Still basking in Solstice glow, or want to be? You can find several hours of programming on Youtube from the recent OBOD Solstice celebration (links to separate videos follow), including the ritual itself, as well as talks by Ronald Hutton on “Sacred Waters” (around the 29:00 mark), John Matthews on “Druids and Fairies?“, Penny Billington on “Sacred Landscapes“, and the Eisteddfod (performing arts) portion. Eimear Burke, Chosen Chief of the order, opens the event (4:00 mark), then introduces Damh the Bard (7:00 mark) who as the Order’s Pendragon briefly describes what the typical in-person event feels like in Glastonbury, and reveals the Order’s sword:
Behold this, our Order’s sword, drawn from the lake of still meditation and returned to it again, ever sharp and ever with us, if our lake be still.
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One of the profound bardic gifts is the discovery (accessible to anyone, more perceptible with some training) that what we first imagine, or encounter in the form of image or metaphor, can take on full reality in the other worlds. (It may manifest here as well, in poems, songs, crafts, groves, meditations, changed lives.) Are we creating it, or did it always exist, waiting to be realized? An important question, one to be answered individually through repeated experience with different worlds and their energies and realities. But even more vital is the effect on us of such experiences. They link us to what humans have always experienced, as Hutton’s and Matthews’ and Billington’s talks attest in their own ways.
The efforts and experiences of others across time pool with our own. Sometimes the solitary Druid may experience this sense of connection more vividly than the member of an active grove. The Sword is ever sharp and ever with us, if our lake be still.
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You can hear an interview on the most recent episode (# 171) of Druidcast with Dana O’Driscoll, author of Sacred Actions which I recently reviewed here. In the interview Dana talks with the same grounded, practical, wise insight her book offers and which has won her devoted blog readers at The Druid’s Garden. (The interview begins around the 10:50 mark.)
Normally I tend to breeze past self-help titles. It’s true they’re sometimes spontaneously (or cynically) fashionable, hitting whatever the current zeitgeist is at its geisty-est. For that reason they can be deeply culture-specific. What resonates in the U.S. may not catch on at all in France or Fiji. It’s also true that the slickest of the titles tend towards the simplistic. Anyone who’s read more than one knows they typically repackage highly useful and applicable age-old wisdom under new headings. Not a bad thing at all — sometimes that’s what we need, especially if the old sources fail us, and we’re looking for guidance. Some titles can serve a deep need very well.
We’ve all had the experience of clicking with a mentor or teacher who gets how we think, how we process the world. With a good match-up between student and mentor, we learn far more effectively and enjoyably. Likewise with a bad match, it’s often just hell for all concerned. Witness the Youtube popularity of good explainers and effective speakers. There’s a reason the best TED talks continue to draw big viewership stats.
And we do love our lists and numbers! Consider film and TV titles: 8 Simple Rules (for Dating My Teenage Daughter); Ten Things I Hate about You; Four Weddings and Funeral; Three’s Company; Twelve Angry Men; A Few Good Men; Five Hundred Days of Summer; Sixteen Candles; Thirteen; Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; Seven Samurai; Eight Crazy Nights; the Ocean’s series (11, 12, 13, 8). Some (or many) of these series and films may not have reached your shores, but you get the idea.
So when online I ran across Jed Diamond’s recent book 12 Rules for Good Men, no surprise, the title caught my eye. A disclaimer here — I haven’t read the book. Ultimately the book isn’t directly relevant to this post. Because after reading the summary of Diamond’s rules in reviews of the twelve things men can do to better their lives (you can see a version of the original list here), I wanted to open it up just a little and make it applicable to everyone — because it is. “Rules for Humans”. Actually, I prefer Practices. Rather than “following” or “breaking” a rule, why not pick up a practice? Try it out, see if it helps. If it does, great. If not, move on. (Who ever says that about “rules”?) Let such practices be things to get better at, one of the reasons we practice. We don’t normally “practice” rules.
Consider these Thirteen Practices of a Wise Druid:
Practice #1: Find a group (or more than one!) that supports and challenges you.
Practice #2: Investigate the various boxes you find yourself in. (Some boxes help give us needed structure! Some are too comfortable, or constricting.)
Practice #3: Accept the gifts of gender and sexuality. (We’re still just beginning to discover what these are.)
Practice #4: Embrace your billion-year human history. (Time, often, is on our side.)
Practice #5: Work with your angers and fears to release their insights and wisdom. (We’ve all got these priceless materials ready to hand. Both store tremendous energy.)
Practice #6: Learn the secrets of love. (Dogs and cats are often our best mentors.)
Practice #7: Undergo meaningful rites of passage. (We all have some in place already.)
Practice #8: Celebrate your true nature as a spiritual being. (Again, you already do. Why not enlarge!)
Practice #9: Understand and grow from your childhood. (Two endless sources of discovery: childhood and dream.)
Practice #10: Grow your nurturer to become more of the nurturer you can be. (Earth, our first nurturer …)
Practice #11: Move through and beyond repeating patterns and the blockage, depression and frustration they produce. (Harnessing the cycle.)
Practice #12: Identify your mission and play your part skillfully and joyfully. (We’re all on a mission. Beta-testing!)
What about Practice #13 — the Thirteenth of the post title? That’s doing these things in our own ways, with the stamp of our unique awen on them — the spiritual creativity that’s the birthright we all possess. (Not feeling especially creative? There’s a practice for that!) That spiritual creativity is what makes my path both recognizably human and also distinct from yours. It’s what makes any worthwhile practices part of a life-long path. It’s what makes them practices rather than rules. (Don’t look now, but it’s also what powers the other practices.)
Now the parentheticals after each practice above are my own provisional notes for where I might go next with them. Already I can feel an itch to rephrase them, personalize them, see which practices might be most beneficial — and most enjoyable. (When was the last time I experienced joy?) To see which practices I’m already doing, and how I can fine-tune them and do them more consciously and creatively and intensely. And to surprise myself with ones I can see in new ways.
It’s interesting to me that with the 13th Practice in place, the very center, counting from either direction, is occupied by Practice 7: Undergo Meaningful Rites of Passage.
This is one of the things Druidry puts before us, urging us to find our own ways to bring such practices into our lives. Some of my previous posts, and some of your comments and site searches, touch on the value and the challenge of ritual and rite and ceremony. “Meaningful” is key. Getting together is friends and family is understandably high on so many of our lists. Often the simplest of these things bring the most joy. My wife and I miss sitting around fires with a neighbor couple, something we’ve done year-round for the past several years. Nothing “huge”, but everything deeply human: the elemental presence of fire, the warmth of company and touch, conversation and good food. This is certainly part of our human heritage for tens of thousands of years (if not our “billion-year history”). This rite of passage is to honor the transient, the fleeting beauty and depth of moments that nevertheless make up most of our lives.
Druidry offers a number of forms, and also training in their use as containers for transformation. Why does transformation need to be “contained”? Often because that helps to build up the temperature, pressure, awareness, power, etc. that catalyze the transformation. Think tea kettle, forge, pump, oven, etc. Scatter or disperse these forces, and the transformation fizzles, stalls, loses momentum, dies down, darkens — pick your metaphor.
Another of the things that Druidry puts before us is a sensitivity to rhythms. So among a range of possible containers, I find myself looking at how I could connect each of these 13 practices to the moon. I think of a 13-day practice centered on a new or full moon, where I place attention on these practices, one per day. Or one per month, for a 13-moon lunar year cycle. How might I honor and explore and deepen them, using moon energy?
Same for a solar practice: either daily, with sunrise, midday, sunset and midnight, or maybe twice each year, at the solstices. Or setting aside one day each month, and meditating on these practices for (parts of) 13 hours, one per hour. A spiritual retreat. Keeping a journal of these things would be a priceless key. So would art and music and other craft that might arise from them. If you have friends, or a grove, that might like to join you, that opens up still further possibilities.
Solstice season, say the wights and spirits. Not just one day.
Ozoliņi, ozoliņi, sings the Latvian ensemble below. “Oaks, oaks …” A fine summer song, celebrating Jāņi, the Latvian summer solstice, June 23 and 24, and the strength of the oak.
TWO
I weave the cincture of protection, sings Caitlin Matthews in her Celtic Devotional for Wednesdays in the Summer, and for Winter Wednesdays, this:
I kindle my soul at the hearth-fires of Winter,
warmth of welcome,
warmth of working,
warmth of nurture,
be upon my lips, my hands, my being,
this Winter’s day,
till Winter’s night.
THREE
As distributors and sharers of the holy energies of the world, we forget to bless and offer them daily. I know I do. Just the recollection, the recall to do this, can become an essential part of a spiritual practice. Bless this day and those I serve, goes one succinct version. A helpful mantra in the middle of a tense situation, or one where I’m tired, stressed, irritable, and otherwise my tendency might be to snap, be short with another person. Instead — and how many “insteads” I find I need! — this recollection-habit can turn me at my less-than-best into a spiritual vehicle and an opportunity for blessing to happen. A space opens that wasn’t there before.
FOUR
WordPress obliges its bloggers with statistics and charts. Here’s one overview of the 9-year life of this blog as of this morning.
With 540 followers, and over 6000 visitors so far this year, I assume many find value in this blog. But how many of you have taken a few minutes to say it matters to you, in response to my recent request? Three. A lovely triad of supporters. But are there more of you?
This is, after all, a version of the ancient ritual wording whose Latin version runs like this: do ut des; da ut dem. “I give, so that you may give. Give, so that I will give (again)”. And so the exchange we agree to establish can continue.
For an explanation of this in Hellenic culture, as an example of ksenia, sacred hospitality, this article is excellent.
FIVE
Each of the four solar festivals in the ritual year, the solstices and equinoxes, is also a form of initiation. We can forget that planetary initiations come every year, releasing energy, subtly altering our spaces and awareness, whether we participate in them consciously or not. Spend any time out of doors and you can sense the shifts as they flow through us, and we through them, each year.
The same holds true with other initiations, sought and unsought, in the life of the cosmos. It’s through initiation that growth comes. From caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly, one form is not the same as the previous or next one. Changes and movement occur in steps and grades.
Rather than accept such statements as some kind of wisdom for the ages, it’s a good idea to question them. Test them, try them out. If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it? goes the quotation attributed to Einstein. Except a spate of research can neither confirm or reject that attribution. Sometimes we don’t yet know. Turn the words a little, and rather than worrying who said it, what value does it have of itself, for me, today? Time to keep trying out this amazing life for what it might offer next.
SIX
Follow a spiritual path for any length of time, and you’ll pick up pieces of things that may not always “fit” (now, or quite yet, or ever). What you do with those things, how you assess which have value and which you can wisely let go, will change as you move through your life. A friend traveling a theistic path has stationery with a heading that reads “What does this have to do with God-realization?” In a form that fits what we each do, in language that resonates fo us, it’s a good question to ask from time to time. Like the stack of pizza boxes and pyramid of soda cans after a party, it may be time to clear away, just to see that table again.
Here’s the nine-pointed star of Thecu I’m incising on a sheet of metal for one of my altars. It may rest on the north face of an outside altar for at least part of the year — that’s not yet clear.
What does my study of this portion of my path, of a possible goddess from the past, and her symbolism, have to do with the rest of it? Is it a piece of Druidry? Exploring that question is itself part of my experience of it. Or in the slang of the past decade, is the juice worth the squeeze? Creating the star is part of my working with possible answers. A capacity for following through is such a large component of so many things — relationships, jobs, creativity, awareness, self-esteem — that I sometimes think it should be a graduation requirement, and a prerequisite for bringing children into the world.
is perhaps the most venerated number of the Dekad, the number par excellence of the ancient world … A group of seven comprises a complete unit, a whole event. But a group of seven is different from other wholes we’ve encountered, particularly the Monad, Triad and Hexad. The Heptad expresses a complete event having a beginning, middle and end through seven stages, which keeps repeating. Seven represents a complete yet ongoing process, a periodic rhythm of internal relationships.
It’s well known that the regular heptagon is the smallest polygon that cannot be constructed using only the three tools of the geometer, the compass, straightedge and pencil, the tools that mirror the methods of the cosmic creating process. In other words, an exact heptagon is not (and cannot be) “born” like the other shapes through the “womb” of the vesica piscis …
Use a calculator to divide each number one through ten by seven. They each yield the same result: the sequence of digits 1-4-2-8-5-7 cycling endlessly, although they each begin with a different digit. Six digits, like the six days of the week, are set in endless motion around the unseen Sabbath.
The common saying “at sixes and sevens with each other” refers to seven’s aloofness … (pgs. 222-226).
As a book of lore, a wise guide to numerological insight, a companion to the Tarot, a counsel for ritual patterning and form, a practice, a set of stories and images, Schneider’s book is a Druidic feast for those attuned to number.
With just a few changes, you can readily adapt my recent Beltane Solitary rite for the Solstices tomorrow, winter or summer.
Earth below me and in my bones, Sky above me and in my breath, Seas around me and in my blood, by the Power of these holy Three, I proclaim this to be sacred time and space …
A Solitary has the advantage of spontaneity. With the skeleton framework of a ritual as a guide, you’re free to improvise, to slow or quicken your pacing, to substitute words, drop or expand a section to fit the moment’s need. Just like with poetry and song-writing, you need just enough structure as a form to create with, and enough freedom not to feel boxed in. You find wings of a definite shape and size — they’re real, after all — and with them you can fly.
As with ritual, so with ritual politics: unlike the blood-curdling threats accompanying initiations in days not so long ago, the wiser rituals (and their ritual-writers) remind the initiate that no bindings are laid upon you, and should ever you, your guides or spirit wisdom counsel you to depart (or change the ritual, or strike out on your own path), do so with blessings. Anything else smacks of power-over.
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The June Solstice here in central New England means our local snakes are finally active both day and night. Although we’ve seen the more aggressive cottonmouth in the area, it’s the common and docile garter snakes (thamnophis sirtalis) that usually hunt our lawns for bugs and frogs and the occasional mole, which have come to sun themselves on our driveway each morning. This supple fellow from yesterday was about 18 in/46 cm.
The Carr-Gomms write in their Druid Animal Oracle:
Although some legendary dragons are strongly linked with only one of the four elements, many of them happily partake of the characteristics of all the elements: sleeping in water holes, curling their bodies around hills by day, and flying through the air or breathing flames whenever they wish. Quintessentially alchemical, they speak of the energies and powers that exist both within our own selves and within the landscape around us (pg. 135).
A good reminder for the Solstices — the alchemy for transformation is always on hand, in encounters possible everywhere. After all, earth, sea and sky are all in me, too. We be of one kindred, o serpent.
And so when Jesus says wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I also, can you feel it? Spirit with us, around and inside us. May we gather in that awareness, wherever we are, by twos and threes, bird and beast, ancestor and neighbor.
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Greetings to visitors from Brazil, whose numbers are up today! Muito obrigado!
The co-occurrence of astronomical events multiplies their psychological effect. Even if the new moon and the coming solstice (winter in the southern hemisphere, summer in the north) on this June 20-21 weekend offer no more than a psychological effect, they would be worth acknowledging and celebrating. But for many they offer much more.
As markers of both sacred and secular time, they locate us in the moment. No thanks, you might be saying. Any moment but this. It can help to think of what our ancestors had to bear, but that’s often easier when our own troubles don’t crowd around us and nip our heels. At such times we may not have the leisure or perspective to be grateful our forebears survived long enough to keep the line going, to pass along whatever wisdom they’d garnered, along with their DNA. The advice to “live always in the present moment, because it is the only one that’s real” sounds wonderful — until the present sucks. Then it’s anywhere and anywhen but here and now. So we time-travel with a vengeance, distracting ourselves through whatever means we can lay hands on. Sometimes it can seem like the best prayer we can offer for others is may your distractions bring you comfort. Wine, weed, wool-gathering, to name just a few.
But pursued with intention and love, moon and sun festivals lift us out of ourselves. We’ve all had the experience of playing sports, or gardening, or some other activity where we’re so intent on what we’re doing we don’t notice the cut or scratch or other injury until some time later, or until we spot the blood or bruise. Only then, with the coming of our attention, do we feel the sting or ache. For an interval, something else was more important and more interesting than pain. Celebrating seasonal and planetary cycles can help us focus where we choose to look, not where our circumstances pluck and tug at us to look. Always? No. Often enough to help us reset and recalibrate? Yes.
Sun and moon, they reconnect us. The jarring frequency of fluorescent lights can bother the eyes, and the hum of them overhead can be an irritant. Sunlight and moonlight don’t feel that way. They energize, unfolding us to ourselves and our surroundings. They bathe us in light, in a vibration billions of years old, native to our atoms.
Antelope Canyon, New Mexico — a play of light and form. Image: Pexels.com
As archetypes with physical analogues, moon and sun help tune us in to other archetypes, if we choose. We can begin with the physical realm, and let experiences accumulate without jettisoning our critical intelligence, taking us step by step more deeply into wonder and joy. Our ancestors painted animals on the walls of caves, danced the hunt, linked with a clan or tribal spirit, saw in animals a brother and sister that could guide and teach, advise and protect. An animal, they long ago discovered, isn’t “just an animal”. One of the large and wonderful lessons of Druidry, as in many other paths, is a simple and profound one: Things are more than they appear.
You might call it the iceberg principle. What’s immediately visible is a key to what’s underneath. We seem to get this with the people in our lives we know reasonably well. We see through a friend’s odd mood or gruffness or silence or manic laughter into a more underlying movement and wait or prod or listen as we’ve learned to do. Moon and sun reward a similar friendship and patience.
The next full moon arrives in just a few days, and I’m revising and tweaking the draft of my recent full moon ritual, and thinking about dark moon and new moon rituals, too. With the clearer skies much of the world is enjoying with the enforced reduction of traffic and travel, this could be an ideal time to deepen acquaintance with the Two Lights in our skies no one needs to plug in, or pay a utility to operate.
And so the voice of a Druid comes, and says to me, even as I say to you:
I bless you in each of your moons,
your fullnesses and your dark nights.
I bless you in your changing faces,
in the pearl shadows of your twilights.
Because who doesn’t need blessing, and to bless ourselves, and to bless others, and to welcome the blessings of others coming our way!
And we can say to ourselves, and to each other:
In between, when we dance or dream,
we trade places with tree,
beast, or spirit of the grove,
and soon or late we uncover
another doorway that opens
for us to walk the sky.
Some of our truest names are written in sun- and moonlight.
“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.
The Southern Vermont Summer Solstice plans finally all came together this weekend, with about 20 people from Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont groves and seed groups gathering to celebrate the Solstice and camp on the land of our host BW.
Potluck, Friday evening 21 June 2019. Photo courtesy FH.
“Friday evening ease”, 21 June 2019, BW’s house.
After dinner Friday, we drove to Putney Mountain to see the sunset of the longest day and watch the stars come out. A marvelous breeze kept the bugs off.
Solstice sunset Friday 21 June 2019 on Putney Mountain. Photo courtesy FH.
The next day we drove and hiked to the Putney Stone Chambers, which I also wrote about here last September.
Saturday afternoon 22 June 2019 hike to the Putney Stone Chambers
The walk to the most impressive of the chambers follows a Class 4 road.
mossy stone on hike
Recent rains have kept the mosses and ferns green.
Investigating a smaller stone chamber. Photo courtesy FH
“Rebirth from the earth”
We nicknamed the largest chamber the kiva, after a similar design in the American southwest.
Gathered at the “kiva” entrance
Entrance to the “kiva” — BW is standing showing depth of chamber. Photo courtesy FH
“Into the kiva — 1”
SF in kiva — photo courtesy BB.
Spiderweb over kiva vent hole — view from inside — photo courtesy GN
“Druid at ease” — MH in a tree near the kiva. Saturday 22 June 2019
Mugging for the selfie — BB (left) and me (right)
“Ignition” — bonfire Saturday evening 22 June 2019 after ritual. AB is blowing the sparks to flame.
Shortly after ritual, as we watch the bonfire light. We’re still wearing red headbands from the rite. Photo courtesy CG.
Young fire. Saturday 22 June 2019
Young fire, Saturday 22 June 2019. Figure within flames?
Bonfire in full burn Saturday 22 June 2019. Photo courtesy CG
Moon at sunrise this morning, Sunday 23 June 2019. Photo courtesy BW.
We closed the weekend this Sunday morning with offerings of cedar boughs and whiskey around a small fire, as we gave thanks for the weekend and the community we share.
Basket of cedar and whiskey bottle. Sunday morning 23 June 2019. Photo courtesy BB.
Happy Solstices! — Summer in the Northern, Winter in the Southern Hemisphere.
Here is “Eagle Poem” by Joy Harjo, which we’ll be sharing tonight at the opening potluck supper of our Solstice weekend gathering here in Southern Vermont.
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circles in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
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!
[Solstice light and fire can fill us with energy to tackle the big stuff. At least, that’s my sense of this post, after drafting and revising it. Here goes.]
MAGUS ’18 fire circle. Photo courtesy Crystal Collins.
The title for this post comes from a line in a recent column in the UK paper The Guardian. (I routinely skim the foreign press both as an escape from the breathless hyper-partisanship of U.S. media and also for key perspectives often wholly absent from American consciousness.)
Every age has ’em: the issues screeching for our attention, promising imminent peril and world-flattening disaster if we don’t ramp up our paranoia, doubt, fear and despair to the pitch of the writer, pol, preacher, activist, etc., etc. If you haven’t developed a nervous twitch just from hearing certain triggering labels in the 24-hour news-cycle, you obviously haven’t been paying attention.
Which is exactly what I try to practice and quietly urge on others, if they choose to give me space to talk. Often they don’t, and I don’t insist. Stop paying attention, which is a form of our energy, to absolutely everything, just because it asks for it. Pay attention specifically to what builds, to what gives joy and life to you and others. Otherwise, why bother?
What follows is geek-talk, if you’re not a Tolkien-fan. You might as well use the search box at the top left to find a topic that interests you, or wander elsewhere on the Net to track down what will feed and nourish your powers. Surf well.
OK, you’ve been warned.
Remember the Council of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings? In that remarkable extended scene with its many speakers, Gloin recounts how an emissary from Mordor comes to Dain Ironfoot, king of the Dwarves in Moria, and demands Dain’s compliance with a request. Dain answers prudently:
“I say neither yea nor nay. I must consider this message and what it means under its fair cloak.”
“Consider well, but not too long,” said he [the emissary].
“The time of my thought is my own to spend,” answered Dain.
“For the present,” said he, and rode off into the darkness.
We’re always asked to decide, to react — preferably as-quickly-as-possible — but certainly notto spend our time considering the messages we receive, or to originate a response that’s not simply a manipulated reaction for or against.
The time of our thought is our own to spend, if we reclaim it, which is precisely what we need to do if we’re to find a balance and poise that will let us act prudently, navigate our own lives with a measure of confidence and joy, avoid inadvertently assisting the dis-eases of our times, and possibly aid the forces of light. (Yes, sometimes the admittedly exalted and grandiloquent language of fantasy has its place in a realist view of things. In times that feel over-the-top, eloquence and dramatic language fit perfectly. If they move us in any way to preserve our own integrity, they merit a place in the action.)
And we each need to do this in our own ways, which means no single formula that I or anyone else proposes will suit us all. No OSFA.* The Druid tradition of the triad quietly tells us to look beyond crippling polarities — it bids us ask where the third factor lies, and what it contributes to the situation — but it’s far from the “only solution”. Other factors shape any situation, but threes at least have the virtue of avoiding the potential deadlock of twos. A tie-breaker is built-in, so to speak. Freed from the grip of either-or, many a situation opens onto unexpected possibilities and directions.
I refuse — with the defiant gesture of Galadriel repulsing the Shadow — to spend my hours in despair, like Denethor, who thought he saw truly with his palantir, when all he perceived were the visions Sauron fed him. And a corollary: If I can’t contribute effectively to matters I care about, I will work where I cancreate and originate something positive, however modest. Instead of complaint, muddying the atmosphere for myself and those around me, I will build as much as I can.
And I vow — with the wisdom of the exchange of Elrond and Gimli following the Council — to keep faith with my own ideals, even as I test their validity.
“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,” said Gimli.
“Maybe,” said Elrond. “But let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.”
“Yet sworn word may strengthen quaking heart,” said Gimli.
“Or break it,” said Elrond. “Look not too far ahead, But go now with good hearts!”
But what does that mean in my case? Showing up to write this blog, I reach 400+ people who find some value in what I say. If I can help raise spirits, I’ve found one way to serve. We each have many, and to identify them and give them attention can be a revelatory experience. We each matter much more than we believe or feel most days. (What dark magic have we allowed to enspell us that we think so little of ourselves?)
Lastly, I swear fealty to what I know of the highest and best, trusting that any purgation I face, should I fall short of my own ideals — as I have and will again, no doubt — will necessarily restore me at length to the commitment and service I aspire to.
There, a triad for myself, and for any others who may find value in adapting it to their situation, experience and capacities.
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*OSFA: “one size fits all” — a personal meme reminding me to suspect the single fix, the one answer, the sole acceptable response, the cloned ideal, the mono-culture, etc.
The title for this post comes directly from a Druid friend’s recent Facebook post. “Spoiler Alert — there are no coincidences”, he writes. “Details later”. That’s a teaser for a whole lifetime.
He’s right, of course. And wrong, in another sense. Everythingis coincident — it happens together with at least one other thing, and usually along with whole bunches of things. How could we recognize any event if it didn’t come wrapped up in everything else? Consciousness depends on noticing differences and distinctions. That’s how our primate brains are wired. We catch things that stand out from other things. We scan the field or background looking for what’s most salient — and that becomes foreground. Food? Sex? Danger? Beyond those three, we can get down to the business of culture, civilization, a lovely meandering conversation with a friend, drinks in hand, on a balmy summer afternoon, discussing unintentional magics like Manhattanhenge.
In this sense, looking for signs is wasted effort. Everything’sa potential sign, because everything is coincident with something else. Events arrive together like a large litter of puppies or kittens (your preference), and we lift one up to our faces to cuddle it, feel its softness against our skin, smell that delicious newborn animal smell of fur and warmth and milk-fed baby-hood. For the moment, at least, that’s our sign, our focus, our access-point to now, the thing that fills most or all of our attention.
But soon enough there comes a moment when our attention, which has dis-membered the whole of the moment in order to grasp at one piece of it, subsides, turning to the next thing, while intuition, the subconscious, a whole host of perceptions and awarenesses linked to but not the same as conscious attention, have been having their own party and we — by which ego often means conscious self — can feel we weren’t invited. The hint, the nudge, the ache, the sense of missing something, until we re-member some of the original whole and just maybe pick up on other elements we didn’t track and hone in on the first time round. But we often suspect this re-membering because it doesn’t originate with that first conscious attention, but pushes up from beneath like a touch of green where we didn’t plant anything. And we have to wait an interval to see whether it’s a weed or not. If like me you’ve been well brainwashed ahem trained! by many Western methods of education, your response is to uproot it at the first sign of its non-approved life.
What’s all this got to do with Druidry? The gifts or original blessing that Druidry takes up and acknowledges in its rituals and perspectives, this embodied existence, along with all the other access-points of awareness and connection, is one key to spiritual practice. We’re not here “for a reason” — reason’s not some kind of cause of things, which if we deciphered it would finally open all the doors. What launches us, and the Land, all its many inhabitants, the whole cosmos, comes before our thoughts about it. Thought is a stop-gap between us and immensity. We’re not here “for a reason” because reason is simply too small to contain more than the most minute fraction of that immensity. But we can treasure and acknowledge being here, and make the most of it — not in some consumerist way, or antagonistic self-against-the-world way, but in an amazed self-in-the-world-with-other-selves way. Of course, reasons may come out of existence, rather than the other way around. Funny, though — they’re no longer reasons as commonly understood, but purposes — oodles of purposes waiting for us to notice and choose and commit to them. No longer the often forlorn quest for a “because”, but so many quests for “in order to” available, sitting or standing, playing their guitars or sleeping, each of them dreaming and longing for some particular one of us, in their Quest Waiting Area. (Settle into even some modest silence and you can hear them breathing and whispering as they dream.)
Druid practice, ritual, harvesting St. John’s wort (it’s almost Solstice, after all!), the work with animal oracles, the curve of a bird’s wing, gardening, the whispers of the Ancestors, the nudges of an animal guide, the fascination of so many branches of learning as they touch on greater mystery the deeper they reach, the quest for wisdom — these are all ways to participate in the blessing, and many more besides.
As far as we can tell, that blessing is inexhaustible. Or if it isn’t, no one’s seen the edge of the cosmos yet. Like the old medieval maps, announcing the edge of the world beyond which yawns emptiness or dragons or an eternal drop into nothing, our little human reason doesn’t do well trying to dissect the cosmos and “figure it all out”. So we try instead to set it to work on things it’s actually good at. Load it with purpose and it takes off like a rocket.
Look at the numbers of people who really want a purpose, but feel they lack one, and the greater culture has no other answer than consume (and spend even more time online).
Time to get to true work, time — we discover with amazement — time to get to joy.
Festivals such as the Solstice, like any enduring spiritual practice, offer times for ritual connection, because ritual is one way to touch the sacred, to sing the awen again.
The challenge, often, is for those who’ve either never experienced ritual and are put off by the thought, or for those who’ve grown allergic to it and are also put off by the thought. Ritual is QWERTY spirituality: a set of keys most of us have heard about and probably know in some way, and second nature for anyone who uses an English keyboard.
first full rhododendron flower, front yard, 5 minutes ago
QWERTY keys aren’t the only set, or the “best”, or any other exclusive label we may try to put on them. But one of their great advantages is that they’re accessible. And practicing them long enough gives us the confidence to try out other combinations — other keys on the keyboard which we may not even have seen, before we gained familiarity with QWERTY. We make the path by walking.
Can I work with that funny word QWERTY and generate a useful though admittedly adhoc guide for ritual planning? Let’s see.
Questioning, wondering, expecting, readying, touching, and y — a dependent variable. We might call it manifestation, or coincidence, or fit. Sometimes it’s the path of least resistance.
Questioning: What’s the ritual for? (Do I need a ritual?) What’s the issue? Who else is involved, visible and invisible? When is the best time? Who can I ask for help? Who’s attending? How many people will take part? How can I maximize their involvement? Where should the ritual take place? How simple could it be? What does divination suggest? What other signs should I consider? How can I acknowledge my guides?
Wondering: Where has my attention been recently? I wonder how my dreams and the coincidences of the past month play into this moment and the ritual I’m considering. What’s my vision of an ideal ritual here? I wonder how I can involve chance, serendipity, inspiration, the awen.
Expecting: I expect about X many people. I imagine good energies at play. I play through a possible ritual in daydream or guided meditation, I anticipate the materials I need, I collaborate with friends, I bless and ask for blessing of the undertaking.
Readying: I clean and purify the ritual space as needed, inwardly or outwardly, I rely on others to do their part, I drop unneeded attitudes and thoughts, I gather materials, I double-check, I do another divination as needed, I listen to guidance, I practice common sense, I rehearse with others.
Touching: earth under our feet, breath in our lungs, light in our eyes, blood in our veins. Gifts already granted. Sweet incense, woodsmoke, breeze, rich scent of flowers, buzz of insects, animal calls, hawk crying overhead at the moment the ritual shifts, a burst of wind, sun emerging from behind a cloud. Touch and be touched.
Y — the dependent variable: Sometimes we won’t perceive this till well after a ritual. Sometimes it arrives in the middle of doing it, unbidden, grace or spiritual presence. Sometimes one person is led to act or speak in a way that makes all the difference. Whatever the dependent variable is, I can’t control it. It’s the universe participating, it’s the magic of manifestation, or coincidence, or fit. Sometimes it’s the path of least resistance spirit takes, like water along a channel, or blood through the veins. Almost always it’s saying “yes” to possibility, change, inspiration, growth and transformation.
And the awen, I notice, asks for “we” from QWERTY. We can find it in community, in the middle of the ritual, in the common experience we all share.
On Friday, Mystic River Grove, an OBOD group based in Massachusetts, celebrated a Summer Solstice ritual inspired by the Anglo-Saxon symbel or feast, and built around toasts, boasts and oaths. I couldn’t attend, but I want to reflect on these three components of celebration, apart from however Mystic River chose to celebrate beyond those three elements.
With a toast, boast and oath, you could certainly hold a fine solo rite. Toast your gods, land spirits, ancestors, teachers, living kin — whoever you’re called to honor. Then on to a boast, a celebration of excellence, a claim to honor for ourselves, for something we have achieved. Like gratitude, boasting’s a skill we neither teach or practice enough. My default boast is survival. I’m still here. But I can definitely claim more; this blog, my other writings, a good marriage, years of teaching young people, a circle of friends I admire and enjoy.
A solo rite still has witnesses: our own selves, hearing the words. Powers and beings of the world who attend because they were “in the neighborhood” so to speak, unless we explicitly ban them. And anyone we did invite to join us. But what’s the value of our community witnessing when we do these things? Why do these things publicly?
Toasts others make can remind us who we honor and who we might include next time. We learn of others’ gratitude. What I’m grateful for carries a story with it. It’s a window into a life, and speaking gratitude in a circle opens us to each other and our stories.
Boasts tell us something of the commitments and dedications of time and energy in others’ lives. If I’m proud of it, I’ve spent myself on it in some way, poured myself into it, and probably sacrificed in some way to accomplish it. Boasts also let us laugh — we can boast about silly things, or make fun of ourselves for how much even a small achievement may have cost us.
Oaths tell us what will matter in the coming days and months. What are others binding themselves to do? How does publicly announcing an intention, having others witness it, help energize us to accomplish it? An oath may include a spell of finding or binding, of opening the way, or shutting down obstacles, resistances, barriers, and so on. When I took part in Nanowrimo in past years, for instance, and wrote my 1600 words a day, announcing my progress online helped me keep going. You helped me persevere because you knew I’d set out to do it.
Depending on the size of the horn passed round the circle for each of the toasts, boasts and oaths, and the kind of drink you quaff each time, you may find your tongue loosened and the three acts easier to pull off!
Here the rhymer in me wants to add a fourth word, wrecking the lovely triad of toast, boast and oath, but creating in its place a new and balanced pair of rhymes: toast, boast, oath and growth. After all, a rite moves us to a new place and space, never the same as where we were before. As with yesterday and tomorrow, the difference from today may or may not seem like much, but just as the daylight lengthens and shortens each year, depending on which side of the solstice I’m on, so do the energies at play in my life. I can do things today not possible yesterday or tomorrow. And that’s worth a toast, a boast, an oath and the growth that comes with them.
Finally, if we’re going to be Anglo-Saxon about things, the Old English Maxims 1, lines 138-140, offer relevant insight here:
Keeping to the spirit I feel lies behind these proverbial expressions, and unpacking their compactness and concision*, I take this to mean, roughly, “Let your speech be words of good counsel to others, write runes of wisdom, sing as epically as you can, deserve praise, test and expand your judgment, while holding nothing back each day”.
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*With even a little Old English, you can explore meanings and fashion your own translation with the help of the online Bosworth-Tollers Anglo-Saxon Dictionary here.
rǣd: accus. of se rǣd; advice, counsel, prudence, deliberation sceal, 3rd sg. of sculan: shall, ought, be obliged, must mon, Wessex dialect nominative of se man: one, person, human, mortal, man secgan: to say, speak, express rūne, accus. plural of sēo rūn: whisper (speech not intended to be overheard, confidence, counsel, consultation), mystery, secret, rune wrītan: to write, cut, draw, form letters (on wood, stone, parchment, etc.) lēoþ: accus. of þæt lēoþ; song, poem, ode, lay, verses gesingan: to sing lofes, gen. of þæt lof: praise, glory, hymn gearnian: to earn, merit dōm: accus. of se dōm; doom, judgment, judicial sentence, decree, ordinance, law areccan: to put forth, relate, recount, speak out, express, explain, interpret, translate dæges, gen. of se dæg: day, daytime onettan: to hasten, anticipate, be active or diligent
I’m going all lore-y in this post, so if plants and herbal history aren’t really your thing, move along.
Vervain (Verbena spp) — “leafy branch” — known among herbalists since at least the time of dynastic Egypt, has associations with midsummer, most obviously because in the British climate where we get much of herbal lore in the English-speaking West, that’s approximately when it flowers. The 11th-century Old English Herbarium (Ann Van Arsdall, Routledge, 2010) describes gathering vervain, using the Latin name uermenaca, at Midsummer. (Any left over from the previous year was to be tossed into the Midsummer bonfire.) Fans of The Vampire Diaries know it for its colorful flowers and anti-vampiric powers. The TV series showed the variety Blue Vervain (Verbena hastata), an American species, and dramatized the herb’s toxicity to vamps and its ability to protect a mortal from compulsion by vampires. Who says pop television has no wisdom to offer?!
The range of vervain’s nicknames also indicates something of how firmly fixed it is in herbal history: enchanter’s plant, holy herb, herb of the cross, herb of Saint Anne (yerba del Santa Ana), Juno’s tears, pigeon’s grass, pigeonweed, turkeygrass, herb of grace, etc.
Blue (or Swamp) Vervain (Verbena hastata)
I’ve been on an intermittent local quest to spot some growing wild. Many North American varieties of the plant are originally native to Europe and were brought by early colonists. In the sometimes quaint and often rewarding language of herbals and herbalists, vervain “has enough garden presence of a rustic kind to justify its inclusion, being in no way boorish or uncivil, and it is easy to start from seed and easy to grow” (Henry Beston*, Herbs and the Earth, David Godine, 2014).
Vervain varieties (over 250!) have been prized for numerous benefits, depending on dose and preparation, along with a few qualifications of sensitivity and toxicity at higher levels. It has tonic, diuretic, and anti-parasitic properties, and can stimulate both dopamine and serotonin, meaning it lifts you up and also slows you down. Leaves, roots and flowers, again depending on variety (harvest early in the season to avoid strong, even rank flavor!), make a soothing tea.
In herblore, vervain sprang, according to one story, from the tears of the goddess Isis as she wept at the death of Osiris. Greeks and Romans both used it as a sacred herb, sweeping it across their altars. In Christian Europe the story runs that vervain was used to slow the flow of blood from Christ’s wounds (though logically this would merely have prolonged his agony), and so thereby the plant gained another of its nicknames — herb-on-the-cross.
Western medicine officially disdains to acknowledge much value to the plant. One site (drugs.com, sourced from Harvard Health Topics), notes “There is no clinical evidence to support specific dose recommendations for vervain. Traditional use for its astringent properties required 2 to 4 g daily in an infusion … Research reveals little or no information regarding adverse reactions with the use of this product” but adds that for pregnant and nursing women, “Documented adverse reactions. Avoid use”.
Nonetheless, many sites include recipes for nursing mothers, such as this one:
Combine 1 quart of water with 1 teaspoon of vitex berries, 1 teaspoon blessed thistle leaves, 1/2 teaspoon vervain leaves, 1/2 teaspoon nettle leaves, 1/4 teaspoon fenugreek seeds, and 1/4 teaspoon anise seeds; steep for 20 minutes; drink 1 to 3 cups a day.
I’m leaving out the source, perhaps to protect the guilty. But anyone who’s benefitted from herbal remedies, as I have, especially if nothing else has worked, can readily attest to their value from personal experience, in the face of official disdain and ignorance.
With all this history and attention, it’s little surprise that among the plants set forth for study in OBOD’s Ovate grade work, vervain occupies pride of place.
With a toast, boast and oath, you could certainly hold a fine solo rite. Toast your gods, land spirits, ancestors, teachers, living kin — whoever you’re called to honor. Then on to a boast, a celebration of excellence, a claim to honor for ourselves, for something we have achieved. Like gratitude, boasting’s a skill we neither teach or practice enough. My default boast is survival. I’m still here. But I can definitely claim more; this blog, my other writings, a good marriage, years of teaching young people, a circle of friends I admire and enjoy.
A Druid Way 
