With the pervasive influence of belief-religions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism on many of the readers of this blog, we tend to think of the dividing line between “who’s in” and “who’s out” as something marked by belief, when there are numerous other options available. It’s not just “paper or plastic?” There’s canvas bags, and boxes, and carry-it-out-in-my-hands-without-any-container-needed-thank-you, to name a few. And if we look over some of the terms available to describe this range of approaches and objects of our attention and intention — terms like atheist — they often bring way too many non-useful associations with them. Often atheist really isn’t a particularly useful term for many who just don’t bother with deity, as deity has never bothered with them. Hence the term ungodded in the title of this post, an awkward attempt to get at this phenomenon.
After all, orthodox Hindus aren’t normally labelled a-carnists, non-meat-eaters, though most are vegetarian. It’s simply their default setting. If I’ve never paid any particular attention to deity at all, I’m not so much an atheist as an alter-cosmist — I live in a different cosmos, where the question doesn’t arise, or hasn’t done so recently. At least until the door-to-door folks come calling with their pocket sermons and their flyers and leaflets and their “either you’re in or you’re out”-trips. Binarists, every one of ’em, devotees of a binary black-white, either-or world that ignores an immense and uncharted middle ground. Worshipers of Binaria, goddess of absolute distinctions in a world of shaded and subtle continuum inherent in almost everything.
Marduk and his dragon Mushkhushshu — public domain/Wikipedia
Or to take another tack, I don’t believe in my ancestors so much as understand they exist(ed), from the evidence of my own existence right now, though many of their names and faces are lost in time. (The same happens to gods. Marduk, son of Enki, anyone? Does your non-belief make you an a-Mardukist?! Or can we concur that most of us check the box marked N.A. — “not applicable”?)
Some ancestors contribute to my genes and bloodline directly, while the others subside into the background, distant cousins, every one of them. Imagine — and I mean imagine — that god/desses fill some of those same spaces. Powers that made and are making a difference, even though I never meet them directly. Imagine the cosmos filled with nothing else than cousins. My counterpart in Azerbaijan gets along perfectly well without my knowledge or belief, and he’s a mortal man. What of god/desses? Can’t they do at least as much?
“Oh brave new world, that has such people [deities?] in it!” — Miranda, Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1.186-187.
Gravity existed long before anyone believed in it. We could call it a goddess, except that we (mostly) haven’t conceptualized that Power in such a way. And no, I’m not suggesting that we pray to Gravitas at her altars — although doing so would doubtless reveal some world-widening insights we haven’t yet reached. Any scientist worth her training knows that dedication to her field reveals secrets obtainable in no other way. What else is devotion, after all, but a means of contact, a chance to widen the world and make use of the divine gift of our imagination and creativity? What else, you might ask, are we for? (Try that out as a subject for meditation and practice for a month of days, in any way you like, and get back to us with what you discover.)
R. J. Stewart offers an “American Goddesses Meditation” as a way to explore deity that you might connect to quite naturally. (Why not use what’s nearby first?! If you’re not an inhabitant of the States, adapt to your locale — who’s a goddess in your area? There might be rivers, mountains, and so on that deserve attention, if only for experimental devotion. Who gets represented in statues, names, images — even and especially if they don’t at first come across as goddesses? And you can try the same with gods, if you’re so inclined. Many deities are partly or proximally incarnate — they have a physical form you can use to approach them, much as the Orthodox in some traditions have icons, statues, etc. Looked at one way, some of the most seemingly Protestant and Evangelical among Americans are polytheists, also worshiping a hard, metallic and martial war-god, carrying around his talismans and charms in the form of AK-47s, Glocks, etc.)
Liberty — Wikipedia/public domain
If, on the other hand, you do practice devotion or dedication to some form of deity, it behooves you to try out non-belief, for what it can offer you that nothing else can. By that I mean, among other things, rather than fearing doubt, to harnessit as a tool for insight and exploration. One of my teachers exhausted doubt as a factor when he finally pursued it to its deepest ends — ran it to earth, so to speak — and realized that for him it no longer exerted power. Doubt became merely boring, not worth the time (like chewing gum you’ve worked on for hours). Doubt no longer offered an illicit thrill, or troubled his inner worlds. As far as doubt is concerned, then, he’s now an atheist.
Can I be an atheist towards fear, or anger, or some other Power that asks for my worship and energy and attention? Who and what else do I worship that doesn’t deserve it, or that I’ve outgrown? (And to turn the wheel another quarter turn, who and what might I be overlooking or ignoring that merits more attention than I grant today? Chances are great there’s something more I can discover about this endlessly amazing universe.)
[“Why, when God’s world is so big, did you fall asleep in a prison, of all places?” — Rumi.]
John Beckett’s excellent recent post “When you have to be a spiritual emergency room” is a good reference for the angle I’d like to take in this post. My focus will be on the self, rather than helping another. Experience your own crises and refine your strategies more than a few times, and the opportunity will come to serve others in need.
Yesterday at an open discussion on dreams I had an insightful conversation with a person who was walking his path as consciously as he could. At one point, he said he knew what gave him nightmares, but he wasn’t going to forgo hot wings every once in a while, just because of the fallout they caused. They tasted too damn good.
This is being the knowing effect of a cause, a step along the path of spiritual discipline. It’s using consciousness to help shape what we experience.
But I’m not talking about that here, about such a reasoned weighing of pros and cons before choosing, but about those moments of full-on spiritual (and sometimes physical) ambush — moments we know too well. The world is no longer a friendly place.
Experience a form of combustion, shock, blowback, fallout, karma, inner explosion, cause and effect, consequences, results, crisis — and hearing someone tell you that “you create your own universe” just doesn’t help ease the suffering. True, down the road, once you’ve pulled yourself back together, tracking down possible contributing causes can be a wise course of action, one that can lead to averting, or processing, or seeking more wisely — the same experience in the future. But in urgent situations, we need a compassionate — and effective — first response.
Obviously, deal with any immediate emergency conditions. First aid, or even a visit to an urgent care center or emergency room, may go far to restoring a sense of safety and self-care. Treat the burn, stop the bleeding: deal with intoxication or drug use or poisoning of any kind. A panic attack may have physical causes among others. Get away from whatever is toxic — smoke from the fire, the bottle of mead, the bong or cigarette, the hypnotic drumbeat, other people, the ritual circle, the spiritual practice, or the room you’ve been in too long. If necessary, remove any books, pictures, clothing, or other objects associated with the crisis — or remove yourself from the space, if that’s easier.
As a next step, yes, listening’s enormous in its power to ease many kinds of suffering, though sometimes it may simply not be available — no one I’m in contact with understands, no one gets me. (True, this can be mere destructive egotism — “I’m special. Nobody knows me or my inner world. I can’t be helped”.) But if I have a partner or friend or community, a priestly counselor I trust, then I’m blessed, and partway home. Giving shape to my experience in words helps me see into the situation more clearly, and know it for what it is or might be. Getting it down on paper does the same thing, and sometimes more solidly. The Wise in Ancient Egypt knew that if you can name it, you can begin to tame it — or at least not inflame it further.
As John notes, ground and center. Repeat as needed. This can be a matter of a practice I already do regularly, or something I haven’t yet incorporated into my routine.
One common version: Sit upright, or — better — stand. Stretch, feeling the muscles and tendons of your body. Take three slow deep breaths. Feel the body rooted in the earth, the legs going down like tree roots. Release what holds you back. Know the blood flowing in your veins is an echo of the ocean’s tide, the same salt sea. Feel the air around your skin as you breathe in and out, whether there is a breeze or all is still. With the blessings of earth, sea and sky, you are here and now.
Address other physical symptoms. A bath or shower can help wash away emotional extremes, as well as calm the body, slow the heart, ease tensions, etc. We all know this, but often remember it least at crisis points when we need it most. Accompany the bath or shower with visualizations and meditations, prayers, and any other physical aids like incense, bath oils and salts, etc. Music can also soothe, just as it can raise adrenaline and blood pressure: choose what soothes. Sometimes silence is perfect. Other times, there has to be something playing in the background to help calm the inner and outer turmoil, if silence itself is unnerving.
Watch diet. Carnivores can often benefit from eating a meat meal, which effectively closes down the psychic centers because it demands significant energy to digest. If I dig into a steak, I can feel the doors close and the body center. (Fasting has the opposite effect and is pursued for comparable reasons — conserving and then redirecting energy normally used for digestion to other purposes.) Other non-flesh proteins can have a similar though less immediate effect.
Choose surroundings. The familiar may be immensely comforting — a place, a particular room. Or a change may be indicated. Be outdoors if possible, if this feels good, rather than too much. Lying on the earth can help restore a feeling of security and groundedness. Make sure any people and animals nearby are a comfort, not a source of anxiety.
By itself, focusing on slow, steady breathing can induce calm, charge the body with oxygen, and release tension. Its regularity is meditative, and counting the breaths to ten and then starting again can become a basic practice.
John Beckett mentions shielding exercises, good ones. Here are some techniques I also use.
Visualizations to dump negative thoughts or unwanted experiences can help. One of my favorites is the snowball technique: visualize what you want to drop as something you pack into a tight snowball. When you’ve clumped it thick, throw it into a river, which washes it away and dissolves it.
Another similar visualization: sweep your outer and inner spaces with a broom of light. Collect the sweepings and cast them away — again, into the river, or a hole in the earth you fill, or a dump truck/lorry, or somewhere/something else that takes them away and disposes of them. Some find visualizing a friendly monster with an enormous mouth which consumes them and then obligingly runs away with them can help. Others like to imagine a whole team working to do the same thing — friends, or an army of helpers, cleaning the space. Go with what works — use the inner creativity we all possess.
A third technique — the Three Doors. Visualize — or if visualization doesn’t come easily — feel your way toward — a cave or tunnel entrance into an enormous mountain. Once inside, close the first heavy door behind you. You hear it boom and resound as it shuts, the locks banging home. Do this two more times as you pass down the corridor or tunnel — three doors altogether. At last you are within a chamber of light, with the three immense doors protecting you from all harm.
Other living beings like pets can serve as a comfort — we’re seeing the growth of using companion animals for relieving stress and reducing anxiety. A purring cat in the lap, or a dog enjoying a mellow time of dozing or looking adoringly at you, go far to restoring balance and centering.
Physical objects — rosaries, statues, prayer beads, talismans, rings, stones, etc. — can also help. Specially-crafted items, like talismans, can bring more specific kinds of ease and provide a sense of protection. We’ve seen the popular spread of fidget spinners to help deal with restlessness, anxiety, stress and ADHD.
Physical activity can also help — sometimes the nerve centers, chakras, etc., are already too fired up and any focus on them only exacerbates the situation. Physical movement — walking, swimming, physical training equipment — can provide a focus and an easing of inner imbalance.
Just as there are many spiritual techniques for every other kind of experience in the world, so spiritual first aid can accompany solely physical responses to crisis periods.
One of my best teachers is in fact a high school teacher and an administrator, and — out of long personal experience — no fan of committees and their guidelines. “Is it a guideline, or a line to my guide?” he likes to ask. Does it get born and die on the page, like most administrator-ese, or is it a living thing, helping me connect to what matters?
A case in point is the funny little post “Pillbug“, about — among other things — the experience of connecting with an animal guide. I first wrote it in March 2017, and it went the way of many of my posts, with a brief flurry of interest when I posted it, and then the usual precipitous disappearance into the group anonymity of most other posts here. But a few of you must be reading backwards, or telling each other about that particular post, or both. Because around 5 months ago, Pillbug started enjoying a second life, with several hundred views, more than after it was first published here. Why? (Take a look at it, if you haven’t already.)
I know the subject of guides and other non-human — or often non-physical — helpers keeps on rising into our group awareness. A blogpost, a forum question, and we’re off again.
The topic’s a perennial favorite, and in our skeptical age we often psych ourselves either into complete rejection of such things, or else we run whole hog in the opposite direction, with uncritical acceptance of our more interesting experiences. No halfway for us!
John Beckett’s current post, “Run Rabbit Run — An Augury For One” takes up the subject as well. He approaches many of the same issues I have [see here, here, and here, among others] — no surprise, because we’re all walking a path, and our paths constantly intersect — an opportunity for rich exploration, if we only see and take it, rather than being affronted by difference, challenge, change, otherness. You might find his perceptions a useful counterpoint to other things on the subject you’ve encountered. If so, tell him! Leave a comment on his blog. Help him keep writing his useful guide, based on his experiences.
As I wrote elsewhere, paraphrasing Mara Freeman:
Every thing that exists expresses itself. How else do we know it except through its expressions? If I arbitrarily rule out any non-physical expression from my interest or attention — and here we can include emotion, hunch, imagination, intuition, gut feeling, creative impulse, dream, memory, love — I merely impoverish myself. Why on the deep earth or in the starry heavens would I want to do that?!
So much of our training — maybe all of it — is training in listening, in paying attention. Often we’ve learned the lesson by school age, where teachers call us back from daydream to “pay attention” — and we are, just not to them!
As I look over these notes, several points stand out. (I’ll put them in first person and speak only for myself, not to presume too much about who you are, or what your experience may be.) First, to my mind, is the desire (I don’t know how else to put it) of the Other — Spirit or spirits, guides, deities, totems — to connect with me. Second I must concede my own obliviousness. I ask for help, or a “sign,” but even when it lies down in front of me and trips me up, I STILL manage to ignore it.
Next is the likelihood that once I start looking, coincidences begin stacking up until it’s clear there’s more than coincidence going on. Common themes emerge. The animal I seek is also seeking me — in dreams, “accidents,” images, unaccountable emotional reactions to seemingly “unimportant” things -– in all the different ways it can reach me, in case one or more channels of communication are blocked (usually on my end).
Animal images in poems also cry and echo for the nerd-Bard that I am. We repress the animal guides in and around us, so that like other repressed things, they eventually spring, animal-like, into our psyches elsewhere, in sometimes strange and nightmarish images, in art, dream, eventually, even, in national obsessions and pathologies. If they pool and accumulate enough cultural energy, they manifest in personal and societal outward circumstances, in political and cultural movements, in wars and other conflicts. Think of W. B. Yeats’ apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming,” which famously ends “what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Or consider Philip Levine’s “Animals are Passing from Our Lives” in the voice of a pig approaching its slaughter. Apocalyptic and angry poems like these, like most art, aren’t “about” only one thing. Run them to earth and they keep meaning something more. We use animals (animals use us!) to communicate what we sometimes cannot say directly. Among all the other things they do, animals help us express that deep love, that bitter grief, anger and darkness, comfort and healing, that simply may not be able to manifest in any other way.
There’s a fine Old English proverb (from the collection of 46 Durham Proverbs, if you’d like to know) that I keep encountering: Ciggendra gehwilc wile þæt hine man gehere. “Everyone that cries out wants to be heard”, as I render it here. Literally, “Of-the-criers, each wishes that him someone hears”. I know that I want to be heard. Who doesn’t, after all?
Or to take a somewhat different context, “Only connect,” says a character in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End. “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer”. The prose of our daily lives, the passion of those moments when we’re lifted out of ourselves and we say this! This is what I’ve wanted!
“And the fire and the rose (or camellia) are one” — T. S. Eliot
Yes, we live in fragments. The commonest complaint in the West is often, ultimately, loneliness — loss of connection, fragmenting of our bonds with the cosmos, to the point where we sometimes feel like an abandoned “bag of skin”. But when I think how the whole rest of the universe is talking, that’s a lot of hearing that things ask of us. Am I myself talking too much to hear them? Can I pare back my chatter, save my speech even a little more for what matters, fast a little from running at the mouth, and begin to attend to all the other things that are talking too?
And rather than waiting on someone else to connect with me, can I be the connector? Isn’t that one thing that Druidry calls us to do? It gives us tools to help us do what we’re made to do — and it launches us into a talking world to listen at least as much as to talk.
The prayer of St. Francis might just have something to say to this:
O Master, let me not seek as much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.
If I want to experience eternal life in this moment (the only place in this busy, brief, uncertain and intense mortality where I can), I’ve got a guide here. This isn’t just “Christian” morality, as though there can be different kinds of morality. The uni-verse is a “one-turning” and it is what it does, it does what it is. St. Francis’s words aren’t something to believe, but to try out. Quite simply, do they work? Is he offering a powerful spiritual tool here, equivalent to burning cedar, invoking the Elements, divining for job opportunities, working magic to heal? (The modern neo-Pagan movement has delved and mined and workshopped and practiced every spiritual tradition on the planet except the one the West has known for two thousand years. How have I been depriving myself of wisdom in my backyard, along with the moles and bull hornets, the woodchucks and clover and hemlocks?)
In this post so far I’ve come at the matter of guides obliquely, which I find is my default way of feeling my path into understanding. I’ve left clues and approaches, words and feelings, tangents and directions to explore.
I could chart it and number it and lay it out — and ask if you’d like me to do so in a subsequent post, and I will — but then, without great care on my part, it can slide perilously close to the administrator-ese my teacher so dislikes. Read the posts, including John’s, ask your own questions as clearly as you can, and see if I or John or the grass and rain and birds out your window have something to say to you that you might want to listen to. And listen to yourself most of all, that deep self, not the selfie-Facebook-chatty self, but the one who’s been deep within you since you arrived here, however many years ago that was, the one that whispers in dream and awake, that knows where you’re going before you arrive, and has something worthwhile to say on the way to every destination.
And may you know the blessings scattered all along your path, the one you are walking right now, and recognize them and share them and find in that sharing the solace and heart’s healing we all seek.
1 — First of all, you, my readers. Forget superficial social-media “likes” (though on occasion it’s true they’re heartening to receive). Many of the most-read posts here are curiously “liked” the least, or not at all — from which I conclude you’re too busy reading and thinking about them to worry overmuch about “liking” them, thank the gods.
Older posts I haven’t referenced in years still get “views” — some of you are either referring friends to them, or systematically reading backwards and sifting through all the wordage here for anything that has value for you. Knowing how, with a little persistence, I can find a window into something of value in the odd or throw-away reference or turn of phrase in my all varied reading on- and off-line, it’s good to know some of you do the same.
2 — Further, you come from all over — from 102 nations, if I can trust WordPress site analytics. That means that important ideas I grapple with here, and get wrong as well as right, are reaching a wide readership, and provoking reflection. Not surprisingly, the U.S. and the U.K. are the most frequent source of readers, but other nations both expected and more surprising appear on this July’s roster of “Top 20” sources of page views — Turkey, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan (Germany and India also normally both feature among the Top 10 when I look at rosters for whole years but for whatever reason didn’t make it last month; Hong Kong isn’t a separate nation — why WordPress treats it as one is interesting to contemplate):
3 — Our much-abused, misunderstood, but still persistent human instinct for the spiritually real, the true, the valid, the potent. To choose just one topic, if your sustained interest in a cluster of posts on Druidry and Christianity on this blog is any indication at all, we sense an intersection there that deserves our attention and exploration. Powerful stuff (a highly technical term) still flows into our worlds and consciousnesses from both traditions and practices, and particularly from their cultural-symbolic-magic conjunction. The Grail, we can say, has never ceased to nourish us.
4 — Our hunger for new — and newly-revitalized — spiritual and pragmatic forms into which we can pour our hopes, dreams, emotions, energies, practices and magic. Rituals, perspectives, prayers, songs, communities — these forms take a multitude of shapes, but any vaunted “decline” in religion that our media love to examine from time to time is very far from the lived experience of many people — we still long to re-link to the numinous, the sacred, the holy, the universal, as much right now as we ever did. Maybe more.
5 — How writing for an audience has helped shape both my writer’s craft and my spiritual practice. What I share, and what I keep private, have shifted over time. You’ve tolerated my moods, my humours, my obsessions, my sometimes narrow or limited perspectives, and you still keep coming back. Sounding my experiences and trying to understand them out loud has given me insight into what can and should be shared, and what shouldn’t or can’t. In this, our deeply confessional era in the West, silence is even more golden — as one of the old “Four Powers”* of the Magus (or of the Sphinx), it retains its place and purpose.
*”to know, to dare, to will, to keep silent” — in Latin: noscere, audere, velle, tacere.
The British futurist and scientist James Lovelock, of Gaia hypothesis fame, just turned 100 on July 26th. He’s also out with a slender new book (Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence) on how to handle the climate crisis and global warming.
His four principal ideas, unfortunately, turn out to be deeply impractical. Because I don’t like to criticize without pointing out alternatives, you can find these here as well. As wiser heads have pointed out, our problems have swollen into a predicament, with no quick or painless fix.
If you have a subscription to the Economist, you can read the whole article there (non-subscribers get just a taste), or else watch this 7:46 Youtube video, with substantially the same material:
Lovelock’s four ideas are these, with the approximate point in the video where they are introduced in parentheses:
1–Retreat to megacities (2:02) before the collapse of already endangered ecosystems.
Where and how food production and transport will take place is rather vague. Won’t many have to remain on farms outside the cities in order to feed the rest of us?
Financially, too, this just isn’t feasible for the vast majority of people not already living in cities. Who will fund the enormous housing projects needed? And given that many of our largest cities are substantially overburdened already, even a well-planned expansion doesn’t augur well for livable conditions. And what of the large numbers who like rural life and would balk at relocation?
Yes, millions will be forced inland from coastal and low-lying regions as the oceans continue their rise. As many have already perceived, the great majority of people who will suffer the most are poor and lack political clout.
Better than a retreat to megacities (though some may certainly opt for inland urban destinations), a planned series of evacuations and relocations are starting to happen, albeit in a piecemeal fashion. This most likely will continue haphazardly, and mostly under duress. We’re just beginning to realize the costs, and we’re most reluctant to pay where we have played so heedlessly.
[You can download a free PDF of The Limits to Growth, the 1970 publication of the Club of Rome, which continues to prove largely accurate in its projection of consequences we’ve known for decades but dawdled in acting on. The publication also ends on a note of hope (with identifiably 1970s pronouns), which we’ve also long known: “Man can create a society in which he can live indefinitely on earth if he imposes limits on himself and his production of material goods to achieve a state of global equilibrium with population and production in carefully selected balance”.]
Already taxpayers — at least in the U.S. — partially subsidize rebuilding costs for many who choose to live in dangerous coastal areas, ignoring for now the increasingly violent weather and the inevitable storms and flooding which will ultimately make rebuilding (at still further taxpayer expense) no longer feasible. I include my father- and sister- and brother-in-law in this category: all of them live on Ft. Myers Beach, Florida, and they already pay more each year in flood insurance that I ever did in annual rent for an apartment.
Changing such uneven tax structures would free up needed resources and allow some of the coastal regions to be returned to original conditions that minimized both flooding and coastal erosion, thereby also providing needed habitat for wildlife, and parks for human visitors within limits. The political will to make this happen, however, hasn’t yet appeared.
2—Use nuclear energy along with renewables, eliminating fossil fuel use (3:02).
Nuclear power has never solved its original issues of how to handle spent fuel – or managed a work-around for the massive subsidies it requires simply to start generating power.
Nor will the powerful petroleum industry calmly yield its immensely profitable enterprise without either enforced governmental intervention, or massive subsidies beyond what it already receives.
The immense fossil fuel transportation system, even with worldwide support, would take at least a couple of decades to change over, and at vast expense. Who will pay for that, and for the retrofitting of the millions of households that burn fossil fuels and would need conversion to electricity?
Carbon taxes, continued investment in renewables, and a gradual reduction in fossil fuel dependency and consumption, are somewhat more likely to actually happen and make a difference. They won’t happen quickly enough to stave off widespread problems. The oceans will rise and coastal regions will flood. More species will be lost. Climates will keep changing. Still, late is better than never.
3—Artificially control the earth’s temperature (4:08).
Lovelock proposes artificially shading the earth’s atmosphere with particulates to block solar gain and help cool the earth a few degrees — similar to what happened geologically when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991. While we may have the technology already to accomplish this, does anyone think Russia or the U.S. would trust each other to proceed with such a plan, given current tensions?
And how much darkening is enough? Who will underwrite such a large space program? And where will we acquire sufficient non-toxic materials to disperse? Pinatubo discharged vast quantity of harmful ejecta into the air and onto the earth. Do we know how to compensate for the nearly inevitable human error and miscalculation here? Who will be in charge, and oversee such a vast plan from start to finish? And who will pay for any follow-up rebalancing if and when the plan is less than wholly successful?
The planet’s climate will worsen. That’s nearly a given. Whatever we do to ease the worst of the consequences won’t be fairly distributed around the globe. The chances are again very high that the poor will suffer the most. And in turn, political unrest and international conflict will abound. Anticipating problems — planning for this in concrete and doable terms — will go a long way to easing it. Again, however, the political will may well be lacking until we reach crisis point. The expenses of prevention have all too rarely been a governmental priority. That’s why individual action will begin to make a difference.
4—Let AI take over (5:28)
Whose artificial intelligence? If Equifax data breaches and Facebook and Google snooping and data collection have taught us anything, we don’t want ever more anonymous programmers “running everything”. The world of speculative fiction has also long ago addressed this issue: AI could quite justifiably write off humans as an evolutionary dead-end, and take matters into their own hands with an AI-backed Final Solution: the planet would in many ways be much better off without homo non sapiens.
Even Lovelock doesn’t sound particularly hopeful about the future. As he remarks at the end of the Youtube video, “Do I think humans can be saved from the numerous threats that exist in the cosmos? I don’t know. I hope so”.
Fortunately, many tools already currently available, including a range of spiritualities, along with the resilience human beings have long shown in the worst situations, mean that it is not “The End”. It IS, of course, the beginning of Interesting Times, a real-time, up-close-and-personal illustration of that famous Chinese curse.
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Metaphysical addendum and caveat: if you’re not a fan of belief in reincarnation, or if you’re still in denial that what goes around comes around, stop reading and return to your regularly scheduled program.
Since you’re still here, it’s worth noting that according to certain occult beliefs, the planet as a whole has already refused the causal initiation once — you know, the one where we accept responsibility for actions and their consequences, and attempt to learn from our mistakes. Like most forms of tough love, the lesson hasn’t gone away simply because we didn’t care for it, and the consequences will still come due, and in even harsher forms, because of that first refusal.
What to do in one of our coming futures, “when the rubble stops bouncing”, as J. M. Greer likes to put it, is the subject of a growing number of blogs, books and teachings. [If you valued Greer’s Archdruid Report and its unblinking look at our present ecological and political realities, along with many subtle but invaluable tips for actually flourishing through it all, you might appreciate and find merit in his new site Ecosophia and his current article there, with over 400 insightful reader comments, and Greer’s sane and wise responses to them: “The Next Twilight of Environmentalism“.]
Blessedly, marvelously, hearteningly, most of the readers of this blog are actually already practicing life-ways that will serve us all well in the days ahead. After all, we need lived examples of alternatives to the madness around us from people who haven’t yielded to despair, who know that our ancestors weathered personal hardships, climate change, plague, famine and war to give birth to us, just as we will to future generations. Some of us, and some of our descendants, will survive to be teachers and preservers of the best of our contemporary wisdom.
What you are going through today is training for tomorrow. You need today to reach tomorrow, says my teacher.
OK, I say to myself. I’ve got today. Heavy headlines. Death. Hate speech. Unrest. Fear. And even seeing the “big picture” can offer little comfort sometimes. Week, day, year? It’s been a hard couple of centuries.
A few years ago, the late Toni Morrison ended an essay for The Nation like this:
This is precisely the time when artists go to work …
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.
Information that can lead to knowledge–even wisdom. I’m so there. It’s a Druid thing, reads the t-shirt I imagine myself wearing this morning. (After all, can you accomplish anything without the right t-shirt?) But what is this “information” that I get from failure and chaos? I’d really like to know.
A first step is a “refusal to succumb”. (And one secret: even if I think I’ve succumbed, I can stop. If I find that’s hard, well, that’s my “work of today” that will get me to tomorrow.)
It’s good and right to grieve — that’s not the same thing as succumbing. Maybe because we often censor our grief — “it’s just not American!” — we don’t grieve well — we refuse the difficult work of grief. Grief blocked can feel like succumbing. Sometimes we spend our energy blocking grief and have little left over for much of anything else.
Make a plan to turn negative energy to advantage, says my teacher. At this level of creative imagination, you’re in a condition of survival. The lesson of these worlds is to develop your ability to ride the crests of life.
If there was ever an art, it’s riding the crests of life, I tell myself. Isn’t that what all my vaunted talk of “spiritual tools” is about?! Be not simply good, but good for something, says my go-to guy Thoreau. On this blog, among other things I do, I want to be good for something. Most of all for myself, because if it doesn’t work for me, I have no business offering it to anybody else.
But sometimes I hear spiritual counsel like “Make a plan to turn negative energy to advantage” and I feel like I’m already succumbing. It feels like too much work.
Where am I grieving failure and chaos? After large-scale events like the recent white supremacist massacres in the States, we see people earthing their grief in flowers, pictures of the dead, and other rituals of grief. Grieve, yes. But also leave some energy for making that plan.
The creative part, the part where we “artists go to work” — and that means all of us, not just those wearing a hat or a self-label that says “artist” — means there isn’t any one plan that fits everybody. Teasing apart the question above — where am I grieving failure and chaos? — that’s part of my plan. It may or may not work for you.
I heard myself talking with my wife this morning over breakfast, still processing some less than ideal aspects of my last two jobs — I still carry anger about how I was treated, for one thing. I’m also still grieving other personal failure and chaos, even as my country reels and deals with its much bigger public versions. New grief can spark older griefs.
As a writer, much of my plan circles around writing. It’s one of my principal tools — a way to ground and earth my life sufficiently that I can take a look at it, celebrate the victories, and with any luck, and through the gift of the gods and the blessings of the ancestors, turn negative energy to advantage.
Because we’re all spiritual transformers — it’s our human specialty. That’s how we all survive, how we’re still here at all. So much flows through us, and we parcel it out to the different elements and to combinations of elements. Some of us ground it in particular forms — our families, jobs, talents, relationships, community service. Some of us let it inspire new ideas and thoughts, which we may or may not later ground and earth in forms and shapes and things. Someone else may pick them up and run with them. And so on. (We haven’t even gotten to fire or water yet.) The point is that a plan taps our unique identities, situations, talents and strengths and amplifies them. We don’t have to do it all. We do have our part, our portion, that no one else can do.
Just where am I sending energy? And how much?
There is usually a struggle when we move to a larger state of awareness, and that is natural, says my teacher. Often we swallow the belief that we’re doing it wrong if it doesn’t come effortlessly, if our growth doesn’t move forward like a hot knife through butter. We feel like frauds even as we hide the hassle, when sometimes that’s one of the more valuable gifts we can offer others — let them see that our achievements cost us something.
If you’re a certain age — if like me you had parents who came of age during World War II and the Depression, you probably heard variations on there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Lost in all that well-meant advice is the point that there is a lunch, and a breakfast and dinner, and feasts and fests besides. Yes, they come with a cost, but they do exist.
It’s gonna cost you, leers the gangster figure or Mob boss, the loan shark, the street dealer, the manipulative partner or blackmailer. We hear the words with a sinking heart, feeling for our heroine or hero. Don’t do it! we may be tempted to shout at the screen. Run away now! Get out while you still can!
In the movie of our own lives, we may have learned half the lesson so well we forget the other half. Nothing kills the Awen-Song from the Deep.
Where and when and how we sing, though, and who we’re singing to — that’s up to us.
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For an example of another’s response and plan, here’s a link to John Beckett’s blogpost.
Earth is in some ways our default setting: we wake again and again to this world each morning, lift the body from bed, feed it, bathe it, put it through its paces, flex its muscles, rub its sorenesses, tend its scrapes and bruises, touch other beings in affection, and send it to bed at last, reasonably confident we’ll do the same tomorrow and next week.
Air has become among other things the elemental energy much schooling expects us to focus on, to the exclusion of other energies and Elements, along with arbitrary rules that regiment the body, keeping Earth at bay: regulated times for things that could occur naturally, like eating and movement and bodily functions; permissible and prohibited interactions with those around us (who sits where? who can speak now? who gets the crayons, chalk, paper? who can move around the classroom or step outside it? who can sing, shout, be silent, dance, sleep? who can opt out of the activities altogether right now?), allowable and discouraged behaviors, as when we daydream with clouds, or birdsong, or the shadows of leaves on the classroom window.
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. — William Blake, Letter to Rev. John Trusler.
Even specifically Air functions may be permitted or forbidden: we do or don’t talk about certain topics; we may or may not say certain words; we’re required to participate in certain rituals (in the U.S., that peculiarly American patriotic/ propagandistic exercise of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance); we follow a clock, that airiest of Air abstractions; we’re mostly discouraged from asking dangerous meta-questions like “Why do we have to study this?” or “How do you know?” or “What really matters?” or “What do you really think?”
Little wonder, therefore, that many of us learn to actively detest Air functions — we have to be taught not to enjoy or ever master what is called “critical thinking”, or make a lifetime practice of “giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name”, as Shakespeare calls it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That is, we don’t attempt to earth our thoughts, put them into forms for others to perceive and learn from, to create and explore thought-worlds as much as we do physical ones. As a consequence, we frequently misunderstand myth and metaphor, confuse symbolic and literal, and generally neglect and abuse the stores of wisdom we’ve inherited from the past, from the Ancestors who strive to leave us with their accumulated wisdom. We forsake the power of thought and Air, and in doing so we abandon a rich heritage and treasure-house that could alleviate much of our present suffering, fear and sense of helplessness, all the while as we flail about and wonder why we feel forsaken, abandoned, victimized by an indifferent universe. We’ve abandoned parts of ourselves — but the deep remedies lie all around us, where we have left them (sometimes buried under mounds of mental, and physical, plastic packaging).
Thought and emotion often blend — the “tricks of strong imagination”, more properly a Water function, but also one of thought, which we clothe in forms we can understand. Many of us think in images; we then feel them strongly, and confuse what we feel with what we think, or see no reason to distinguish the two.
Explore Air with my preconceptions reined in even a little, though, and I get a sense of vast expanses and possibilities, rather than the indoctrination or thought-bubbles plaguing so much of the planet. Even more difficult is to perceive one’s own thought-bubbles: we all have them, and we may live all our decades without ever seeing our own thought tracks and furrows and ruts, imagining that such things limit and circumscribe everyone around us, but never ourselves.
Our cultures teach us how to think — that’s their purpose, to pass along a traditional means of survival; one way to step outside this teaching and thought-shaping in order to examine its shape and dimension and influence, is to enter another culture and explore it. Such an action is simultaneously freeing and disconcerting: what I thought was “normal” or “natural” turns out to be merely what my culture taught me, an arbitrary though admittedly useful way to organize human behavior, and the humans performing it.
Can I move beyond “Why do they DO that?” to “What does it feel like to do this from inside the culture?” When we meet, we shake hands. No, we bow, the depth of the bow showing the respect we grant the other person. No, we kiss each other on both cheeks. No, we press palms together, saluting the other person. No, we rub noses. These are the merest of surface behaviors, some of the more obvious “proper” ways to behave: these manifestations of thought may indeed begin here, but they go so much deeper than this.
Druids, like other truth-seekers and spiritual explorers, ideally seek out and welcome such opportunities to enter and travel through multiple thought- and culture-worlds. “Pilgrim on earth, thy home is the heavens. Stranger, thou art the guest of gods”.
At least some of the time!
Likewise, one measure of relative freedom from a particular (limiting) thought-bubble is the sense not of self-justification or righteousness of “my” way of thinking (as if any one way is the onlyor best way), along with criticism of anyone else’s way, but of the hugeness of still-unexplored regions, of the vastness of the elemental world of Air and the quickness of thought towards its targets, like the arrows, lances, javelins and other flashing projectiles we’ve used in metaphorical attempts to describe how speedy thought can be. And to see all of this not with fear, or other rigid conditioning or reaction, but with a child-like excitement and openness at possibilities of discovery, of expanding beyond what one knows now to what one may come to know.
Give a child this chance, and often the body stills naturally, a repose that Earth grants in the presence of engaging Air. Or it may well get up and dance in delight. Either reaction, or still others, are wonderful harmonies of the elements and their blessed conjunctions in hallowed human consciousness and experience. Likewise the asanas of yoga are ideally a harmony of Elements, the Earth of the body following the Air of thought and the guidance of Spirit.
After I attempt to look at Fire and Water in the next two posts, in the fifth in this series I want to look at the applications and parameters of the spiritual tools I listed in the first post, and how we might begin to mix and match, and try out variations-on-a-theme for as many tools as I can.
Until then, and always, may your Elements blend and uphold and guide you to excellent discoveries and to joy.
I mention “spiritual tools” a lot here, and since my wife recently organized, according to her own criteria, my basement hand-tools as she searched for the particular item she needed in the disarray that table-top had become, I’m minded to do the same here. Every tool-kit accumulates items seldom-used, well-worn, taking up space, or simply unidentifiable. Even more so, if it’s a spiritual tool-kit. Add to that the spare parts, left-over washers, bolts, rods, screws, assembly wrenches and bent nails, broken drill-bits and reminders-to-replace-by-holding-on-to-the-old-item-until-you-do.
Tool-kits are often idiosyncratic, at least partly inherited, and with at least some overlap and mismatch, similar to metric-imperial conversion. Beliefs about a tool’s suitability, applicability or even legitimacy can dog the tool-kit user. And each of us makes use of some things no one else might consider — or be able to use as — a tool.
What do I mean by, and what do I include among, my “spiritual tools”? Why do they belong in my kit? How do I know which ones to use, and when? Wow, you’re asking some good questions today! (That’s how it can feel, when you’ve been blogging a while.)
pine slope, Mt. Ascutney State Park
Divination, prayer, fasting, trance and other non-ordinary consciousness work, ritual, magic, chant, sacred names and words, writing/recording/journaling, drumming and rhythmic inputs. Dreamwork, visualization, herbs, yoga and similar practices, meditation and contemplation, dance and sacred movement, mandala and sacred images. But also rehearsal, repetition, expectation, staging, music, group consciousness, affirmations, pilgrimage, non-human allies, earth energies and power sites, crystals and other helpers. Quite an assemblage of items. And probably still a few missing from the list.
Though some tools have gone in and out of fashion over time and in different cultures, and some have been intermittently mocked, proscribed, and even feared as the domain and practice of “evil forces”, however understood, by some religious and spiritual groups, nearly all of them have also been in use at some point in virtually every spiritual tradition on the planet. And rightly so — they’ve proven their value and efficacy countless times over millennia. Some even have “approved” and “non-approved” versions in particular traditions, depending on their perceived origins or source of their energies. It can be useful here to contemplate a powerful question old enough it has an ancient Latin version: cui bono? — who benefits from such official approval, and disapproval? Who may use which tools, when, and why?
Because spiritual tools reflect the complexities and blending of states of human consciousness and awareness — that we shift from one state of consciousness to others all day long, generally without being aware of it, or doing so consciously; that we have often unconscious, preferred states; and that we often confuse states with each other, and insist we’re in one even as we’re in another — it can be helpful to examine spiritual tools according to the part that each of the Elements plays in their make-up and use.
Consider this, then, a first approach to a very large topic!
EARTH
Tools which have an Earth component don’t forget the body. Many of the great world religions attempt to leave the body behind: forms of yoga and prayer which aim at stilling the body so one can attend to inner worlds; ascetic practices to dull or smother physical demands for food, sex and sensual stimulation; social rules to curtail sexual activity outside prescribed forms and relationships in order to maximize closely-defined forms of purity or dedication, and so on.
One of the potential strengths of Pagan practice is its acknowledgment of what the body can contribute to a spiritual path: we’ve barely begun to plumb our instincts, inherited DNA and animal wisdom. Even more, we sometimes resent the physical limitations that this “too too solid flesh” imposes on our lives, forgetting that part of the great magic of Earth is to hold results in one form long enough for us to understand what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Unlike the Astral plane, where things can quickly shift and dissolve again, Earth brings consequences back for us to look at over time — a superlative teacher, when this is the kind of training we need (and it is). Children start with wooden blocks, before they’re given the keys to the family car. As Shakespeare has Hamlet say about the theater, Earth is also vast stage that “holds the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”.
Earth, in short, gives great feedback.
The body-as-Earth can be a wonderful ally, a base of operations, a means of connecting and offering and receiving animal comfort from others when no other connection is open to us. Our senses are exquisitely tuned to the vibrations of this planet, and Earth magic abounds every moment of our lives.
The body also needs care — it’s one of the first places we can learn and show responsibility. The body-as-Earth teaches us both how important and also how transient the physical world is, and through its pains and pleasures, it youth and aging, its limits and its possibilities, helps us distinguish between what the Anglo-Saxons called this “bone-house” (banhus) and the tenant who lives for a time in this bone-house. Lif is læne — earthly life is transitory, on loan. The body isn’t all of what we are by any means, though the apparent world may urge on us that limited perspective — because of the very groundedness of Earth.
But solidity and inertia also make of the body a ready shelter when we haven’t yet mastered the potent energies of emotion and thought. Wake from a nightmare, and it’s deeply comforting to re-enter this safe, solid physical body, feel your pounding heart slowly ease, and sense your adrenalin step down, step down, back to normal. Sleep, rest, relaxation or vigorous exercise can all ground us quite effectively, as does a heavy meal — they give the body its due. That it has a due, that the body makes claims we might wisely acknowledge among other Elemental claims, leads to Part 2 — Air.
“isn’t to make Druids”, a fellow Druid remarked to me over the Solstice weekend at our Vermont Gathering.
Huh. I thought. Right! As soon as you say it …
strayed iris along our driveway
Druidry’s a practice to re-connect with Spirit. Whataspect of Spirit you reconnect with, how you reconnect, why, and what you call yourself — these matters circle round the rim of the practice, however helpful or significant they may be. They’re not the hub, like the practice of connection is. (A wheel, of course, is more than its hub.)
devil’s paintbrush (Hieracium aurantiacum; Pilosella aurantiaca) aka orange hawkweed — one of my favorite “unplanted flowers”. They set the lawn on fire!
The metaphors that bubble up when we try to talk about a practice matter, too. Circle, spiral, wheel. The patterns of the oldest games we play as children, the deepest truths of existence we perceive.
When you’re reconnecting, the tree-wisdom that is one probable etymology of the word Druid is at work in your life.
How does it manifest?
For me, it takes increasingly specific forms that become my practice by themselves. I know something larger than me and my hopes, fears and dreams. I find I want to honor it, and strive to live in harmony with it. The more I give it my love and attention, the more numerous my encounters. I slowly discover how interactions and exchanges with it are mutually beneficial. I work to bring more of my life into a dance with its rhythms.
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Part of my particular how of connecting and manifesting lies in where I find myself, as does yours, if you’re seeking to connect.
I bless the previous owner, as you know from previous posts, for the Rowan in our front yard, and also for the row of three old blueberry bushes in the back. We’re letting blackberries grow up near them. Both like the acidic soil we try to provide with pine needle mulch, and after the spate of bitter weather this past January, we’re seeing some die-back among them and the rhododendrons out front. As if to compensate, this has been a particularly wet year, and a warm one, once it got going.
Blessings on Europe, and a request to Spirit to temper the heat burning there. Balance, balance.
Everything wants to make a gift of itself to you, came the insight one morning some years ago.
Sh*t! I remember thinking. Really?!
But the message wasn’t done yet. Reject it and the gift often comes harder, more insistent and difficult, in less easy forms.
All right, I think. Well, no. A little right. This will take some getting used to.
Everything?!
Difficult gifts … I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.
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Yesterday was too rainy, so it wasn’t until this morning I finally thought to get a shot of the two pine trunks I rolled from where our friend and neighbor Chris helped to cut them into manageable lengths with his chainsaw in May.
For a month they lay there, too heavy to move.
So thank-yous to all of you who contributed Solstice energy to our recent Vermont Weekend and helped me raise these “Alban Gates”!!
After meditating and listening for a bit about where I should set them, I raised them as gateposts for my backyard grove over the weekend. They now sit on stone footers, with wedges to steady them. I’ll be adding some side supports and possibly a lintel post later.
Below is a pic of them, looking west towards our house. The slightly larger left trunk is about my height, to give a sense of scale. Thank Spirit they’re pine. They won’t last as long, but I wouldn’t have been able to lift and set them in place if they were as heavy as oak, or the cherry of our recent Solstice bonfire.
I’m still listening about when to dedicate them. Lunasa, or the next full moon, maybe.
Solstice energy to raise and open the “Alban Gates”! Facing west toward house.
Same pillars, facing east — with the mystery of light on leaves
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“Wood-month” is upon us. Or at least on many Vermonters. Everywhere, a store of winter fuel dropped off on roadsides, yards, driveways, ready for the work of stacking. Sweat equity for stacking makes up the significant difference between cost per cord and cost per gallon of fuel oil. As long as I can, I’ll sweat instead. I’m still more cheap than lazy at this point. Of course, I can virtuously claim to be a little “greener” as well.
We manifest here by applying effort. It’s one of our special abilities. Spirit (and other beings without physical bodies) need incarnate beings to achieve such things, and humans are especially good at this, at building and shaping and moving stuff around. Part of why we’re here is to learn to do it more wisely, at need and not merely at whim.
One breath follows another. You’re doing it right. Keep going!
The air kisses you as soon as you step outdoors. No judgment!
Sun, stars, clouds, moon, rain, snow — they each greet you in their seasons. They’re with you, doing what they are, just like you do.
Fur companions in your life, their moist noses and soft, warm coats, a blessing. What I do is me*, they remind us. You do you. No one else can.
Trees do it every day, breathing out what we breathe in, breathing in what we breathe out. It’s a prayer-song — you may have already heard versions of it. If not, make one up right now. You can hum it to yourself around the trees, setting a tune, letting them know you know, telling them they’re doing it right. They know, but it’s good when we do, too, and we say so.
“No one knows what will rise, when the pond is working” — Linda Allardt
Solstice, greatest of all the Feasts of Fire, beloved of the Faerie Folk …
I don’t know about you, but I hear that and I’m there. It’s a line from OBOD ritual, and we’ll be saying it this weekend at our Alban Hefin/solstice celebration.
I whisper it now to myself, this word-charm, along with that earlier line about breathing, and I listen to the rhythm, the music, as I speak the syllables:
Greatest of all the Feasts of Fire, beloved of the Faerie Folk …
We breathe in what you breathe out, we breathe out what you breathe in …
And I imagine singing this as a round at our ritual.
Druidry, writes Philip Carr-Gomm in his foreword to Nuinn’s (Ross Nichols) Book of Druidry,
is a way of working with the natural world, and is not a dogma or religion … Druidry honours, above all, the freedom of the individual to follow their own path through life, offering only guides and suggestions, schemes of understanding, methods of celebration and mythical ideas — which can be used or not as the practitioner sees fit (pg. 14).
You could just stop there, and run with that, because this post eventually descends into a rant. Or irascible prayer. OK, you were warned.
clover overtaking weeds — no mowing needed! (but woodchucks love it)
<begin rant>
The word “honours” matters in the quote above. Not “grants” or “permits” freedom. Druidry recognizes something that’s already there. Druidry says Pay attention, so you can recognize these things, too.
Freedom, guides, suggestions, schemes, methods, celebrations, myths. These are the “seven paths in freedom” I want to look at in this post. Don’t worry, it’s not really a numbered list. A different Song is playing. The Song matters more than any list.
Freedom, that much abused and misunderstood word, is an actual thing we can experience and live from, not merely a “concept” or an “idea”, though it’s these things, too. It’s not only “in my head”. Freedom, like any song, comes first, then we have thoughts about it. It’s a gift, just like our lives. A melody at the heart of things. And like our lives, we can end our own freedom in so many ways. Turn off the music. (At least temporarily, though the Spiral remains, all the way down into our DNA.) If you need to be reminded how, just read the headlines. It’s practically multiple-choice at this point. Fifty ways to leave your lover, sings Paul Simon. Shedding your skin, walking on the other side, is a really good option at this point. We do it every night in dream. How about while awake?
A free person gives freedom to those nearby. Freedom spreads, like air, fragrance, sound, waves. We all know others who take from us when we’re around them, just like we know people who give, who make space, and work not to impose their limitations on us. Sometimes we read of the “torch of freedom” — and though cynicism is a popular defensive shield these days, that’s a live metaphor for the sense of kindling and expansion we feel in the presence of a free person. May we meet — and be — such people!
Don’t want to, or can’t, join a Druid Order? You’re a Druid from the day you accept your freedom, and act from it. An Order’s just a form, a guide, a suggestion, to try or not.
If we act from freedom, we discover everything is a guide, a suggestion. The old challenge, Everything is permitted, provided you can accept responsibility for what you do, is a rich seed for meditation. How far can I go toward testing it?! Not Is it true? but How is it true?When is it true? In what ways is it true? These tests, and their results, work much more creatively and productively, at least for me, than a simple “yes/no” Is it true? Because I’ve found pretty much everything is both not true, and true, depending. So that question’s off the list, until I can come back to it on a higher spiral, when it may turn out useful once again, after I manage to learn a few more things. Consciousness makes all the difference: it’s the “depending”.
Druidry offers some things to try out. (Now I’m imagining that as my quick seven-word answer to anybody who asks “So what is Druidry?”!)
Ground a practice in the things of my world: air, water, fire, earth. Not just ritual, though that too. Expand my rituals. Thinking, this morning, while I wash two-days-dried dirty dishes in warm water: air/thought, water (obvious!), fire/heat of the water, of my blood, of the sunlight streaming through the kitchen window; earth of my bones and flesh, of the food scraps on the plates and pots and silverware, of the sink and walls and world all around.
Brother Lawrence wrote a wonderful classic, Practicing the Presence of God. You almost don’t need to read it, the title says so much. If you do read through, be patient with it and yourself — you’ll need to do some digging to excavate the gold, given the change of cultural understandings.
It’s a practice, not a one-time deal. You get better.
Listen to other beings. The white ants that come every summer to our kitchen have more to teach me than the last book I read, whatever it was. Practice asking good questions. I’ve spent at least four decades on that one, and no sign of stopping yet. You know — magic in, magic out. Or the opposite.
“My God is bigger”, said a Christian to an author friend of mine. “Maybe that’s because your need is bigger”, said the friend.
An infinite abyss separates any two moments in time, in eternity, says one of the Wise. I practice resting there, feeling the lightness of spirit, of creative fire, of the awen as it flows. I set my hand on a blank journal page, a computer screen blog post, and enter that abyss. If like me you flash on vertigo for a moment, know too how weightless is fire, always rising up, climbing the spirals we all walk. If a child falls in a dream, the Senoi people of Malaysia encourage the child to fall, and not wake up to escape the dream. “They taught the children to fall, knowing they wouldn’t be hurt, and to climb, to travel, or fly to unknown places, to unknown cultures, to learn new things. If they woke up instead, they would be advised not to escape from such dreams the next time they occurred”, write Stewart and Garfield in their 1972 book Creative Dreaming. Easier on everybody than the wrenching costs of the rising suicide rates in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Schemes of understanding, patterns, webs, networks, interconnections, links, circuits. Our “marvels of modern technology” work (when they work) by building with earth — metal, glass, rare earth elements. Technology grounds these sometimes abstract, intellectual facets of elemental Air and manifests them, re-alizes them, makes them what Latin calls res — things. Ground and center, counsels beginning practice, again and again and again. I always need to earth what’s goin’ down.
Heirs though we are of two thousand years of Christianized thinking, somehow we’re still more Gnostic than Christian, eager to flee this world, constantly forgetting the god at the heart of Christianity who incarnated, became flesh, manifested, took on a body, got as earthy as anybody can, and died that way too. Eucharist, literally thanksgiving — this is my body, this is my blood. The Things of Earth are holy, divine.
Pilgrim on earth, thy home is heaven. Stranger, thou art the guest of God(s).
And yes, William Carlos Williams, you turn out to be right on both counts: “It’s difficult to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there”. You write about a fracking flower [short / long] and stake us through the heart. Bards, tell us how it is, how it can be. Now take out the comma. Bards tell us how it is, how it can be. I’m still practicing as I listen harder.
Or another take, if you like or need it: “Earth’s crammed with heaven” , says Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “And every common bush afire with God;/But only he who sees, takes off his shoes./The rest sit around and pluck blackberries,/And daub their natural faces unaware …” Another practice, taking off my shoes, and walking through the grass.
And that’s fine, too, says Druidry. The Spiral always waits. No one’s reached the end yet … There are always rest-points. We need ’em.
Methods, celebrations, myths. Five, six and seven, if you’re counting. J. M. Greer says one key is “embracing an experiential approach to religious questions, one that abandons rigid belief systems in favor of inner development and individual contact with the realms of nature and spirit”.
Everything’s political? Nope — everything’s spiritual. Or mythical, if you prefer. Politics wants the power and energy, but without bothering about the spirit that powers them. (Zeus tried all that out long ago, and look where it got him!) Things of this world? Sure! But just know where they come from. Get the order right. That’s why we keep screwing ourselves over with men (and it’s still mostly men) of power. Give the women a chance to mess things up, too!
They can’t give us what we really want. But we keep handing politicians our freedom anyway, as if they knew better what to do with it than we do. Reclaiming, Starhawk calls her Witchcraft tradition. Get it back! Don’t give it away again!
<end rant>
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Fallen pine, cut into lengths: edging for more raised beds? Gateposts for my backyard grove?
Solstices.
Just as at the Winter Solstice we celebrate the shortest day and longest night, knowing that light will grow again, so at the Summer Solstice we celebrate the longest day and shortest night, knowing that daylight will now shorten. Here is a teaching of paradox: each peak, dark or light, contains the seeds of its own change. And as Taoist tradition teaches, “When Yang peaks, it shifts to Yin; when Yin peaks, it shifts to Yang.” — adapted from OBOD publications.
I begin again. A couple of deep breaths, to center myself. Then the awen, or another sacred word. Open the inner doorways.
Get out in the sun, advises the OBOD ritual booklet for Summer Solstice. Sit in a shadow. I love these two apparent contradictories, side by side! So perfect! Harvest your garlic. Sunburned, shaded, garlicked, I proceed.
Having neglected to grow either St. John’s Wort or Vervain for our Solstice rite next weekend, I’m on the lookout for them along the road, in fields nearby, or at a farmers’ market. We’re naming the local landscape and its creatures in our Solstice ritual script, listening between the words for their other names, ones they may not tell everyone. Indian Place Names of New England, in a hodgepodge of less-than-complete formatting for online viewing, gives one Native American name for our local Vermont region: Kawassentekwa “barren spot along the (Connecticut) River”! One more way to laugh, to stay humble, to see and work for possibility where, outwardly, things look bare.
Apparent world, crazy uncle at the door, we hug you and invite you in to join us at the Festival table. Meet the others here!
The heat is on — at least for a few days here in Southern VT, where temps yesterday and today reached 80 F / 27 C.
Do you feel it, that flaming toward summer solstice? If you’ve spent time outdoors, even at sunrise or sunset, you can sense the shift. The birds feel it, launching their first songs when the sun still lacks half an hour to cresting the horizon. Trees know it, their leaves finally fully unfurled and deeply green.
We’re two weeks out from the longest day — about the time I frequently sense a shift, turn my thoughts toward the next festival, and “listen harder”.
Just about year ago I posted 19 Ways to Celebrate Summer Solstice, and looking at it again, I see how many of the 19 Ways are for solitaries. Part of the appeal of Druidry is how any one of us can begin it, and deepen it, right where we are. We don’t need to find or start a group, though groups can provide fellowship and community, a hearth to cherish, a portable temple to support our practice, and also those chance conversations that can transform a ritual afternoon or evening, spark a friendship, mark a turning point, or open up a new direction for us to take. Yet most of the Ways could also fit group practice as well.
But I also want to yellow my nose with dandelion pollen as I sniff the flowers, stretch out full length in the grass, run my fingers over the bark as I listen to a favorite tree, anticipate the berries that will follow the delicate white flowers now on the berry vines, mark the slow dissolution of a fallen branch as the earth takes it back, ponder an anthill, study the mud-dauber wasp as it enlarges its nest. So many lives neighboring mine, why would I want to miss them? I have an appointment with the wild I will not miss.
The lore of the solstices is wisdom. Just as it reaches the heyday of its strength, the sun’s light yields, and the days once again start to shorten. And in the southern hemisphere, dark now rules over half of each day, but come winter solstice and the light will slowly begin to grow again.
From the traditions of OBOD, the Order I belong to, emerge older accounts of a three-part observance, a vigil till midnight (and for those willing, an all-night watch, interspersing periods of meditation with music, storytelling, etc.), a dawn ceremony to welcome the shortest day on Solstice itself, and a final noon rite several hours after that. Our local Vermont Druid group is hosting a full Solstice weekend, with a Friday evening mountain-top potluck, a sundown ritual Saturday evening, followed by night drumming, discussion and vigil, and a breakfast the next morning.
Harvesting and hauling firewood for the ritual a week ago, from the conservancy forest land where our “host for the Solstice” lives, we came on a large half-standing cherry, whose wood we cut and stacked, to await the bonfire.
Cherry bonfire wood stacked. Photo courtesy Bruce W.
We can read rituals and myths, imagine them enacted, choose a portion which we will enact and dramatize, or maybe leave in half-symbolic form. The Oak King reaches his greatest power at Summer Solstice, and we crown him with a chaplet made of his own leaves. Yet it is the Holly King who rises, going forward, as the Oak weakens. We pass the oak-leaf crown to each other, and perhaps some of us hold in our thoughts the ancient proverb: nomine mutato, de te fabula narratur. Change the names, and it’s a story about you. A little shiver in the heat.
[I first drafted this short post in early May, and I’m returning to it now, leaving its seasonal references untouched.]
part of our two rhododendrons that survived the winter, now blooming in June
Penguin/Random House provides this excerpt from the late Mary Oliver‘s 2016 book, a collection of essays called Upstream.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion”, she writes, at the end of a section.
Druidry, like other true practices, is devotion, a measure of life away from distraction and toward attention. What do I mean by “measure”? A choice, a predilection, a heeding of instinct, or as Robert Frost puts it, a “stay against confusion”. After all, it’s we who do the measuring. (Or else we yield that privilege to others less worthy, less qualified to know what’s best for us. Until we do the difficult work of reclaiming.)
Truth, I find, sorts itself out marvelously well, once we start paying attention. Love itself is a kind of attention, a focus on what matters to us. I look into my partner of 31 years and discover a being new, mysterious — she’s becoming more of who she is. Both of us are graying and wrinkling, our kinship with trees ever more visible in the likenesses between bark and skin.
Attend, and we encounter. We meet other beings, landscapes, presences, the place we’re standing, feet pressed against the earth, the air we breathe, our own bodies, breathing and pumping blood, sweating under the early summer sun, or shivering slightly in this May air that only days ago frosted the grass and blackened the first brave flowers. Just beyond our skin, the cosmos. Looking only at the proportions of existence that are me and not me, you’d think attention might be in fact a wholly reasonable thing, though much modern life tells us no. So it is that the “apparent world” named in Druid ritual is what we’ve created — a sometimes-useful bridge that may not accommodate all the cars we wish to drive across it. At need, I remind myself, let that world fade away. Don’t worry — it’ll be there when I return.
There and back again, writes Tolkien. True voyage is return, writes U. K. LeGuin.
For this post I’m returning to a thoughtful comment by Lorna Smithers from several years ago:
The division between what remains in the journal and what to communicate is a question I confront continuously as a Bard, for unlike with a path that focuses solely on personal transformation through magic, Bards are expected to share their inspiration.
I find that some experiences are OK to share immediately, others need time to gestate for the meanings to evolve and take on a clearer form, and a select few may always stay secret.
I see good craftmanship to be the key [to] sharing experiences. In contrast to the vomit of ‘compulsive confession’, well-wrought craft lifts the raw material into the realms of art, creating works that affirm the awe and wonder of the magical world.
I can’t simply mechanically transcribe from my journal (or my id — sometimes the same thing) onto the page or screen and expect comprehension, let alone value, or anything remotely approaching art. We’ve all heard about how social media has enervated meaningful communication, gutted nascent relationships, obliterated thoughtful engagement with alternative ideas and perspectives, and helped fuel partisanship, indifference, callousness and a host of our worst impulses. But we also know how much of value we’ve all found online that we might never have encountered anywhere else. There might even be a clue in all of that about where else to look for a solution, a response, a direction, a path to take through the digital (and other) wildernesses we traverse.
Craft, like any choice, applies to our spiritual journeys, too. From the baseline of a regular practice, I find I can achieve greater insight, connection, growth than without it. Craft is care, attention, devotion, dedication to a standard I’ve taken to heart because I understand its value. We used to apprentice ourselves to a master in order to learn not only the technical points — what woods to use, how to mix the paint, what companion plantings work best, how to splint a compound fracture, what to do about obsessive thoughts during meditation, what a recurrent dream can reveal — but also to absorb a set of attitudes and stances and inner disciplines: how to persist in the face of discouragement, failure, boredom, lack of patronage, incomprehension, inner silence in the face of years of effort, and other joy-annihilating experiences.
Cræft bið betera þonne æhta. A craft or skill is better than possessions, goes the Old English proverb. And further, Se cræft ðæs lareowdomes biþ cræft ealra cræfta. The craft of teaching is the craft of all crafts. If I manage to apprentice myself to a good teacher — bird, beast, tree, or even human — I learn not only the craft but the heart behind it. Craft begets craft.
And by a happy synonymy, OE cræft has the same additional meaning that its descendant does in Modern English of “boat, ship” — we’ve enlarged the reach of it with “spacecraft”.
Craft is the craft that will carry us across, to where we want to go.
That — according to the statistics WordPress freely offers to the obsessed among each of its subscribers — is today’s proportion of published posts to unpublished drafts sitting on this site that never made it to your eyes. Except the number is misleading. All of the published posts were drafts at one point. (Many feel like they still are.) It’s all draft till you die, said one of my writing instructors. So you can always revise. A poem (a life) is never finished, simply abandoned. Then mix in the perspective of this Druid who sees rebirth as part of the process, and death as simply the end of a chapter, a stanza, not the book, not the Song.
Original and image. Courtesy Pexels.com free images.
My chosen magic, I’ve discovered (What’s yours? Have you found it yet?), is to write myself into new spaces and truths. Yes, often an experience will boot me into new territory, but it’s reflecting on it, writing about it, trying on multiple understandings of it, that converts much raw experience into its subsequent effect on me — turns it into resource, compost, practice, training, the tenor and temper of my days.
How else to explain two people, same experience, very different outcomes? It’s what we do with what happens that matters. And what I “do” isn’t ever “done” — I’m what I’m doing, after all. (As you are you.) I keep adding, revising, re-imagining. Or I can, at any point along the way. The inexpressible freedom of this is something I keep encountering, flowering where I least expect it, hidden beyond the rise of the next hill, flickering through the screen of leaves in the woods around my house. An eye or ear or sometimes a whole face shows through the leaves, then disappears behind them again.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
Am I really listening? Do I hear it? Listen harder, says one of my teachers. Each mortal thing does one thing and the same. I read the poem aloud to myself again, not troubling over meaning, just attending to the sounds and echoes of the words.
Other counsel: Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world gives, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid, says the Galilean master. Peace, a different kind of giving, no need for trouble or fear: immense gifts. Gifts Druids often claim. Gifts bigger, for the world today at least, even than any kind of salvation “down the road” — bigger to our current time-fixated mindsets, anyway, because they’re gifts for here, now. We need them today!
So am I called to receive differently — not as the world receives — in order to recognize and accept the gift? (If the gift is different, then — so my thought runs — my receiving of it must be different, too.) It sure looks like it. And that could explain much of our current sense of estrangement from “how things should be” — the sense of wrongness abundant in personal and public spaces, the partisanship, the distrust and anger and fear. “The time is out of joint”, exclaims Hamlet. But we may or may not share his corresponding sense of duty towards the situation: “O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” (Not the whole show, Hamlet. Just your piece of it. Or at least start there.)
But how do I receive differently? As a Druid, I tell myself, I look to what I’m already doing. (Truth be told, as I’m still learning, we never start from scratch. There’s always a pilot light burning somewhere, at the heart of things. If I’ve lost sight of it, then that’s my practice: recovery.) I breathe, yes, but the air is also ready to come in and go out at the same time. Thus do many spiritual traditions counsel us to watch our breathing as one of the first and readiest and most powerful meditations or spiritual exercises. Do that attentively, regularly, and you’re halfway home.
Likewise my heart beats. (Through certain yogic practices, if you accept the evidence, it’s possible to achieve a level of physical mastery where you can stop and start the heart at will. Though for reasons that should be clear, I’m not spending my time learning that particular skill.) Can I receive the truth of how much of my life is a gift already, however I choose to honor or ignore it? Can I live the gift?
Let the fraction that is the title of this post remind me how much more I receive than I know or acknowledge. How else, indeed, is a life possible? So much flows through us to sustain us in every moment. Receive differently, tune into what’s going on this instant, then every subsequent instant.
OK, got it, I say to myself. But how to actualize this, to turn what is, after all, just a momentary perception into something useful and workable? Ah, there’s the need for a practice. Oh, we’ve attended the workshop, dived into the retreat, felt the flush of inspiration, had a mystic moment or two on our own, uninvited, or called by ritual, intoxication, chance, gift, an instant of vulnerability, openness. Useful, needful, helpful things. But to transform such a moment or interval into the richest soil where I can root and grow — that’s the work worthy of a life. And I know of no one who accomplishes that in any other way than by a spiritual practice.
That’s the magnum opus, the Great Work: to make of a life a gift in return. It is in giving that we receive, sings St. Francis.
Stop this day and night with me …
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
A Druid Way 