Because sometimes, especially this time of year as we approach the Solstice, an animal lethargy creeps in and “what matters most” means eating and sleeping. You should be hibernating, whispers Oldest Brain. And I long to listen.
Not doing the work is familiar by now. And all around us flash examples too numerous to count. Headlines and posts and memes and Facebook feeds, what’s trending, and even our friends may not offer what we need. Or indeed be working actively against it. Peep at a partner and they’re no help either, most likely because they’re in the thick of their own version. Or will be soon enough. (Sometimes it’s the height of respect simply not to dump my load onto my wife’s.) To lift a few lines from Rilke for my purposes,
Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
Look, if we want an easy Bard, then we need to tune to another channel. Rilke isn’t it.
Sometimes it’s not even clear what he’s naming for himself, for us by proxy, though we may feel it in our marrow. Possibility slips by and sleep calls, that easy drowse-and-wait. Sometimes, true enough, sleep is good strategy. Only you and you and I and she and he and they can tell, each by ourselves, if such a strategy fits right now, peering between a dream and a nightmare and the choices seen and unseen that keep tickling our skin and our blood.
For it seems that everything hides us.
Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand.
We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.
If we’re hidden, what luck finding anything else, or anything else finding us?! Especially what we feel we need most — that’s the most fugitive thing of the whole lot. I’m standing here looking and listening for a sign, but it turns out I’m it, tagged by the universe, which runs away — it wants to play — while I’ve got all this serious sh*t to deal with! If there’s a conspiracy, it’s a cosmic one, with shame and hope for fuel, a secret formula we’ve paradoxically always known.
So we take December mindsets like these with us as we go, turning them over to see where the light leaked out of what looked so very promising last week, or a month or year or decade ago.
Have I named it yet, this mood? Pause a moment and toss your own contribution onto the heap. Plenty of room.
There’s nothing wrong with composting these things, though we can often feel ashamed of all the brown leaves and earthy smells. It’s the right season for it. Rot and spoilage and scraps, odds and ends of the year all go in, and earth begins its long work over again, and transmutes it. Serious sh*t and funny stuff, dead skin and ideas, fingernails and ashes and brown lettuce leaves and apple-cores and the last squash that never grew once the days turned cold. That deformed pumpkin from the front steps, mummified relic of Halloween, and the remarkable sludge from the back of the vegetable drawer in the fridge. Fling in those irritations and annoyances and petty snarks. Spites and attitudes all go in, rattling as they hit the sides and bounce around against the Cave of Souls and disappear deeper down its gullet. We see that yawning mouth of darkness that terrifies us, even if only a little or for an instant, then realize we were just standing too close to the mirror and caught a glimpse of ourselves up close. So we do the work anyway, just as it does us without our permission. Because to be alive at all, we’re in it.
It’s good to take these things out and air them, get them the turning and churning and the even exposure they need, basting them in earth, so they transmute all the more readily. Everyone’s got them. Think of them as the scraps at the end of the craft session, husks and shells and scurf and skin, bone and gristle dropped into the sink after the holiday dinner’s done and guests gone, before the grand cleanup begins. Shards left over after creation’s finished. What gets swept up from the garage and basement floor. What the kids tracked in from outdoors, the carcass the dog dragged around the yard and left near the mailbox, the small furred or feathered corpse that the cat so thoughtfully dropped on the doormat. We’re always putting a foot in it.
So we squawk and shrink and blanch at these things, disowning them if we could, turning away, dismayed the universe sends such awkwardness our way. Among difficult gifts, the mind of winter ranks pretty high, because it’s pretty (not pretty at all) rank. Overripe, expired, corrupt, foul, putrid, excremental, cadaverous in its open decay.
“This too is mission”. And I can achieve it. I grasp the shame by its least offensive corner, or shove my arm in up to the elbow and shuffle it along, helping it slither and slide into its next moment. And I might catch the eye of someone else doing the same. We nod stiffly at each other, almost imperceptibly. Earth blesses it, blesses us, accepting nothing short of all.
And I sigh and begin again, making room for that second part, unutterable hope. Which, as all Bards do, I keep trying to put into words.
[5 May 2020 Update — Druid Magazine has been removed from online. Only paper copies remain.]
NOTE
A version of this post appeared on pg. 32 of the summer/fall 2017 issue (large PDF) of Druid Magazine. I’m grateful to the editors, and to their liberal policies that actually recognize the ownership of authors!
In the Southern Hemisphere, Beltane has recently passed, and we can, if we choose, draw on the “opposite” energies here in the North in November, in a six-month harmonic with the South. (Isn’t it always Opposite Day anyway?) It’s Spring in Autumn, Christmas in July, your six-month birthday.
Because when don’t we need sacred fire?
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1–Finding Fire
Every Druid tradition I know of honors fire in some way. “It is the hour of recall”, go the closing lines of OBOD ritual. “As the fire dies down, let it be relit in our hearts”.
Here is the promise of elemental fire, never quenched, always ready to rekindle. But so often I find myself dry, cool, grounded, earthed—all excellent things after ritual, ideal for smooth re-entry into our lives, but hard to live from when we crave and need the flame again.
I’ve detected more than a fair portion of Earth in my makeup: a little reserved, suspicious of quick flares, with a tendency to solidity, inertia even. Does a spark still smolder in the heart of a person like that, waiting to be relit? Can I coax it to flame again? I hold the answers like twin children, one in each arm: of course, and not today. As I write this, I look out the window at fog and wet pavement. Where do I look for flame? In moments like these, it seems a more than reasonable question.
Yes, in the electrified West, we turn a key to start the car, we flip any number of switches all day along, expecting and usually seeing instantaneous lights, readouts, computers booting, phone screens lighting, and hums and rumbles of devices jumping into action. If, like me, you happen to heat with wood, you lay paper and kindling, strike a match, and flame obliges. Praise be to Brighid!
But for all that, I keep reminding myself, we do not command fire. In her The Way of Four Spellbook, Deborah Lipp notes:
Fire has always been set apart from the other elements, because Fire alone has no natural home on the earth; Air has the sky, Water the sea, and Earth the land, but only Fire stands apart from geography. In nature, Fire is the outsider; it is out of control, and it conforms to no known rules (pg. 10).
This is lovely and poetic, evocative and wise, and, as a friend remarked when I quoted it to him, it’s also bullshit. The only place fire happens is geography, just like with every other element. Heart, fire pit, computer screen, creativity—we light and relight them constantly. It’s our extensive craft with the fire principle that’s made much of civilization possible. But mastery in the end means service, and our wizardry rings hollow whenever we forget this.
2–Serving Fire
“I am a servant of the Secret Fire,” declares Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien, 2004, p. 330). Not a bad magical declaration. So I turn to the Indo-European past and summon reconstructed ancient words* to say something like it: *Ambikwolos esmi yagnos ogneyes [Ahm-BEE-kwoh-lohs EHS-mee YAHG-nohs OHG-neh-yes], which roughly translates to “I am a servant of the sacred fire.”
So I ask how I already serve fire, because contrary to an adolescent tendency in us to see our lives as all-or-nothing, we have a starting place within us for anything that can manifest—or so some Wise Ones have told me. How else can we recognize a lack or hole or void except by feeling the outline of what’s missing, of what’s supposed to be there?
Now, when I need to reignite the fire of the sacred, and that includes writing about it, my daily practice, my own “hour of recall”, hopefully guides me to embers that still throw off heat. (If it doesn’t, I know I need to fine-tune what I do each day.) I keep re-learning that we never really extinguish sacred fire. We merely smoor it—that lovely old Scottish word—not “smother” or “suffocate” as some dictionary entries render it, but bank it, setting it to smolder till morning, when it can be breathed and fed to flame again. Peat excels at smoldering, but so do woods like hickory, and so do our human spirits.
While preparing a fire workshop for MAGUS Beltane, out of ruminations like these, I made a list of questions I found I kept asking myself, so I shared them with attendees. Here are seven from that list you might use in your journal, or for a series of meditations. And if one or two of them call you away from reading this, go with them for a while along your own green and shining path. Your responses are more valuable, after all, than “finishing the article”.
1) What does it take—literally and intentionally—in order to kindle you, and in order for you to kindle other things in your life?
2) What offering, if any, do you make to help you kindle? What else could you bring into your practice? What could you discard?
3) What is sacred to you? How do you find, invite, welcome, increase the sacred? What sacred ways are a part of your life right now that can help you kindle?
4) What ways, if any, do you tend to discount, push away, ignore, or feel “aren’t my way of connecting with the sacred”? What can you learn from your attitude towards them?
5) Where are you already kindled? What is burning, warm, or fiery in your life right now?
6) Where do you desire kindling? (Where do you need to bank a fire and cool off?!) Or to put it another way, what needs to catch fire in your life?
7) How has sacred fire already honored your practice and flames inwardly for you?
3–Building a Ritual Fire
In reconstructed Indo-European, one of the words for “altar” is *asa. If you want to expand your ritual declarations and charm-making, you can say *asam kwero [AH-sahm KWEH-roh] “I build an altar”. And if you’re consecrating a talisman or another person, you might add *Yagnobi ognibi tum wikyo! [YAHG-noh-bee OHG-nee-bee toom wee-KYOH!] “I hallow you with sacred fire!”
What to burn on that altar? Here your judgment, tempered and instructed by divination, practice, dream, and study, matters more than anything I might suggest. But if you’re seeking such a suggestion, here is one. Druid and Pagan traditions speak of Nine Sacred Trees suitable for kindling sacred fires (Steward of the Woods, 2015).
What about an altar? You may well have one already, whether backyard fire pit or space cleared on a bookshelf for images, a piece of quartz found on a walk, Tarot card for the day, incense of the season, and so on.
Evidence from several different traditions tells us that squares of sod or turf were a common form that a ritual altar could take. The Aeneid (Mandelbaum, 1961, p. 117) mentions a sod altar. Records from the Scots in the 1700s (Frazer, 1929) talk of building May Day fires on an altar of sod. And the Æcerbōt, the Anglo-Saxon “Land Remedy Spell”, amounts to a ritual for creating sacred space and restoring the land’s fertility (Jolly, 1996). To do so, it instructs the ritual performer to take one sod from each of the four directions of the land to build the ritual altar. Ceisiwr Serith (2015), an experienced ADF ritualist, author, and Indo-Europeanist, gives more supporting info in an article on his excellent website, “Proto-Indo-European Religion”.
In closing, I turn for words to the Rig-Veda 1.26.8: “For when the gods have a good fire, they bring us what we wish for. Let us pray with a good fire” (Three Cranes Grove, 2007; To Pray with a Good Fire).
Note on reconstructed Proto-Indo-European:
The * asterisk is a conventional notation for indicating a reconstructed form. You can never know enough about linguistic prehistory to do more than mangle reconstructed languages. Even graduate study like mine in historical linguistics inoculates precisely nobody from error. (Though a professional career demands pursuing the unattainable.) So in releasing perfectionist worries over Indo-European reconstructions and pronunciations, I cherish the advice of the great medievalist scholar, teacher, and author John Gardner. In advising readers when trying to speak Middle English aloud, he remarks,
“Read aloud or recite with authority, exactly as when speaking Hungarian – if you know no Hungarian – you speak with conviction and easy familiarity. (This, I’m told by Hungarians, is what Hungarians themselves do.) This easy authority, however fake, gets the tone of the language …” (1978, p. 315).
Tone, we might say, covers a multitude of sins.
If you’d like to learn more, two readable, popular, and authoritative books are by West and Mallory, included in the bibliography. Work through them and you won’t need me or anyone else. You’ll be writing your own reconstructed Indo-European phrases and rituals with “conviction and easy authority”.
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Gardner, John. (1978). The Life and Times of Chaucer. New York: Vintage Books.
Lipp, D. (2006). The Way of Four Spellbook. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications.
Mallory, J. P. & Adams, D. Q. (2006). The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OBOD’s weekly email “Inspiration for Life” offers good advice here, but frequently my question after reading is this: how exactly do I go about practicing any insight it contains? And of course part of any answer sends me back to digging through what I’ve learned. It prods me to open my spiritual toolkit once again.
Here’s a recent weekly prompt, as I think of it, for a possible focus I might take up during the week:
Don’t feel bad about feeling bad. Don’t be frightened of feeling afraid. Don’t be angry about getting angry. There is no need to give up when we are feeling depressed. Nor should we be dismayed at the grief which often accompanies the outgrowing of anything which needs outgrowing. We can be glad that our soul is speaking to us and pushing us onwards. We frequently need to persevere with a period of inner turmoil before the dust can settle and be swept out the door. — Donna Goddard
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First comes an experience, and then any emotional response to it we may have. Sometimes there isn’t one, though often one comes, just not right away. My wife and I moved out of state for a promising new job, quit within a month, and moved back to Vermont in mid-September. In various ways I’ve been dealing with more fallout from that over the past thirty days than I did in late September, when the event happened, or shortly after we returned.
These delays frequently catch us off guard because of the time gap between initial event and response. Then we react to our reactions, without looking at the cause. Sometimes our secondary reaction takes up our attention and energy far more than the original experience or emotion. So we fill too many waking — and dreaming! — hours grappling with the effects of effects, rather than being cause in our own lives. And if like me you’ve truly mastered this peculiarly modern and dysfunctional art, you now feel guilty for a second, third or even fourth-level reaction: your response to your response at emotions stirred by the initial experience. How craftily we perform these perverse and twisted magics against ourselves!
Fortunately, the same skill we use in tying ourselves in knots can serve to aid us in climbing free. It needs only our fire to turn it to our purposes.
So I summon my magic, starting with the Law of Reversed Effort. Rather than resisting the guilt, inertia and listlessness, I realize they’ve become so heavy they start to drop off me, pulled by their own weight and gravity. They puddle in a mess around my feet. Stepping away, I begin to rise, calling for help if I wish from teacher, friend, familiar or other beneficent spiritual presence as I ascend.
As I rise, I pass through clouds, and then suddenly I’m above them. Here the sun shines with an intense brightness I can feel warming my skin. I continue to ascend, the earth growing smaller and smaller beneath me. It’s now a blue-green ball of coolness beneath me, the solar system around me. Then that too recedes. The whole galaxy swims around me, then clusters of galaxies, shining strands of stars and families of stars. Piercing the sphere of the cosmos like a soap bubble, I rise yet further, into another and larger universe. I slow and pause, absorbing the sense of light and freedom and expansiveness.
When I am ready, I descend back the way I came, through galaxies, back to the solar system, back to earth, and down into my body again. When I feel my physical form sitting on the chair, I savor the sense of lightness and ease, and give thanks. Then I open my eyes, savoring the gift, and record the experience.
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In this world rich with experience, it’s fine that I am not always the cause. But it’s immensely helpful, in such an interconnected world, to remember that things don’t happen tome, as if I’m a stone, but for me, because I’m an integral part of the web. It’s feedback for what we’re all doing. Just this shift in awareness can begin to free me to find useful insights, spiritual tools, and paths forward, right in the middle of circumstances that otherwise may feel like dead-ends. Because choosing to be the effect of thoughts about experiences will return me to remarkably useless perceptions, like “That’s just your imagination!” which of course is perfectly true, but not, however, in the sense that this accusation comes.
Imagination is spiritual sight. It’s never just one thing. In fact, it constantly, unfailingly, eternally (internally!), tries to show us multiple, innumerable other ways to see, to perceive, to understand, to celebrate, to create. It shows us ourselves, and everyone and everything else, as we can be. Not in a Disney, fluff-bunny or Hallmark sense, but in the truer sense of potential buried and awaiting all the transformations that human consciousness is designed to achieve and manifest. Here, where it’s needed most. In the middle of the sturm and drang, the drama, the doom, the headlines, the media chatter. Yes, right in the middle of it all, a birth, a growth, a flowering.
Imagination at work is nudging the roll of the cosmic dice, when the Dungeon Master sets us to establishing who and what we will be in this iteration of the Great Game. Because we know we’re the dice, the throw that sets them rolling, the twinkle in the eye of the Master, and the numbers that come up which we then agree to play with, as well as the Players themselves.
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Or if that package of metaphors doesn’t work for you, fire is always burning. Honor it. We decide what to use it to ignite, warm, inspire.
Air is always breathing and flowing around us. Respect it. We decide what to breathe on, and endow with careful attention, thought, planning, symbolism, imagery.
Water is always pooling and rippling. We decide what needs nourishing at the roots, where the true dream lives, what we deeply feel, and how our hearts guide us along the paths we instinctively know already. Acknowledge it.
Lastly and most kindly, earth is ready beneath us, supporting us, stage for manifesting all we make of our lives from this moment forward. Love it.
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Peering out the windows of this train at strange new territory passing by, talking with curiously-attired strangers in the car, supping with voices and images of beasts and birds in my ears, dozing off with conversations still echoing. You know, the life of a writer obsessed for a time with characters and story.
At 27,201 words, I’m somewhat under my target word-count for Nanowrimo. The lovely impossible experience of any sustained period of writing means the simultaneous tyranny of daily word-sprints and counts and updates and bemoaning the calendar and days passing, along with a complete, blissful disregard for all these things, as I bathe in a refreshing pool under gentle sunlight, that has appeared in the middle of my story, a moment of solitude surrounded by moss and mists and a distant valley calling me to explore.
What would you teach a young person asking to apprentice with you for the wisdom, skills and insights you’ve gained in your life? And how would you go about teaching these things?
The season itself encourages me to be mindful of such things. With its focus on harvest, completion, the Ancestors, and with my own middle age upon me, it’s natural to take stock and ponder what’s most worthwhile out of all the experiences and insights a human accumulates over several decades.
Before going any further, why not take a few minutes and write down your responses to those questions in the first paragraph above?
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What follows is one half of a possible conversation with the other person.
“Thank you for asking. You honor me by bringing these questions to me. In turn, I’ll start by asking you what you’ve learned so far. We build on what we already have discovered, so this is a good starting point. Let’s go for a walk — you choose the direction.”
“One way to begin to answer these things for yourself is to look at times in life when you are happy, or totally engrossed in whatever you are doing. What were you doing, and what did the experience feel like? No need to hurry toward an answer. We can talk again in a few days. Time for a cup of tea or coffee, right?”
“What would go on your ‘favorites’ list? You know — favorite colors, places, animals, people, activities, etc. These things can be a source of comfort, encouragement and energy when you need to recharge or rebalance. Turning to them consciously and gratefully and making them a regular part of your life can assist you greatly. And they can be keys to explore further, and develop as part of your personal toolkit for living. For instance, carving out space and time to practice them, and making a physical space where they are represented, can make a surprising difference in our experience of each day.”
“For some people, these can become doorways to a profession or career. For others, they become rituals and practices to restore and rebalance. For still other people, they can become spiritual symbols and subjects for meditation and insight. Here on my table altar is a hawk feather I found while my wife and I were looking at property here in Vermont. It was a teaching symbol that continues to remind me to pay attention to small signs. Because way beyond random probability, they can often turn out to be big signs.”
“What kinds of things are you good at? If you don’t know or aren’t sure, start asking and paying attention. Everyone has certain latent strengths, talents and abilities. It may be that others have already helped you find some of them, or have encouraged you if you’ve started showing or practicing them, but you can find them on your own as well. They may not always be things that others value right away, but you probably practice them anyway. In fact, some of the things we can be shy about are often things we deeply value and don’t want to expose to others’ opinions or judgments, so we keep them hidden. In spite of what Western culture tells us, there are such things as good secrets. Respect your own sense of when to open up about them, and when to keep them private. Or if I’m listening to the wisdom of plants and trees, build my root system first, then flower second.”
“If you’re wondering about what we’ve been talking about so far, or if you’re thinking they don’t seem very spiritual things, you’re partly right. We often undervalue such things, or think they don’t matter, or overlook them when we’re considering ‘matters of real significance’. Yet all these things make up part of the value of each individual. Each of us has importance, and each of us has core purposes we can discover and fulfill.”
“One powerful way to grow and learn is to serve. You hear a lot about service, and about ‘selfless service’. But I’ve found that the most balanced service is one that we may enter knowing we’ll benefit along with others, but not worrying about that either way. We serve because it’s another way to be grateful for what we’ve received. But we also serve because the universe makes us curious, and service takes us places we can reach in no other way. It connects us to people and places and other beings who we can help and who can help us. Service builds relationships. It’s a form of love. Though it may sound very strange to say it, loving another person can be a form of service. That includes loving ourselves. If we think about the numbers of unhappy people in the world today, loving ourselves is truly a vital and desperately needed form of service.”
“Finding something larger than myself and connecting to it is the only lasting source of happiness and fulfillment I’ve found. We long to feel deeply that our lives matter, and that kind of connection brings meaning and purpose and a deep sense of rightness. We may connect to a craft or art or skill, and we may connect to another person or organization or movement. During my life, I’ve moved around a bit among these at various times. Some people find one way to connect and spend their entire lives with that single way. But like everything else, there’s no single ideal way for everyone, but simply the way that works best for you right now. This isn’t something to believe, though you can if you want to, but it is something to test and try out and determine its validity for yourself.”
“Extending these insights into the practice of a craft, an art, a religion or spiritual path, an organization or cause or profession, are each natural developments of the initial urge and instinct to serve and to express our talents and abilities. A god or gods may help us focus our service, or become the center of what we do. But our service may not take that particular form. Our judgments about others’ choices will always be incomplete. To know our own purposes and priorities is the task of a whole life. We can honor others’ choices and give them the freedom to choose just as they give us that same freedom. There’s a deep test: does my practice afford others the freedom to choose? And does their practice offer me that same freedom?”
“In this world of time and space and change, there is a spiritual adage whose insight I’ve learned the hard way, repeatedly throughout my life. And it’s this: each day’s rhythm means we must re-win our spiritual freedom for that day. It’s an ongoing practice, not a single achievement. In fact, it’s the substance of our service.”
Feeling from the West, and from the South the fire of intention set on slow burn. Now on to thought, consciousness, intellectual discrimination — the original sense of the word, that priceless ability to make distinctions, not our unfortunate modern meaning-shift of imposing them hurtfully on our brothers and sisters. Properly-made distinctions distinguish between stupid and wise uses. Distinctions by themselves are inert, lifeless. They need human consciousness to animate and manifest them.
ECG directional banner for East and the Hawk of Dawn. Design by Dana Driscoll.
But often, feeling is first, before thought, before reflection. We feel and then think about it, even as we experience and then reflect on what happened. e e cummings captures it perfectly in his love-poem of that name:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
and death i think is no parenthesis
So much here, in the “syntax of things”, the pattern and web that bards sing of. Here the Bardic impulse lives: thought in the service of feeling, shaping in words what comes first in emotion. So we continue to turn counterclockwise to work our spell, from feeling to intention and now to perception, clarity, naming what first was wordless. My spellchecker flags my initial typo “worldless” — true as well, because without thought is no distinct world, for feeling floods everything, without the distinctions of thought.
We flow liquidly from feeling to feeling, not bothered by the categories and parameters and boundaries of thought. But feeling, if it’s to lead to anything other than the next feeling, needs the mold and shaping power of thought to give it direction and focus. Thoughtless feeling blunders and bumps into things, knocks over both bad and good, never noticing the wreckage. But wise thought charged with feeling bears a rare potency.
How marvelous that thought is also magically linked to spring, to beginnings and formative activity! The freshness of new thought, the airiness of clean perception is indeed Springtime. And the cosmos invites us to say, as cummings poem announces, “we are for each other”. Because as another Bard reminds us, “no man is an island, entire of itself”. (What do they teach in schools nowadays? We’ve long had that wisdom laid out before us that we need to navigate difficult times. True Bards have always been out in front, pointing and singing us to our heart’s deep desire.) We are kin, family, relatives. The Lakota know it, calling the cosmos mitakuye oyasin, “all my relatives”, winged and footless and four- and two-footed.
It’s in the Western world in particular that we’ve carried individualism too far and made a cult of it, set up altars and applied ourselves to worship. Friendships and families, strained. Human connection breaking. The Me generations are reaping the harvest of being cut off from the cosmos. Sever the link to the worlds, cut the original umbilicus that was never meant to break, and we’re just “stupid bags of skin”, to quote yet another philosopher. Beings who live, and die, alone. Sad, and wholly avoidable.
Thus to thought, to link us up, to relink us, Latin religare, from which comes the noun religio, a relinking. The multitude of shapes and forms that religion can take testifies to mental creativity. Almost anything shaped with love can help to relink us to what we need to truly live. Lose the love, though, and any form empties out pretty fast. It can’t serve its purpose without feeling, any more than it can without thought. Without the heart, religion dies. Without the head, it’s brain-dead at birth.
Of course, if we leave religion in the hands of thieves and scoundrels, we’ll get the same result we do when we leave governance in similar hands. But that’s on us. Religion well-practiced can relink us to what nourishes and feeds us. When (not if) it’s not doing that, it’s always time to wrest the reins from the hands of the incompetent and the malicious. Little wonder we’re in a spiritual-but-not-religious age. But the spirit needs a container, a form, a shape, to embody it in a world of bodies, forms and shapes. A formless spirituality may work for spirits, but we have bodies while we’re here, and an embodied spirituality will almost always serve us better.
So I light my fire, I meditate with an image, I write and draw and dance and do ritual to embody what I want to celebrate and remember and welcome into my life and the lives of those I practice with.
And I write about some of that here.
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As this blog approaches its 6th anniversary and 50,000 hits, I again want to thank all of you who visit and read. Site statistics tell me more of you stay than leave, which in turn tells me I’m talking about things that matter enough to you that you come back, and wrestle with some of the same issues, and attempt to make of your lives something worthy of the gift of life we’ve been given.
Like so many truths, the title for this post is both a truism and a guide.
Want to perceive something? Set it in high contrast to something — often, anything — else. Human consciousness, biologists tell us, is built to detect patterns and contrasts. Among other things, consciousness is a sophisticated survival mechanism. What stands out from the background may be friend, food or foe. That’s one good reason why we won’t be color-blind any time soon, any more than we typically ignore hair or eye color, gender or height or clothing. These are all vital signals that convey information too useful to ignore.
Fire, full moon, night, autumn — as my wife said, after we’d sat for an hour talking and fire-gazing, “It’s very grounding.”
Why not “ground and center” with fire? Oh, I know the reasons: earth helps neutralize imbalances, reconnects us to our physicality when we may be lost in thought or feeling, and so on. Earth’s a great insulator. It helps deaden psychic forces, just like eating meat does after intense ritual or magic or a nightmare. Ground and center, that basic of Pagan practice, one that renews itself as we walk our paths.
But sometimes if I’m too grounded, neutralized and banked and bermed, I need fire. The centering’s still crucial — focus is part of our struggle in this age of so many distractions. In this case, it’s “spark and center”. (With water or air, then, it can be “bathe and center”, or “breathe and center”.)
Kindle me to action, don’t drug me to inertia. In our age of rampant anti-depressants and opioids, you might say we need new prescriptions if we’re to flourish and thrive as the gods invite us to do.
And by “kindle” I don’t mean “prod me to outrage”. That’s a “flash in the pan”. I’m going for a slow burn, the kind that makes good stews and soups, that’s perfect for barbecue so tender the meat falls off the bone, and the ashes keep warm for hours after the flames have died down.
That’s also the kind of kindling that keeps me warm through winter. In this counterspell to our times, I turn us counterclockwise, from West in the last post to South and Fire. As we edge toward Winter in the northern hemisphere, I evoke Summer in us. After all, my preparations of food preservation and stacking firewood and insulating and covering and closing all aim to shelter the sacred fire within.
It takes sacred fire to understand sacred fire, so I lit one last night. Like any dedicated practice, and like all good ritual, action and prayer embody each other.
In these times, the sacred shines all the more brightly by contrast.
Here we are, autumn of the year, gathering the harvest of what we have sown, both bitter and sweet. Hail to the West, place of the setting sun, of evening, of fullness and reflection and maturity.
ECG ritual banner of the West. Design by Dana Driscoll.
West, traditional place of feeling and intuition, and in this cycle, the moon waxing toward fullness, too. I know: in the associations of many tables of correspondence, West is the waning moon. Why not attune to what will light the sky this evening, rather than a pattern that obviously doesn’t fit the moment? Tonight I’ll sit at my fire-circle for an evening contemplation, open as I can to what comes.
With the full moon can come illumination of what was previously hidden. We move in cycles, nourishing some causes and energies in the unconscious, till they move into awareness and we can assess whether they work to our advantage.
Larger cycles concern nations and planetary systems, whole species and immense and intricate patterns, while smaller ones shape our communities and individuals. Disasters and tragedies will keep coming, whether through deeply-rooted patterns in human psyches, or in natural cycles of change, disruption and rebalancing.
After a hurricane, rather than recriminations, it’s most useful to serve obvious need. Likewise after a human tragedy like a shooting. Let my sympathies rouse me to understand causes better, work for change, or open my compassion in concrete forms of aid. Otherwise, am I doing anything more than muddying the astral waters?
Emotional reaction has its place — we feel what we feel — but it can most lovingly be grounded in prayer, ritual and contemplation, and action, for my own good as well as for the good of others. Look to your own self first. the beginning point of all thought and action, counsel my inner guards and guides.
Here’s a first draft of a ritual meditation I’m still working on:
Earth in my hands, my gaze to the horizon,
I cast fear away, hate away, anger away.
clearing the bodies for health.
Water in my hands, my gaze to the wells of spirit
I wash in love, I bathe in compassion, I cleanse with caring,
clearing the springs of the heart.
Fire in my hands, my gaze to the flame of purification
I burn away limitation, I incinerate obstacles, I ignite useful anger,
clearing the will for further growth.
Air in my hands, my gaze to the way of wisdom
I conceive a change, I know a change, I understand a change,
clearing the mind for action.
I don’t say these things because they’re easy, but because they’ve proven themselves to me to be among the best responses over time, and the best ways to take a pro-active stance as well. They’re a practice, something I find worth doing in itself like any practice worth the name, and for healing needed so plainly and deeply.
As a set of guidelines, the six principles my new school works to embody and put into practice offer a new angle on some profound Pagan principles. I’ll list them, then look at each one from my own perspective. (Season to your taste. After all, in the end we’re the ones who choose to adopt — or refuse — whole sets of values. Whatever story we tell about them later, we’ve chosen or turned from them.)
Be here.
Be safe.
Be honest.
Let go and move on.
Set goals.
Care for self and others.
Be here. Am I here, fully, now? Well, in New Jersey, yes. Over our last week of professional development, one presenter made a point I’ve been carrying around. We tell kids, and adults too, to “pay attention!”. But do we ever teach how to do that? What’s it mean, really? Is it just one thing, or a collection of practices? Is it even always the same thing?
I’m going to look at “being here” in terms of trees. When I walk up to and greet one of my new favorite trees here in NJ, I’m also listening for a rhythm, a wave of energy that has its own pulse. It may take me a bit to tune in to it, or once I do tune in, to harmonize with it. Touch can help. The give-and-take is part listening, part sinking into myself. I’m both more with the tree, and also more with myself. Trees differ as much as humans, so the rhythm or pulse differs with each one. Some challenge. Some welcome. Some heal. Some rouse. Some just have better things to do than interact with humans — nothing personal, you understand.
Being here is listening, feeling, monitoring, relaxing, attending — a whole cluster of practices and responses that intermesh and modify each other. Fortunately, the tree (usually) takes part and helps, like in any conversation, to make an exchange happen, and make it instructive or beneficial for both parties.
Be safe. Many of the girls at the school have struggled in other places, had bad experiences as learners, face significant gaps in capacities that would let them thrive in public high schools, and vary widely in their command of work-arounds, strategies, self-awareness, support systems, and so on that help them play to the strengths each one has. How can they or any of us feel safe in a world of change and challenge and heartbreak? Significantly, other people can be a resource. In the favoritism that the West and particularly the U.S. shows to independence and self-reliance, we often overlook the family, the group, the tribe.
The girls — and faculty, too — are trained to “call group”, to ask for the help of class, team, squad, dining table, or entire school. Call group for clarification: what does each person understand about the task at hand? Call it for celebration: let’s acknowledge what we’ve accomplished. (Ask another person to call group on your behalf, if you’re too shy or stressed to do it yourself). Call it for confrontation: let someone who has bullied or threatened another hear that the group knows and rejects that behavior. Can we do that and still be safe? Can we do it and not become bullies or sources of intimidation ourselves?
Are we ultimately safe in this universe we inhabit? Is the cosmos malevolent, seeking us out to crush us and pulverize every plan and hope? If we know fully our kinship with all life, the great teachers tell us, then we can indeed be safe here. But how to get there, just like how to pay attention, is something we rarely teach, or are rarely taught ourselves. Pay attention! Be safe! How, please, can I do that? Is it safe to be here, where I’m called to be?
Be honest. Can we be honest, and safe, too? Show me!
Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”, which gets quoted a lot for various purposes, offers a kind of Pagan gospel, a trust in a deep and intricate order that our human drama often belies. Maybe we could call this the Pagan trust, one of the most honest things a Pagan can tell you about life and the cosmos.
You do not have to be good. [Really? So many moral codes tell us otherwise!]
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves. [Danger! say many scriptures. Disaster! Damnation! Doom!]
The poem shifts in what feels to me like its second pulse, the second chamber of its heart. It doesn’t say our soft animal bodies automatically transform every problem. They’re a start, not an endpoint. Start with the fact of embodiment, says Oliver. Whether or not my attention is here right now, my body sure is. But what’s next?
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
What are we to make of the “meanwhiles”? Like so many of us, you may have experienced the strange double vision of intense grief or other emotion, while the whole rest of the world all around you goes on, continues, unconcerned. Depending on where you are in your intensity, that may confuse or enrage or sadden you. How dare the cosmos not notice my suffering? Or, alternatively, if you’re swept up in a big high, why aren’t more people celebrating the amazingness of simply being alive?
But we’re not alone in the lows any more than in the highs, however isolating our internal hurricane can feel at times. But how can something of the wild geese “high in the clean blue air” communicate itself to me here in the middle of my grief or rage or despair? Here, where I’m paying attention, because I’m held in the grip of an immensity and can’t do anything else anyway, even if I wanted to.
Oliver generously, Druidically, gives us three “meanwhiles”, so perhaps we may hear at least one. But how exactly do I “head home again” out of all this?
One powerful key, or two together, appear in what I feel is the final “pulse” of the poem:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Imagination and family. How do we access this connection, our place in the family of things? One way is through the imagination, which — like attention — we’re rarely taught how to use. No wonder the West suffers. It’s thrown aside many of the skills and strengths of imagination. We see the suspicion of art and the fear of imagination and transformation outside any sanctioned practices or churches or political persuasions or sexual orientations. So often we see the world, or a pretty fair chunk of it, as “out to get us”, instead of “inside to help us”. Imagination, that bottomless source of so much misery and joy. It’s imagination that connects us to our true family.
Meanwhile — Oliver’s wonderful, terrible word — meanwhile, the cosmos pays no attention to our fear. It just keeps sending us messengers, in spite of anything we do. It just keeps announcing the deep good news of our real place in the family.
Melas commented thoughtfully on the previous post, and I’d like to reflect on his words here. In trying to explore the questions he raises, ultimately I end up pushing hard against my own doubts and understandings and probable prejudices. By this I mean I’m mostly arguing with myself, not Melas. So here goes …
First, Melas’s initial observation:
The poem, though short, is moving, especially upon a reflection, as you have provided. Without considering the poet’s evident meaning or original intention, I’d venture upon a somewhat different interpretation than yours, that is, one based on my traditional views. Let us at least agree that ancestry bears some degree of importance in any tradition of polytheism; the difficult questions are, how much, and what if one is of mixed ethnic ancestry?
I’ll add to Melas’s two “difficult questions” here and make them four: Does ancestry in fact matter, how much, what if one is of mixed ancestry, and does polytheism affect the issue one way or another? (One or many gods, or none, we all have the same energies to work with. Or do we live in wholly different universes simply because we group and name and work with these energies differently?) To continue a theme from the previous post, if we consider a person of Greek descent whose ancestors for at least ten or more generations were most likely Orthodox Christians, is practicing Hellenismos, reconstructed Greek polytheism, a comfortable or straightforward way to find harmony with these most recent ancestors, to enlist their aid, or to maintain their tradition? Or consider the opposite: is the Orthodox Christian angering all those ancestors who preceded Christianity? Is it merely a numbers game?
When I welcome ancestors — the occasionally monotheist, sometimes pantheist, intermittently polytheist being that I am — I invite those sympathetic to me, one of their descendants, today. (Who else, after all, would want to come? Think of those family events you’ve tried to escape!) In this sense, ancestry is indeed everything. I’m here because of them, and with them rest both my gratitude and reverence. But I face choices and challenges both similar to and different from ones they faced. I have ancestors who were Christians, Pagans, atheists, agnostics, animists, polytheists and shamans. How do we sort out such identifications and allegiances?
Do the last thirty generations of so of Christian ancestors of varying degrees of devotion and wisdom trump hundreds of generations and more of pre-Christian ancestors? Will the polytheists among them fight the monotheists in the Otherworld, or at my ritual circle? Does more recent ancestry matter more than the more ancient strains? OBOD’s standard ritual includes a declaration of peace, without which no work can proceed. Those who work the rituals can attest to the power of that declaration, and to the tenor and energy of the rites that follow. What we do, and who we welcome, matter here and now. A feast is ultimately for those who actually attend (though even to be invited is pleasing, too). To paraphrase Jesus, many are called, but fewer are fed.
King’s poem in the previous post acknowledges his
people
back to the beginning of
life,
In the witness of the gods
and the ungods
Back to the beginning: bug and bird, beast and beech tree. I suspect, one of the words I prefer to use in place of believe, because it captures both my doubt and my intuition, that such matters as commitments and practices from one life may recede when we drop the body of that life. We work on what we need to learn. If we truly do experience all things as we move through each circle of existence and awareness, as some Druids teach, then so do our ancestors along their journeys. Some things we give up, even as we take on others. (Some will follow us through many lives.) Whether this time around I was baptized into the “right” church, or offered the traditional gifts to welcome my spirit guide on my vision quest, may matter little compared to our enduring work along the Spiral of all beings to learn and grow in strength and love. And from what I’ve seen, we’re all slow learners. The Spiral is large and long.
Melas comments:
To the first [how much does ancestry matter?], I would say as much as possible, since a connection by blood is an inner force and connection (literally and figuratively) that can’t be replaced easily or dispensed with as unessential. I am not wholly Greek in ancestry, but my ancestors are partly from neighboring nations, and therefore choosing for me is easier than someone half-Greek and half-Chinese. In such a case, it would be best to take a side, I mean join one tradition without scorning the other, since large distance is inconvenient and causes confusion in the mind and heart.
When the choosing is clear, the choice can align the chooser quite effectively within a tradition that can be a solace and a guide, a source of strength and identity. Today many are still born with such a clear ancestral heritage. In such a case, it may indeed “be best to take a side, I mean join one tradition without scorning the other”. Perhaps Americans feel more keenly the “confusion in the mind and heart” that Melas talks about, with our often mixed ancestries. Confusion may result, whether the distance is physical, cultural, linguistic, genetic, spiritual, psychological, etc.
But should I then be a Christian, because everyone in my immediate family was, and because though I’m deliciously mongrel in many ways, most of my more recent Swiss German, English, Welsh, French, and Scottish ancestors were Christian as well? (I have transcripts of letters from one ancestor eight generations back, admonishing her children to strengthen their faith in trying times.) Should I be Catholic, or Protestant, or provoke ire on all sides and practice a blend of Christianity and Druidry?
Candomble ritual, Brazil
And I call to mind people known to me personally, who don’t count among their keys to identity a genetic match in this particular life to a particular tradition that nonetheless calls deeply to them. Is there no place for an Asian or African in an often Euro-centric tradition like Druidry? Most traditions of Druidry I know welcome all who come with good will and an open heart, regardless of DNA. And that feels right to me, and to many others. Does that weaken the tradition, or strengthen it? Or indeed not affect it either way?
What are we to make of those whose inner experiences orient them toward traditions outside their apparent genetic heritage? What of the Euro-American adopted into a Native American tribe? The person of mixed ancestry who practices two or more traditions, a syncretism that seems more the rule than the exception, if we look at human history? Many homes in America find ways to honor a colorful braid of ancestral strands, Latino and Jewish and Thai, Catholic and Native American and Nigerian, etc. Haitians practice Vodoun, and Candomble and Santeria flourish in many places in the Americas — syncretistic forms all of them.
Santeria initiate
What of other new traditions, and restored ones, among people who already have a clear cultural and genetic identity? Native Americans have established the Native American Church, a distinctive set of beliefs and practices blending Christianity and shamanism, with sacramental use of peyote. As a Wise One once quipped, “There is little nature likes so much as to destroy old forms and then create new ones like them”. Do the ancestors of Native tribes ignore their descendants because of this innovation? I suspect — that word, again — that the ancestors either haven’t figured out yet, or worry about it a great deal less than we do.
Melas closes:
This point of the essential connection between ancestors and polytheism is too often overlooked nowadays, and I think it is dangerous. If we don’t stick firmly and mainly to a certain tradition and people (again, without scorning others), we expose ourselves to the uneasiness (sometimes misery) of uncertainty, and further we render traditions unlasting, empty and jumbled by removing distinctions from them.
Does the distinctiveness of a tradition depend on ancestry, or on honoring the ancestors? I see these as different things. I may know next to nothing of my ancestry, or through misinformation and deliberate ancestral deception I may believe things that are inaccurate, but the existence of my ancestors is still indisputable. And what of ancestors of spirit, those who have taught and trained and nourished me though we have no kinship by blood? They matter equally to me and to many others. Are such calls outside our blood the calls of those ancestors?
In the end, I’d argue that the distinctiveness or value of a tradition is simply this: does it meet the needs of those who practice it? Does it nourish the heart and spirit? Does it answer our innermost cry? If it does, it thrives and flourishes: wethrive and flourish in it. If it doesn’t, then like all things in this world, it changes or dies. It may be distinct, but dead. We contain, but also surpass, all that we do. That’s time-bound, however wonderful it is. And we live in more than one world at once, acting in each. But each of us is also still a seed, a potential, waiting in the earth, even as along time’s spiral we fruit and die, sprout again and blossom. The world shows us that much every year.
Irish poet Dennis King opens his poem “Altú” “Grace” like this: “I láthair mo mhuintire …” “In the presence of my people …”, finding reason in human existence itself for thanks. So often we need gratitude most when we feel it least. But on to the poem:
In the presence of my
people
back to the beginning of
life,
In the witness of the gods
and the ungods,
In homage to the
immense
generosity of the universe,
I give thanks
before my portion.
I’m going to do the English teacher thing you and I both have learned to detest: take a perfectly good piece of writing and analyze its parts. My goal, however, is not some obscure symbol-hunt or post-Modern Deconstructionist manipulation, but the pursuit of wisdom. What can this poem teach me?
First, King acknowledges witnesses. I live in the presence of my people, whether I belong to an extended family of the living, by blood or choice, or to the default tribe each of us can claim, one among a host of ancestors. All we do and are takes place in their presence. We don’t need to summon, invoke, or invite them, though it’s a courtesy in ritual, and it serves to remind us we’re companioned always.
Look in the mirror and you see the ancestors in eyes, nose, hair, line of jaw and length of limb. Consider what goes deeper than skin, and you can find them in your temper, your tastes, native tongue, social class and assorted beliefs and prejudices. Yes, you’ve added your own variations on these themes, and many of these you can shift to some degree through chance and choice and effort.
Send off for the increasingly popular DNA check, and you may find, depending on the accuracy of the particular test, that your tribe includes ancestors from unexpected places, that you can claim roots in many lands — that you even have something like a choice of tribes, if you’re looking to trade labels or identities.
Hellenic ritual
If the genetic test runs true that my father’s cousin ran a few years ago, I have some Greek ancestors, though family trees I’ve received and researched back ten generations or more on both sides offer no hint to explain an “8% Hellenic background”. But what does thatmean, anyway? Wanderers, all of us, with ancestors as human, amorous, deceitful and restless as any of our relatives alive today. If because of all this I opt to worship Zeus, Athena, Hermes or Dionysos, they may or may not deign to notice. It’s an option for me, of course, and there are Reconstructionist Hellenists today who are reviving the old ways, Olympian style. But is that my call, or calling?
“Back to the beginning of life”, King continues. Whoever played a part in launching this whole enterprise of living, “gods or ungods” or lightning zapping the primordial chemical stew of a young Earth, we’re here and thinking (and drinking) about these things. And so these possible witnesses deserve acknowledgement, too. Why?! Because whether or not they exist, to remember and honor them even for a moment does me good. It enlarges my sympathies, and sets my life in a field much larger than what my social security number and bank PIN code and town tax ID and physical address suggest I am. We’re more, I hope we keep remembering, than the boxes we check on the endless forms we fill out. No single identity can define me, so why insist on just one? Pagan, white, childless, married, cancer survivor, writer, heterosexual, teacher, male: any one of these, and many more, could be a life-project to explore. Does one contradict or deny another? Does a census or a faction or political party or church begin to define me? Yes, you say?
Who are the true “authorities” in my life? Ancestors of scores of millennia, or a few political office-holders of the current arrangement, fulfilling one piece of their own lives by holding up one political system among how many possibilities? “I am large”, says Walt Whitman. “I contain multitudes”. (Easy to say, Walt, if no one insists on you being small, single, unitary, one thing only. Box checked, census complete, status once-and-for-always. But how large a claim about me, this thing I was born into, am I willing to assert?)
To exist at all is gift. “In homage to the immense generosity of the universe”: what would my life look like if I lived it daily in such homage? Can I begin to imagine it? Could I begin today, in small ways that could build over time?
“I give thanks before my portion”. Physically before: there it is, on plates and in bowls and cups. And temporally: before I take any of it into my body, I thank. Not after. Gratitude, how many doors can you open?
My portion: each of us has a part, a piece, a portion. If you’re a Christian, and you take Communion, the bread and wine or grape juice represent, or become, the inexhaustible blood and body of God. We eat and drink god-stuff, ungod-stuff. Our portion is endlessly refilling, and replenishing. To find and know and cherish my true portion: another project worthy of a life, of living.
In the previous post I said I’d talk about prayers and praying. If there’s a blogger’s equivalent to stage fright, I get it at least 50% of the time. I commit, I step up, and — yup, there it is, running its paws along my spine. (It helps keep me paying attention to guidance I receive.) Who am I to write some of the stuff I’ve written? I’m a person like you, alive today. That’s all the authority any of us needs.
front yard, hydrangeas, 17 August 2017
Anne Lamott’s Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers offers a helpful starting point for prayer and fasting. Because each of the three kinds of prayers in her title combine both: I can’t ask for help if I don’t fast from pride or despair. I can’t be grateful if I’m caught up in fear and anger, and so on. Prayer IS fasting, and vice versa — a magical choice to place our attention not where anybody else wants it but where we choose.
Sometimes all I can do is ask for help. Often asking — even trying to ask — opens a door, especially if I can shut up before and after, even if it just means hearing the hinges squeak. Something’s in motion that wasn’t before.
After a three-year job search, I despaired of outside help. Persistence and patience between them do gather up tremendous reservoirs of energy. But you get in line, one of my wife’s go-to techniques, and you advance until it’s your turn just wasn’t working for me.
Until it did. Last week I received a solid job offer to do just what I’d been asking for. But because it was out-of-state, because it meant a move and other changes — because it asked me to grow into it — I immediately found several reasons to say, quite loudly, NO! Fortunately, just not to the person offering me the job. As U. K. LeGuin so gracefully puts it, I had to enlarge my heart to accept the gift.* And I had to recognize the gift as gift before I could even do that.
I ask you — what can the gods do with such mortals?!
Often, a lot.
Hemlocks, north property line, 17 Aug. 2017
Other times you just want to say thanks. If I haven’t done so for a while, I can tell by how it feels to start up again. Like I’d forgotten a key ingredient. But now it’s back in the sauce, the mix tastes sweeter, the glue sticks, the paint dries to an appealing hue.
This blog offers guarantees very rarely, and for good reason. But practice no other prayer than gratitude for a year and a day, then get back in touch. I guarantee this triad: transformation, wonder, and a new conviction in you.
Wow is a third kind of prayer. If you choose, you can perceive awe as a form of tribute, a gift at the altar. “The finest emotion of which we are capable”, Einstein exclaimed. “is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science”. Even if we scale it back for the sake of the skeptical among us, who doesn’t appreciate awe? How else to feel so small and so connected at the same time?
In a post from a few years ago I looked at a “prayer prompt” I still find valuable.
The prayer serves as a starting point for how I try to pray for others in difficulty without mucking things up further for them with what I think they need. It’s also more eloquent than I can usually manage to be, which never hurts either.
In the excerpt below, from Mary Renault’s splendid evocation of classical Greece, The Last of the Wine, a friend of the main character Alexias is speaking, near the tail end of the suffering that much of Greece experienced during the three brutal decades of the Peloponnesian War:
We have entreated many things of the gods, Alexias. Sometimes they gave and sometimes they saw it otherwise. So today I petitioned them as Sokrates once taught us: ‘All-knowing Zeus, give me what is best for me. Avert evil from me, though it be the thing I prayed for; and give the good which from ignorance I do not ask.’ — Mary Renault. The Last of the Wine. Pantheon Books, 1964, pg. 344.
Can I pray for what’s best for me, can I keep alert for its first stirrings when it arrives, even or especially when it’s not what I thought I wanted? If I can answer yes even someof the time, change can open my heart to possibilities I’d otherwise turn away from, if not actively shut down. Then maybe I’m ready to pray for others, too. (We won’t mention changes that come to all of us anyway, unasked for. Welcome, travelers of all realms, whisper the gods, to these worlds of time and space. Buckle up.)
Other times prayer means simply immersion. I go for a favorite walk, I sit with a favorite CD, a song or chant for meditation, or I follow a theme in a series of meditation sessions, and I’m in it. Borne away from here-and-now to there-and-then. Sometimes I only know when I return, like waking from a dream, that wherever I was, it sure wasn’t here. And I’m better for it.
Formal prayer has its place, too. As many do, I find Iolo Morganwg’s Gorsedd Prayer, also called the Druid Prayer, which Morganwg first spoke publicly at the 1792 summer solstice, a comfort:
Grant, O God/dess/Spirit/etc., thy protection,
and in protection, strength,
and in strength, understanding,
and in understanding, knowledge,
and in knowledge, the knowledge of justice,
and in the knowledge of justice, the love of it,
and in that love, the love of all existences,
and in the love of all existences, the love of God/dess/etc.,
and all goodness.
You may turn to other prayers, or you’ve written your own. I’ve mentioned sources like Caitlin Matthews’ Celtic Devotional. Sometimes all I can manage is the spontaneous cry of the heart, standing at my backyard fire circle, facing an indoor altar, or stunned to despair while I stand in the shower, hot water indistinguishable from tears. You go with what comes.
Sometimes it’s stillness I’m called to. In the stillness I may receive much. The blessing of turning off the monkey mind. Intimations of the future. A nudge towards or away a choice, a pattern, a practice, a person. Or any of a range of still small voices that will never shout to be heard, that have waited patiently for me to listen once again.
Sometimes it’s a reminder about a commitment I’ve made. In that case it’s a god invoking me, rather than the other way round. How have I answered, how will I answer, now? The offering I made was for my own good as well as a gift. The service I vowed transforms me in the doing of it, even as it fulfills a request by guide or god or spirit I have promised.
Sit, sing, and wait, counsels one of my teachers, if I need things to clarify, and no other path seems clear. And a book that same teacher delights in offers two additional pieces of advice, opening and closing the same paragraph: “Hold all and wait … Drop all and start over again.” Both valid, both true, both potent for good. How to know which to practice, other or either, if not both at once? I turn once again, I return, listening, praying, fasting. Don’t we all?
/|\ /|\ /|\
LeGuin, U. K. A Wizard of Earthsea. Bantam Books, 1968, pg. 69.
Hail, Goddess. I will go with what I know,
with what you show: you give me
nine runes, nine paths of storm;
you tell me their wisdom lies in riding changes,
walking the storm-paths. So I ask how
I may serve in return for your gift.
Speak how, instead of squaring the circle,
to try circling the square. Not to share
exact shapes [of the runes], but their greater principle
you may share. [For] they form a sequence:
linear as you received them, but also
a circle or spiral. Four by three, and three by four:
ending and beginning lie side-by-side,
or — you will understand it —
directly above and below each other,
[on] different rounds of the spiral.
The Runes of Thecu combine straight lines
and circular shapes — lines of force
and vortices or whorls [of energy in motion].
How to ride changes?
Practice [with the runes] to find out.
And I will guide you.
How to transcribe what you receive in such instances? Well, the obvious answer is this: you do the best you can. And you ask, usually more than once, for clarification.
Let me puncture any mystery here: the words I attribute above to Thecu came during three intervals. The first and second, along with runes, over the past week, in two separate periods of meditation. The first led to the insight that Thecu was offering guidance on how to walk “nine paths of storm”, and a preliminary sense of what that might mean. The first five runes also came then, drafts scribbled on scrap paper, as I tried to get their shapes to match the different flows of energy my inner experience felt like it conveyed. The same thing a second time, two days later.
Then this morning: I already knew I was going to write about this, and I’d made a draft, along with the admonition I’d received not to share except in general terms the insight of the runes. So in about five minutes the above lines came, as I attempted to pull together fragmentary notes about the runes and render the impression of those meditation sessions into something more like continuous speech.
Are they “the words of the goddess”? Sure. Also, no and yes. In keeping with the deep wisdom of unverified personal gnosis (UPG), they’re meant to be tested and tried out, to see how their truths work for me. One key to practice, and it can be disconcerting, is to shift from “UPG mode” to “critical thinking mode”. I get this stuff in ways similar to how I get pieces of poems and stories. And it’s the same kind of thing: then you have to figure out what to do with them. Sometimes the message, image, metaphor is clear. Other times, it needs shaping or untangling. And to keep honest about proportions of these things has indisputable value, but not — it needs to said as well — spiritual primacy. The impulse-message-insight-inspiration needs to get recorded before, like such things do, it flows away like cloud.
And I share this experience for what it’s worth to others who may encounter similar impressions, nudges, doubts and insights. What to make of such things? For me, it’s to see how and where they might fit in living my life, and whether their usefulness, if any, merits passing along anything about them to others. So I serve notice here most of all to myself. Any value to this experience will emerge, or not, in and over time. And I will try to report that here.
We can of course take an a-gnostic approach to all of the above as well: I sense changes coming (no surprise at all, given the state of the world!) and my imagination/subconscious is throwing up images, ideas, tools, hints to help me deal with them. Useful, wholly apart from the nature of their origin, because they’re intended to be empirical: their value lies in what they can do, what I can do with them. Who says the imagination or subconscious has no practical value? In some ways, that’s the ONLY thing it has.
Site statistics for the last post drew readers from surprisingly varied lands: Vietnam, South Africa, Argentina, Ukraine and Latvia among them. I highlight these simply because their national languages aren’t English (with the exception of S. Africa). Not only are readers there interested in Druidry, but they’re seeking out English-language media that talk about it.
“Show us applied Druidry and we’ll pay attention”, you’re saying.
Here’s a follow-up, an excerpt from my “post-mortem” journal entry after the ritual. Because “feels” don’t really tell the whole story, as you’ll see. How I think a ritual progressed, and the whole picture with every factor included, can be two different things.
First off is the ritual set. You know: state of mind, weather, time of day, preparation. Alert. Noticing many animal presences, especially ants, flies, aphids, grasshoppers. Slightly edgy, the way I often feel when stuff’s going on I know I don’t otherwise notice. (Material for later meditation there.) Weather sunny and clear, 73 F (23 C). Approximately 2:00 pm. Preparation minimalist, with a few objects I was led to choose in meditation earlier that day. (Barely visible, behind and below the cup to the left/north sits a black Cherokee owl cup, containing objects from my first OBOD initiation, along with a symbol of the wild boar, one of my animal guides. (Yes, in one sense this wasn’t “minimalist” at all; I’d pulled out all the stops for this rite.)
Below is an image with the fire lit, a little more than halfway through the rite. I began with a standard OBOD ritual opening: “By the power of star and stone, by the power of the land within and without …”
In the picture I’m facing East. Directly in front of me is the blue bowl of water for West. To the right, South, the dragon candle-holder, with a green candle.
“Green for South?” I hear the purists gasp. Yup. Why? As one of my friends might say (and spell) it, that’s the color of “the green fyre” of nature. I’d been nudged to use green at our Midsummer ritual. More than the sun, how the Land flourishes under the sun at the solstice says “summer” to me. Your climate and tools differ? Excellent! We’re both learning to listen to what’s in our faces and under our feet and in our hearts.
On the far side of the circle in the East is a deer-bone whistle from Serpent Mound. Its high pitch matched the cry of birds overhead, the wind in the trees. Finally, to the left and North is my Ovate anchor stone and one of several offerings, a cup of milk and a slice of bread (already offered by the time of this picture), white for the northern snow, for Lugh Lord of Light, and for Thecu Stormbringer*, for fertility and harvest both, how we are all nourished from the time we are born, “the fat of the land”. What is it that fire burns, after all?
Dry wood lay ready, kindling and newspaper, too. I’d just said these words “I ask your aid in consecrating this fire circle and the greater circle, that has its center here, its circumference everywhere.”
Out with the book of matches. One after another. Nothing. The fire wouldn’t light.
So back into the house for wooden matches. “Disaster! Bad omens abound! No fire means no passion, no energy for your work. AND you broke your ritual circle!”
Well, no. Remember the part above about the “greater circle”? I was still in it. I pondered the nudge to include this line as I wrote it earlier in the day. And if such “ritual breakage” distresses you in your own rites, you know what to do: cut yourself a ritual doorway, The circle won’t blow away during the few minutes you’re gone.
Sometimes a break in the ritual points to a specific focus for the ritualist to attend to. I took the need to get better matches as a ritual message: when I tend any fire — energy — passion — heat — will — decision — I need to pay particular attention to beginnings, to my tools, to an extra step that might be necessary to assist with manifestation. Fire spoke: any ritual worth its salt links self-as-home together with the ritual action. Fire comes from within as much as from without. Much more useful and to the point than irrational fear of bad ritual mojo.
“I kindle this fire in honor of all the elements, earth and form and north the altar, air and breath and east the means, water and cauldron and west the capacity.”
At length, after a meditation I’m still reflecting on, the closing, again adapted from OBOD ritual: “As the outer fire dies down, may it remain a pure flame within. This circle is closed in the apparent world. May its inspiration continue within us all, a gift”.
/|\ /|\ /|\
*In the next post, an update on my work with Thecu of the Nine Paths of Storm.
A lot of talk these days about truth or reality and fakeness, almost as if our era was the only one ever so burdened, so challenged, so troubled by discerning the difference. So I cheer when I find a key to help me along the way, one I can hold up to the light and turn in my hands and consider, one I can offer to you and see whether it serves your need, too.
Es ist alles wahr wodurch du besser wirst, runs a German proverb Thoreau quotes in his journal entry for October, 1837 — “Everything is true through which we become better.”
I love this as a test for truth. No abstraction here, but rather a laboratory prompt, a calibration on our internal alethiometers, to use the example of Philip Pullman’s delicate device for measuring truth.
In the first volume of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, Pullman describes the alethiometer like this:
It was very like a clock, or a compass, for there were hands pointing to places around the dial, but instead of the hours or the points of the compass there were several little pictures, each of them painted with the finest and slenderest sable brush (Northern Lights, 1995).
(Do you have your own alethiometer already? You do? Is it in good working order? Or are you looking for one?)
And that in turn should tell me something. As much as it is anything else, truth is an image, a whole set of images, that I carry around. From childhood onward, from experience, from stories, movies and the examples of others, from my culture and the era I was born and grew up in, I gather up and walk with a museum of images. Does what I see and experience right now match those pictures? If not, can it be true? How can it be true?
Everything is true through which we become better. Should I walk around asking, “Have you become better yet?” Well, no: unless I start first with myself. You know this is my principal strategy for avoiding insufferable arrogance, spiritual myopia and self-righteousness. Turn the edge on myself first, before urging the blade on others. A better question is “How did you do it? And can I generalize a principle, extract a technique from your answer, so that I can pull it off, too?”
What am I doing, what have I done, and has it helped? Have I become better? If so, can I do more of it? How Druidic! Rather than an eternal and external standard to which I must somehow conform but which is native, apparently, to nobody, instead I practice one dependent on my life and my experience. Yet we can recognize a shared quality in both our experiences, even though they’re different. What can that tell us? What are we perceiving? Part of an answer seems to lie in the relationship between honoring my own experience even as I honor another’s.
To give a specific example, echinacea consistently upsets my system, but my wife finds it a wonderful aid. My truth doesn’t trump hers, but neither does hers negate mine. One principle does for both: if it helps, if through it I become better, it’s true for me. As with freedom, so with truth: yours ends where mine begins, and vice versa. Force either on me and they cease being what they are, but become their own opposites. (We still endlessly practice this negative magic on ourselves and each other.)
I do ritual alone, or with others, and stand together in a circle with the Visible and the Invisible to welcome the sacred. My wife and I work at our marriage, and it has its good and better years, like anything planted and cultivated, watered and weeded. I fell out of touch with a college friend, and we’ve drifted apart. I remember others regularly, and our relationship still holds true.
I find truth in the quality of such relationships. Improving a relationship is one way I become better.
Oh, uniformity or conformity has its place. Build a house and you want dimensions as close as you can measure and cut them. We also speak of angles, materials and directions as true. True north. We’re dismayed, or gratified, when potentials and promises come true. In a ritual it’s helpful if we work together. The chant grows stronger when we say or sing the words in unison, like any chorus. Unity can be … fun.
Alan Watts (1915-1973)
The principle remains, whatever the design of the structure you build, house or ritual, song or life. As Alan Watts quipped decades ago — I can’t locate the source offhand — most creatures on the planet are endless variations on a single design: tubes with various attachments. (We’re improvisations, like jazz, like the unrepeatable concert version your favorite band performs of its signature song.) What wonderful diversity elaborating and playing with that unitary principle!
But what’s diversity for? I remember my first years at the school where I taught, serving as international student adviser. “Students from 38 countries!” the school brochures and website crowed at the time. “OK,” I said at one faculty meeting, feeling out the parameters of my new position. “We’ve got diversity. Now what do we do with it?” I genuinely wanted to know. No one answered. But I wasn’t being rhetorical. Was “having” diversity enough? Was that the goal, now achieved, box checked, on to the next item on some larger list? Was the school, were we, with our vaunted diversity, somehow now better? If so, how?! Could we measure it? Could we be or do something, anything, better as a result?
“I desire”, says Thoreau in Walden,
that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.
If we respect ourselves in all our quirky uniqueness and individuality, how can we not respect everything else? Your difference affirms mine. The world and all its creatures, the Chinese wan wu, “Ten Thousand Things”, announce this principle every moment. How can we not glory in such diversity?!
Apparently, to judge by what’s happening in so many places, we often can’t. Is it because we don’t trust our own uniqueness? Do we fear ourselves as distinct and free beings, and therefore fear everyone else who is also a unique self, different from us?
Does your difference help me become better? No, it must be said, not if I run from it in fear, or if I feel I must attack you to protect myself, or deny you any way to live your difference, so that it leaves mine alone. Shortsightedly, I could even claim your difference makes me worse, not better, because I don’t like it, or because you remind me of my own freedom and uniqueness. Because all difference urges me to the responsibility to live from that knowledge. No, I don’t want to become better. Save me from any such transformations! I want to be, not become.
I find truth in the quality of relationship. I want to connect to others who help me become, just as I want to help them become more of who they are.
Selfishly, I readily admit, they’re more fun to be around when they’re becoming than when they’re locked in fear and desperately trying to remain who they are. And paradoxically, they become more of who they are when they keep changing and growing. And so, they tell me, do I.
Yes, the Great Self of the Cosmos first says Be! But then its continues, saying Become! I want to hear those Words and live them. Because what else is there? Serving something larger than the self, another paradox here, fulfills the self. All the many species around me live and flourish and die and return because they and I are what the cosmos does.
And ritual, song, art, creativity in solving problems, joy, relationships with other unique beings, are all ways to express and take part in and complete that doing.
Yes, to be national for a moment, the motto on our U.S. currency proclaims E pluribus unum — “Out of many, one”. When you start with states that are nearly independent nations, unity can hold great allure.
In other contexts, too, of course, we seek that uni-verse, that “one-turning”, of one-ness. But if we seek a more whole truth, a “single turning” through which we might become better, we also recognize and acknowledge and begin to live from its other half, too — its complement, which we’ve often overlooked: Ex uno plures — “Out of One, many”. As the old song goes, echo of a cosmic melody, you can’t have one without the other.
Long-time readers of this blog know my admiration for Henry David Thoreau (who rhymed his name with “borrow”). I’m well into a new biography* of him, and reminded by a New York Times book review that today is his 200th birthday.
*Walls, Laura Dassow. Thoreau: A Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. (Go for the Kindle edition; hardcover is $35!)
Partly from Thoreau (1817-1862) and his Transcendentalist circle, but also of course from vivid Medieval conceptions, Westerners get Nature-with-a-capital-N, that idealized if not deified Presence. In the same millennium-old perception, we get two Books of Wisdom as well. The Book of Scripture, the Bible, yes. But also the Book of Nature. (Ah, but which is volume one and which is sequel?)
From the Concord, Massachusetts man and his most famous book, we learn his credo: “In Wildness is the preservation of the world”. For there is a tameness that allows us to live together at all, that is much but not all of what we mean by “civilization”, and another (or perhaps the same) tameness that makes us lie down in front of the onrushing disasters of the day, provided they don’t touch us too directly and painfully.
Or at least not right away. (Boil me gradually, and I’m a happy frog or lobster.) A few posts ago, I wrote of making coffee in an analogy for doing ritual: any trade deal made or broken is fine with me — until it deprives me of a ready supply of overseas beans. Or let’s say I do step forward, full of fire and righteous indignation (is there any other kind?!) to protest a worthy Druid-y cause, putting my life on the line, what then? Isn’t my life always on the line? As one follower* of a certain wilderness prophet cautioned us long ago: “I may even give away all that I have to the poor, and give up my body to be burned. But if I don’t have love, none of these things will help me”. More to the point, I’d say, will they help anyone else?
There’s also a wildness in “a certain forest god”, as John Beckett calls Cernunnos. As without, so within. There’s a wildness in each of us that politicians are eager to sedate and numb to stasis with material consumption and soundbites and spin. There’s a wildness like that of the Wild Hunt of European legend and myth, which modern Pagans, among others, have elaborated in provocative directions. The wildness of Nature isn’t Sunday-afternoon safe, and direct contact with it (if we survive) can strip away our pretences and excuses, can initiate us into powerful awareness and lasting change.
But like Tolkien’s Ents, we don’t like to be “roused”. I’ll fight tooth and claw for a comfortable cage, if one’s on offer, rather than for freedoms I claim I desire. For someone like Thoreau, Walls declares, “The dilemma that pressed upon him was how to live the American Revolution not as dead history but as living experience that could overturn, and keep overturning, hidebound convention and comfortable habits”. For we humans stand at the hinge, the pivot, the axis, in and of nature and yet able for a time to hold ourselves apart from it. Because where else is there?
Still, we strive to contrive and survive, little Sarumans every one of us. “Once out of nature”, writes W B Yeats in his almost infamous poem “Sailing to Byzantium”,
I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling …
Artifice, civilization, nature, justice? Just let me live forever, something in me cries. Just that, and I’ll sacrifice everything else to achieve it. You too can sail to Byzantium — for a price.
“Send lawyers, guns, and money”, says Warren Zevon in a song with the same title. “I’m the innocent bystander. Somehow I got stuck between the rock and a hard place. And I’m down on my luck …” Solutions present themselves. Not all deserve us. Few have anything to do with luck. And innocence or guilt completely misses the point of now. We’re all in it.
But wait …
“Once outof nature”? Are we now in that impossible place? Is that the legacy of the much-bandied about “Anthropocene“, our mythical present day, that time when human action carries geological force? “Health”, said Thoreau, “is a sound relation to nature”. “Physician”, says the Galilean master, quoting wisdom already proverbial in his time, “heal thyself”.
Oh Yeats, let me take bodily form from every living thing, let me know form, let me inhabit nature fully, and I will understand better, I will heal, and I will be healed.
“So how did the ritual go?”
A lot of talk these days about truth or reality and fakeness, almost as if our era was the only one ever so burdened, so challenged, so troubled by discerning the difference. So I cheer when I find a key to help me along the way, one I can hold up to the light and turn in my hands and consider, one I can offer to you and see whether it serves your need, too.
In the first volume of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, Pullman describes the alethiometer like this:
Yes, to be national for a moment, the motto on our U.S. currency proclaims E pluribus unum — “Out of many, one”. When you start with states that are nearly independent nations, unity can hold great allure.
Long-time readers of this blog know my admiration for Henry David Thoreau (who rhymed his name with “borrow”). I’m well into a new biography* of him, and reminded by a New York Times book review that today is his 200th birthday.
There’s also a wildness in “a certain forest god”, as John Beckett calls 
A Druid Way 
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