Hopi | A Druid Way

The Hopi of the American Southwest call one of their ceremonial pipes natwanpi — literally, “instrument of preparation”. As words do, this one stuck with me ever since I read it, decades ago now. No wonder: we need markers for passage into sacred time, because otherwise it can burn and blow right past us. Or, to shift metaphors, if we don’t catch the sacred wave, we can’t surf in sacred time. We miss that tidal flow, then wonder why life can seem flat or dis-spirited.

With a beloved festival like Imbolc calling us, what better time to consider how we can attune to sacred times and sacred tides?

Shinto, that perennially popular topic here at A Druid Way, offers a mid-January festival called Bonden-sai which feels harmonious with Druid practice. Of course it has cultural flavors and overlays unique to Japan and Shinto, but its focus asks for and offers a kind of natwanpi. (Besides, a cold, gray, snowy northern January can use some color and liveliness.)

Bonden-sai, Akita Prefecture

The bonden for which the festival is named is called a “sacred wand”, though as you can see from the bonden in the picture above, “pillar” or “column” better suggests its appearance. (Let the chickens on some of the bonden above enlarge your sense of “sacred”!) A typical bonden, the Japanese National Tourist Organization (JNTO) helpfully informs us, measures

almost four meters in length … [and] serves as a marker for the gods descending to this world. In ancient times, bonden used to be made of paper or rice straw, but in recent years, they are often made by decorating a bamboo basket with colorful fabric. The bonden wands are carried by groups of children, townspeople, or even company employees. Each group entrusts the bonden with their prayers for an abundant harvest, good health for their families and success in business.

akita-map Bonden-sai is intimately associated with Akita Prefecture in Northwest Japan. Akita is also famed for its onsen (hot springs) and mountains, and Mount Taiheizan, the symbol of Akita City, is a major site for the festival. Bonden-sai there means a vigorous race up the mountain with your bonden to procure the blessings of the gods.

Shinto and Japanese culture, so long linked, have celebrated the sacred in so many things that the secular West allows to pass unremarked. Whether it’s drinking tea or sake, or bathing, or marking the calendar with a plethora of festivals, Japan models practices the West and particularly western Paganism learn from, build on and delight in.

Because when the gods are dead, the human heart also dies a little every day. You certainly don’t have to “believe” in them as any kind of prerequisite, any more than you have to believe in anything in particular to celebrate Halloween or Christmas or MLK Day. The gods themselves can serve as a kind of natwanpi, a means of preparation. Belief, like so much else, is a tool, a strategy, a technique for connecting to things other than ourselves. Use it skilfully, delicately, consciously, I’m learning, and it repays the respectful treatment.

Nyuto Onsen (hot springs), Akita Prefecture

Ultimately it’s the impulse to celebrate that’s the flame to cherish. And if it chances on occasion to be gods that help it happen, as one of the forms the sacred can take, why exclude them out of hand, just because they’re gods?

As for me, I try to take advantage of any natwanpi that comes my way. And if I succeed and connect only 30% of the time, well, isn’t that a very respectable baseball batting average?!

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Images: Bonden in Akita; Nyuto Onsen.

Persistence, and its twin patience, may be our greatest magic. Sacred writings around the globe praise its powers and practitioners. So it’s hardly surprising, here in the too-often unmagical West, with its suspicion of the imagination, and its demand for the instantaneous, or at least the immediate, that we are impatient, restless, insecure, harried, stressed, whiny, dissatisfied and ungrateful. We bustle from one “experience” to the next, collecting them like beads on a necklace. The ubiquitous verb “have” leaves it mark in our speech, on our tongues: we “have” dinner, we “have” class or a good time, we even “have” another person sexually, and one of the worst sensations is “being had.” We do not know self-possession, so other things and people possess us instead.

The “slow food” movement, the pace appropriate for savoring, craftsmanship, care, reflection, meditation and rumination (slow digestion!) all run counter to the ethos of speed, promptness, acceleration that drive us to a rush to orgasm, speeding tickets, the rat race, stress-related illness, and so on. None of these problems or the observations about them are new, of course. But we remain half-hearted in our efforts or understanding of how to “pursue” their remedy. We chase salvation as much as anything else, as a thing to collect or gather or purchase so we can be about our “real” business, whatever we think that is. Spirituality gets marketed along with orange juice. For a sum, you can be whisked off to a more exotic locale than where you live your life, spend time with a retreat leader or guru or master or guide, and “have” (or “take”) a seminar or class or workshop.

Anyone who has adopted a spiritual practice and stuck with it has seen benefits. Like regular exercise, it grants a resilience and stamina I can acquire in no other way. I sit in contemplation and nothing much happens. A week or a month goes by, and my temper might have subtly improved. Fortunate coincidences increase. My dream life, or a chance conversation, or a newspaper article, nudges me toward choices and options I might not have otherwise considered. But usually these things arrive so naturally that unless I look for them and document them, I perceive no connection between spiritual practice and the increased smoothness of my life. From a slog, it becomes more of a glide. But the very smoothness of the transition makes it too subtle for my dulled perceptions at first. It arrives naturally, like the grass greening in the spring, or that gentle all-day snow that mantles everything.

I abandoned a particular daily practice after many years, for complicated reasons deserving a separate post, and I needed only to read the notebooks I kept from that earlier time to recall vividly what I had lost, if my own life wasn’t enough to show me. My internal climate faced its own El Nino. I was more often short with my wife, mildly depressed, more often sick with colds, less inspired to write, less likely to laugh, more tired and more critical of setbacks and annoyances. Set down in writing this way, the changes sound more dramatic — didn’t I notice them at the time? — but as a gradual shift, they were hardly noticeable at any one point. I still had my share of good days (though I didn’t seem to value them as much), and my life was tolerable and rewarding enough. “But I was making good money!” may be the excuse or apology or justification we make to ourselves, and for a time it was true enough of me. Then came the cancer, the near-breakdown, the stretch of several years where I seemed to move from doctor to doctor, test to test, treatment to treatment. If you or anyone you know has endured this, you get what I’m talking about. It’s distinctly unfun. And while I won’t say lack of practice caused this, it’s an accompanying factor, a “leading indicator,” a constituent factor. Doctors might very profitably begin their diagnoses with the question, “So how’s your spiritual practice?” Our spiritual pulse keeps time with our physical lives. They’re hardly separate things, after all. Why should they be?

In the story of Taliesin I mentioned in my last post, the boy Gwion, so far from the future Taliesin he will become, is set by the goddess Cerridwen to watch a cauldron as it cooks a magical broth meant to transform her son Afagddu, a mother’s gift to her child. A year and a day is the fairy-story time Gwion spends at it. A full cycle. The dailiness of effort and persistence. The “same-old,” much of the time. Gwion’s a servant. The cauldron sits there each morning. The fire beneath it smoulders. Feed the fire, stir the liquid. It cooks, and Gwion “cooks” along with it, the invisible energy of persistence accumulating as surely as the magical liquor boils down and grows in potency. Through the spring and summer, insects and sweat. Through autumn and winter, frost and chill and ice. The cauldron has not changed. Still at it? Yes. The broth slowly thickens as it bubbles and spatters.

One day a few drops (in some versions, three drops) fly out onto one of Gwion’s hands, burning. Instinctively he lifts the hand to his mouth, to lick and soothe it with his tongue. Immediately the magic “meant for another” is now his. He did, after all, put in the time. He sat there daily, through the seasons, tending the cauldron, stirring and keeping up the fire, swatting insects, breathing the smoke, batting sparks away, eyes reddened. Yes, the “accident” of the spattered drops was at least partly the result of “being at the right time in the right place.” It is “luck” as well as “grace,” both operative in his life. Part, too, was the simple animal instinct to lick a burn. And the greater portion was the effort, which catalyzed all the rest into a unified whole. Effort, timing, luck, chance, grace: the “package deal” of spirituality.

And the consequence? For Gwion, his growth has just begun. It is his initiation, his beginning. In his case it distinctly does NOT mean an easier path ahead for him. In fact, just the opposite — more on that in a coming post.

The Hopi of the American Southwest call their ritual ceremonial pipe natwanpi, “instrument of preparing.” The -pi suffix means a vehicle, a means, a tool. Tales like this story of Gwion can become a natwanpi for us, if we choose — part of our preparation and practice, a tool, a way forward.