, whether it’s some profound additional shock, or the more routine experience of our physical bodies running mad with hormones, hair, smells, urges and general mayhem, it can be a real humdinger of a decade.
Among other things, we begin to come to terms with the full measure of shadow and light we each carry around with us, a personal atmosphere with its own storms and sun, its seasons of gloom and glory. As Hamlet exclaims to Ophelia (Act 3, scene 1): “I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us.”
Quite a catalog of self-condemnation. But on our “crawl between earth and heaven,” we can choose to do more than indulge in self-loathing. It’s not a competitive sport, after all. No prizes for “arrant-ness,” to use Shakespeare’s word. This being human is a mixed bag, a potluck. We work out our own answers to the question of what to do crawling between earth and heaven. It’s an apt description: we truly are suspended at times, halfway to both realms, too rarely at home in either.
And so, rather than New Year’s resolutions, I prefer to look at themes and nudges. If I take my own advice, courtesy of Yoda, and tell myself “do or do not, there is no try,” then “small moves” becomes the game. Nudge a little here, prod a little there. Few life trajectories change overnight. If yours does, then all bets are off. You’re probably in full-on apocalypse mode right now — and that’s apocalypse in the 2012 “all-hell-about-to-break-loose” sense. It’s time to rewrite the manual, reboot, do over. But the rest of the time, the smallest change can eventually lead to big consequences. Lower expectations. Make it almost impossible for yourself not to follow through.
Now you’re not trying to change; you’re playing with change — which has a very different feel. If you want to commit to half an hour of exercise a day, for instance, make it five minutes instead. Psych yourself out or in, your choice. Small moves. Make it foolishly easy, like using a credit card. It’s just a piece of plastic, just a small thing you’re doing. A game really. I’ve been surprised how I can make changes, as long as I make them small enough, rather than big enough. Seduce yourself into change so small you can’t resist, like those bite-sized pieces of your current favorite snack addiction. “Nobody can eat just one.” And so on.
We think too much of ourselves. I’ll think less, on alternate days, to see how it feels. This is real trying — not an attempt that focuses on probable failure, but the testing, the probing, the experimenting, as in “trying the cookie dough,” or “trying a kiss on the first date,” or “trying on a new set of clothes.” There’s self-forgetfulness available in the fascination of the game-like quality life takes on when we cease to take ourselves quite so seriously. Instead, we may come to revere some other thing than the self. Because one of her insights is apropos of what I’m getting at, I’ll close here with Barbara Brown Taylor, from her 2009 book An Altar in the World:
According to the classical philosopher Paul Woodruff, reverence is the virtue that keeps people from trying to act like gods. ‘To forget that you are only human,’ he says, ‘to think you can act like a god — that is the opposite of reverence.’ While most of us live in a culture that reveres money, reveres power, reveres education and religion, Woodruff argues that true reverence cannot be for anything that human beings can make or manage by ourselves.
By definition, he says, reverence is the recognition of something greater than the self–something that is beyond human creation or control, that transcends full human understanding. God certainly meets those criteria, but so do birth, death, sex, nature, justice, and wisdom. A Native American elder I know says that he begins teaching people reverence by steering them over to the nearest tree.
‘Do you know that you didn’t make this tree?’ he asks them. If they say yes, then he knows that they are on their way (20).
So maybe I’ve seduced you into trying or tasting your life and its possibilities instead of getting hung over changing it. May you find yourself on your way, may you celebrate what you discover there, may you delight in reverence.***
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*See John Michael Greer’s Apocalypse Not (Viva Editions, 2011) for an amusing take on our enduring fetish for cataclysm and disaster. You’d think that after Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, the Japanese tsunami and nuclear disaster, hurricane Sandy, and the yearly shootings we endure, we’d be fed up with real actually-documentable apocalypses. But no …
**The name of the Greek sea-nymph Kalypso means “Concealer.” Undo or take off the concealment and you have apo-kalypse, unconcealing: revelation.
***Once my attention is off myself, I find that change often happens with less wear and tear. Reverence can seduce us into other ways of being that don’t involve the stressors we were “trying to change.” We may not even notice until later. I get so busy watching the moon rise I forget what I was angry about. Anger fades. Moon takes it. Reverence, o gift of gods I may not know or worship, I thank you nonetheless …
Updated 2 Jan 13
Compassion has no religion. Silence is not always indifference. O great, listening, witnessing world, you too have something to say, something you always are saying, without words. What comfort we can offer, miles and lives away from the families of the Sandy Hook school victims, and from other, newer sufferers since then, may consist of not filling the airwaves and spiritual spaces further, with our own shock or anger or sadness or dismay, or whatever other responses events may next provoke in us. Even if we do not know the families or victims or any of those touched by an event, we may send sympathy, because we are not stones. This is prayer, too. But every turn of the world changes us because we’re in it together. A great service is to love those who need love, and not merely to feel, to emote. We can do more than relive pain, especially another’s pain, or make it ours. Suffering needs no extra rehearsals, no practice. There’s always more than enough to go around.
We’re not stones, but we may raise them into a cairn, a act that by its solidity and palpable weight can lift suffering even a little, if it may, stone by stone. Let earth bear a portion of the weight. Allow this elemental power of Earth to transmute, to compost and transform, as it does all else that comes to it. The turning of the year again toward light in the middle of winter, the planet doing again what the planet does each year, can be solace too, earth re-establishing its balance. Soothing motion of the familiar, wordless touch with its animal comfort. Moon growing again towards fullness, light on the world in the middle of darkness.
But sometimes we hate comfort. Too often solace can reek of appeasement. We stiffen. One more easing is too many. Intolerable. Like words — already more than enough. With no ready target we seek out whatever will serve, anything to shut up the noise, the roar of raw nerves jangling. Anodyne. Oblivion, even, at least for a while.
Grief is too steady a companion. It knows us, it seems, deeper than a lover. OK, we get it. Pain too has something to say that will not be denied. We make a place for it, and it moves in, gets comfortable, settles down for too long. (How long is memory? Is recollection what we consist of? Do we relive, instead of living new? Does this become our only, instead of our also?)
When words do not do, I bring silence to the altar. When I cannot pray, then that is my prayer, just the act of moving toward the altar, a center, a focus.
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The house has cooled overnight when I get up to write this. In between the last two paragraphs, I open the door of the woodstove to put in another two logs. In a turtleneck and sweats, I sit on the floor, feet toward the fire, with my laptop where its name says. Warmth, says the body, unrepentant in loving what it loves. Warmth too, radiating from the electrical current flowing through the machine I write with. So little, but a little. A start.
“there is an altar to a different god,” wrote the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Perhaps that’s some explanation for the often mercurial quality of being this strange thing we call the self, ourselves. We can’t easily know who we are for the simple reason that (often, at least) we aren’t just one thing — we consist of multiple selves. We’re not individuals so much as hives of all our pasts buzzing around together. Whether you subscribe to the reality of past lives or see it as a possibly useful metaphor, we’re the sum of all we’ve ever been, and that’s a lot of being. And with past lives (or the often active impulses to make alternate lives for ourselves within this one through the dangerous but tempting choices we face) we’ve known ourselves as thieves and priests, saints and villains, women and men, victims and aggressors, ordinary and extraordinary. When we’ve finally done it all, we’re ready to graduate, as a fully-experienced self, a composite unified after much struggle and suffering and delight. All of us, then, are still in school, the school of self-making.
Doesn’t it just feel like that, some days at least?! Even only as a metaphor, it can offer potent insight. The Great Work or magnum opus of magic, seen from such a perspective, is nothing more or less than to integrate this cluster of selves, bang and drag and cajole all the fragments into some kind of coherence, and make of the whole a new thing fit for service, because that’s what we’re best at, once we’ve assembled ourselves into a truly workable self: to give back to life, to serve an ideal larger than our own momentary whims and wishes, and in the giving, to find — paradoxically — our best and deepest fulfillment. “He who loses himself will find it gain,” said a Wise One with a recent birthday we may have noticed. We all learn the hard way, for the most part, because it’s the most profound learning. Certainly it sticks in a way that most book learning alone does not.
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[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9]
In our last conversation, Aithne had said nothing about needing my help. All this stuff about ancestors and bloodlines, and now I was wondering about that piece. Had she forgotten? But even if she did need me in any way, how could I really help? After several decades of living, I have a pretty clear sense of my talents and abilities. It wasn’t false modesty that told me both Rosmert and Aithne could certainly handle challenges and obstacles I couldn’t. Wasn’t that why they were teaching me, and not the other way around? There’s an innate order to things that we ignore at our own peril but that we can also learn to our advantage — that’s one of the foundations of my worldview. I guess when I thought about it that I saw helping others along the path is a form of payback, or maybe paying it forward. It’s a way to show gratitude, a way to keep the heart open. Gratitude feels good. Just do it.
So it was when all of this was still spinning through my brain that Aithne appeared again. It had been more than a few days since I’d tended to my Sacred Grove. The excuse doesn’t matter; it’s a poor one. But shortly after I returned, there she was. But she certainly was not dressed the same this time. Biker chick was all I could think: leather jacket, torn and faded jeans, bandanna, dark glasses, snake tattoo on her neck, even chains. Again she was gazing off into the distance, and when she turned toward me she took off the sunglasses and winked.
“You ready?” she asked.
“For what?” I replied. That was Aithne, I was beginning to understand. Small talk rated low among her priorities. And it was rubbing off.
“A ride,” she said. “I’ve got an ’86 Harley Sportster, 1100 cc’s. Want to try it out?”
And that was how, maybe an hour later, Aithne and I were roaring down a little-traveled country road that arrowed flat and straight toward the western horizon. After a series of lessons, practice runs, one spill and a bruised right knee, I felt reasonably confident handling the heavy machine. I wasn’t ready for a lot of traffic yet, but the basics were coming along nicely.
“We’ve got clear road,” she said. “Let’s open it up for a couple miles.”
The big bike still ran smooth when we topped 80 mph. I eased back on the throttle, listening to engine as it lost the high-pitched whine of speed. A few minutes later we were sitting on the side of the road, sipping Gatorade. Aithne was studying a ladybug on a blade of grass she held in both hands.
“You can help me, you know,” she said. “We need you healthy for the work, and for your part which only you can do. That’s your focus for now. Get healthy, and balanced.”
“I wanted to ask you about that. What can I do?”
“You can begin again.”
“Begin what?”
“You’ve completed another spiral. The next months may look familiar, but they aren’t the same thing that’s come before. Pay attention to what they can show you.”
“But what am I supposed to be looking for?” I asked.
Aithne paused and looked at me for a moment.
“You’re thinking about quitting your job after this academic year. You’re wondering how little you can live on if you do, how much food you can grow for yourself back in Vermont. Those aren’t bad things by any means, but your principal focus needs to go beyond that. Those aren’t ultimately pathways to the next two decades. You’re looking at surviving. I’m talking about thriving.”
“After the last couple of years, surviving looks pretty good to me.”
“And it is,” she said. “We had to work with your wife to get you to that surgeon in Baltimore. You weren’t listening when you most needed to. Fortunately, she was. So you survived the shift, you kept this body through the turn. You’re still here, and the ancestors aren’t finished with you in this life yet. You’re on commission. Did you know that?”
“Commission for … for what?” I stuttered. “Can I have some clarity just once about what I’m supposed to be doing?”
“You’re confusing clarity with looking back on a path you’ve already walked,” she said. “So often you can know by going. And for as long as you’re here, you’ll find that’s one of the things time’s for.”
And then I was back in my living room. The clock said 9:48 pm. It had been a long day, and I had much to think about.
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Updated 23 April 2015
[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9]
“The Blood of Veen is a key to new insights for you,” said Aithne. “Your ancestors reach you through the body — your body. You carry them with you wherever you go, in your cell memory, your DNA, your genetic coding, and the energy signatures scientists are just on the edges of discovering, which are part of the bonds that link the physical body to the other worlds.”
“So how does the Blood of Veen connect with me personally?”
“If you visit a place where your ancestors lived, you may have a dream or vision that teaches you something you need to know.” Aithne stood gazing a little above my left shoulder, or head, as if she was watching something move there. “Veen is in the province of Brabant.” She paused, apparently studying empty air. “And some of your mother’s ancestors came from that region,” she added. Aithne’s knowledge startled me. One of my mother’s aunts had traced much of the family line back to medieval France and Belgium. Some of her ancestors came from Brabant, including a noble named Joscelyn de Louvain, when Brabant was a Duchy. (Don’t get the wrong idea here. I have my full share of black sheep in the family, too!) And Louvain is a city in Brabant — its capital, in fact.
“But I can’t just pick up and visit Brabant or anywhere else in the world at the drop of a hat! Most people don’t have the time or money to track down their ancestors in other countries or take some sort of reincarnation tour.”
“You don’t need to,” said Aithne, ignoring my flash of irritation. “Pictures can help. And there are online forums where you can ask questions and find out detailed information about almost anything you want to know. Let your curiosity work for you. After all, how much time do you waste online as it is?!” Her sudden smile was teasing. “Make the first move, and the ancestors will respond. You’ll have a dream, find a book, ‘happen’ to meet someone, make a connection. They will guide you.”
Somehow it surprised me that Aithne knew these things. While I’ve come to expect my inner experiences to bring me general insights and hints and nudges on occasion, whenever I receive specific information it still surprises me. A few years ago in a dream I got the name of a small British town in Devon where some of my father’s family originated. I’d never heard of it before, and it no longer exists today. For that reason I know that no one in my family had ever mentioned it. But there are archaeological records and mentions of the town in chronicles and censuses of the period showing that it once did exist.
That was the outer confirmation of an inner experience. Such validation doesn’t always come, but when it does, I feel a shiver of awe and wonder. These things are real. The worlds link however briefly, and lives change as a result. I know this, I’ve experienced it before enough time to silence any doubt, but my inner doubter doesn’t care. He’s achieved pro status by this point, and just goes about pointing out sly new possibilities of self-deception. I guess my ancestors have to be pretty patient with me to get through at all. I often think they must find other descendants more worth their time. Then I remember they’re working outside of time — at least outside of my time. They can afford a little patience with the stubborn and half-deaf ones like me.
Aithne seemed to be following my thought. She was nodding slightly, and then she said, “Sometimes the act of inquiring leads you to new people and experiences that are beneficial for everyone involved. You know this,” she said.
“I’ll return one more time,” she said. “We have a few more things to discuss.”
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Updated 23 April 2015
[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9]
Rosmert returned again today, but only briefly, and only, he explained, to introduce Aithne. At first I could not see her clearly, except to note she was only slightly shorter than Rosmert. Then it seemed the space around her sharpened somehow, or — I had the distinct feeling now — she was letting me see her. She wore the hood of her robe up, and it shadowed her face. Freckles dotted her nose, and a few tendrils of chestnut hair slipped from her hood. Then all I knew was her eagle gaze. Two green eyes of startling fierceness regarded me. She grabbed my half-extended hand, shook it vigorously, then promptly pointed out a problem.
“Greetings. You do realize you left the gateway open? Magically careless. Let’s close it immediately. I’ll show you how. But first, let me take a quick look around.”
From her brisk words and tone I could tell that today at least there was no such thing as Druid-business-as-usual. Or maybe this was usual, for her. As she studied the trees and stones, she began to describe one way to seal a grove more effectively against unwanted presences and energies.
Then I saw Rosmert winking at me just before he disappeared. He made a sweeping gesture that seemed to say “You’re in her hands now.” I laughed in spite of myself.
At the sound, Aithne turned from her survey of my grove and regarded me with a frown. “You have made a beginning, but you need practice at defense,” she said. “Now expel me from this space.”
When I hesitated, she exclaimed, “Do it! You did not invite me like you did Rosmert. I came at his bidding, not yours. So you can rid this grove of me quite easily. Do it. When you are quite satisfied I am gone, you may choose to invite me back, or not. But secure the gateway first, whatever you do.”
I centered myself in my grove and sang the Word of Protection. One instant, Aithne stood there, her head tilted to one side, listening. In the next, she vanished.
I walked the inside perimeter of the grove, singing. I walked it three times. I played with the thought of not inviting her back. At length, when I was satisfied with the wards and had formulated the triple seal, I called her by name, just once. A second later she appeared a few meters away.
“Better,” she said. “I tested the gateway several times before you called me. Much better.”
She turned slowly again to take in the trees. Over the past months it had been a fallow time for me while outer things made their demands, and I needed to do some inner work. The space certainly reflected this. It looked, quite frankly, unkempt and overgrown.
“But I did not come to critique your grove or your training,”she said, “or to sight-see. Whatever you might think.” She clapped her hands, and sat down on the same tree-stump Rosmert had occupied when he and I talked. “I need your help.”
Nonplussed, I stuttered, “Well, OK, with wh- … uh, how can I help?”
“It’s a matter of the Blood of Veen.”
“Who — or what — is Veen? Like it sounds? V-E-E-N?” I asked, spelling it. Goddess help me, I thought I could hear capital letters when she said Blood and Veen. It sounded, well, cheesy. Like hack sword-and-sorcery writing.
“It’s a town in the Netherlands. You have an ancestral connection to the region.”
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Updated 23 April 2015
[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9]
Rosmert had appeared recently during my Inner Grove exercise. I’d been discouraged about my progress. So many setbacks. Autumn had come, and projects I’d set for myself over a year ago remained distant goals. After I recovered from my surprise at his appearance, I realized I had indeed been asking for help. Of course, when it comes, I often don’t recognize it. I nearly snarled at him to go away. I’m glad I didn’t. But that showed me how out of balance I was.
My awareness shifted from inner grove to my living room and back again. Half the time I saw Rosmert sitting on a tree-stump. Half the time he was perched on the edge of the recliner in the living room, facing the woodstove. At first I scolded myself for lack of focus. Then I realized it just didn’t matter. Grove or living room, he was still here. So I just went with it. I told myself I could figure it all out later. Soon we were in it pretty deep.
“You mean there’s a law behind even the randomness of things?” I asked him. So many obstacles, it sometimes came near to breaking my spirit.
“Yes,” said Rosmert, stretching out his legs in front of him. “But it’s not only a physical law, even if it accounts for physical things. Spirit is at work throughout all the worlds, continually keeping everything in balance.”
“That makes it sound like there’s still room for slippage,” I said. Overhead, heavy storm-clouds and sun competed for equal time. “Between one interval of growth and inspiration and another, there can be an awful lot of bad weather.”
He nodded. “In a world of change, the adjustment is continual,” he said after a pause. “So the tests we face, the people we meet, the problems, excitements, opportunities, setbacks, decisions, challenges, sorrows and joys are expressions of spiritual energy finding whatever opening it can into our consciousness to expand our awareness and our understanding of life.”
“Doesn’t it also sometimes shut down, or diminish? Or maybe we do that to ourselves? All I know is that we certainly take a lot of sidesteps, or steps backwards, too.”
Rosmert gazed steadily at me for a moment. “If we’re trying to get a mile further down the road, a flat tire looks like a delay. If we’re learning how to travel, it’s just another lesson. Keep a spare. Have your tools ready. Change your tires before they wear too thin. While you’re in the moment, though, a flat tire can definitely seem like a major setback.” He grinned and leaned forward.
He was about to continue when I interrupted. “What if the ‘flat tire’ is your life? Not just a small setback on the journey, but all-out disaster.”
Unexpectedly, he laughed. “The human consciousness does love drama at times. And Spirit creates as it flows. That’s what it does, what it is. If we choose to create disasters as it flows in and around us, that’s what we’ll usually get.” He laughed again, this time at my scowl. “Yes, we encounter lesser and greater cycles of spiritual movement and flow. Some of them involve a whole lifetime. Some remain small, and fit into the larger cycles. We each work with spiritual energy in our own way, as it flows into us, and as we give it back to situations and people according to our state of consciousness, through our words, deeds, thoughts, feelings, and imagination.”
He stood up, turned slowly in a complete circle, and then faced me again. “Have you ever gone horse-back riding?”
I shook my head at the sudden shift of topic. “What?” I said.
“We can move with the horse, or we can bounce on every up and drop an instant late on every down, out of the rhythm all around us. That makes for one really sore butt at the end of the day. It’s a choice that solidifies into a pattern and then into a destiny. For a while. Then we choose differently, moving from one pattern and trying another, learning, and sometimes crashing and flailing as we go. For a long time, we’re all slow learners. Then we begin to notice the patterns, and finally maybe even look at the choices. What is it you say? ‘Been there, done that’?”
“So is there a way to increase the flow, or does that kind of pushing also throw us out of balance? I guess my question is, can we speed up the process?”
Rosmert didn’t answer right away. He breathed slowly and steadily four or five times. Then he said, “The goal of the most useful spiritual exercises you’ve been learning is ultimately to invite a greater inflow and permit a greater outflow. We need both. We also need balance as we learn to do this more effectively. Bottle it up without letting it out-flow and the result is the same as if you shut the inflow off completely. To put it another way, we need to complete the circuit. As we become more conscious of the movement of Spirit in and around us, we’re able to relax into this current that is always in motion, and live our lives more fully. This is our own individual spiritual path to greater love of all life.”
“So if we stop resisting the complete flow,” I said ruefully, “we won’t get beat up so badly.”
“Right,” he said, chuckling at the expression on my face. “It’s a practice. Who doesn’t have some scars and bruises, and a broken bone or two?! We keep practicing till we get it right. Let’s stop here and go for a walk.”
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Updated 23 April 2015
OK, be forewarned … this runs long. If you’re more in the mood for bon-bons than for jerky, come back later. This ended up pretty chewy. It’s also provisional, a lot more tentative than it sounds. Now I’ve told you, so don’t get cranky with me later. Here goes …
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In her poem “Circe’s Power,” Louise Glück speaks in the voice of the sorceress who transforms the crew of Odysseus into swine when they arrive on her island. Even the great war-leader and trickster Odysseus himself would have fallen under her spell, but for a charm the god Hermes gives him. (“Some people have all the luck,” “the gods favor them,” etc.) So it’s dueling magics at work, divine and mortal enchantments competing for supremacy. (Sort of feels like life at times. Like we’re adrift in a hurricane, or trying to build a house on a battlefield.) Circe speaks to Odysseus, to all of us, in a kind of explanation of life seen from the vantage point of magic. Or not.
I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
look like pigs.
I’m sick of your world
that lets the outside disguise the inside.
Your men weren’t bad men;
undisciplined life
did that to them. As pigs,
under the care of
me and my ladies, they
sweetened right up.
Then I reversed the spell,
showing you my goodness
as well as my power. I saw
we could be happy here,
as men and women are
when their needs are simple. In the same breath,
I foresaw your departure,
your men with my help braving
the crying and pounding sea. You think
a few tears upset me? My friend,
every sorceress is
a pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can’t
face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you
I could hold you prisoner.
Oddly, this poem always cheers me up, with what I take to be its hard realism. That may sound funny, since part of the time Circe’s talking about magic, and she has a cynic’s view of much of life. Or maybe a minimalist’s. How do those two things go together?! But it’s a magic we’re born into, the nature of a world in which the outside does indeed often “disguise the inside.” Here, almost everything wears a mask. Even truth hides as illusion, and illusion as truth. The god of this world, we’re told in the Christian Bible, has the face and name of Liar. We learn this soon enough, discovering quite young the great power of lying. It’s a magic of its own, up to a point — a beguiling enchantment. Some of us never recover. It’s lies all the way. But there are other worlds, and other magics as potent, if not more so. If Circe is “sick of this world,” what can she tell us of others?
Another way of looking at it can come to us in an Emily Dickinson poem. (What is it with these poets, anyway?! Liars, magicians, many of them. Enchant us into the real.) “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” says the Amherst visionary, and we’re off to the nature of truth seen in a world of illusion: paradox. (Maybe truth needs a mask, to exist here at all.) “The only way out is through,” insists Frost in yet another poem, but in spite of our longing for the Old Straight Path, it’s fallen away from us, and the world is now “bent,” as in the Tolkien mythos. We can’t get out so easily.
“Success in circuit lies,” Dickinson goes on to say. In other words, “you can’t get there from here”: the directions are all scrambled, even the best of them. You travel in a cosmic roundabout and end up somewhere else, not just on a road less traveled, but one apparently never traveled before, until you set foot on it. Who can help you as you journey there? No one? Anyone? One paradox is that you’re walking the same path everyone else is, too. Everyone’s having an experience of being on their own. What we share is what keeps us separate. Paradox much? Useful at all?
“Too bright for our infirm Delight/The Truth’s superb surprise,” says Dickinson. OK, so what the hell does that mean? Well, Circe knows, or seems to. If every sorceress is indeed a “pragmatist at heart”, then she and all the others who deal in truths and illusions may have something useful to tell us in the end. Certainly our encounters with truth can have a surprising quality of sudden opening and revelation. Whether the surprise is “superb” depends in part on you. But what are we to make of her next assertion? “Nobody sees essence who can’t face limitation.” The two negatives “spin your head right round.” Is it still true if we remove them? “Everyone sees essence who can face limitation.”
This is without doubt a world of limits, of hard edges, of boundaries we run into all the time, however much we try to ignore them. Inconvenient truths aren’t the same as illusions. (We just wish they were.) Some of the edges cut, some leave scars. We get away with very little, in the end. Most of our illusions get stripped away, in this world of illusions. What’s left? Emily, Louise, mother-wit, “the sense God gave gravel,” somebody (anybody!), help us out here!!
“As Lightning to the Children eased/With explanation kind/The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind –” Emily concludes. (Maybe the dash says it all.) Is there any “kindness” in this world of disguises? Well, if some truth really is, or can be, as potent as the words here suggest, then one kindness is precisely the illusion we complain about. It’s protection, insulation, a hot-pad between us and the Real, to keep it from scorching our skin, burning our vision. Mortal eyes cannot behold the infinite. “No one can see the face of God, and live,” Moses is told. Things get scaled down in this world. The hot turns lukewarm, tepid. You want scalding? You were warned.
So what might we take away as a provisional set of guidelines to test and try out, and maybe use, if and when they fit?
1. Know your worlds.
This ain’t the only one. Don’t mix ’em, or expect one to work like any of the others. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” and all that. This world in particular revels in concealment. Spring lies in the lap of winter, and unlikely as it seems, green and warmth will return to this world gone gray and white and cold. Neither winter nor spring is the whole truth, but each is true in its season. Time works out truth in a world built of time and space. “Dazzle gradually,” so you can surprise and startle and reveal intensely … in the end.
2. Essence and limitation are linked.
“Nobody sees essence who can’t face limitation.” If we want the truth we seek, and desperately need, and deep-down know already (a particularly maddening truth we reject whenever we can), we find it here in this world, in limits and seeming dead-ends and walls and obstacles and finales. Death’s a big one. These are our teachers still, till we’re able to move beyond them. Really? That’s the best you can do for us? Well, got any other world handy? Yes? Then you know what I mean. You don’t need this. No? Then you’re right where you need to be. Understand that I’m not speaking from any privileged or superior place. I know what you know, and vice versa. Deal. You’ll notice that I’m here in this right beside you. As my wife and I remind each other whenever necessary, those too good for this world are adorning another.
3. Truth ain’t so much obscure or impossible or unavailable or “an empty category,” but it IS often different than we think or want it to be.
We manifest it as we discover it. We know it when we see it, like pornography or good taste. Just don’t ask for someone else’s version to guide you, or you’re back to square one. (As a clue, OK. As absolute authority over your life? Don’t even think about it!)
4. In the end, it’s all Square One.
5. And that’s a good thing.
6. To quote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, “Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, then it’s not yet the end.” Patience is one of the primal and most subtle of magics.
7. Your version of “all right” will keep changing.
If it hasn’t changed recently, check your brain for clogs. You may have missed an important message the universe has been trying to tell you.
8. Everything wants to make a gift of itself to you.
The distance between your current reality and that truth is the measure of the Great Work ahead. This one’s taken me for a couple of l o n g walks indeed. Everything. Gift. If I resist it, it comes back in an ugly or terrifying or destructive “un-gift” form. There are hard gifts. Each life ends with one. Still a gift.
9. Ah, the triple three of nine, a piece of Druid perfection.
The ultimate four-letter word is love. “A love for all existences,” goes the Druid Prayer. Get there, and life begins in earnest. We’ve all been there, briefly. Time to make it longer than brief. “Reverse the spell to see the goodness and the power,” to reword Circe only a little. Still working on these.
To “winter over” has always sounded encouraging to me. It may be a matter of full-on hibernation …
or merely that human sleep of cold weather that lingers through the darkness, drives us to seek out heavy, fat, rich foods in ancestral echo of our animal heritage, and longs to do nothing more strenuous than curl up and dream. There is animal “faith,” if you want to call it that, built into our bones and blood: the world will not turn away from us while we sleep, and we shall wake again to life.
The dormouse in the picture has it about right: sleep with food half your size (hazelnuts, in this case), wake up, snack, pee, then back to sleep again. Drowsing comes much more easily now, especially after daylight savings time has shifted our days and brought evening creeping into the afternoons. With that extra jolt of possible light (this IS November, after all), mornings may be brighter and better, if you’re a morning person, but let 5:00 or 5:30 pm roll around and it feels like late evening already. Then today, with snowfall along the east coast as the winter storm makes its way along the same path Sandy took a short time ago, and you have hibernation mode with a vengeance.
May New York and New Jersey find their hazelnuts, their winter store of energy and life. A prayer to the South, where the people are cold in the dark, and my living breath upon it. A prayer to the west, where the frozen time has come, and my living breath upon it. A prayer to the north, warmer than many places closer to the equator: my living breath upon it. A prayer to the east, with winds cold and damp: my living breath upon it. Let all that breathes move its prayer with each inhalation and exhalation.
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Image: dormouse.
Updated 8 Nov ’12
Author, Episcopal priest and current professor Barbara Brown Taylor has written An Altar in the World, a splendid little book on simple, essential spiritual practices which anyone can begin right now. She writes from a refreshingly humble (close to the humus, the earth) Christian perspective, and a broad vision of spirituality pervades her words. Because of her insight and compassion, her awareness that we are whole beings — both spirits and bodies — because of the earthiness of her wisdom, and her refusal to set herself above any of her readers, she makes an excellent Druid of the Day. I hope I will always remember to apprentice myself gladly to whoever I can learn from. As the blurb on her website page for the book notes, “… no physical act is too earthbound to become a path to the divine.”
Taylor brings a worthy antidote to the bad thinking and fear-mongering so widespread today. Here’s a sample:
… it is wisdom we need to live together in this world. Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails. Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act. They are free to act, trusting that the practice itself will teach them what they need to know … If you are not sure what to believe about your neighbor’s faith, then the best way to find out is to practice eating supper together. Reason can only work with the experience available to it. Wisdom atrophies if it is not walked on a regular basis.
Such wisdom is far more than information. To gain it, you need more than a brain. You need a body that gets hungry, feels pain, thrills to pleasure, craves rest. This is your physical pass into the accumulated insight of all who have preceded you on this earth. To gain wisdom, you need flesh and blood, because wisdom involves bodies–and not just human bodies, but bird bodies, tree bodies, water bodies and celestial bodies. According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it whispering, “Grow, grow.” How does one learn to see and hear such angels? (14)
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Taylor, Barbara Brown. An Altar in the World. New York: Harper One, 2009.
Go to Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
Much of what we can do with initiation consists of bringing the inner experience outward, establishing it in consciousness, so that we can begin to live in and from the new awareness. That can often mean we find ourselves expressing it through light, sound, color, form, in painting, drawing, photography, dance, music, writing, embroidery, etc. — some way to bring that inside stuff into this realm of touch and smell and contact and physical sensation. The correlation doesn’t need to be, won’t be, exact. Doesn’t matter. It’s a bridge to somewhere over the rainbow, where the sidewalk ends, where the path disappears into a pool of still water. Pick(le) your metaphor.
Believing, as the (transformed) saying goes, is seeing. We see it through, we manifest it, because we’ve seen it before, maybe via an inner sense that doesn’t always feel like sight but may come as some other way of knowing. Do we need to be told “what to look for and when” as the cartoon suggests? Only if we’re focused on proof rather than transformation. Only if we’re trying to see somebody else’s vision. Ours, however, is ours — it doesn’t require tricks. (True, it may sneak up on us, or we may be the ones doing the sneaking.) Others may well “believe” it when they see it in our lives, when they have something they can contact that reassures them we’re still grounded here. Even if — or especially when — we’re not, anymore. Or not like we were, exclusively. We’re not freaks (at least usually not obvious ones). But the life that flows through us when we complete the circuit and connect to both poles comes across to everyone. Each person is charged at least a little, whenever any one of us is. The democracy of spirit. The changes come, and with a measure of luck and grace and good weather, we survive this life again, and enough of our loved ones are still with us to carry on.
If it’s a difficult initiation — unwanted or unsought — we may resist the awareness. The divorce, the scary diagnosis, the death of a friend, the chronic pain. But even if it’s the events and timing of the outward initiation that seem to be the launch-pad, the dividing line between our old and new selves, almost always, in my experience, sign-posts and markers of the inner preparation and change have shown up beforehand. We just may not recognize them till later, if at all. Scant consolation when your life falls apart all around. And even less welcome are the well-meaning Others in your life who may let slip that they “saw that one coming a mile away.” (But could we listen, could we hear the warning? Nope. Absolutely not. Don’t want to, don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear it!) Sometimes deafness is protection, the only shield we have at the moment. Compassion for ourselves, for others in that moment, and after.
One of the reasons I maintain this blog is the opportunity it gives me to test and measure some part of my inner worlds against this outer one. After all, this is the world I live in with a physical body, and if I want to use here what I’ve experienced elsewhere and inwardly, it needs to be adapted to the dynamics of this world. This physical life is one pole of the circuit that is our existence. The other pole lies in our inner worlds, but that’s no reason either to discount it or to grant it a superiority over everything else that it doesn’t deserve. Who has explored “everything life has to offer”? I’ve been around for several decades, and I still feel like a rank beginner, like I’m only just starting to do more than scratch the surface. And yet at the same time as doors open, a strange-familiar welcome lies on the other side, like I’m returning to something I’ve always known but haven’t yet walked. Now (first time? second time?) I’m setting foot there.
In the first branch of the Mabinogion, Pwyll prince of Dyfed encounters Arawn, Lord of the Otherworld, and the exchanges that develop between the two realms profit both of them. It’s a circuit both literal and figurative, as most things are: accessible to the metaphorical part of our minds, but also to our inner senses, if not our physical ones. And sometimes the division falls away and no longer separates the worlds. In the Western Tradition, Samhain or Hallowe’en celebrates just such a thinning of the veil. The Otherworld enters this one, or we journey there in dream or vision, and we become walkers in both worlds. Sometimes this world can then go transparent, and we see both worlds simultaneously, that old double vision that dissolves time and distance and the game of mortality. Then the veil falls again, easy concourse between the worlds slips away, and we resume to our regularly scheduled lives. Except not quite. We’ve changed.
As the old U.S. Emergency Broadcast System (now the EAS) used to say, more or less, “Had this been an actual emergency, you would have received instructions about what to do next,” except that instructions are already hard-wired in our hearts. Listen without listening, and all we get is static. The station has nothing more to say to us. No instructions. It seems like no one’s at the controls. No directions. If we can’t easily access them any longer, out of neglect or fear or ignorance, sometimes there’s a gap between learning about the “emergency” and “receiving instructions ” — a gap of hours, months, years, lives even. Where to go, what to do, how to go on, all become unknowable, impossible, lost to us. And so the ferment works in us, till we’re driven to find out, to quest for wisdom, to cry for vision. And what we ask for, we receive — eventually — as the Great Triad records: Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and it will open to you. Eventually. Patience, old teacher, maybe the earliest and longest lesson of all. Another face of that strange love that sometimes seems (dare we admit it?) built into things, that will not ever let us go.
Go to Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
Updated 15 March 2013
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Images: mystical dancer initiation; proof; b&w figures
[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9]
Crying for vision, I step into the forest. Early twilight cloaks me, and mist cloaks everything else. A shiver stalks my spine. I feel something tread nearby with feet heavy as horses’ hooves, yet subtle and delicate as cloud. How it can be both I don’t know. Something breathes on my neck, though when I spin around I know nothing will show. Yet. I know I can freak myself out — I’ve done it lots of times. This is different. It is not fear, at least not fear as I know it. Instead it comes as joy and awe mixed, like the charge of touching the bark of a towering redwood a thousand years old, or the first glimpse of a landscape wholly remade by a night’s snow — beauty unlooked for, encounter with something awake and vital and ancient that I’m paying attention to at last.
How to explain it? Almost anyone listening would think I’m crazy, when all I can do is say “Look! Don’t you see them?!” as they dance and stalk and whirl themselves all around us both. And all the other person can do is shake his head at me, totally ignoring them as they gaze at him and size him up — perplexed, annoyed, amused, indifferent — depending on their natures. I shrug and turn back to them, watching, listening, enjoying and returning their welcome.
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Updated 23 April 2015
When the phone call came, she was standing bent over the kitchen table, up to her elbows in pumpkin innards. A crop of volunteers had sprung up in a poorly-turned compost pile. She thanked Spirit for the gift, leaving wherever she harvested pumpkin a small bundle of dried thyme in exchange.
At the first ring, she looked down at her sticky hands, then out the window. A brief scatter of rain still sparkled on grass and leaves outside the kitchen window. Calls these days were almost always marketers. If it was Jack, she could call him back. They still needed to sort out a few things. But she would not rush the day, nor her mood, over answering the damn phone. She did pause at the third ring. Your worst arguments are with yourself, she remembered hearing. No, let the machine take it. She’d had it since high school, the black plastic housing cracked and duct-taped together. The sexless mechanical recording came on. She turned back to pale orange pulp and slimy seeds, slipped a couple into her mouth to chew, imagined them baked and salted. She waited, half expecting the caller to hang up.
The raspy voice on the machine straightened her back all by itself. Cassie, her father’s baritone said. And paused. Cigarette cough, the same. I want … I’d like to talk with you. She didn’t know how she felt. He’d kicked her out … eleven years ago, it was. They’d talked just twice since then. All that weekend’s worth of argument over a festival she’d been determined to attend. She couldn’t even remember its name.
No more of that Pagan crap in this house, he said, finally. I’m sick of it. You go and you don’t come back. They didn’t yell, at the end. Plenty beforehand. Fine with me, she said. She left about twenty minutes later. Didn’t even slam a door. And that was that. But you could have bottled the acid in the air and scoured steel with it.
I’m in Sacramento now. Oh, my number, it’s … She heard him stumble over it. I hope you’ll call back. Another long pause. As if he could hear her thinking, waiting. Not answering. Not wanting to. Cassie. The tug of her name again. Then a click and brief dial tone. She stared bleakly at the red digital 1 that appeared on the messages screen. How much of life was playback.
Outdoors the sky had darkened again, and her mood with it. She knew she needed to breathe and stand in the open air, to listen to something other than her own thoughts. Once outside, she knelt and rested her palms flat on the grass, to give her anger to the earth, not to carry it. Earth, take what I need no longer, teach through weakness what makes stronger. She breathed through the words, said them again, then a third time. She would call him back this evening. At nine, six o’clock his time. Sacramento. What was he doing there? Well, she could wait to find out.
This unretouched image of trees and sky, courtesy of Druid Debbie Brodeur, was taken from a moving car. How much glory lies just behind the “ordinary.” Our eyes insist there’s “nothing new,” while all the time endless wonders dance past us. It’s possible to remember to “look again,” to re-vision things, even a few more times a day. Small steps, to see the world new again.
She was Druid. When she needed to know things, a way would open. She was learning to trust it. Sometimes an opening way asked for patience, and that took work, still. Waiting rarely looked hard when others did it, but she’d done enough herself to know better. A song made it easier, and when she listened a certain way, now and again songs came, tinkling on the air, or roaring out of someplace she didn’t know she’d gone to till she returned with a start, the phone ringing, or her cat Halfpint curled in her lap and kneading one thigh with paws tipped with needle claws. Often the words came later, the melody already running ahead of her, in and around her attention till she got a version down on paper or on her music program.
She was Druid, she knew. It was a long time coming, that knowledge. Sometimes she’d resisted, convinced she was done with paths, and seeking and god-stuff, anything like that. But through it all the gifts kept arriving. Hard ones, and easy ones too. Often enough it meant whatever the land gave her at the moment. For proof, all she had to do was look at her house, filled with stones, bird bones, animal skulls, pressed flowers, carved branches, vervain and basil and mint, garlic and St. John’s Wort and other herbs she was learning as she went. After Jack left with his secretary, she got the little ramshackle two-bedroom house and the six acres of pasture they’d planned to farm, and slowly the once-empty rooms filled with links to the green world outside the door. Inside, too. Spiders in the corners, mice in the walls, squirrels skittering across the tin roof, crows caucusing in the back yard.
Jack. One of the hard gifts. He left, and for a while the emptiness threatened to eat her alive. A big hole she had to stop looking into. No bottom, but walls dark with bitterness. So she stayed busy volunteering and running the food pantry and substituting at the local elementary school, until one day a boy complained about the smell of incense that seemed to follow her wherever she went. “Witch” was the real reason, she heard from a sympathetic colleague. Parents complaining about “that teacher.” Though when the principal called her in “for a little chat,” what he said was they just couldn’t rely on her to be on time. All she knew then was that her morning ritual had just cost her one needed source of income. Hard gift.
A month of therapy, and “you’re stuck in a box labelled ‘wife,'” until she knew she could give herself better advice, and cheaper. When the box is the whole world, then I’m Druid in a box, she thought. And thinking inside the box is a great place to start. Hardly anybody else is in here. They’re all outside, because that’s where they’ve been told they should be. That’s where the clever ones are, the ones who want to be ahead of the curve. Mostly people do what they’re told. But almost always something held her back from doing what everybody else did, shoved her or kicked her sideways. A kind of resistance, a suspicion, a compass set in her belly and spinning her some other way. Ahead of the curve? It was more than enough to be the curve, bird’s wing in the air, crescent moon, arc of water coursing over a falls. The backyard junipers and oaks and one old willow bowing at the sky.
Then it was October, her birth month, and in spite of turning 30 in a few more days, her mood lightened. She could feel a shift coming, something new trying to find her, a little blind, and maybe needing help. She could help it. Listen, she reminded herself. It was one thing she’d finally gotten good at.
To be continued …
A Druid Way 
