Our Vermont seed group, the Well of Segais, met for Lunasa yesterday at Mt. Ascutney State Park. And Down Under, it’s Imbolc, the feast of Brighid — a parallel deserving meditation on its linkages and subtle connections.
Ascutney summit parking lot — looking south
The haze of August already lies on our hills. Here’s a shot from the car as I drove north along Rt. 91 toward the park. In a state of so many hills and higher peaks, Ascutney doesn’t immediately claim particular status. (At 3130 feet/954 meters, it’s the second-highest peak in our county.) But begin the ascent to the summit, and if the pitch of the climb doesn’t clue you in, you pass into cooler air about halfway up — a most welcome change in the heat of the last several weeks.
We held a quiet, meditative ritual in what has become our favorite location, in a grove next to a pavilion overlooking a valley to the north. A couple arrived midway through our ritual, and settled into the pavilion to talk quietly, just as we were saying “each person here is a blessing”.
Lugh swims into my awareness this time of year, around his harvest festival — I honor him as I would a majestic tree. “Believe” in Lugh? Standing under the branches of a tree, belief in that tree is a strange thing to concern oneself with. Instead, I prefer to inhale the scents of the grove around me, noting the evergreen cones on the ground, feeling the shade against the summer sun, hearing the birds in the branches.
A sometimes-frantic concern with what one believes, or should believe, belongs to other paths — it needn’t trouble Druids, unless they find value in it. There is much more to explore that meets us halfway, rather than folding our thought into shapes that may or may not have any connection to what is already all around us, shapes prescribed by those who came before us, because they arose from their lives, experiences which need to be tested, along with other such legacies, for their applicability to us today.
The “apparent world fades”, whispers the ritual. “With the blessings of earth, sea and sky”, we “cast aside all disturbing thoughts” and attend more carefully and lovingly to what is going on all around us. (Billboards proclaim, “God is still speaking”. Druids strive to keep listening.)
Belief can be a useful tool, and indeed it does shape our experiences, along with much else. But it is so often subject to change, to distortion, and to incomplete knowledge — as exhibit A, witness the political landscapes these days in so many nations. Wisdom, though harder to gain, has proven more trustworthy as an aid to living my life. (Discerning the difference between them, and living from it — ah, there’s a journey worth anyone’s dedication. Let’s meet there!)
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What Lugh has to say to me, or I to him, may manifest in ritual, or before, or afterward, in my interactions with those I celebrate with, meet at the park entrance, on the road, at the gas station on the way home. Meanwhile, festival communion is our ritual, a priming for honing the attention, for honoring the day and its gifts and our lives.
Steps on .7 mile/1100 meter footpath to the Ascutney summit
In Vermont, Mt. Ascutney seems a fitting place to honor Lugh and his festival, a place of heights and vistas, a place of green quiet and perspectives, in keeping with his attributes as a storm god and warrior, with links to Mercury and Apollo.
Lugh “has several magical possessions,” notes the Wikipedia entry. “He wields an unstoppable fiery spear, a sling stone, and a hound named Failinis. He is said to have invented fidchell (a Gaelic equivalent of chess), ball games, and horse racing”. His Welsh counterpart is Lleu Llaw Gyffes, the “fair-haired one with the skillful hand”. In Welsh tradition, from his mother Arianrhod he receives a tynged, the Welsh equivalent of a geis, an obligation or prohibition, a taboo linked to one’s destiny. His story, along with Blodeuwedd, comprises the second and third branches of the Mabinogi.
All these details suggest directions for possible Lunasa rituals and activities.
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I arrived early before our ritual gathering, partly to check on locations and partly to re-visit the “sleeping dragon” stone along the footpath to the summit.
True, without that near-horizontal gouge suggesting a closed eye, the stone might not evoke the name I give it. But as far as I can tell, the gouge is natural, a result of the stones tumbling about each other that make up the summit and its paths.
Below is the “slab” indicated by the sign above — the camera foreshortens the dimensions of the sheet of broken stone that extends over 100 feet/30 meters up the mountain.
Sometimes a place with dimensions of its own, not immediately convenient for humans, is a helpful reminder and subject of meditation. The slab, like the slot, requires effort to navigate successfully.
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I’ll close with this meditation, plain water after the potent mead of ritual. VT poet Charles Butterfield writes in his poem “Matins” of the natural world:
it is enough to know
here is something
that does not require
your presence
but of which nevertheless
your presence is a part.
“Lately I have succumbed to an old atavistic urge: the worship of trees.”
So goes the opening line to the Telling the Bees’ marvelous song “The Worship of Trees.” On the particular Youtube version below, these words come just a little after the 1-minute mark. Druids are named for their association with trees, and I can think of no better way to communicate a Druidic response to the previous post, where in one section I talked about salvation as just one religious and spiritual alternative in spiritual practice. Druidry doesn’t seek salvation so much as wisdom and connection. If this is atavism, let’s make the most of it!
“Something deep inside of me yearns to be free.” This freedom is not merely a negative “freedom-from,” but a positive “freedom-for.” What do we long to do, what wouldwe do, if we could? Unlike in “spiritual pollution” religions, in Druidry sin doesn’t eternally hold us back (though poor choices can for a time). The blessings of the natural world can heal more than we imagine. Especially when we see how large the borders of the “natural” reach, and how we and our bodies and our sciences and arts and spiritualities, our planet and solar system and galaxy, fit cozily in one small cosmic cubby.
“Lately I have touched the sublime, out of sight out of mind: the worship of trees.” It’s dangerous to state absolutes about something as fluid as Paganism or Druidry specifically, but I will nonetheless: most Druids accept the existence in some form of more than one plane of existence. Note I don’t say “believe “– it’s not a creed to recite each full moon, but an experiential awareness that the cosmos vibrates up and down a very wide range, and our human experience is only part of the bandwidth. Ecstatic experience can for a time open us to other portions of the band, and broaden our sense of its range and of what’s humanly possible too.
“Lately I have been flung into rustication: the worship of trees.” Part of the Druid experience — again, here I can generalize — is a sense of being part of something much larger than human only, something that sweeps us up in its flow and carries us with it along with everything else, in a direction that isn’t different from where we’re going anyway. It’s a harmonic of existence, and so it’s not something to fear or resist, but to study and harmonize with in our own ways, as each species does. Note that the existence of so many distinct species shows the flow needn’t extinguish individuality — it can also manifest through it. What is it in the flow that calls us with such a strong imperative? Only as humans can we deny or ignore the summons, though ultimately we’re borne along willy-nilly anyway.
“I’m too far in …”: some practices and ways of being in the world aren’t wholly “safe.” They may change you, change the environment, and have unforeseen (though not unforeseeable) consequences. John Beckett talks of “a certain forest god” he serves, Cernunnos, whose worship isn’t always comfortable or easy.
And to take things one more step, to the madness which exists in so many shapes we might say we’re all mad to a degree. We have our fixations, obsessions, relentless habits and cherished opinions. Some days it doesn’t take much to shove us a little further in one direction or another that may well land us outside what’s socially acceptable. The gods may be fine with our eccentricity. It’s other humans who get left shaking their heads — or burning down our houses and chasing us out of town. But in that madness, an ecstasy may empower you to open doors no one else can open, and you fulfill a great purpose that answers that “yearning to be free deep inside” which not just you but many feel. And like the leaves a tree drops each autumn, madness is one way to receive and transmute energy.
After all, I ask myself, would I really value a religion or spirituality that doesn’t include an edge?!
“Three reasons for supplicating the Mighty Ones: because it is a pleasure to you, because you wish to be a friend of the Wise, because your soul is immortal” — traditional.
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Like many I revere Brigid. This time of year it’s easy in our house — the fire in our woodstove reminds me of one of her domains, and the lovely orange and blue flames of well-seasoned wood could wake any heart to poetry. I honor her in thought whenever I recall her, I honor her in action by lighting the fire, a daily practice this time of year. To see the wood take flame, to feel the house temperature begin to rise each morning once a good burn gets going and I can close the flue — how could these not be a pleasure, a cause for celebration?
I love that none of the usual default reasons that our monotheistic culture provides for supplication or prayer come up in this Triad: to save your soul, or to avoid hell, or to please a god or God, or to make up for some human weakness. No, the reasons here are splendidly other, and the first — the first! — is pleasure. Ask yourself, “Do I actually like the company of the Divine? If not, why spend time pretending I do? But if I do … ‘Can I have some more, please?'”
Or perhaps I don’t know either way. So why not find out? One reason to revere and honor and supplicate — lovely old word! — the Mighty Ones is find out what happens if I do.
And to be a friend of the Wise? For me that means I value wisdom, value those who aspire to it, and aspire to it myself. It’s a measure of our times that wisdom isn’t a word we hear very much. Maybe because it’s fallen out of favor. Maybe because many have abandoned it for cheaper thrills online and off. The company and friendship of the Wise! This, too, is a pleasure I hope you’ve had.
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Yesterday out of a mix of nostalgia and procrastination at improving my Nanowrimo word-count, I was skimming through James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, which gave us the fabulous Shangri-La. (I first read the novel in high school, at the insistence of an English teacher who also pulled us through Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. You can practically determine my age to within a few years just by those details, if you happen to follow — or yourself suffered through — trends in U.S. secondary education. You can find Hilton’s work online at Project Gutenberg Australia here.)
Hilton gives us the following wonderful exchange between Roberta Brinklow, a British missionary, one of a number of Westerners stranded in the Himalayas at the monastery of Shangri-La, and the English-speaking Chinese monk Chang, who is the principal go-between for the little band of Brits and the Tibetan natives.
“What do the lamas do?” she continued.
“They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom.”
“But that isn’t DOING anything.”
“Then, madam, they do nothing.”
“I thought as much.” She found occasion to sum up. “Well, Mr. Chang, it’s a pleasure being shown all these things, I’m sure, but you won’t convince me that a place like this does any real good. I prefer something more practical.”
“Perhaps you would like to take tea?”
I don’t know about you, but I enjoy stories that deal with the meeting of cultures and the delightful misunderstandings that inevitably result. Of course, my sympathies in this instance lie where Hilton’s also appear to — with the long-suffering Chang.
What good does wisdom do?! Oh darlin’, if you have to ask …
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And the best reason of all which the Triad gives us (if like us the Celts saved the best for last)? Because we recognize the gods are our kin — because what is immortal in us answers the call of what is immortal in them.
I don’t need to have any belief about this either way (“More slackness!” as Hilton’s Miss Brinklow might have said). I can experiment instead. Am I immortal? Let’s see if I can actually get some inkling either way. Do the gods have something worth my learning, something that may touch on just this issue? Why not supplicate them and find out for myself? Could there be a connection between an experience of the divine and a greater understanding of what it is to be human?
Wherever did we begin to imagine that such questions ought to be matters of belief rather than personal experience?! As if we were asked about the taste of fresh berries and cream on the basis of our knowledge of somebody else’s report, rather than the bowl of them sitting right in front of us! Here’s a spoon. Dig in …
Our lean-to, with wood drying for next winter, ’16-’17.
After a long absence, Wadin Tohangu stopped by again to talk. The old Druid grinned broadly at my surprise in seeing him. Though I shouldn’t have been so surprised, I know. Usually, if I’ve been thinking about him, he appears sooner or later.
The unseasonably warm November weather in the 70s over the last few days made it a perfect time to be outdoors. I was carrying log lengths of willow to our woodpile after some trimming and pruning work by a tree service company we’d hired a few weeks ago. Willow is a soft wood and isn’t all that suitable for burning. It doesn’t provide much heat, but it can be useful to work with for other purposes. Some of it might form the edging for a new compost pile, and rot back into the earth itself.
Without any preamble, Wadin got to the point. “You’ve been doing some firming up of your understanding. I can see changes in you.”
“That’s … interesting,” I said, letting an armful of logs fall to stack later. “I feel less certain about a lot of things I thought I knew. Like what love is, and what my purpose or focus should be, for instance. You’re sure you’re not seeing doubt and uncertainty instead?”
He chuckled, and pushed a log into a firmer position between two others. “Part of deepening understanding can mean you rely less on ready verbal formulas and definitions, and in their place you turn more to any wisdom you’ve earned. It may feel less certain, because you can’t summon it in quite such a convenient mental form, or immediately rattle it off if someone asks. Do you do any cooking?”
“Um, yes,” I said, still surprised sometimes by Wadin’s quick shifts as he developed a point. “Mostly baking, actually.” I turned to walk back to the pile of fresh-cut willow lengths. The wheelbarrow I’d normally use to make quicker work of this had a flat tire. But I didn’t mind. The weather was just too splendid to miss.
“Well,” said Wadin, keeping pace beside me, “if you bake bread, for instance, you know at several points that familiarity with the process lets you make decisions about timing that you learn best by practice, not by rule.”
“True,” I said, grabbing an armful of logs. Wadin did the same. “Bread dough that’s going to rise well has a certain feel to it. And up to a point, there are tricks and back-ups you can do with a batch that’s not turning out so well.”
“But,” he said, shifting the logs into a more comfortable position, “that feeling and those tricks aren’t easy to put directly into words, even though you know them well.”
“True,” I said.
“People often treat understanding the same way. They may say, ‘I want answers,’ but they could find that a tool might be more useful to them in the end than any answer.” He dropped the logs and brushed his hands.
“Would you explain that a little more?” I asked him.
“Answers tend to have a compact form,” he replied. “Someone else has done at least part of the thinking, so when we ask a question, the answer arrives with a definite shape and size, and maybe even drags with it some definitions, or some do’s or don’t’s attached to it. It may not fit our needs and awareness. It can be like a key in a lock. Sometimes the key just doesn’t fit. Nothing turns. Even though that key may open plenty of other useful doors, it doesn’t open this one.”
“I guess I understand what you mean. So what about tools?” I picked up three more smaller logs. Wadin grabbed the last couple of strays.
“A tool isn’t meant to provide a final conclusion,” he said. “It simply helps with a particular step, or with a set of steps. It’s part of an open-ended process. A screwdriver applies force, or rather torque, in a way that the human hand unaided cannot. It doesn’t do this by itself — a human hand must wield it. But a screwdriver allows us to open or close things with screws, or do some light prying of covers, perhaps. The screwdriver goes back in its slot (at least in a neat work-area) until you need it again.”
“O.K.” I said, thinking.
“An answer, though, often implies a close, an ending.” He dropped his armful on the pile. “A tool keeps things moving. One helpful strategy is to practice seeing all your answers as tools. There’s nothing final about them, and neither is there anything wrong with that. They’re exactly what they’re supposed to be. They just help move you to the next step you need to take. Put them away when they don’t achieve that, keep them all in good condition, and find another tool that will do what you need at that moment.”
“So you’re talking about a kind of flexibility.” I leaned against a woodshed post.
“Yes,” he said. “The same tools are generally available to everybody, but in the hands of a master craftsman, the right tool saves time, accomplishes the task smoothly, and contributes to the flow of work. The master doesn’t curse his tools, or despair when the tool he insists on using doesn’t do what he wants it to. He knows what each tool can do, just as he knows how each tool feels when he uses it. Part of his mastery is knowing from the feel of the tool in his hand whether it can accomplish what he intends.”
“And part of the joy of mastery is knowing there’s always more to learn. What would it mean, after all, if there was nothing more to aspire to? If you truly knew it all, you’d get bored. What’s the point? The beauty of mastery is its delight in always learning something new, not being discouraged by it, but inspired instead by endless possibility. Sharing what you have learned, communicating that delight simply by doing, and marveling how each person develops an individual style. All right. That’s enough for today.” He smiled and turned toward the afternoon sunlight. I blinked, and he was gone.
If I asked “Is he real?” or “Was he really here?” any answer I received probably wouldn’t be as useful as what I learned. His gift wasn’t some kind of proof that he “existed,” but simply a few more tools he left for me to work with. Answer, tool. A useful distinction. I sent out gratitude, confident it would reach its destination.
What I want to talk about here, others say well and beautifully, so this post will invoke quotation for these two potent magics. And in anticipation of what’s to come, if you haven’t given yourself the wise pleasure of reading Ursula LeGuin’s fantasy A Wizard of Earthsea, promise yourself you will soon — your library may well have its own copy or can get you one through interlibrary loan — a “magical familiar” as powerful as any in the pages of medieval grimoires.
A “young adult” fantasy, Wizard has as much to say about magical power as any book I know. If you haven’t read it, I’ve tried to avoid spoilers, and I feel I succeeded. And if you know of a book that teaches more than Wizard about these things, please send me the title!
Here’s more from J H Brennan as he continues to recount his first steps in magical training:
What actually attracted me to magic was not service but power. Nothing grandiose, of course. I had no burning ambition to rule the world or enslave hordes of beautiful women. (Well, maybe just one or two beautiful women…) But I was undoubtedly a prey to a disease which is becoming even more prevalent with the increasing complexity of modern society: a feeling of helplessness.
There are many reactions to such a feeling. Some people embrace political credos. Others get religion. A few (usually male) take to beating their spouses. I turned to magic, which seemed to me to be the ultimate antidote: for what is magic if not a secret system which promises control of damn near everything?
You will be desolate to learn it did not work. Although I spent some nine years in daily Qabalistic training and learned a great deal in the process, I remained Clark Kent: no amount of magical leaps into ritual phone boxes could turn me into Superman.
(J. H. Brennan, Foreword, The Ritual Magic Workbook, p. 4.)
If you’re honest, your first reaction to Brennan’s admission may well be, “Then why bother with magic?!”
In fact it’s a deeply legitimate response, tangled with helplessness. In so many peoples’ lives today — I’m thinking only of our own time — so much anger, pain, suffering, despair, all because we sense a deep truth about ourselves, but one that the world does much to discount, deny and distract us from: our spiritual selves are strong. LeGuin captures this wisdom at the outset, in the first chapter of A Wizard of Earthsea. Her mage hero Ged is still young, but even untrained, in a moment of crisis he draws on a profound truth about himself: “He … raged at his weakness, for he knew his strength” (A Wizard of Earthsea, Bantam Edition, 1975, p. 8).
Our detestable weakness never quite overwhelms that inner knowing, though we may well go under without a lifeline, without support, without confirmation, without some practice that sustains us, whether it has the label “spirituality” or not. Despair at not being able to get at our strength has destroyed many lives. It’s cruel, that despair. In our search for a door to the power in us that we dimly recognize, but which seems to elude us day after wretched day, we may clutch at a cause, as Brennan notes — politics, or religion, or magic — or, if we’re half-under already, at abusive behaviors that may not target others in our lives, but ourselves, though all abuse brings “collateral damage.” Which is double-talk for karma.
The appeal, the draw of power, is clear.
Ged’s teacher, a wizard named Ogion, tries to show Ged the realities he faces in a world where power can be used well or badly. After Ged encounters one who uses her power in a questionable way, and has had his own terrifying encounter with a dark spirit just before this conversation, Ogion admonishes him:
The powers she serves are not the powers I serve. I do not know her will, but I know she does not will me well. Ged, listen to me now. Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do, you must know the price that is to pay!
When we hear this, it’s too much. More evasion, more powerlessness! We’ve apprenticed ourselves to those who claim to know, and instead of — at last! — affording us even a littletaste of power, they scold us for not knowing anything, and set us instead to memorizing, or visualizing, or some other repetitive task that smacks of elementary school drills. (For of course that’s where we are — in school, at a beginner’s level. Again. How long this time?!)
Predictably, Ged rebels. Note what motivates his response:
Driven by his shame, Ged cried, “How am I to know these things when you teach me nothing? Since I have lived with you I have done nothing, seen nothing–”
“Now you have seen something,” said the mage. “By the door, in the darkness, when I came in.”
We seek power, yet once we commit to a magical or spiritual path, often the first thing we meet is darkness. In ourselves. Distinctly notfun.
Ged was silent.
Ogion knelt down and built the fire on the hearth and lit it, for the house was cold.
There it is in plain words — Ogion demonstrates literally the “Path of the Hearth Fire” that is one of the magical and occult paths we can take. And he does it not in words but in actions LeGuin describes — the daily tasks of an “ordinary life” that can be done with magical awareness of their place and purpose, a responsibility that we can serve while we learn — a way that actually leads to our ideal “inner Hogwarts” without fleeing from the obligations of our “mundane” world which have far more to teach us than we know.
Then still kneeling [Ogion] said in his quiet voice, “Ged, my young falcon, you are not bound to me or to my service. You did not come to me but I to you. You are very young to make this choice, but I cannot make it for you. If you wish, I will send you to Roke Island, where all high arts are taught. Any craft you undertake to learn you will learn, for your power is great. Greater even than your pride, I hope. I would keep you here with me, for what I have is what you lack, but I will not keep you against your will. Now choose …”
(A Wizard of Earthsea, Bantam Edition 1975, pgs. 23-24.)
Power greater than pride: Ogion nails the issue. As J. H. Brennan notes, implicating many of us:
The problem with arrogance is that it is a quality for which I have a sneaking admiration. Consequently it plays a greater part in my character than it really should.
(J. H. Brennan, Foreword, The Ritual Magic Workbook, p. 4.)
There’s a whole book of wisdom to be unpacked from Ogion’s words, which deserve extended meditation. I’ll zero in on the last two: “Now choose.” How can we choose before we understand the consequences of choice? As Tolkien says (in talking about translation*), “We constantly need to know more than we do.”
*translating Beowulf. In J R R Tolkien (ed. Christopher Tolkien). Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, pg. 191. For much more on this that you probably could EVER want to know, come to the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI this May 2015, where I and many others will be delivering papers on Tolkien’s translation — and in my case, on his peculiar theories of “correct style” and how this intersects with his whole legendarium and the power of imagination.
Back from a seminar this weekend on the art of spiritual dreaming, with a series of quirky, honest, challenging speakers and panelists. “Intimate” was a word I heard more than once to “describe the vibe”: the distance between speaker and audience collapsed in a remarkable way, so that we were all participants. Or as one speaker remarked, talking about his experience with dreaming and comedy and comedic training with the improv group Upright Citizens Brigade, “you show up, listen and tell the truth.” If the truth isn’t yet funny-sad at the same time, you keep showing up, listening, and telling and digging. You bring it with everything you are. ‘Cause otherwise, what’s the point? Except maybe chocolate.
But the statement I heard during the seminar that has stuck with me is the line that provided the title for this post: “Here, in these worlds of duality, everything has a container.” Or to put it another way, “soup needs a pot.” My wife and I riffed on this on the drive home. Relationships, stress, jobs, life: we’re just having “container issues.” The center around which the storms rage witnesses it all. Uncontained, it doesn’t get slimed or cracked, burnt or broken, stolen, ripped off, bungled, overpaid or underappreciated. Container issues, these. How to shift attention offthe containers, even for a moment, is a source of great freedom and possibility. Don’t, say some. Can’t, say others. Shouldn’t, say still others. We listen, and we don’t, can’t — until we discover a “why not?” lying at the bottom of the bag, like a stale fortune cookie, or a light-switch felt for, in a strange house or hotel room, in the dark. And we do. And so it begins.
Hence the “art” part in the “Art of Spiritual Dreaming.” As an art, it needs practice. Really improves with trying out and adapting and personalizing, missing and picking up and proceeding in fits and starts, in the best human tradition.
The first stages of practice can be squeaky, atonal cries, like the noises from that violin you or your nine-year-old has just picked up and attempted to drag a bow across. Or grunts and groans, as when you move into that yoga posture, and you suddenly can count every damn one of the 206 bones, plus assorted tendons and ligaments, in the human body. Yourbody, thank you very much. Sometimes the art consists in not crying. Or doing so, with all the tears and sobs the situation calls for. If you’re a puddle, you’re sometimes half-way to “soup without the pot.” Then you climb back in. Repotted.
Your art may be different. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” said a certain wise teacher not so many millennia ago. How your art comes to you is your life, what you’re doing today and tomorrow. And after that, maybe. But when this art we’re all practicing becomes dogma, the artist — who’s the pointof it, after all — gets lost in the bans, inquisitions, burnings, purges, pogroms, reformations, downsizings and re-organizations. (Looked at one way, it’s all church/work.) Let me out, says the Artist. I need to breathe. And when we confuse cop-out with drop-out, we’ve confused what Tolkien called the “the flight of the deserter” with “escape of the prisoner.” One is weakness, though sometimes we need to acknowledge weakness, too, just like with crying. (Show up and tell the truth.) The other, the escape, is a necessity. The bush may survive in the prison yard, but it blossoms in open air. You and I dream every night (proven, documented, everyone single one of us, every night — remembering is just another art to practice) to escape the container into more open air.
We talked in the seminar about techniques. They’re not hidden, not anymore. Half a hundred schools and temples and ashrams, synagogues and retreats and workshops teach them, sometimes try to claim them, copyright them even, if they’re reeeeelyinsecure, or greedy and want your $ or other equivalent metal and paper tokens.
Silence. Chant, kirtan, song. Prayer, mantra, favorite refrigerator-magnet team-building-button go-to verbal icon for centering. Icon, image, idol, focus, mandala. Posture, breathing, zazen, yoga, tai chi, krav maga, judo, karate. Ritual, rite, gesture, mudra. Dream, metaphor, lucidity, shift, imaging, visualization. All of these can rattle the container, making us aware of it if we mistake container for real deal, for the truth of what’s going on right now. Pursued with sufficient discipline and zeal, they begin to open doors. Too many! you may say. I’ve just begun with this one, and you’re dumping a truck-load on me.
All you need is to master just one technique, says the Teacher. Just one, and that will be enough.
Enough for what? Suspicious that someone’s selling you something? For me that enough leads to pure experience. Opinions just not needed till after, if at all. Tolkien describes his sense of new/familiar in one of many instances in The Return of the King, in the chapter “The Houses of Healing”:
… as the sweet influence of the herb stole about the chamber it seemed to those who stood by that a keen wind blew through the window, and it bore no scent, but was an air wholly fresh and clean and young, as if it had not before been breathed by any living thing and came new-made from snowy mountains high beneath a dome of stars or from shores of silver far away washed by seas of foam.
And if this metaphor, which is simply another technique, happens to work for you, you catch another glimpse that can be strengthened by one of the techniques here. Or if you’ve swallowed long years or lives of dogma and you practice denial as one of your (powerful) techniques for self-defense against liars and their lies, or simply if your spiritual taste is nourished by other food, it may not work, and you need to look elsewhere, and maybe else-how. And like so many things that may have started for you way back in high school, “you’ll know it when you find it.”
All of this is simply a larger over-technique. And because it’s shaped in words in this post, it may trip you up as much as help you. So with that caveat I pass it along for what it’s worth. Sometimes even an echo is enough to keep us going down the hall and out the gate and along the next path.
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If you’ve been following my nano-progress in the last few posts, you’ll see by the numbers here (showing up and practicing my telling the truth) that I’m lagging in the numbers game. Words, word-count, Nanowrimo, this novel, writing — all containers. Necessary, but not the final story. I’ve got plenty to write, but it’s coming slower than usual, because it feels good to get it right.
Like the story’s already out there, Emily’s sitting here in the living room, curled up near the fire on a snowy, rainy, yucky Vermont day. She’s cradling a mug of tea in one hand, reading or sketching or listening to music, waiting for the next segment I’m just finishing up, and I’m trying to tell it accurately so she’ll recognize it. Or I’m transcribing from a dream what she told me in detail, in Dirnive, which she granted me a pass to enter last night, and I have to punch “replay” and re-enter that dream to check the experience one more time against what I’ve got so far.
It’s coming through like a dream, not linear — that’s for later, with editing — and with textures and colors and sounds that will loom up suddenly and ask for space and time I hadn’t anticipated. A scene with her parents and brother, casually shopping in an antiques store. A class at St. Swithins that seems to link to Emily’s absence for about two weeks’ earth time, but nearly a year on Dirnive. To conceive and give birth to a child there. Because if she doesn’t, given the difference in time passage between the two worlds, her love will age and die quite literally before she herself is out of her teens. Which makes her parents grandparents — her mother would adore a grandchild, only not so soon — but grandparents of a baby they will never see. Because Emily can come and go between worlds — her worlds — but no one else can. I think. Emily doesn’t want to risk it, yet. She says. See what a novel can do to you?!
[Related posts: Shinto & Shrine Druidry 1 | 2 | 3 || Shinto — Way of the Gods || Renewing the Shrine 1 | 2 || My Shinto 1 | 2 ]
The continuing interest among visitors here at A Druid Way in the posts on Shinto says hunger for the Wild, for spiritual connection to wilderness and its rejuvenating spirit, and potentially for Shrine Druidry, remains unabated. No surprise — in our hunger we’ll turn almost anywhere. What forms our response to such hunger may take is up to us and our spiritual descendants. Spirit, the goddesses and gods, the kami, the Collective Unconscious, Those Who Watch, your preferred designation here _____, just might have something to say about it as well.
What we know right now is that we long for spirit, however we forget or deny it, papering it over with things, with addictions and with despair in this time of many large challenges — a hunger more alive and insistent than ever. And this is a good thing, a vital and necessary one. In an artificial world that seems increasingly to consist of hyped hollowness, we stalk and thirst for the real, for the healing energies the natural world provides all humans as a birthright, as participants in its “spiritual economy” of birth, growth, death and rebirth.
As physical beings we live in a world where breathing itself can be a spiritual practice, where our heartbeats sound out rhythms we are born into, yet often and strangely have tried to flee. Even this, my sadness and loss, can be prayer, if I listen and let them reach and teach me, if I walk with them toward something larger, yet native to blood and bone, leaf and seed, sun and moon and stars. Druidry, of course, is simply one way among many to begin.
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If you know Kipling‘s Just So stories, you’re familiar with “The Cat That Walked By Himself.” The cat in question consistently asserts, “All places are alike to me.” But for people that’s usually NOT true. Places differ in ease of access, interest, health, natural beauty, atmosphere — or, in convenient shorthand, spirit. Shrines acknowledge this, even or especially if the shrine is simply a place identified as Place, without any sacred buildings like Shinto has — a place celebrated, honored, visited as a destination of pilgrimage, as a refuge from the profane, as a portal of inspiration.
Here’s a local (to me) example of a place in Vermont I’ll be visiting soon and reporting on, one that sounds like an excellent direction for a Shrine Druidry of the kind people are already starting to imagine and create. It’s called Spirit in Nature, and it’s a multi-faith series of meditation trails with meditation prompts. Its mission statement gets to the heart of the matter:
Spirit in Nature is a place of interconnecting paths where people of diverse spiritual traditions may walk, worship, meet, meditate, and promote education and action toward better stewardship of this sacred Earth.
Spirit in Nature is a non-profit, 501 (c)3 tax-exempt organization, always seeking new members, local volunteers to build and maintain paths, financial contributions, and interest from groups who would like to start a path center in their own area.
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So much lies within the possible scope of Shrine Druidry it’s hard to know where to start. Many such sites (and more potential sites) already exist in various forms. Across Europe, and to a lesser degree in North America (public sites, that is: privateNative American and Pagan sites exist in surprising numbers), are numerous sacred-historical sites (some of which I’ll examine in a coming post), often focusing around a well, cave, tree, waterfall, stone circle, garden, grove, etc. Already these are places of pilgrimage for many reasons: they serve as the loci of national and cultural heritage and historical research, as commemorative sites, spiritual landmarks, orientations in space and time, as treasures of ethnic identity — the list goes on. Quite simply, we need such places.
Lower Falls, Letchworth St. Pk, NY. Image by Wikipedia/Suandsoe.
The national park system of the U.S., touted as “America’s Best Idea” (also the title of filmmaker Ken Burns’ series), was established to preserve many such places, though without any explicit markers pointing to spiritual practice. But then of course we already instinctively go to parks for healing and restoration, only under the guise of “vacations” and “recreation.” And many state parks in the U.S. extend the national park goal of preserving public access to comparatively unspoiled natural refuges. Growing up, I lived a twenty-minute bike ride from Letchworth State Park in western NY: 14,000 acres of forest surrounding deep (in places, over 500 feet) gorges descending to the Genesee River. Its blessing follows me each time I remember it, or see an image of it, and in attitudes shaped there decades ago now. May we all know green cathedrals.
I’ll talk more about shrines on other scales, small and large, soon, and tackle more directly some of the similarities and differences between Shinto and Druidry. I’ll also look at some of the roles practitioners of earth-centered spiritualities can — and already do — play in connection to the creation and support of shrines.
But what of the Galilean Rabbi himself? Enough about trends, which I said last time I wasn’t really interested in. We may forget that Jesus is a common enough religious name of the time — a version of Joshua — “God saves.” (It’s a name still popular today among Hispanics.) Thirty, and he’s still not married. A disappointment to his culture, his family. After all, both count immortality at least in part through heirs and bloodlines. His mother tries to understand, received a sign when she conceived him, has her suspicions and hopes.
Reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem
An itinerant teacher and preacher, one of many, traveling the countryside. On festival days, when he can, like many of his countrymen, he visits the great Temple in Jerusalem. A short career: just a few years. A group of followers who scatter at his death, denying him repeatedly. A promising life, cut short by an ill-timed visit to the capital. The one who betrays him comes from among his own followers. Roman overlords, touchy at the major festival of Passover, the city bulging with visitors and pilgrims, a powder-keg, awaiting a spark to flame into chaos. A summary arrest and trial for the young Rabbi, followed by an ignominious and agonizing death.
Except unlike so many other such preachers, after his death Jesus is not forgotten, is eventually deified, gets elevated to membership in the theologically-problematic Trinity that Christians insist isn’t polytheistic. (If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck …) What was it about him that came across as godlike?
As with other spiritual teachers, we can see his divine intoxication ebbing and flowing, peaking and falling away again, a common enough human phenomenon. Most of us have known a peak experience at least once; we’ve also sadly watched it slip away.
At times Jesus is a poor Rabbi working for justice and compassion, firmly ensconced in the tangle that is 1st century Judea, with its liberal agnostic Sadducees, conservative legalistic Pharisees and radical Zealots. Israel, a stand-out nation, with its peculiar and demanding monotheism, an island of faith and practice in a sea of surrounding nations with their many gods. A politically contentious region, one the Romans occupy, “pacifying” it in typically straightforward Roman style, with local career politicians like Pilate. The Romans crucify troublemakers, tax the province for whatever they can squeeze out of it, and garrison it as a staging point for patrolling other legs of an Empire increasingly wobbly and quarrelsome and groping towards revolt.
More and more, this Rabbi draws a crowd when he stops to preach. He’s a vivid speaker, his rural Galilean-accented Aramaic familiar to his audience. He’s one of us, Joseph’s son. Did you hear what he said earlier today, last night, a week ago? Almost always something memorable.
Show me a coin, he asks those gathered around him one day. A natural teacher, using whatever’s on hand to make a point.
Whose image appears on it? he asks them now.
It’s Caesar’s, they answer.
Exactly so, he says. Distinguish rightly what goes where. The coin, the tax, that goes to Caesar. The divine , however, requires something different.
Like what? his listeners wonder.
Good master, somebody else asks him, intent on his own issues. What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?
Don’t call me “good,” the Rabbi replies, after a pause. I’m not. Call nobody good, except God. And that’s not me, not me, not me the silence echoes, in case anyone was wondering.
The fig tree, when he reaches it, has no figs. Of course not — it’s not the season for them. Jesus, hungry, tired and discouraged, curses it anyway, goes to bed with an empty belly. Real son of God material. Not likely. Word of it gets written down, too.
I’ve been with you this long and you still don’t get it? he scolds his closest followers one day. How long must I endure you? Almost losing it. In public. Another low point. Another note that rings humanly true.
Sea of Galilee
That’s “this-world” Jesus. He sweats in the Mediterranean summers, shivers in the damp, rainy winters. Cries when his friend Lazarus dies. Bellows at the merchants and money-changers in the Temple.
Sheep and goats wander the roads as he walks from town to town. It’s hot and dusty, it’s raining, it’s stormy. The Sea of Galilee can turn to whitecaps in a minute, threatening the small fishing boats that work its coves and depths. Workmen hail him, stop and question him, ponder his words. His own people. Fishermen, slaves, tax collectors, soldiers, prostitutes, farmers, widows, children. The sick, the street people, the lepers and beggars, the homeless. His message first of all must reach them, before anybody else. They need it so badly.
But at times we hear a different voice, sense a very different presence. The Otherworld vivid, all around. (“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees, takes off his shoes …” writes Elizabeth Barrett Browning, nineteen centuries later.) The Kingdom, here, now. This Jesus, so drenched with the divine that the rocks sing to him with it. He can be wrapped in a shining cloud and commune with the ex-carnate Moses. Perceive the spiritual temptations of worldly power, available to anyone who begins to walk into the heart of the Great Mystery. He can say, Satan! but he’s really talking to his own human capacity to choose for good or bad. The power that goes with deep awareness and choice.
This Jesus says The divineand I are one. I came to testify to the truth. If you see me, you see the face of the divine. I came so that people can have more abundant lives. I came for you all. And you are all my sisters and brothers. All children of God, all walking the fields and forests of the Kingdom.
This Jesus knows the divine is all-present, that the flow of Spirit sustains everything, that there’s always enough.
How to capture this inner truth in stories? A huge crowd, fed, with left-overs. A leper healed. A poor woman looking for love or a livelihood, taken in adultery or prostitution, forgiven — and no one to say “But wait!” or argue the letter of the law with the Rabbi with the shining eyes. The accusing crowd, unsettled, disperses.
The hick Rabbi, dying a criminal’s death on the cross, thieves and murderers on both sides pf him, gasping as he asks God to forgive those who nailed him up to die a slow death. The palpable sense of his presence after his death.
His consciousness rising and falling in its breadth of awareness of its own divine potential, its union with all things, its kinship with mustard seeds, with the birds of heaven and the foxes of earth and trees that clap their hands. What could be more human? What could be more Druidic?
The world has three levels: heaven, earth and hell. The leaven is divided into three portions and hidden for a time. All things will be revealed. The divine is both different and the same, yesterday, today and forever. Ask, seek, knock. Druidic triads everywhere, once we start looking. No, the carpenter’s son wasn’t necessarily a Druid. No, Jesus maybe didn’t “in ancient time walk upon on England’s mountains green,” as Blake imagines it in his poem “Jerusalem.” Another story to convey the sense of the divine, here. No reason to claim kinship where it doesn’t exist. But every reason to celebrate links and commonalities and similar wisdom, wherever, whenever they appear.
A man who touches the divine and tries to express it in a culture steeped in a monotheistic tradition of necessity will draw on monotheist images and tropes. How else to express his sense of profound communion, except by an image of a family, father and children? How else to communicate the sense of despair and agony of being cut off from every hope and healing, except by images of lasting hell? How else to convey the divine promise rich inside every breathing moment, except by saying something like It’s the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom?
The gift, already given, given every day, dawn, noon and sunset. The divine never offers less than all. We strain to catch and carry the ocean in a coffee mug. We gaze at dawn and can never hold all that light. We go for water, and it changes to wine, intoxicatingly alive. Each spring, the world practices resurrection. And yes, even the rocks are singing.
I mentioned OGRELD in an earlier post — acronym for that “One Genuine Real Live Druidry” that never existed. But for a non-existent thing, it’s proven surprisingly lively in my thoughts. Every time I scratch my head and say about somebody else, “How can you dothat?” when they do or believe or say something that doesn’t match my quirky and partial understanding of the universe, OGRELD raises its fictitious head, pretty frisky for something that isn’t.
But then “existent” and “non-existent” together comprise a pretty useless category anyway, from what I can see. Hit a paradox, seek for a unifying truth behind it: basic tool in my toolkit. Do I really think that what became my mother and my father flashed into existence from nothing some eight decades ago, mucked around, made a life, made me (thank you!!), and disappeared again forever? That’s far less likely, far harder to believe — a major mismatch with my and others’ experience of the universe — than an alternative take on things: that what manifested as my parents, as me, as all the birds and animals and plants and everything here and there and everywhere, the Ten Thousand Things, is something the universe excels at doing.
Rodent of Unusual Size
Why? Because, first of all, it just keeps doing it. Blessedly, bountifully, provocatively, right under our noses, before our eyes, in our ears, right on hand, at the tips of our tongues. And that, more than anything, spells out my sense of any immortality that may be: this wonderful energy keeps changing form, so don’t get too attached to forms. Roll with it. Dance with it. See where it wants to go next, and follow. Get sufficiently intoxicated in the flow, and its apparent ending is just a wave against a rock, a splash in the endless current. Real? Definitely. Splashy and messy? Yup. But not the whole story by any means. The story goes on with the current. The form (the previous chapter, where we left our hero/ine dangling from a rope above the rapid or the ‘gators or the Rodents Of Unusual Size*) gets left behind. Life 101. What do they teach in schools nowadays?! Move along, move along. These aren’t the Druids you’re looking for.*
But our sneaking suspicion of a truth underlying things also brings with it an annoying tendency for us to think that anything out here, in the manifest world, equals that underlying truth completely, finally, once and for all. That’s a mistake in categories — doesn’t work that way. Instead, it arrives provisionally. Approximately. We encounter any “underlying truth” through time, not all at once. You get your piece, I get mine. For today. Tomorrow we need to reconnect, re-source, re-build. Not “two steps forward, one back,” but instead, keep moving or stagnate, bleed and breathe or fossilize, innovate or institutionalize. Where we are today is always somewhere on that continuum (and almost never at either pole, however much the shrillness of current headlines wants us to believe otherwise. Exhibit A: Anti-Christ Obama / Exhibit B: A New Hope).
So OGRELD can seduce us along every one of its points. “One”? Unity is a tough one for human beings. We see it as a goal, but it usually happens intermittently, then we retreat to our local tribes.
“Genuine” and “Real”? Think of the money in both advertising and purchasing for whatever is “authentic, genuine, real.” But in spite of how those qualities have gotten cheapened, or rather because of it, we long for them more than ever. (The Velveteen Rabbit became real because he was loved. Could be we’ve been looking in the wrong places. “Genuine” and “Real” aren’t in other things, but in ourselves, or nowhere. Whether that’s an improvement, a miracle, a discovery, a revelation, Good News, depends on where you’ve been spending your time and energy.)
Even “Live” can be problematic. (That’s one sign of human genius: we can make problems out of everything.) It’s a game — as long as we remember we agreed to play, and as long as we know that the solution or the victory or the endgame is a solution for today. Tomorrow the games reboot. We’re back with the starting pieces and our own ingenuity and creativity. If we know it’s a game, it’s delightful. If we take it too seriously, it’s pure and absolute Hell for everybody. Oh, we know these things. OGRELD (fill in your preferred means of deliverance here: god, sex, liquor, drugs, the Singularity, Progress, Apocalypse), lead us into your truth!
And “Druidry,” the final component? It’s just as problematic as the rest. It’s not for everyone — not because it excludes, tolerant** little sucker that it is — but because, as with most “solutions” we pose to the problems we created, we exclude ourselves from it. We’re better at no than at yes. If you’re looking for an idol to worship (and we all have one or more already), make sure it’s the best damn idol money can’t buy.
So make a list: what do you want in your job/mate/religion/diet/life? Then interrogate that list. If you actually hadX, what would that let you do or be? Keep going through a few more cycles of interrogation: if you then had Y, what would thatlet you do or be? Stop when exhausted, or when you’ve arrived that the truth that underlies the “truth.” (If you don’t know what thatis, there’s a project/problem for you. Have at it!)
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*There are times when an excess of pop-culture movie references can mar an otherwise perfectly decent blog post.
**Some brands of Druidry are more tolerant than others. In some forms of Druidry, you’re encouraged to invest your time and energy exploring almost any tradition and practice EXCEPT Christianity — shamanism, Egyptian polytheism, Reiki, permaculture, Hinduism, Voudon, veganism, Asatru, Wicca, Buddhism and onward to the ends of the earth. But not Christianity. (If you think Jesus didn’t also teach good Druid principles, you’ve missed substantial insights from both Druidry AND Christianity.) Not true for all flavors of Druidry by any means, but Christian Druids tend to hang out together, or practice solitary, or stay closeted, or drift away, from what I’ve seen. But see OBOD’s page on Christianity and Druidry.
Images: labyrinth — a fine instance of Druid (Pagan) and Christian imagery working synergistically; “Rodents Of Unusual Size”: photos and accompanying article at The Huffington Post, from an article from June ’13.
“Druidry is a middle-class phenomenon. What with your workshops, books, weekends and camps, and especially the pricey study materials for groups like OBOD, who else but somebody middle-class could afford it? It’s like so much of the New Age: take away the cash cow that supplies the milk and it’ll collapse. Your ‘nature spirituality’ or ‘green religion’ is just middle-class consumption of good marketing. It’s not the real thing. Where’s the outreach to all levels of society?”
OK, let’s listen to this mostly economic critique. On the face of it, it may seem pretty damning. If Druidry is simple good marketing and money-driven, it’s like so many other trends and fashions: it depends on a manufactured need, or at least a market-boosted one. Take away the marketing and it fades away.
Outdoors the October sky is gray. I gaze out the window, sending a brief acknowledgement to the directions, thanking Spirit for the gift of this life, breathing and being aware of my breath, centering my attention before proceeding with this blog post.
If we look at ancient Druidry, through the filter of its classical recorders who did not always have its best interests at heart, it appears to be a distinct caste. Druids had status and power, and were definitely not the mass of society. They were an elite, with all the pluses and minuses that go with it. There was little we would call “middle-class” about Celtic society. Slaves, warriors, traders, farmers, craftspeople … but no one with that strange combination of material luxury, education, and political clout that looks remotely like what we mean by “middle class” today or for the last 100 years. By our standards or even by Medieval ones when something like a middle class began to emerge, most ancient Celts were wretchedly poor.
As for the over-marketing of the New Age and spirituality and all our current hopes and dreams and fears, that’s one of the creeping plagues of capitalism. If it can be packaged to make money, someone will package it. The retreats and workshops and therapists and healers and “sacred” this and “spiritual” that fill a need, or they wouldn’t exist. But they don’t touch the heart of knowing yourself for part of the world, feeling your body and the earth and trees, birds and insects and fish and animals, sun and clouds and stars all as kindred. The awen that is always streaming out of silence and calling us to sing back does not go away when the money stops clinking and whispering at the cash register. It only becomes more profound. There we can find the heart of Druidry.
Let’s look at the cost of study materials like those of OBOD right up front. If you decide to enroll in the Bardic course, you receive monthly course mailings, access to a tutor, online forums, a subscription to the OBOD magazine Touchstone, and supplemental materials throughout the year. Many people take more than a year — sometimes several years — to complete the work of the grade, but there’s no additional cost. The text-based Bardic study materials cost £215 — at the current exchange rate, that works out to $344 — a little less than a dollar a day. Many people spend more on cigarettes and alcohol. That’s the cost of joining one specific teaching and initiatic order. Printing and mailing cost money. But it is admittedly beyond the reach of many on tight budgets.
Of course, you can be a Druid for free, starting at this moment. You live on this earth, and you can follow your intuition and common sense and spiritual need and shape your own way throughout your own life, paying no one for any teaching, and bowing to no one and nothing except those you feel deserve it. Yes, the support and encouragement of what others have discovered and thought and written is invaluable along the way. Many valuable books and other materials are free online, or available at libraries. But if you want to receive and study OBOD’s Druid teachings, they cost money to reproduce and ship. If you want to study with ADF, or AODA, or the British Druid Order, there are fees because there are administrative costs and physical materials you receive. If you think Druidry is the next big way to make money, form your own order, market your One Genuine Real Live Druidry, and have at it.
One of the joys of living Druidry is a sense in the West at least that we’re recapturing something lost, something beautiful and profound, but also something utterly vital and practical. Many tribal peoples have preserved their traditional wisdom for living on earth without destroying it. Such wisdom is hard won. Tribes that practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, for instance, often found their land damaged after a few cycles and needed to move. Poor farming practices meant not just environmental degradation but often starvation and death.
As one flavor of Druidry, OBOD offers itself as “a spiritual way and practice that speaks to three of our greatest yearnings: to be fully creative in our lives, to commune deeply with the world of Nature, and to gain access to a source of profound wisdom.”* That may on occasion be good marketing, but it’s also uncommonly good sense to live in a way that makes our decades here all they can be, to walk lightly on the earth.
With a title like that, you might expect shocking revelations, secret tips, insider advice, or something — anything — designed to titillate or distract a readership. Or perhaps I could offer some variation on “what people want” — if we try to deduce that incoherent impossibility from reports on Google’s most popular search terms.
Instead, I’ll start with the literal. Our west-facing driveway warms up during the day, and on late spring and early fall mornings like yesterday’s and today’s, when we open the overhead garage door, as often as not one or more garter snakes will have curled up on the concrete during the night to warm themselves on the residual heat. Each morning they’re sluggish and need to be coaxed with a toe from their stupor to move and so avoid getting run over by our car. Thus the “serpent under the door.”
But as with all other things (Druids like to claim), coincidences can be teachers, too. Take our power outage yesterday afternoon. I saw a flash of light, heard a popping sound, and our electricity died as I was starting to draft this post. Green Mountain Power arrived a couple of hours later and promptly fixed the problem. With an extensible pole, the line workman loosened something small and dark from the overhead transformer which plummeted to our lawn, and then he apparently reset a surge protector or trip device. Problem solved. When he came to the door to report success — I was watching all this from our living room window and stepped out to meet him — he said a bird had shorted out the line, tripping the transformer. The small dark object that had fallen was the burnt corpse of the unfortunate. Wholly unperturbed, our resident pair of mourning doves resumed their perches nearby on the power line soon after the GMP service truck departed.
Serpents and doves: be shrewd as the former, and gentle as the latter, counsels the Galilean master*. To put it more bluntly, avoid getting fried, or run over — each grisly fate available, significantly enough, through human agency. So it’s fitting that any shrewdness and gentleness I can wring from these two instances should issue from the same animal world.
As I write, goldfinches brighten our feeder, squabbling with the jays and an acrobatic chipmunk for seed. Today’s late morning humidity and temperature already climb toward midsummer highs, just a few days after night-time frost warnings in our area. The serpent under the door is my instinct, the bird on the power grid my arrogant ignorance. No, that’s not it. Something else, something other. Yes, the danger of allegory is its all-too-easiness, its tendency toward glib preachiness. A welcome Buddhist and pragmatic strain in some contemporary Druidry reminds me that sometimes a dead bird is just a bird, a sluggish serpent just a snake. It’s the “and yet” that rears up and insists on making bigger meanings from small ones that is a sometimes annoying blessing.
But why shouldn’t we squeeze every event and experience for all it might be worth? Equipped with overactive brains and growing out of a world we have tried to name and explicate, it’s a natural tendency, one literally native to us, crafted by nature, by natural selection and chance, by the divine at work with these, their alter ego, their personification, their image. Tolkien’s elves, the Quendi, named things and tried to wake them. In this they followed their nature: Quendi** means “those who speak with voices,” the verbal echoes of their name present in words like bequeath and loquacious, query and quest, inquisitive and require. Kweh, kwoh, kw-, kw- … Human deeds, human cries, human needs. The same world that wiggles and flutters in snakes and birds has shaped and turned itself to allow humans to name — and endanger — them. Because we can do something may not mean we should. So we look to our animal kin for direct lived insight into how to thrive in this world, their wordless gestures rich as words. In an early poem, Mary Oliver captures Druidic wisdom:
Sleeping in the Forest
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
At first we might think it’s death she’s talking about, but as she says in other poems, it’s deeper and more significant than just that particular transition, that magnified human fear and obsession. Death, yes: but there are many more marvelous things in addition to that. We can imagine ourselves different, “better” — what that may mean. “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.” Gratitude to bird and beast; this, my offering.
This is the second in a series of posts about magic. The first looked at two kinds of knowledge, one of which we often discount in a world where knowledge ofa thing counts for more: “Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.” Other kinds of knowing exist beyond these two, but we build on these.
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In the past, for almost anyone who sought out magical training, a teacher offered the surest guidance. Few people were literate, so other than learning through trial and error, a guide or mentor was immensely useful. Little was committed to writing anyway — too risky, impractical, wasteful of materials for a minuscule readership — pointless really. Shaman, witch, hoodoo man or woman, conjurer, curandera, priestess, mystic, sorcerer, mage, wizard, druid — a panoply of names to call what a seeker might be looking for.
Nowadays, as an aspiring mage, I can locate and open a beginning magic textbook — one that actually sets out a course of training for new magicians, as opposed to one that assuages the ego by offering vague reassurances and “instant magic.” When I do, I run head-long into the hidden first lesson: my undisciplined attention needs training and focus. But I skim the chapter, or look ahead at one that seems to promise more. Soon the first excitement of a promising title or author — or, gods help us, a flashy cover with a robed figure — begins to wane. I want The Big Secret; instead, the first chapter sets me to doing a couple of modest-seeming exercises I am to practice for a month and record the results. Too much like work. Where are the glowing runes and mysterious passwords to infinite realms of gold and shadow and silver? Where are the guardians with amethyst crowns and rings of adamant? I want the symphony, and this book has me practicing scales.
More than anything else it does, magic even half-practiced bring me face to face with myself. “Gnothi seauton,” said Socrates. “Know yourself.” We aren’t altogether what we think we are — both more and less, we discover the prime tool of magic: the self. All other powers pale in comparison to what we already are, what we bring right now to the art of magic. We are marvelous beings, with dimensions, capacities and talents unexplored. Discovering the truth of this firsthand ideally will not puff up the ego, but engage the curiosity, another tool the mage never stops using. I will need that curiosity to help me through the first month. By the end of the first week or so, if I’ve actually stuck with the exercises that long, the first aura of wonder has dimmed. But in its place, a glimmer, usually no more, of things I didn’t know I knew, of aspects of consciousness, of a window opening where before there was only a wall, of passage through, where before was only cul-de-sac. It’s faint, that sense of expansion, and if I don’t write it down, it dwindles to nothing. Gone. Easy to forget, easy to minimize, discount, ignore altogether. Hence the advice to record it. The hard evidence of pages of experience accumulates into a consistent realm of action and reaction and consequence that the mind cannot so easily argue away any longer. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I need to unify my forces if I am to accomplish anything worth doing.
The first lessons of magic use and highlight abilities we possess in the service of clarifying the task ahead. Knowledge, memory, discipline, attention, imagination. And persistence. I discover both more — and less — than I’d hoped for. I learn what a slippery, supple and potent thing consciousness is. I learn in spite of myself and in spite of the biases of many current cultures that consciousness isn’t all I am, and it may not even be the most valuable or striking aspect of my identity. Or rather I learn that day-to-day consciousness is to the full spectrum of possible consciousness what the visible wavelengths of light are to the full electromagnetic spectrum — a small slice out of an enormous bandwidth. I learn that other beings may prefer and reside in other portions of the spectrum, the way insects can see ultraviolet and infrared beyond the human range, the way dogs hear pitches of sound and smell an olfactory melange we never register, the way countless worlds are stuffed with possibilities we never notice at all.
Some knowing is remembering, is recollection. Where did I encounter this before? And who was with me when I did?
Read about any of this too soon, however, and instead of learning it, I’m convinced I already “know” it. Next cool thing, please, says the mind. Next one. As if magic, somehow different from eating or love-making or listening to music, were a matter of hurrying to the end, rather than practicing the delight of being present in the moment, noticing all we can, taking it in, marveling.
So I begin to know differently, more broadly. Go slow, says the Master. What’s the rush?
Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman or brujo made famous in Carlos Castaneda‘s controversial book series*, remarks of the magical journey, “For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length–and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.”
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*Castaneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968; 1998 (30th edition).
This is the first of a series on the powers of magic.
“All I know is a door into the dark,” says Seamus Heaney in the first line of his poem “The Forge.” In some way that’s where we all begin. At three, four, five years old, some things come into our world already bright, illuminated, shining, on fire even. The day is aflame with sun, the golden hours pass until nightfall, and then come darkness and sleep and dreaming. We wander through our early days, learning this world, so familiar-strange all at once. We grow inwardly too, discovering trust, betrayal, lying, love, fear, the pleasure of imagination, the difference between visible and invisible worlds. Which ones do people talk about, admit to themselves? Which ones do people around us ignore, or tell us don’t matter?
Much of our knowing is experiential during those years. We learn about the physical laws of our planet, the bumps and bruises and sometimes breaks of childhood a testament to the hard edges of this world. We learn some of its softnesses too: favorite foods, the touch of loved ones, the warm fur of pets, a dog’s nose meeting ours, the new air on the skin that spring and summer bring, the delight of rain and puddles and baths and fresh-laundered clothes.
Then in some parts of the world comes another learning, one that typically fills much of our days for the next decade or so: a knowing about, the accumulation in school of facts and statistics and words and ideas, math and languages and art, science and history. Still some experiential learning comes through as a matter of course — Bunsen burners glowing, magnesium and potassium in chemistry doing their flaming and bubbling tricks mixed with other elements. The practice of basketball, baseball, volleyball, football and soccer, the sprints and catches and throws and spins and tricks, the correct forms and personal styles. Wrestling, dance, music, track and field, teaching the body to know beyond thought, to form and shape habits useful precisely when they becomehabit and no longer demand our full attention.
And other knowledge of the body, too: the awakening of sexuality, the chemical prods and prompts of hormones to stir the body into further change, the powers of attraction and desire, the experimentation with consciousness-altering that seems a universally human practice, whether “naturally” through exercise and pushing one’s physical limits, through chant, prayer, meditation, dance, song, music, or through “assisted alteration” with certain herbs, drugs, alcohol. Even into adulthood much of this knowledge rumbles and whispers just below the level of conscious thought much of the time. Without socially-approved times and places to discuss many of these experiences, we withhold them from daily conversation, we “fit in” and accommodate, we commit to being just like everyone around us, and the nudge of what feels like difference becomes part of the background hum of living, an itch we scratch haphazardly, or learn to tune out.
We forget how valuable this kind of knowing is, how it persists throughout our lives. This used to be wisdom of a kind we valued precisely because it took lived experience to acquire. You couldn’t rush it, couldn’t buy it or fake it, at least not without so much practice you almost recreated for yourself the original source experience anyway.
Some kinds of knowledge are experiential and therefore in a different sense hidden or secret from anyone who hasn’t had the experience. Consider sex: there is no way to share such “carnal knowledge” – you simply have to experience it to know it. And thus Adam and Eve “know” each other in the Garden of Eden in order to conceive their children. Many languages routinely distinguish “knowing about” and “knowing” with different words, as for instance German kennen and wissen, French savoir and connaitre, Welsh gwybod and adnabod, Chinese hui/neng/zhidao. The kinds of experiential knowledge humans encounter in a typical lifetime are substantial and significant: first love, first death, first serious illness and so on.
Back to the poem I mentioned in the first line of this post. Reading it can be, in a small way, a re-initiation back into some experiences and kinds of knowing we may have forgotten or waylaid. It’s “just words,” but also — potentially — more.
The Forge
by Seamus Heaney
All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
Here’s one opportunity of our human life (there are others) — a door into darkness, a world inside us that is a forge, a place of shaping and molding, of hammering material into a desired form, a place of work and energy and transformation. The door leads to a place where we can find an altar, where we can “expend ourselves in shape and music” and “beat real iron out.” Sometimes it appears others stand there before us; at times, we stand alone, tools scattered about, not always sure of how to proceed, dimly aware, or not at all, of anything like an altar or metal or tools. But here lies a chance at the magnum opus, the “great work” many of us seek, that task finally worthy of all that we are and can do and dream of, a labor that is pleasure and work and art, all at once or at different times.
Even to know this in some small way, to imagine it or suspect it, is a start. The door into the dark may not stand open, but we discern the outlines of something like a door, and maybe grope towards a handle, a yielding to an inner call, something that answers to a hand on the doorknob, or shifts like a latch, clicks open. To know this much is a priceless beginning.
How magic can build on this beginning, and assist in self-making, will be the subject of the next post.
I’m still learning courage, just as we all are. Tests along the way, but no endpoint, no “I’m as brave now as I can be.” Courage is a practice. And I’ve learned that I miss opportunities for bravery where I need to, and can, practice it daily — in the face of my lazinesses and indulgences. These opportunities don’t look particularly heroic or brave, but that’s because I’m still learning what courage is. Too often I think it’s something somebody else has, or needs to have. Or I bewail its lack in others to whom I give power over my life, giving away the courage I already have. I slip into fear, and then into denial as soon as someone points it out, makes me aware, that I’m acting out of fear.
These are not words of self-blame. They’re words of clearing away, of washing the dishes, polishing the silver, emptying the ash from the woodstove. They are words of working the soil, turning the compost, preparing the growing space for the season to come. Actions that make room for courage to happen. As I prepare for health reasons to leave this teaching career of almost two decades at a private boarding high school, I look for new work. Some of it, some of what I know I need to do, doesn’t offer a paycheck. Some asks me for payment instead, and of a different kind.
Sometimes courage is just inconvenient. I’ll do it, whatever has to be done. If I’m the penguin next off the ice floe, I know that water’s cold. I’m not looking forward to it, but I know it’s necessary. I bring the best heart to it I can, if not for my own sake at this moment, then for others, as I move forward. Plunge. Afterward, I discover — maybe — that was courage. At the time I thought it was “just living my life.” “Guess what,” my life says back at me. “No difference.”
In the end, curiosity is stronger than fear. If I can imagine something different, I’m halfway there. Just catch a hint of it, a flavor, a whisper of something new yet also oddly familiar. There it is again …
Teacher, counselor and author Stephen Jenkinson has become a voice I listen to (“Yes, I hear voices”), to see what I can learn from him. He speaks, among many other things, about our need for elders — for people who have done the work and learned and earned wisdom. He talks about cultural death and the need for witness:
There is a lot of work to be done now, right now, in our time. Some of it is ecological, some political and economic, but all of it is cultural. Work I think is best understood as ‘the thing you’re least inclined to do’, and so we have our work cut out for us. The dominant culture, as near as I can tell, is in the beginnings of a terminal swoon. I don’t think it can be avoided. It’s end can only be prolonged or prompted, veiled or midwifed; those are our choices. The dominant culture was not built as if the last five hundred years on these shores had happened; it was built in spite of those years. It was built with a shrug to the past, and with the view that the past is gone. That is the principal reason for its ending. A culture unwilling to know its ragged, arbitrary origins is fated to a kind of perpetual, uninitiated adolescence, and it is by this adolescent spirit of privilege and entitlement and dangerous amnesia that our culture is known in the world.
We have to be in the culture making business, and soon. Real culture is not built on bad myths of superiority or inevitability or victory. It is built by people willing to learn and remember the stories that slipped from view, the rest of the truth that the empire won’t authorize. That learning and remembering costs people dearly. The work of building culture is learning and remembering how things have come to be as they are, without recourse to premature, temporary fixes, or to depression and despair. The way things are now, despair is a laziness no one can afford.*
That’s useful: knowing what I can afford. Fear leaves, despair leaves, when I know I can’t afford them any longer. Not a matter of will, or often even of anything other than a realization one day. A judgment, wisdom coming at last. Something taking its place — the place of fear — but also something taking its own place, its rightful position all along. Something bigger, more important. Fear turns out to be just a temporary place-holder, a filler, padding, a zero that ultimately let me count how many spaces have room for something more, native from the beginning. Return.
Thanks to Philip Carr-Gomm for sending me a link to Griefwalker, a moving and provocative video about some of Stephen’s work. You can watch a trailer here:
Sometimes I can contrive nothing better to say or do on this blog than simply pass along something I’ve been reading for its surprise or its insight — or at best, both at once. (Why begin with an image of Jake, Donny and Walt? Keep reading. Or call it a Druidic obsession with triads…)
Today’s shamelessly self-indulgent instance of such a something comes from a post on another blog, where I encountered the following passage from The Greek Commonwealth by British scholar, utopian and idealist Alfred Zimmern, first published 1911, and now available online. (It’s also been reprinted at least five times by Oxford, the latest edition I’ve found dating from 1977. Yes, I spent time tracking that info down. It’s better than grading the mountain of essays that sit on my desk and desktop. Call it rationalized procrastination.) In a chapter on poverty, noted the poster, Zimmern “tries to get the reader to imagine, in a poetic passage, the daily life of the Greeks in Classical times.”
Here, then, is Zimmern himself:
We think of the Greeks as pioneers of civilisation and unconsciously credit them with the material blessings and comforts in which we moderns have been taught, and are trying to teach Asiatics and Africans, to think that civilisation consists.
We must imagine houses without drains, beds without sheets or springs, rooms as cold, or as hot, as the open air, only draftier, meals that began and ended with pudding, and cities that could boast neither gentry nor millionaires. We must learn to tell the time without watches, to cross rivers without bridges, and seas without a compass, to fasten our clothes (or rather our two pieces of cloth) with two pins instead of rows of buttons, to wear our shoes or sandals without stockings, to warm ourselves over a pot of ashes, to judge open-air plays or lawsuits on a cold winter’s morning, to study poetry without books, geography without maps, and politics without newspapers. In a word we must learn how to be civilized without being comfortable. Or rather we must learn to enjoy the society of people for whom comfort meant something very different from motor-cars and armchairs, who, although or because they lived plainly and austerely and sat at the table of life without expecting any dessert, saw more of the use and beauty and goodness of the few things which were vouch-safed them – their minds, their bodies and Nature outside and around them.
Greek literature, like the Gospels, is a great protest against the modern view that the really important thing is to be comfortable…
How many Druids would hold this up as an ideal as well, at least at first? But would — or could — we be as happy? Somehow I can imagine Jake Lebowski (from the Coen brothers’ ’98 film The Big Lebowski) would manage better in such conditions than I would. The Stoner might just beat out the Loner. “There are things more important than comfort”, says fantasy author Ursula LeGuin, “unless one is an old woman or a cat.” She’s now an old woman, as her image here shows; I confess that for some years, I’ve noticed a creeping feline-ness of (dis)inclination invade my once radical and rebellious bones …
A Druid Way 
