Archive for the ‘Robert Frost’ Category
[Updated 26 July 2020]
Part of my what is ancestor magic. And — no surprise — it’s not a fully-worked-out thing by any means. It doesn’t need to be, because unlike fully-worked-out and therefore dead things, my magic is alive. Sometimes like all living things it changes and shifts where I don’t expect it. Yes, my mind can still run circles around my practice, with arguments like But the ancestors have already reincarnated and they’re off on new adventures. They’re not just waiting around on the off-chance that maybe you’ll finally notice them and pay attention to them!
To which another part of me answers You’re thinking from a limited vantage-point. There’s no time in the place where we meet with the ancestors. Or rather, all of time opens up, if we allow it, for ancestors and descendants alike. What I did yesterday and will do today ripples back and forth through time, just like the actions of everyone else flow and eddy and wash across other lives. Yes, in some of what I do, I fulfill an ancestral goal or vision in my life today, and also launch my own projects, and sow my own dreams. I may work to rebalance excesses and extremes set in motion long ago, and extend long-term projects and plans, even as I add my own energies to the stream which others in their turn live and work in. And some of those others may be the ancestors themselves, returned to take up the Great Work.
A tool for my magic and my connection to ancestors:
Below is a picture from nearly a century ago in 1922, of three generations on my mother’s side. In the small-town Iowa living room, she’s the youngest, the dark-haired three-year-old near the center, looking down at the doll in her arms. Everyone’s standing in front of the fireplace — though all you can see are the bricks and the mantle above. On either side of my mother are my aunt and uncle, ten and five respectively. The young woman on the arm of the chair to the right is my grandmother Lila, with her father, my great-grandfather, ensconced in the wicker chair, the bald patriarch of the clan, calmly reading. Facing him is my great-grandmother in a dark dress, her laced boots mirroring her husband’s. It’s all carefully posed, an image of the white middle-class domestic ideal of the time.
What magical uses here? you ask. So many. What is remembered lives, runs the Pagan proverb. Another is the magic of images themselves — this image, both frozen and alive in time, potent to evoke. (Remember that image is any sense impression: yours may be a song, or a recipe, the taste of family. Or an heirloom, cherished family object whose touch rouses memory.)
Another piece of magic: I know everyone’s names here, and the lives of everyone but my great-grandparents overlapped with mine. But I don’t need names to evoke anyone, because any evocation is built-in to my bones and blood. With each heartbeat I evoke them. They are each already a presence for me, quite literal pieces of my DNA, as well as the stories and impressions I carry. Put a finger on my pulse and I have a practice: with each heartbeat I say the Names — I live because you lived, you live through me. You stand by the family hearth, the fire that still lights and kindles in me, that I pass on.
In any situation, they are a council of elders to consult, a family gathering both in and outside time. One key is to ritualize this, or it will most likely remain a vague impression at best. How to ritualize it matters less: the act of holding them in my attention vividly, aided by gesture, words, objects, and a commitment simply to do the ritual, matter more. I can’t do it “wrong”.
Put a question in meditation, for example, being sure to write it down as well, and watch for dreams and subsequent meditations to round out the query. So much wisdom to draw on, if I can begin to listen to hear it. Each of my ancestors lived out a life with its sorrows and joys. My aunt who never married, in a time when single-dom was much rarer, but built a quiet and modest career as an editor, keeping her sexuality under wraps for most of her life. My uncle, who at 12 years old drove my great-grandmother along country roads in the family car, while she literally “rode shot-gun”, bagging pheasants for Sunday dinner. My grandmother, widowed young, who raised three children. My great-grandfather, who hunted and fished and homesteaded in Sun Valley, Idaho in the late 19th century, before settling down to farm life “back east” in Iowa.
With all this richness of human experience to draw on, I can draw on it to amplify my own, make better choices, honor their lives by living mine more fully, paying forward the investment in family that each made, just by being alive. In such a family gathering, they shift and move from their places in the photo, and turn to take up their lives, before and after the brief flash of the camera that captures their forms in two dimensions. (Oh, let me supply the third dimension of time!)
Another key: I can make of their strengths several charms to strengthen and clarify my path, holding their images and memory as I say the words and lay the spell on myself most of all:
Aim of the hunter is mine, to hit my target. Singleness of purpose is mine, to achieve my goal. Sureness of place is mine, to flourish where I find myself …
Part of my honoring and my magic both is to recognize and embody their strengths. It may reach concrete magical form as a bind-rune or ogham lettering of their names.
Now this is a fragment of my mother’s side of my family. My father’s side, from my perspective, is less easy and comfortable. My relationships with those ancestors are more troubled. Love doesn’t flow as easily or readily. But magic rests there, too, more potent for any difficulty — because they also survived. A great-great uncle and great-grandmother who immigrated to the U.S. in their teens, just the two of them, brother and sister making their way as family servants where they boarded, learning English and acclimating to a strange new country. Survivors of wars and their traumas. My grandmother with the weak heart, knowing a widow’s struggle to keep going through the Great Depression. Illnesses and early deaths. Both common stories, and also utterly personal. We each inherit a full roster of them, and are adding our own right now. Their lives, and my life, are utterly our own, and also glyphs to read for insight and prophecy. Stomach issues on my father’s side, cancer and ulcers: a challenge quite literally to learn better how to stomach the ups and downs of life. Heart issues — what challenges my heart today?
Far more often than I imagine, such signs and wisdom are plain, not hidden at all. Through the concrete details of their lives, the ancestors can provide personalized “prescriptions for living” for their descendants, like this one: find ways to drop stress to clear the path for yourself. Otherwise blockages and barriers will eat you up inside. You eventually arrive at a point where you can see that your inheritance is neither weakness nor strength, but an insight into a long project you’re an integral part of, one that comes with certain parameters you’re working with, whether you choose to recognize them or not, work with them or ignore them.
Practicing ancestral magic means family relationships don’t end just because of death, any more than they do because of birth. Travel to a different era along the time-track, to their time, and I’m the one not yet real, as yet unborn, simply one possibility among many, a descendant whisper they may not hear as they live their lives under clouds and sun, shadow and brightness as vivid as ours today. Yet my birth and subsequent life did happen, and I’m here in my own time, even as I visit theirs, and they visit mine.
I take up the photo again, and in the magic of images and numbers, I’m the seventh element, the six in the photograph complete in themselves, yet also waiting for a missing factor. This is a paradox to work with and explore, how and where (and when) we fit in the cycles and spirals. And it’s a chance, to listen and discover where we find a place, and how we contribute. It comes with work and listening, with knowing all that family means.
Any number of sacred writings have wisdom to offer here: “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars” (Proverbs 9:1). “The math and myth of seven”, notes Michael Schneider in his A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe, “the Heptad, are intimately related to those of twelve, the Dodekad. Both have in common the interplay of Triad and Tetrad, triangle and square. That is, 3 + 4 = 7, while 3 x 4 = 12” (pg. 233). Use your triangle of manifestation (1 | 2), find your triads, use your four elements, build your own 7 and 12.
But what about those perhaps harsh and bent branches of a family tree? Robert Frost, no stranger to difficult families or to the keenness of multiple personal losses, provides a key to a door that may seem shut and locked. Lest we think ancestral magic is closed to us because of breaking and broken families, he writes in one poem, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in”.
Not necessarily outwardly — that can indeed sometimes be too much to ask of anyone — but inwardly, where all magic is worked. Because Frost’s poem is a conversation between husband and wife about a hired man, someone who both does and doesn’t belong to the family, an increasingly common position many of us may find ourselves in. For the wife replies about home: “I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve”.
Ancestral magic finds us where we are, if we care to let it in. It’s then that we may discover how we’ve been practicing it all along in some form, and can build on that practice more consciously, in ways uniquely fitted to our lives and circumstances. I hope that I’ve supplied some hints and suggestions for how to go about recognizing practices we already have, and where we might amplify them, turning up the volume to hear what family, or just one wise member of it, has to tell us that may be useful in these challenging days.
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Previous posts touching this theme [ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 ] have drawn a range of responses. Some readers took issue with the word “fake”, rather than reflecting on the often spurious claims to legitimacy and authority that prompted its use in the first place. Some took it as an insult, like Robert Frost’s bird “who takes/Everything said as personal to himself.”
Another noted, though don’t I recall mentioning gods, that
the deities … do not need belief in order for them to exist, nor do they need faith. They existed before we even came onto the earth, we are born and surrounded by them and gain consciousness of their presence …
Of course, such an observation is itself a statement of faith. A staunch materialist is equally convinced that the physical world and its processes are sufficient to explain everything — no “gods” needed.
Attend a Pagan gathering, a Muslim masjid at prayer, a Christian church service, a Jewish synagogue or temple on the Sabbath, a Hindu puja, and so on, and while statements of belief may be part of the event, the communal experience dominates. People gather for celebration, for spiritual reconnection, for a dip into sacred time and space.
Druid, this dip’s for you.
Argumentation and logic and pure intellect have their place, but if they were all, we wouldn’t have much in the way of human culture. Would even music or art exist? For so many of the purposes they serve are akin to religion and spirituality — something more than molecules moves our hearts. And without that, would some of the more unlikely religions such as Dudeism or the Jedi faith (link to lively interview on British TV!), to name just two, ever have gotten off the ground? What are we to make of this impulse that surfaces in every human culture and enriches it beyond measure, in an astonishing abundance and a variety of forms and colors? Does it have “evolutionary value”? Why might it persist?
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We can add fake to other dangerous four-letter words like true, evil, just, only: you know, “It was just a dream”; “It’s only your imagination”, and so forth. (We won’t even mention three-letter words like why, or two letter words like if.)
“My fake Druidry is faker (and therefore more interesting and exciting) than yours, so there!”
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From “Meditations of the ‘One Genuine Real Live Druidry’ Ogreldi Druid”:
There’s always more to learn.
Spirit refuses to sit obediently within any human container. That includes death.
The Land where you live is your teacher today.
A magic as big as your heart: begin now.
We all live in more than one world. Check your passports before entering.
When does a wall become a window, then a door?
The awen sings in your blood and heart, in your neighbors’, in the stars, in the spider’s in the corner. What songs have you heard today?
The Ancestors still talk.
Make an ally of darkness.
Everything starts dancing, when you look closely enough.
Evil is misplaced force.
Find the fire.
A moon for mundane tasks, a year and a day for magical ones.
Everything is true through which we become better.
Nothing is mundane. Absolutely everything is. A sage bought this at the market of truth, but it’s not the final word on the matter.
What shatters the veil of form?
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We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
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[Updated 30-Dec 2019]
Omen Days [ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5-6 | 7-9 | 10-11 | 12-13 ]
Groundhog, whistle-pig, moonack (derived from a Native American name), or French Canadian siffleux (“whistler”) — as I take more firewood from the stack, I’ve found our backyard woodchuck has again taken shelter for the winter in a burrow between our woodpile rows. It makes good animal sense: until I started taking the wood away for fires, the burrow mouth was protected, and tin sheets still partially shield both wood and burrow from snow and rain.
woodchuck — marmota monax — Wikipedia
The woodchuck enjoys a regional claim-to-fame in the U.S. as “Punxsatawney Phil” and indeed has a brief cameo in the ’93 Bill Murray/Andie MacDowell comedy, Groundhog Day.
(We can detect in the February 2 Groundhog Day — no surprise — echoes of older celebrations like Imbolc. The harsher winters in North America merely postpone the coming of spring that the European holiday anticipates, until late March at the earliest, at least in New England. Animal divination!! The groundhog’s “prediction” of early spring or more winter depends, after all, on sunlight: if it’s sunny and he sees his shadow — only his “priests” know for sure — that means, paradoxically, six more weeks of winter.)
When our next-door neighbor dug a new in-ground septic tank over a year ago, things reached a tipping point that made “his” marmota monax leave home in search of a better life. The journey didn’t demand much — no long treks for the plucky immigrant who would ultimately set down roots in a strange new land. Instead, just a quick run under the property line fence, and voila! Our handy clover patch no doubt also played a savory role — we saw him — them? — off and on this past summer in the thick of it, grazing quite contentedly, bees humming all around in the clover flowers.
Last winter I discovered him burrowed in under the first row of the woodpile. By the time spring came, and I’d cleared away the logs and knew he was out, I drove a log firmly into the mouth of the burrow. (I absolutely refuse to use the smoke bombs that poison both animal and soil. Have-a-heart traps may be the next option.) Sure enough, un-dissuaded, he dug a new hole in June, this time right along the east-facing foundation of our house. When I stuffed a log into the mouth of that hole, he dug around it. I added another log. Then when I didn’t see him for a while, I thought my harassment campaign had paid off, and maybe he’d finally crossed the road, where there’s some prime woodchuck real estate that could be his for the taking. A neighboring farmer mows the open, level 5-acre meadow bordered by woods just once a summer, and otherwise it lies fallow, undisturbed.
Hard to see, but dirt between the log rows comes from the enlarged burrow
But there’s the roof of his winter burrow, with its mouth one row deeper into the woodpile. Part of me rejoices at his resilience, even as I plan anew how to see him off, once warmer weather arrives. All this, of course, while another part of me ponders whether this is indeed the unsubtle arrival of a new animal guide, upping his campaign to grab the attention of this torpid and obtuse human.
In the guise of a woodchuck, a delightful link exists between Frost and Thoreau, those two quintessential New England bards. A wry Colby Quarterly article, “Two Woodchucks, or Frost and Thoreau and the Art of the Burrow” , exhibits good Druidic sensibility in exploring that link. Regardless of whether the article author actually follows through on his own insights, they remain for readers. To make a cellar for his cabin at Walden Pond, Thoreau enlarged a woodchuck’s burrow, trusting the beast had dug deep enough, beneath the frost line. Here the “Two Woodchucks” author cites Thoreau’s sense of the need to dig down both literally and metaphorically to find out the truth of things:
In order to find this reality, we must first “settle ourselves,” establish a sense of place, a living connection with the landscape. Then we must “work and wedge our feet downward,” in woodchuck fashion, “through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion [alluvium] which covers the globe”.
I read as I draft this post that the woodchuck can nearly double its weight as it gorges each autumn to store up fat for hibernation. The average burrow, with between two and eight mouths, requires the removal of 500 lbs / 225 kilos of dirt. Sure enough, it often digs a separate winter burrow, much deeper than its summer quarters. Though at need the woodchuck can climb trees to escape predators, and typically retreats to its burrow rather than fight, when cornered, the sturdy beast has claws and sharp incisors to defend itself. Their range spans from Georgia to Minnesota and New England, north as far as Newfoundland, and west across the Canadian plains into Alaska. Study almost any creature, and you begin to see its adaptations to its specific life-path emerging as something quite remarkable.
Boar, pillbug, woodchuck — the teachings of animal encounters to guide this Druid, if he only listens, through his days.
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“One of the most striking characteristics of Druidism”, writes Philip Carr-Gomm, “is the degree to which it is free of dogma and any fixed set of beliefs or practices” (What Do Druids Believe? Granta Publications, 2006, pg. 25). “It honours the uniqueness of each individual’s spiritual needs. In this way it manages to offer a spiritual path and a way of being in the world that avoids many of the problems of intolerance and sectarianism that the established religions have encountered”.
So how does such a remarkable characteristic avoid fragmentation and a kind of “everyone for themselves” approach that would seem to end in splintering and a piecemeal practice and a hopeless muddle of “it’s my truth — find your own” subjectivity where no one can agree or discover common ground about anything?
Community and shared practice. That’s one experience that binds us together. This last weekend was the first New England BAM Druid Gather at Camp Middlesex in Ashby, Massachusetts.
Photo courtesy Catriona McDonald
With a rainy Thursday a.m. to clear the skies, a full moon on Friday the 13th, and sun all the rest of the weekend, the Gather(ing) of some 70 Druids showed Druidry at its best.
A Camp or Gathering by its nature needs contributions from many to happen at all. It simply can’t be the work of one person. Planning, reservations, cabin cleaning, fires, food purchasing and kitchen crew, scheduling and programs, kids’ activities, accessibility, publicity, registration, transport, fundraising, scholarships, website, site and event insurance, initiations, workshops, materials for activities, emergencies, special guests, first aid — you begin to get the idea from this still-incomplete list.
Rather than partial either-or labels of “create” or “experience”, a Gathering at its best is both at the same time. We experience what we create together as we create it, as it unfolds while we experience it, because of how we experience it, because of who we are. A Camp or Gathering is a demonstration of what Druidry does, rather than a sometimes-stillborn philosophical statement in words that can be (mis)read, argued with, etc. Participate in a Gathering — preferably, more than just one — help to make it happen in any way that fits your current life and means, and you begin to comprehend the tribal nature of this spiritual practice. As both a unity and a diversity, a Tribe united in experience embodies Druidry. To use a word from another tradition, the Tribe incarnates the Druid experience.
Where does that leave Solitaries? Which, after all, is all of us, when we’re apart from our Tribe, whether by preference or necessity, calendars or the nature of the gods or the exigencies of finances, time and space.
The same thing happens when we’re “alone” in our practice. Because if I practice for any length of time, I begin to sense my connections with the Others, both human and non-human, in all the Worlds around me. Again, this isn’t really a matter of belief but of demonstration — though it’s true belief can often catalyze, as well as limit, such experience.
I suppose it’s even possible, given how flexible and elastic this cosmos often turns out to be, for a resolute materialist to practice Druidry seriously over time, and still experience nothing of these things. But it would take immense resistance to the “Ten Thousand Things”, as Taoism calls them, all asking to be heard, to commune, to express themselves all around us and within our cells and sinews and fibers, to link with us and work at making a world. Ours is a thoroughly-inhabited Cosmos, and it’s ready to let us know it, if we give it even half a chance.
As Robert Frost, one of my Core Bardic Sages For Every Occasion™ puts it, “We dance round in a ring and suppose,/But the Secret sits in the middle and knows”. Ritual, Tribe, spiritual practice — all these contribute to our sitting in the center right along with the Secret, till it is secret no longer, but shared abundantly among us all.
May you know and savor and cherish such communions, wherever you are.
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The page is never blank, though it looks that way each time I click “new post”. Always the track of beast flares across the path, the flight or song of bird ignites the sky. All beings burn with life. Any blankness I may encounter is specific terrain I’ve chosen somewhere, sometime. Now to learn just where I took that quirk in the path. I tremble as I ask, I’ve sown it, so let me own it.
If “I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places” as Frost says in “Desert Spaces”, I also carry within me other worlds upon worlds, mirroring all the ones around me. I stand at a mid-point, and so much flows through me, through us all. Do I even notice? (Do I want to?)
Seamus Heaney observes of these lines that
… whatever risk they run of making the speaker seem to congratulate himself too easily as an initiate of darkness, superior to the deluded common crowd … they still succeed convincingly … [an] undeniable emotional occurrence which the whole poem represents.
I call it an emotional occurrence, yet it is preeminently a rhythmic one, an animation via the ear of the whole nervous apparatus …
If I’m looking for awen, for spiritual energy and music and delight, for movement into the wider self that includes but never stops with the apparent world, then rhythm and melody will take me there — the drums of Beltane beating on my inner ear, the hum and whisper of birdsong and newly-minted leaves. (Doubt just becomes boring, no use.) Once out of my head and into such prayer and listening, the recovery of life-giving vision can proceed. Lock myself into my own concerns, though, and that’s where I’ll remain. Meanwhile the cosmos keeps saying enlarge, enlarge — “an animation via the ear of the whole nervous apparatus”. Let me sync with what’s playing all around me. Ah, there it is again, that Song in all things.
Bagby at play. Photo courtesy NY Classical Review.
Follow me, friend, as I take this tangent: tonight I’m leading the second of two local discussions of Beowulf, Tolkien, and Benjamin Bagby, who performs the first third of the Old English poem in the original language, accompanying himself on a reproduction harp. Bagby’s coming to perform in Vermont next month — the surface occasion for tonight’s discussion.
We’ll talk, among other things, about wyrd, that old word that still half-lives in modern English weird, lives more fully in the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, and most fully in its original sense of the pattern of things which is both destiny or fate, and also the stage for meaningful human choice and action. Beowulf falls to wyrd, but also survives because of it.
Anglo-Saxonist author Stephen Pollington puts it this way:
The analogy of a spider web is usefully employed in considering wyrd. Each section of the web is a discreet part of the whole, yet the tiniest ensnared insect will set the entire web vibrating. Whether the spider wins her dinner depends on how skillfully she has woven her web, how quickly she reacts, and the chances of the captured insect to struggle free. The web is wyrd, but what the actors do upon it will decide the outcome.
Wyrd, says the poem, oft nereð unfægne man þonne his ellen deah. Taking Pollington’s analogy to heart, I render this as “The Pattern often saves an undoomed man when his courage holds” (Beowulf line 572). And I repeat to myself the charm: What the actors do upon the Web will decide the outcome.
We’re all “initiates of darkness”, of fates and destinies set in motion and still unfolding, yes — but that doesn’t define us. It just leavens the crusty bread that we are. Without a taste of that Old Tree of the knowledge of good and evil, what after all could we manage to accomplish? The first breath of any opposition would blow us away like dandelion fluff, like breadcrumbs. (No inner resources, I can hear my grandmother sniff.) We didn’t start the fire, sings Billy Joel. It was always burning/Since the world’s been turning.
Part of the journey beyond Druidry 101, as on any path worthy of the name, is the discovery of the usefulness of opposition. In careful measure (wyrd measures out some, yes, but so do I, each day), it gives us something to push against, a resistance, like weights in the gym, the settings on the stairclimber, the hills that are part of my dog-walk. I find out where I am, in the face of it — it’s potent in dispelling my illusions. It’s part of our training for what a world of polarities means. Armed and tested with this hard-won wisdom, we’re ready for realms of light. A Druid can aspire to live, serve and create anywhere. (And until that day of fuller mastery, there’s today with its choices and challenges. The poor, says the Galilean master, you will always have with you. What is my poverty?)
Some days, of course, I long for a cosmos that’s easy, or even just easy-er. But, I notice, after some time there, I’m restless again, eager to jump back into the fray and play of a more demanding laboratory world, where just about everything is subject to change and experimentation. So what happens if I take this tangent?
Mount Wantastiquet trail.
Meanwhile, I pray with the Leaf-Lords and Ladies around me:
Oak, shade my path. I welcome your wisdom.
Birch, green my way. I call on your courage.
Hemlock, heal my heart. I fast under your foliage.
Pine of all lands, I gather your gifts.
Tree companions all, I seek the shelter of your boughs.
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Images: Bagby.
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“But what can we do?” people often ask. Whatever the need, the question is a perennially valid one. What action is best for me to pursue, yes. But also, what can I do before I act, before the main event, so to speak, so that I can choose more wisely how to act on that larger scale? The Hopi of the American Southwest use a ceremonial pipe they call natwanpi — literally, “instrument of preparation”. What can I do to make of my actions a natwanpi in my own life as often as possible? How can I act now to prepare for the next action needed? How can my deeds begin to form a shining set of links, not merely a random assemblage?
Philip Carr-Gomm writes,
Try opening to Awen not when it’s easy, but when it’s difficult: not when you can be still and nothing is disturbing you, but when there’s chaos around you, and life is far from easy. See if you can find Awen in those moments. It’s harder, much harder, but when you do, it’s like walking through a doorway in a grimy city street to discover a secret garden that has always been there – quiet and tranquil, an oasis of calm and beauty. One way to do this, is just to tell yourself gently “Stop!” Life can be so demanding, so entrancing, that it carries us away, and we get pulled off-centre. If we tell ourselves to stop for a moment, this gives us the opportunity to stop identifying with the drama around us, and to come back to a sense of ourselves, of the innate stillness within our being.
Of course, one key is to practice the Awen when it IS easy, so that it becomes a skill and a habit to draw on when “life is far from easy”. Right now I take this advice, pause from writing this, and chant three awens quietly.
After all, what good is any spiritual practice if it doesn’t help when I need it most? I find this holds true especially with beliefs, which is why so many contemporary people have abandoned religious belief, and thereby think they’ve also “abandoned religion”. All they’ve done, often, is abandon one set of perhaps semi-examined beliefs for another set they may not have examined at all. “Carried away, pulled off-centre” — we’ve all been there. But each moment, in the wry paradox of being human, is also calling us home, “back to a sense of ourselves”.
A few weeks ago I had cataract surgery on my right eye. I was surprised how the looming procedure, with its success rate of above 95%, kicked up old fears in me from the major cancer surgery I’d experienced a decade ago. Coupled with that was a series of dreams I’d had a few years ago about going blind. Altogether not an enjoyable mindset to approach a delicate procedure on the eyes.
But instead of the victim version of the question “Why is this happening to me?” I can choose to ask the curious version of the same question. Insofar as anything in my life responds to events and causes I have set in motion, it’s a most legitimate question.
The answers, I find, can be surprising.
I feared loss of spiritual vision, because I was drifting away from the other spiritual path I practice. This is clearly a cause I’ve launched. I didn’t approach the surgery as some kind of superstitious opportunity for the universe to “pay me back” for spiritual neglect, as if the cosmos operates like a sinister debt collection agency. But if I approach my whole life as an instance of an intelligent universe constantly communicating with me, my fears have a cause, and an effect, and my experiences will mirror all that I am and bring to each moment. Not out of some sort of spiteful cosmic vindictiveness, but because all things, it seems, prod us along the next arm of the spiral. We’re all part of the Web. The same force, I believe, that pushes up the first flowers in spring, in spite of the lingering danger of frosts, the force that urges birds to nest and hatch a fleet of fledglings, even though a percentage will die before reaching adulthood, is the same force alive in me and in my life and the lives of every other being on this planet. Even our seemingly static mountains weather slowly in wind and rain, frost and sun.
Christians focus closely about “being in right relationship” with God. Druids and other practitioners of earth-spirituality are likewise seeking harmonious relations with the world around us. Though a god or gods may not have exclusive claims on me, still, if one makes herself know to me, it’s not a bad idea to pay attention. Same with anything else that knocks for my attention — and deserves it. Day-to-day practice of an earth path like Druidry is an ongoing opportunity to seek out new kinds of harmony as well keep to ones I’ve tried and tested, an opportunity to balance claims of allegiance and attention and energy, to make good choices, and to stand by them as much as I can. (Of course I’ll mess up from time to time. Part of the fun is seeing if I can mess up in a new way this time, to keep myself entertained, if nothing else. Why hoe a row I’ve already weeded, unless it really needs tilling again?!)
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With Lunasa in the northern hemisphere comes Imbolc in the southern one. The ley lines linking the earth festivals around the world deserve my attention, I find, as much as the lines of connection between hills and wells, trees and stones on my continent.
So it is that Brighid of many skills, healing and poetry and smithcraft among them, pairs well with Lugh Samildanach, Lugh “equally gifted” in all the arts and crafts. Both at Imbolc with the kindling of a new cycle of birth and growth, and at Lunasa as first of the harvest festivals, we’re reminded of origins of the crafts of civilization. With human and divine inspiration and gifts supporting our lives, we draw our existence today. I eat because my ancestors tilled the earth and lived to birth and teach the next generation. I wear this body because spirit clothed itself in this form among all the other forms it takes. I peer out at the world and at all the other forms who are likewise looking at and listening to the ongoing waves of existence. From this perspective, how can I not celebrate in simple amazement?!
We’ve all felt those moments when life seems paradoxically dreamlike and marvelously real. Robert Frost, bard of New England and a Wise One I keep turning to for counsel, says,
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes.
Is the deed ever truly done.
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
Where love and need are one: how often do I separate them? Do I respect my need enough to love it, or truly need what it is I think I love? Can I align these two and make them one? Mortal stakes: is what I spend the greatest energy on actually contributing to life, my own life among others? After all, Druidry urges me to consider that each life is worthy and valuable, mine no more but also no less than others.
A Frostian triad emerges: There are three things fitting for the aspirant to wisdom — a seeking after unity of love and need, a work which is play for mortal stakes, and deeds done for heaven and the future.
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After the builders finished the weaving studio addition (visible on the left), they seeded the lawn with clover, and now we have a lovely nitrogen-fixing, weed-inhibiting perennial I refuse to mow. The bees have been loud and happy, cheering at my choice, and the crop will also hold down the still-loose soil against runoff, and help it firm up.
You can see, too, in the foreground the edge of the recent delivery of firewood I need to go stack.
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As I write, the sleet and rain of a mid-April winter storm blanket southern Vermont, patter on the roof, and coat our driveway and solar panels.
Dana Driscoll in her wonderful Druidgarden blog writes:
This unseasonably cold spring offers a number of powerful lessons. The first is in studying people’s reactions to the cold vs. the land’s reactions to the cold. Humans have grown to expect predictable certainty; the certainty of the seasons coming on a schedule that we could depend on, the certainty of USDA* zones and last frost dates. But that’s not what this planet can offer us anymore. Predictable certainty says that by mid April, we “should be” firmly in the spring months. There “should be” buds and flowers. There “should be” warmth. But climate change prediction models say otherwise–-the East Coast of the USA, where I live, is likely to see shorter springs and longer winters, particularly as the jet stream continues to shift. The truth is that spring will come, but it may take longer than any of us would like. Spring will come and frost will come, and summer and fall will also come-–but no longer on predictable schedules. The daffodils understand this-–they simply wait. The animals and insects understand this–-they wait. The flowers and seeds understand this–-they, too, wait.
[*United States Department of Agriculture zones for estimating growing seasons, planting dates, plant hardiness, etc.]
Such patience is cauldron and wand working together.
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I recently obtained a copy of Hewson’s Dictionary of Proto-Algonquian (Canadian Ethnology Service Mercury Series Paper 125). If we’re serious about wanting to talk with the spirits and land-wights in North America, and we also want to avoid cultural appropriation of living languages and practices, why not go to the source?! Just like with Proto-Indo-European for Europe, we can learn Proto-Algonquian! (Right now I’m looking at how place-names are constructed.)
Except.
One of the fallacies we cherish involves continuity and change. In our search for authenticity we often grant an unconscious, and sometimes conscious, primacy and superiority to “languages-spoken-when”: we study Old English or Old Icelandic if we’re Heathens or Asatruar, we turn to Irish or Welsh or Gaelic to be truer to the Celtic tradition, just as Catholics may pick up some Latin if they attend Catholic schools or regularly attend a traditional Mass, and more conservative Jews acquire some Hebrew as a language of their heritage and tradition for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and Seders and Synagogue prayer and ritual. Languages of lore and wisdom are valuable gifts from the past, from the ancestors.
But just as speakers of English no longer speak Old English as a native tongue to greet the dawn and the land, or pass the bread and butter, the spirits and land wights can connect through our modern tongues just as well with us, and we with them, as we ever could in the past.
Robert Frost, old bard of the land, like any true bard, had access to Otherworld wisdom. You can hear it in “The Gift Outright” (which I often return to when this topic comes up), through the views and stances and limits of his time — as through ours, limits which we cannot yet wholly see — when he peers into that deeper well for vision and understanding:
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living …
Possession, possessed by, withholding — we carry deep attitudes and archetypes not lightly to be dismissed. Indeed, they are part of our work. But for all that, the Land where I live here in New England doesn’t “withhold” itself from me because I say Lake Champlain rather than Bitawbakw, or Burlington rather than Winooski. Rather I withhold myself through heedlessness. It’s my intent and practice that make up any difference.
view of Nubanusit from Hancock, NH
Every land has seen many people on it come and go. The language — any language — is for my comfort and focus — for any act of consciousness. If out of respect I devote energy to learning old ways of address, the Otherworld (and this world) accepts that gift in the spirit it is given. Let it outweigh other considerations, though, and I’ve stepped out of balance. To use the terms of the previous post, my speech and ritual are my cauldron and wand.
Yes, it’s still a pleasure to say the New Hampshire Abenaki lake names Skatutakee [skah-TOO-tah-kee], Nubanusit [noo-bah-NOO-sit] and Winnepesaukee [win-neh-peh-SAH-kee], even if they’re poorly Anglicized.
Names matter. Echoes remain. That’s how we fashioned a modern Druidry. Trust the echoes, if they’re all I have at the moment, follow them, and they lead to the originals.
Wiccan ritual often demonstrates an instinctive understanding of the power and wealth of names and naming. The Charge of the Goddess reminds us to attend to echoes and inner music:
Listen to the words of the Great Mother; she who of old was also called among men Artemis, Astarte, Athene, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Cybele, Arianrhod, Isis, Dana, Bride and by many other names …
Here we’re close to the Jewish Psalm 137, a song of exile sung in Babylon:
How shall we sing the LORD’S song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
If I do not recall and recite the old names, may I lose the power of speech as proper penalty. A curse, just as with a blessing, is not a thing to be summoned lightly.
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To paraphrase the old adage of the Hermetic Mysteries: “Pilgrim on earth, thy home lies in all the worlds; stranger, thou are the guest of gods”.
MacLir (cited below and in the previous post) notes:
We find other wands in myths that are the sources for our modern wands. One wand user, the Greek god Hermes (Roman Mercury), has long been linked to passage between earth and the higher realms. The staff or rod … the caduceus of Hermes-Mercury has come to be associated with healing and the medical profession due to its similarity to the rod topped with a brazen serpent employed in the Bible by Moses to work healing magic. It has also been mixed up with the wand of Asklepios, a Greek demigod closely associated with medicine and healing. Asklepios used a wand that is usually depicted as a rough branch with a single snake spiraling around it (Wandlore, pg. 7).
Wand, staff, ogham stave, intention to plant, to sow and to manifest, I honor you.
Spring, east, dawn, wind, intelligence, will, knowledge, wand-realm — cauldron has called you forth, evoked and invoked you. Kundalini, serpent power always coiled, wand and cauldron, now I will work with you both, doing the work humans are uniquely called to do, standing between earth and heaven, foot and hand in so many worlds.
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Images: Lake Nubanusit.
Hewson, John. 1993. A computer-generated dictionary of proto-Algonquian. Gatineau – Quebec : National Museums of Canada. 281 p. ISBN : 0-660-14011-X.
MacLir, Alferian Gwydion. Wandlore: The Art of Crafting the Ultimate Magical Tool. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Books, 2011.
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photo courtesy Brenda Ash
OBOD Chosen Chief Phillip Carr-Gomm at this weekend’s Gulf Coast Gathering in Louisiana. The Alban Eilir/Equinox altar features Spanish moss and whelk shells. I didn’t attend, but through a magic as palpable and marvelous as any, an image consisting of light particles carries this moment from the event to all of us. Surely we can number images among our altars — beloved photographs of dear ones, of family and friends gathering, of the large moments and smaller ones of our lives.
And in the image below, Mystic River Grove’s Equinox celebration, which I was able to attend, processes through the March snow toward their ritual site in a Massachusetts park.
photo courtesy Anna Oakflower
Here are many altars: the altar of the event, held in imagination and expectation. The altar of the location, a park, a dedicated space of a different kind: the will existed to preserve a natural space from development and for the public, an acknowledgement of common wealth, re publica, for which the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is named in aspiration. The altar of each body present, beaver (broad tails slapping the water when we edged too near), birch, stone, water, human (about 25 of us gathered in eastern Mass.), avian (crows, and an owl hooting during an Ovate initiation preceding the main rite), canine (coyotes yipping just at the close of the ritual and as darkness settled in).
“I make of my intentions an altar”: something I can practice doing at any moment, if and when I remember. And how often the moment makes its own altar, if I pay attention: sunlight and silence on an afternoon walk, or a caucus of crows startled into flight and talk. A found stone that perfectly fits your hand. The first drops of needed rain finally beginning to fall. The greeting of a passing jogger or hiker out like you for word from the sun and the air and the world around us.
These are the democratic altars of existence, moments and openings of life and energy accessible to all. In them lie the origins of Druidry and so many other practices, a “momentary stay”, as Frost says, “against confusion”. Even the effort to “stay”, or simply to celebrate as it all passes by, is an altar, a focus.
We gather after the ritual at a long-time member’s home, another kind of ritual. Two soups go onto the stove, chicken and potato-leek. A salad comes together, and — warmed by a generous assortment of alcoholic contributions, an altar of bottles on the kitchen counter — several of us nibble at irresistible dessert cookies while the main course warms. We glow a little brighter in each other’s company, another altar we make by choice and effort. We could have stayed home for any reason, but we didn’t. An important altar. Others — a parent’s death last autumn, remembered; an upcoming surgery and a request for prayers; a first home and all the discoveries of ownership.
The “secular” is the “world” — Druidry recovers the world in all its sacredness, a human forgetting changed into human recollection.
Trees, humans too, we stand against the sky, a grove of profiles, outlines against the sky. Feeling our ways along, delighting — given half a chance, making one for ourselves — in all the altars of our worlds.
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Have you seen them? The ridiculous (to my mind, anyway) articles, often partial advertisements or product placements, that purport to instruct the reader. They arrive in a simple format, usually with the same clear lead: “You’re doing X wrong”.
(I strive to avoid yielding my attention, as much as possible, to things that can’t instruct me, however I may initially feel about them. So let’s see what we can gain here, for I would exploit all things that seek to manipulate me, and wring from them something both needful and utile. You know: just to turn them back on themselves, and fulfill my part in manifesting the ancient wisdom that says all thing work together for good for those that love. Because, to exploit another more recent piece of wisdom, “Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it is not yet the end”*. We are, after all, actors in a 10 billion-year-old play. Just gotta get through this particular scene. Find your character’s mark, don’t bump into the furniture, deliver your lines with feeling. Ah, there now.)
Public? private? Is there a difference, if both need clearing?
Now it may be Americans in particular who are susceptible to this form of social insecurity — wanting desperately to fit in, do the right thing (wear and drive and own and think the right things), be hip, be au courant, woke, and all the other necessary adjustments that our national Puritanism tells us are necessary for secular salvation. And so perhaps only Americans are doing our planetary Druidry wrong. Or not.
(Anyone outside the petri dish-circus-nuclear meltdown-barbecue that is America can spot a number of necessary adjustments Americans should be making for our own good and the good of the planet, but which we somehow inexplicably and wilfully ignore, but that’s another matter. We all have our own to-do lists.)
If there was money in it, somebody somewhere would be telling me I’m doing Druidry wrong.
And I am. Because all that means is I’m not doing me precisely like you’re doing you.
The tree-wisdom that is Druidry means living our lives on earth, in these earth-bodies, whatever else may be going on with us, whatever other realms we inhabit. All we can do is go with what we get — through the senses and training and experience, memory and genetics, personality and character, hints and clues and dreams, the nudges and examples of friends who wish us well, inner and outer gods and neighbors, animals and the blessed trees.
Quite a package. When we say we don’t know what to do, how to choose, what matters, how to go on, it’s not for lack of choices and possibilities, but from a super-abundance. And no clue, key or compass ready to hand.
So when I say I’m doing Druidry wrong, I mean by that what Thoreau says (pronouns expanded): “I desire 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 their own ways, and not their father’s or their mother’s or their neighbor’s instead”.
That is, I ignore or defy peer pressure (insofar as I can) where it really matters — not in the obvious outward ways of young people discovering for the first time what it means to have a self, choosing hair or makeup or clothing or other faddishness at odds with arbitrary norms that superficially reassure us all is well, that the walls are secure, that wakeful sentries guard the gates. Not outwardly but inwardly I wander and marvel, where as yet the Thought Police do not patrol. (Though cookies and bots, Google and Amazon are scratching at the windows.)
What cookies have I swallowed whole lately?
It’s because we do not trust each other to “be very careful to find out and pursue their own ways, and not their father’s or their mother’s or their neighbor’s instead” that we feel we must lay out tracks and paths for all, lest the heedless deeds of a few bring down the whole ramshackle scaffold that passes for civilization. And the few are never us but always Somebody Else. Until the trees finally reach me and teach me differently.
Ya gotta go wrong to go right.
“You gotta get in to get out”, Genesis sings in “The Carpet Crawlers”.
“The only way out is through”, says Robert Frost in “A Servant to Servants“.
Ah, Outback Steakhouse, guru of the moment, with its tag “No rules, just right” — there’s a form of my own credo: that somehow, in the spiritual Outback we’re each exploring, I suspect there’s a path that’s right, apart from (other’s) rules, one for each of us. My evidence: we’re all walking our own paths anyway, in case you haven’t noticed.
Something of what all this can mean in turn I’ll be addressing in the next post.
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*The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, 2011.
Images: cookies picture by Kimberly Vardeman; Outback Steakhouse tagline.
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[A version of this post was originally published in Druid Magazine. How do we orient ourselves, and what guides and markers can we use? The things I write about are part of my own “Druid compass” — you probably have a similar set yourself. The article gets a little purple in its prose, but if you’re a regular here, you’re used to reading past that.]
Inwangsan (photo by Gael Chardon)
Sometimes it takes another country to teach you lessons about your own. Five summers ago while I was teaching English for a busy month in Seoul, Korea, I encountered a local land spirit who showed me that this lovely country I was just beginning to discover was decidedly not my home.
It was about a week after I’d finally joined OBOD and requested the Bardic course. It was also my last weekend to explore Seoul and its environs before I flew back to the States to await that first of a series of welcome brown envelopes with the British postmarks of the OBOD course.
So on a foggy Sunday morning I made my way by train toward Inwangsan, a sacred mountain a handful of kilometers from my one-room apartment in Seoul, and then on foot into the mist. Outside Dingninmun Station and under the overcast sky, I managed to miss the tourist signs and markers , but the mountain loomed nearby, unmistakable, so I began my ascent off trail, figuring I’d intersect it higher up, near where a Buddhist and shamanic shrine coexist peacefully. Inwangsan is famous for its commanding views and granite cliffs. As for the view, I had little hope for on this gray day, but exposed granite slabs and outcroppings shone slick in the rain.
Forty-five minutes of climbing later, wet, muddy, and annoyed with myself, I paused to catch my breath. The fog had thickened, but the rising slope was still a reliable guide for the direction I wanted to go. I took a step, and –- how to describe it? –- up rose a wall of resistance in front of me. Something challenged me and barred my way from further ascent. At first I thought, stubborn and oblivious as I can be, that it was merely the tug of my own fatigue, but when I took another step it was clear this issued from something other than me. The hair on my arms stood up. Heart pounding, I apologized out loud, mumbled the few phrases of polite Korean I knew, turned around and slogged back down.
What was it? I rarely see anything inwardly in such situations, but impressions came this time as I made my way off the slopes. Something with multiple arms, big as a pickup truck, banded in stripes of dark and light, and determined to block me from advancing any further. I’ve not written about this till now, and just putting it into words makes the feel of it march again up and down my spine, vivid as if it happened this morning, a heavy ascent of wet earth, a tang of juniper and Asian pine and dead leaves. Yet I’d forgotten the mountain’s name, and the train station’s, too, and had to consult my journal from that summer. That as much as anything reminded me yet again (as if I need any further sign) of my “outlander” status there: I did not know the proper names for things.
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Rupert Brooke, 1887-1915
After British poet Rupert Brooke visited the Rocky Mountains some hundred years ago on a North American tour, he wrote: “There walk, as yet, no ghosts of lovers in Canadian lanes … it is possible, at a pinch, to do without gods. But one misses the dead” (Brooke, Letter XIII, “The Rockies”).
Brooke was young – it was just a few years before his untimely death at 27 – and he wrote with a young bard’s flip ignorance to cloak his discomfort with an unfamiliar country. For of course ghosts walk this continent, millennia of them. Brooke simply hadn’t yet listened closely enough. But new landscapes often strike us that way. A Chinese proverb I heard while working in The People’s Republic of China sums it up handily: shui tu bu fu – “earth and water aren’t comfortable.” We don’t yet know them, and neither do they know us. But stay in a place long enough, sweat and sleep there, plant and harvest, raise families and bury your dead, and the land begins to learn you, too, and to recognize you. And as you work out names for the shapes of water and earth you find in the neighborhood, and come to greet the stones and trees as friends, the words get shaped by mouths that eat and drink here, by lungs that take in the local air.
In the way of Bards, another who grappled with the same challenge comes to answer Brooke’s verses with words of his own. At 86, Robert Frost was asked to deliver a poem for President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January, 1961. The day dawned cold and bright, and with his failing vision and the sun in his eyes, Frost couldn’t read the words in front of him, so the old bard made do with memory instead, and recited another of his poems.
Frost at Kennedy’s inauguration
“The land was ours before we were the land’s,” he begins in “The Gift Outright” (Frost, 1975, p. 348). How often a bard finds a way through error and trial and awen. Frost continues, naming an experience common enough among many American Druids who may strive to honor a rich heritage originating east of the Atlantic, while also heeding new-old voices here on what some First Peoples still call Turtle Island:
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves …
Here in what homesick settlers called New England, older names still linger for things no one truly possesses. Within an hour from where I live you can find Mt. Monadnock, Mt. Ascutney, Wantastiquet Trail, Skatutakee and Nubanusit lakes. Anywhere you go on this continent, similar names and undercurrents whisper, and careful listening will repay any effort to attend to lore and myth and what the land wights may have to say. (The earth’s an old house: many lands have the same overlay of newer names on older ones.) Sometimes it takes long patience to regain their trust, if careless previous inhabitants squandered it. Sometimes it takes longer practice to stop withholding ourselves from our places, and to inhabit them fully.
Here in Vermont the Yankee accent and sensibility rise like springwater from long winters and sap from local trees boiled to syrup, pork from free-range pigs that graze the oak mast on Windmill Hill, which we can see from our living room window, and Okemo State Forest not so very distant. “Eating local” needn’t be mere marketing of another yuppie indulgence. It’s what we all did until just a couple of generations ago, growing it ourselves, letting the land feed our bellies and spirits. And it makes sense if you’re committed to “Druiding” (let’s make it a verb!) –- the taste and smell of home, and of a new place, too, can be powerful guides. The body leads the way by a kind of homing instinct.
Names, listening, tastes and smells. What of ritual and ceremony? Once my wife and I settled in Vermont, walking to learn my neighborhood became a go-to practice for me, with a three-mile loop of dirt roads my almost-daily ceremonial. When I honor the four quarters, I see the fish pond east of our house the former owners stocked with carp, and I remember water-of-air. The cold fronts each winter sweep down from Canada: air-of-earth. And with a hill named for a grove of hemlocks to our east beyond the pond that obscure the horizon, we never get much in the way of sunrises, but dramatic sunsets make up for it: fire-of-water. Online you can still track down Mike Nichols’ Wiccan classic “Re-thinking the Watchtowers: Thirteen Reasons Air Should Be in the North” (Nichols, 1989): it’s now a “sacred text” itself, though it started out as an observed deviation from traditional practice. Rules change with places, but ancient patterns abide.
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Works Cited:
Brooke, Rupert. (2004). Letters from America. Project Gutenberg EBook #6445. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6445/6445-h/6445-h.htm
Frost, Robert. (1975). The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged. New York: Henry Holt and Co.
Nichols, Mike. (1989). “Re-thinking the Watchtowers or 13 Reasons Air Should Be in the North.” Internet Sacred Text Archive. Retrieved from http://www.sacred-texts.com/bos/bos089.htm.
IMAGES: Inwangsan by Gael Chardon; Rupert Brooke; Frost at JFK Inauguration.
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The Tarot Fool — a fitting symbol as we pick our way slowly from this time of greatest dark right after the Solstice and into the slowly growing light. Blessed fools, all of us, lost and stumbling where angels often fear to tread (is that because, unlike us, they can actually see where they’re going?!). A time for gestation, if we can grab a few moments in the modern restless energy to fill every moment of this season, a time that, if we listen, calls us inward, to introspection and nurturing, to brooding on the new life in us that seeks birth and is always possible. So we run away instead with busy-ness. Almost successful in drowning out the possibility of transformation. Almost. How valuable our failure is to us becomes clear only later.
It’s still dark, though by minutes each day the time of light grows longer. But if the skies are cloudy, you may take a lot of convincing. Looks just like yesterday to me.
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“The card,” writes A. E. Waite, “which bears no number passes through all the numbered cards and is changed in each.”*
A little shiver at that. Like it or not, if we’re alive we’re changing. Un-numbered and free at the outset, I soon enough get counted, numbered, labelled, weighed, boxed and mailed to an unknown address. I get unboxed by others, or I unbox myself. I keep arriving, but never quite get there. But then that means the situations themselves are static, and the trajectories we follow are shaped by the initial energies we manifested when we set out. We are what we started out as, and we build as we go from there. Action, reaction. Source of traction to be able to walk at all.
The Fool isn’t looking at the drop right in front of him. White dog at his heels (I say “he” and “him” because I’m personalizing things here — the fool quite rightly looks androgenous in many decks — it’s the Every Person card. Rewrite any pronouns to fit — it’s your story here), the Fool is intent on the journey, that first inhale, the animal spirits of hound and flower and golden sun urging him forward.
Of course, the path’s still unclear, the picture has a frame, we haven’t seen what’s up next. The Fool hasn’t even set out yet, or — inevitably — fallen, or opened up that pack on a stick that holds food, a map, a key to a lock it doesn’t fit, a phone number, a debit card with an initial balance. A roll of the dice. A lotto number. With clothes still clean, no grime from the trail, or wrinkles on the complexion, the Fool is unscarred, untried, fearless. Zen calls it Beginner’s Mind. Jesus says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”** Yup, know that, been there. Weak and not even recognizing it. No grace to be seen — because it’s dark, because grace manifests not as a separate thing in this case, not as something I can see or sense, but as the nature of the Fool itself.
Swept clean, rebooted, upgraded, ready to take the world by storm, found that dot-com, make a million before you’re 30, met your soul-mate, have the 2.2 kids and the photo-shopped life that the Fates and your parents conspired to deprive you of, and so on. Or simply in love with life, not yet hard-boiled and cynical, jaded and sarcastic, still full of yearnings and dreams. Not yet beaten down. Not just with eyes on the horizon, but above it, in the clouds. “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them,” says Thoreau.
Or the Fool is in fact immensely powerful and full of potential, but wholly blind to it. Dragon energy curls and flames in us. No mystery (all mystery) that one symbol for Britain and for things Celtic is a yin-yang, a Western mandala of two dragons, white and red.
In this card, the awful gulf below means nothing to one with the power of flight — but will I, will you or any of us, realize it in time? Instead I look back, I turn away from the chance to fly, I long for the comfort of the past.
Stephen Batchelor writes in his book Living with the Devil: “Without the devil to obstruct it, one could not create a path. For a path is kept open by overcoming the hindrances that prevent freedom of movement along it.”***
The devil is in the details, and the devil, or the details, are me — I custom-make the circumstances of my life from which I can learn the most. That’s one view. Everything is feedback, and therefore useful. Another view. “I do not believe in God any more than I believe in Hamlet,” says Batchelor elsewhere, “but this does not mean that either God or Hamlet has nothing of value to say.”
Back to square one, that first step, the dawn, the new day, the Fool’s setting forth. It’s summer, it’s winter, it’s summer again. “The wheels on the bus go round and round.” The wheel of the year takes us again and again through the great cycle of death and life and mortal beauty.
“We dance round in a ring and suppose, while the Secret sits in center and knows,” says sly old master Robert Frost.
“Knows what?” asks the Fool, and insists there’s an answer, never mind what anyone says.
“The Fool who persists in his folly will become wise,” says William Blake.
And the Fool, the blessed Fool, takes the next step.
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*Waite, A. E. “The Soul’s Progress.” Manual of Cartomancy. Reprinted as The Complete Manual of Occult Divination, Vol. 1. University Books, 1972.
**2 Corinthians 12:9.
***Batchelor, Stephen. Living with the Devil. New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2004.
IMAGES: Fool from the Rider Waite deck; dragon.
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Perform a Rite of Chocolate: only you and your Guides know how much is too much. (If you need an actual god of chocolate, the Mayan deity Ek Chuah, “Black Star,” patron of merchants and cacao, may serve your purposes; this site includes an image and some ritual details to build on.)
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A 21st century mound — Northala Fields, London
Robert Frost makes do for my divination today — words from his too-famous “The Road Not Taken” bumping into each other in my head this morning after a walk: “I saved it for another day, but knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”
The Spiral we all walk leads me away and away, until I forget I ever meant to come back at all. Then when I do, I run smack into what I’d “saved for another day.” Now the day’s here. Nothing lost. That inexplicable half-recognition at the arrival of things that we can’t possibly know, that kiss of the strange-familiar we all face once in a while — or many times — washes over me, gift of the Spiral. But oh how the hide-and-seek of it all can last lifetimes. What else did I save long ago “for another day”? No way to know, till it happens again.
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The last few days I’ve been awkwardly mindless. Today, a little more joyously mindless. Oh, I still think, or maybe more accurately, what passes for thought comes flitting by and makes do, till my brain finds its way home again.
Fortunately this masquerade of consciousness seems to convince everybody else around me right now. I got through a short-term job interview yesterday that seemed to go well enough, I balanced my checkbook, I wrote a note to an old friend.
“Your brain could fit in the navel of a gnat and still rattle around like a BB in a corn-flakes box.” The old high-school insult, embroidered and endlessly recycled, just about sums me up right now. Except it’s insult no longer, just blunt fact.
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Without warning I feel the power gather on the other side of the Gate. (What Gate? How should I know? But there’s a Gate right now, and power on the other side of it. Ya gotta roll with these things, I tell myself. Mindlessness helps.) A sound, a word, it’s the name of an ancestor who wants to reach me, whose wisdom I need right now, name which is also a pass-key to a world opening like an eye onto a twilight landscape.
I know this word, I say it to open wider, but it’s nothing I can write down, nothing to save for another visit, nothing with a human shape, though I keep saying it. But even as I think this, the inner reassurance comes that when I need to visit again, I’ll be able to. Then the whole thing is gone as quickly as it came. I stand on an endless beach, watching the tide go out all at once. At least that’s how it feels.
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Images: Northala Fields, London; Men an Tol, Cornwall — from a wonderful site of Moon Gates.
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[Updated 28 May 2020]
[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3]
Is either choice more than blind?
Do choices ever present themselves clearly to the self?
You summon your judges of hunch and experience and logic and passion, your own High Court. Finally they’ve assembled, all robed and solemn, but when it comes down to it, often the choice is no choice at all. Or all choices are equally bad. Or indifferent. Nothing to distinguish between them. Or both are good, better in fact than whatever you’ve got right now.
No wonder we resort to oracles and soothsayers, or follow a prophet who shows more than half a chance of being right. Or at least less wrong than everyone else. We must choose, but we can’t. Or the choice itself doesn’t matter. Or it matters supremely. Our lives in the balance. You get it. Familiar human territory. A deep intiation all its own. How many choices you’ve faced — a measure of how far you’re being stretched.
(We say to our young people, “Make good choices.” Sounds wise, but how many of us start out by telling ourselves, “Yes, this time I’m definitely gonna make a bad choice”? OK, one night here and there you decide to throw caution to the winds. You accept things may go wrong — part of the thrill, in fact, till that kind of thrill gets old. But an actual good choice: how is it you make one, exactly?)
I use a Robert Frost poem for my divination today. (What? You have a better oracle? Use it then — but do let us know your results six months or a year from now. That’s only fair.) Frost has served me well in the past, and besides, with a name like that, how can I refuse?! The name itself is a rune, an ogham, a sybil-whisper on my skin. Sounds like he must have chosen it as a stagey pseudonym, part of a poet’s verbal bling, though he didn’t.
Of course, Frost and his poems aren’t garbed in the ivy blessing of centuries, like the Mabinogion is, or maybe the Colloquy of the Two Sages. The old New England sage and his poems can be homely, earthbound, regional. Names matter, yes. And if names are attached to something old and venerable, aren’t a lot of us willing to trust that something, regardless of its actual track record? Safe, familiar.
We troop to the old water hole, not because it has water right now at our need, but because it did in the past. Or so solemn voices among us say. But how many skeletons lie around the caked mud of the dried-up hole? And even now we crowd each other to stare and speculate when the water might return, bubbling up clear and fresh.
In “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” Frost writes about splitting wood. In the painful Vermont cold that stalks outside our windows right now, splitting wood and feeding our woodstove is about all I can manage. Set the log up, raise the axe, have at it. The rhythm gives you intervals to think in, and when the axe doesn’t hit a knot, and a single blow neatly drops and divides the wood, your bones and sinews know a rightness hard to find in other realms of living. The physical correlate to choosing, to making a good choice: you feel it.
How often the body knows and takes action before the mind can even begin to engage! How often reflex and instinct save our lives, sparking off the spinal cord before the slow processing of a choice can become a thought. We jump, duck, flinch, blink, dodge, twist, swerve, spin the wheel, slam the brakes — the body saves us so often we’re at a loss when the body itself fails, through sickness or injury or — eventually — death. Old Reptile Brain, we erect no altars to you, though you see us through more disasters averted than we can count. Here is your winter incense, your tribute, your prayers and offerings. Hot cocoa, stews and soups, curries, sauces, butter, wine, hearthstones warm to the touch, wool scarves, light and heat and familiar voices saying Come in, get warm.
Face a choice, and what does the body say? How is it that we know things “in our gut”? Can we “stomach” what we opt to do or not do? One guide for choice, right there. A spiritual barometer we often look past. Too homely, when we want glamour. But especially good at guiding us away from bad choices, if not always toward good ones. Go with your gut.
My choices can often look skewed even from the first moment I face them:
Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
And the pause that choice may bring to me, if the spinal column hasn’t already intervened to propel me one way or another, as often as not muddies things rather than clarifying them. “Two tramps in mud time”: my choices.
Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.
Getting and spending. Is my life only this log-splitting, this routine? It has its rightness and beauty — but right now I’m sick of them. Cabin-fever? Seasonal affective disorder? Hunger for the return of the Light? Sure. Have you felt it, the call to serve something more than this daily routine? Right now the power I might spend for any common good goes to splitting logs. At least it keeps me warm.
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.
Even before I choose, too often I sense the danger of choosing at all. Choice can stun us into inaction. Even thinking about it may throw everything into jeopardy — “if you so much as dare to speak.” But also, that’s just what the season does. One step forward, two back. (Right now, mid-February, I’ll take mid-March gladly.)
The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.
Old love. There it is. “The time when I most loved my task” hits me when I see I must give it up. Or when it’s not mine anymore, but belongs to someone else. Or its shape has changed, and I must find it elsewhere, with few clues to guide me. Move along, move along. Oh, where? But no, that’s not yet the end of the story. (“Everything will be all right in the end … if it’s not all right, then it’s not yet the end,” says Sonny in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Nope. Can’t manage sunny in the middle of winter. You ask too much.)
Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
The judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.
I long to “know a fool,” even if it turns out it’s me. I can take it. Know things for what they are — that’s half of choosing, right? Because if I can’t do that, how can I choose? Choices come, and everything I’m doing turns “theirs of right.” They claim it all, swamping my direction, my focus, my energy. So I turn to careful, linear logic. An “appropriate tool” for the moment?
Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right–agreed.
Here is the claim of need, stronger. After all, we pay attention — right has a price, right is a need. Spinal column says so. Gut may say so. You feel it, that need, creeping along nerves and veins, feathering your skin, the breath of something you can’t yet make out. But real. Hot real.
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
That may be what I seek. Right now, though, I don’t even know. What am I yielding to? Separated, fractured, scattered, longing for two to be made one. Not sure I’m the one to achieve it. But worth achieving. We mate and strive to obliterate the division between us, if only for a brief interval. We choose and strive to make our choice the only thing worth doing. We live and strive to make a life worth more than the death that ends it. High stakes. Lower them, oh lower them any way I can.
In the last lines my oracle speaks more clearly. Not sure though if I can listen, if I can hear it.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
Love and need, two guides for choice. I can live with that. I do live with that. So do we all. Faces of the same thing?
This is the Initiation of Choice, sorting out need and love. Difficult initiation. Usually lifelong. We serve it as we struggle with it, and it opens, or delays us till we earn it.
And want? Oh, love and need are enough to grapple with. Need and love will open a space to figure out want, which often takes third place. Probably should, if we’re honest. Though it rarely does, since we bundle need and want into a lump of trouble for ourselves. That old Meatloaf song: “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.” Ah, but which two?!
And two questions follow the initiation, which we answer as we can, from out of who we are: Can I love through the choice I need to make? Do I need what I’ve spent my life loving?
Those are the challenge questions of the initiation of choice. I serve my life by how I answer.
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Images: choice — paths; carved in stone; two out of three.
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[Part 1]
In the Celtic worldview (and also for anyone in the Northern Hemisphere it’s abundantly clear), we’ve entered the “dark” half of the year. “Dark” drags in its wake many associations, many millennia old in primate consciousness, of fear, death, danger — all things we instinctively flee, unless we pause to examine cultural conditioning to see why this should be so. If you’re still moved to flee after such a pause, at least you’ll be running with eyes open. Watch out for the lemmings up ahead.
And here is another lesson about Orders and freedoms. The planet we live on follows its own rhythms, regardless of our druthers, and as natives here, willy-nilly we move with the earth under our feet. Earthquake, hurricane, flood, volcano; spring, summer, fall, winter. We’re tenants, not landlords. As much as we try to banish winter cold and darkness, they abide just inches beyond our noses as we peer out our triple-glazed windows. And that’s fitting, of course. Among all its other wonders, the planet grew this wonderful fore-brain of ours that makes childbearing a challenge when it’s time to pass a large skull through a small birth canal, but that same large brain helps us live in temperate and even arctic climates, as well as virtually everywhere else there’s legroom. A balance between order and freedom, limit and innovation, change and stasis. We’re a part and apart, at the same time, courtesy of a species the planet’s still experimenting with, and probably always will be, till we die out or evolve, some of our descendants, into something else.
OK, you say. Got it. Had it before I came here. Heard the lecture, took the tour. Tell me something I don’t know. And these are precisely the challenges to throw at all our ways of thinking, not just the privileged few that happen to irritate us because the horrid Others say them. First assignment, due on your next day of reckoning, at your local time, or whenever is most inconvenient. All our assumptions need a stir on the compost heap. Political affiliations, marriages, jobs, habits, hobbies, what’s vulgar or profane (Miley Cyrus? Death camps? CEO incomes? Ignorance? Missed chances to use petroleum to prepare for a world without it? Endless lolcats? Taupe and mauve and puce?). The once-over should include everything — especially whatever’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of your left hemisphere. What don’t we know? Got a hunch about that. Isn’t our ignorance one more miserable discomfort, to join the ignoble quartet above — death, dark, fear, danger? We don’t look because it’s hard. It asks us to start over. Not to reinvent ourselves, but to return to what we threw away because it seemed old, to pick it up, and see it again for the first time as utterly, endlessly new. One thing becomes another, in the Mother, in the Mother. Look it up, or consult the nearest young thing growing. The Goddess makes all things new.
No Order can “teach” us such “wild wisdom.” All it can do is point the way back to our bones, blood and sinew that always held it, gift that doesn’t turn away from us merely because we turned from it. Change, cycle, spiral. We see it celebrated, repeated (doing what it’s being) in Celtic art. We can feel it in the flow of Tai Chi, the circular movements of dance and swimming, the serve and volley and return of tennis, sex, night and day, birth and death. What goes around comes around. What you do comes back to you. Is this not a great gift, that we see the results of our actions? Nothing is lost, and all is stored like seed in the earth, and returned at the next springing forth. Only a short-sighted people would fear the fallow time, forgetting the blossom time after. Only blind people would act as if this is all there is. “This” by definition is never all there is. Reconnecting with the natural world “lengthens” the sight. Vistas re-established. Perspectives re-balanced. Cure at hand for too much left hemisphere, too little humility. When was the last time we praised a world leader for that trait? And why is that? OK, call me Groucho.
At the recent East Coast Gathering, Damh the Bard told a version of the fine story of the Hare and the Moon. The Moon had a choice piece of wisdom to impart to the people of earth, and asked the Hare to carry the message. “Tell them this: you are all going to die,” said the Moon, and like a shot the Hare was off, bearing the Moon’s message to the people of earth in great leaps and bounds. Of course, Moon had been showing the lesson each month, passing through darkness to fullness, waning and waxing, shrinking and growing, endlessly, patiently teaching. But the people had forgotten, and when they received Hare’s partial message, they wailed bitterly at their wretched fate. “We’re all going to die!” But the Hare, impetuous fellow that he was, had not stayed to hear the second half of the message, which was delayed in reaching the Earth: “… and you all will be reborn.” For Hare’s over-haste and obliviousness, when he returned, the Moon split his lip, and to this day the harelip is a reminder to hold in the heart the whole message, to find wholeness in the many pairings that a true cycle treats as “One Thing, moving” — a Uni-verse.
So what are Druids to do who feel Orders may not be for them, or at least not right now? The whole world beckons. If, as Robert Frost says in “Carpe Diem,” which must by all signs be the true religion of America*, “The present / Is too much for the senses, / Too crowding, too confusing— / Too present to imagine,” a few years later, his splendid poem “Directive” urges: “Drink.” This too can be religion, can be spirituality, can be a saving and healing practice that does not split the two, if you will have it: “Drink, and be whole again beyond confusion.”
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*Carpe Diem: (Latin) literally, “seize the day”; Nike’s Just Do It; YOLO — you only live once; “in heaven there is no beer; that’s why we drink it here.”
Images: spiral at Newgrange, Ireland; winter brook.
Updated 6 Nov. 2013
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A Druid Way 
