A curious dampening has beset me since I began this series. I find writing useful for so many reasons, and as a spiritual barometer it’s priceless. Things I didn’t realize were rumbling beneath the surface come into awareness when I write. Rather than always worrying at (or about) a topic, I start talking, and momentum almost always delivers something to say. You’d think that armed with that experience I’d easily complete a series like this, or a minimum number of words a day.
And I can and have. What’s so curious about this unproductivity is how casual it seems. The commitment to write doesn’t even occur to me, and then I realize a day or several have passed. While I’ve used to-do lists to my advantage, one of the perks of semi-retirement is ignoring a list if I chose — even better, not making one at all. And so I successfully manifest my inner sloth or slug.
I’ve also learned to celebrate what I get done, rather than punish myself for what I fail to do. This third entry in the series is three entries I didn’t have beforehand. And flow begets flow.
Part of my spiritual path involves always having a focus point for contemplation. Often it’s a word that’s become a love-portal, a way to open myself to good things, while letting the less-than-desirable ones flow away from me, water down a hill. Sometimes, as in my current run or spell (the magical associations are fitting; spell originally meant ‘story’, and any magic is part of a story we tell ourselves, if we don’t like the current narrative and can imagine an alternative), the focus is an object rather than a word. A visual, one with useful associations that make up my practice, as well as themes for why this particular focus has arrived for me now, and what that portends. Like my friend’s sauna above, it’s both a symbol and a usable thing in living a life on earth.
Where and how to find such focus points? Asking is one good way. Saying that, getting it down in writing, I realize both how ordinary and strange that can sound. Asking who? you might wonder. And that’s a very good question, a good ask, all by itself. Chant the word who for long enough, and you’ll be answered.
The act of asking sets up a movement or motion, or you could term it an opening or setting, that delivers me to insight, and to a new focus point. Other times the focus point simply arrives. I’m caught up in an object or word, something I’m reading, or something from a recent contemplation, and the new point slips into awareness. I found the most recent one on a walk, an object, rather than a word, though the object has a name. Name and thing, two faces to use in my practice, and to explore — part of the focus.
Our ranch house is small enough to heat easily, but it does sometimes leave us tight for space. Ever since we moved here I’ve made my office in our front entryway, a 7-foot by 6-foot space, with small windows facing north, west and south. It’s cold in winter, but bright enough: even on the most overcast days I can write and read without a lamp. As I started to write this morning, I heard a rustling of birds in the nest above the south-facing door. It’s sheltered by the house to the east, and my entryway-office to the north, and almost every year I hear the peeping of the year’s crop of nestlings. In another hour the sun will hit the nest directly. Some birds still sun themselves there, even now in late October.
Samhain is the start of another kind of nesting season. Beltane is of course a nesting time in more literal ways: birds raising families, and soon enough kicking them out of the nest to get them flying. We nest at Samhain and turn earthy, drowsing, seeking warmth, comfort, richer foods to keep the cold at bay. At Beltane we celebrate the fire in us, and we can do the same at Samhain, especially if we seek more inwardly for the flame. Samhain and Beltane fires differ — you know this in your skin if you’ve observed both holidays in some way more than in your head.
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The other path I follow celebrates its new year this weekend, and enters a year of creativity, one in a twelve-year cycle of named years. A year tuned to creativity: we need it, to work through the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
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I like Susan’s recent comment: “does our breath with intent to our ancestors give breath to them … hmmm I would like to think so.” I try it out — breathing as a way to connect with those who breathed before me, those whose bodies enabled this body, who made it so it could breathe. One communal shared breathing, the same air: beloved ancestors and I, one large set of lungs among us. We keep the breath going, the ancestral lines, the lines of inspiration, taking in what’s handed down to us, and breathing it into new life and possibility. I breathe with intention as I light my tea light, as our local sunset arrives, and send off this post.
I find myself in a rhyming mode today, and over time I’ve learned to work with it when it comes, because it can often give me light touches and entries and approaches to things that can otherwise be heavy or obscure, or present no handles, no entrance or doorway at all.
On this first Day of Samhain, I’ve lit a small fire in our woodstove. This Saturday’s sunny, but that autumnal nip in the air is real, and the dampness of early morning fog crept into the house. My wife and I were outdoors early and suddenly we were noticing cardinals. Maybe because many of the leaves are already off the trees, we speculated. Maybe it’s easier to spot them. The bright birds match some of the leaves as they darted in and around the trees. Depending on the weather, sometimes they’ll winter over here.
Beltane moon, Samhain moon …
As with dream work, so with blogging: first I have to get words down, a tentative, preliminary, approximate account. If I’ve left off dream study for a while, the direct links between dream and waking consciousness can take some work to revive. (Indirect links never leave us — they filter into reverie, whim, daydream, flashes of intuition and inspiration.) For me, the music of a line or two of verse can help. Other times, reading past dream entries can spark a new dream. I take these into sleep and recall improves, coming sometimes over several days, and slowly, or all at once.
I titled this post “cardinals,” but that’s really a placeholder. The birds aren’t thinking in human words, and “cardinal” evokes the color, which is often more useful than the word itself for many of my purposes. Let me bathe in cardinal red. Words as stepping stones out of our hyper-verbal culture — words simply as light touches, into something other.
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Tonight at dusk I’ll set a match to a tea-light and daydream with it. Scrying with flame? Sure. Drawing a tarot card? Possibly. Maybe literally trying my hand at drawing a tarot-like image. Just being alive is itself a kind of divination. Samhain flame links me to a thousand generations. I take air into my lungs, I let it go. O mortal thing, whispers everything else around me, mortal thing, are you listening?
Both fire festivals, so fire can feature prominently in both, if you choose.
Nine Days of Beltane? What’s that? Well, go ahead — create it, if only for yourself! Noon for Beltane, dusk for Samhain. Or some other time that fits you and your season.
Often I try to model these things here on this blog, because so much of Druidry is in the doing. I’ll be starting my own Nine Days tomorrow, Saturday — 23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31 — ending on the Holy Evening itself, which is after all what Hallowe’en means. I’m posting today, a day before, in case you want to try it out yourself. Or you could start on the 27th, with Samhain/Beltane as the middle day, and continue for four days after for your count of nine. Or try seven days, or five. The point is to make a shape, and then fill it with a practice, with intention, with doing and experiencing and trying on the shape for size and fit, partly to see how well it actually works.
Much has been written recently about how to deal with toxic ancestors (here’s one example). Do a blog search if you need support in that regard. I’m focusing on a few ancestors I specifically choose to remember. As for inviting their presence, if they’re direct blood ancestors, I carry them in me already, in all their messy humanness. And I can make any invitation to a ritual quite specific: to those who wish me well, whom I respect and love, whose legacy deserves acknowledging, whose imprint helps shape me in ways I benefit from. If I need a further reminder, I can look in a mirror. That I’m here at all, I owe to those who came before me, and built this physical form from their own bodies. If it feels right, include a small mirror for the ritual.
Fire works so well at these times because of the major seasonal shifts occurring — whether into early winter, or early summer. In both cases, fire fits. It signals to the unconscious that something profound is happening, that something elemental is one appropriate response. If I do nothing more each day than light a fire — a candle, a lamp, a blaze in the woodstove or fireplace — and sit in silence for a time with that light, that flame, I am opening a portal for memory and inspiration and deep reflection. As the wisest recipes advise, season to taste.
You might find a star meditation a simple addition. If you’ve investigated ceremonial magic, you’ve likely heard of the rituals of the pentagram, of summoning and banishing forms. Here at these elemental times a full panoply of the Four Elements and Spirit is good to recall, to embody, to honor and enact. With nothing else needed but fire and my own body (“earth my body, water my blood, air my breath and fire my spirit”), I have all I need. Anything I opt to add is a gift, an offering. If I choose, as one part of my simple ritual, I can shape a star in the ethers, the akasha, the astral, drawing it with a forefinger, good as any wand. If I need or choose, I can declare my finger a wand for the purpose of ritual. Or search the day before I start my Days of Samhain for a found object as wand or magical tool. Spirit honors creativity, because we’re doing what It does all the time. We’re awen-izing.
Or I may spend that fire interval of each day’s ritual just journaling. I can mark each entry with a star, or do any other rituals that surround my writing. “Here begins the first day of my fire writing …” and I’m on my way for that day’s entry.
When you start thinking and imagining these things, the ritual also starts taking shape.
With covid, wildfires, floods and political turmoil, the U.S. exhibits profound imbalances in all four Elements. With air transmission of the virus and a mental haze surrounding our responses, with fire in the west and our over-heated rhetoric, with water leaving its channels in flood and drought, and our emotions swamped, and with stubborn disagreement about whose land this is and how we can best inhabit it together, Druids, we have our work cut out for us.
It was one of those moments when the blindingly obvious actually became visible. We’ve all had those perceptions, and wondered why until now we hadn’t seen them in terms that made their focus clear. And yes, it would be nice to think that a clarified and clarifying perception is all I need to move forward. But as you and I also know, by the time we perceive something clearly, we’ve almost always been working on it for a while already, and we usually stand somewhere around midway on the particular leg of the path we’re walking. The next half of the journey awaits us.
Deborah Lipp writes in her Way of Four Spellbook that Spirit
is what happens when all four elements meet and combine. Spirit is the quintessence, the “fifth essence,” the original elemental whole from which the other elements emerged. Elementals have only their individual qualities. For example, Gnomes will only be Earth, and are incapable of acting in any way but an Earthy way; they won’t feel or be willful. And Salamanders will only and forever be Fire; we cannot ask them to be stable or exercise self-control. But people, and other beings with spirit, have the capacities of all four elements, and the freedom to grow and explore in any direction (pg. 16)
By devoting myself to a particular element, I’ll certainly see results. That’s also how imbalances result: push hard into too much of a good thing and soon I’m no longer in “good thing” territory. We may tend to think that only skilled users of magic obtain results, when almost anyone can and does manifest them — just not especially balanced ones. We’re all magicking ourselves into and out of situations constantly. It just may not be particularly gracefully or intentionally or lovingly.
Lipp notes:
… heavy work in a single element — such as several Earth spells over a period of time unbalanced by other elemental work — might call forth the presence of the appropriate elemental. It is important to pay attention to signs of excessive elemental activity in your life (pg. 19).
We can and should certainly work for elemental balance. Earth, air, fire, water — diet, exercise, staying hydrated, work, routines, “getting enough fresh air”, partners, pastimes, practices — these are almost the definition of the whole ” self-help” genre, the workshops and guides and supplements, the exercises and fixes, the “one-size-fits-all” that almost never does. Balance means something different for each of us.
We’ve all had the experience, too, of a remedy that does work — for a time. Then eventually we need to tinker, adjust, modify, adapt — or yield at last to the need to change, or do a complete overhaul. “People, and other beings with spirit, have the capacities of all four elements, and the freedom to grow and explore in any direction”. We might add that people have the freedom and also the need to grow and explore in any direction.
I’ve found it most helpful to begin with Spirit — because that’s where balance originates. Starting with any other element means I’m guessing that’s where I should work. But it’s different with Spirit. In fact, if I’m looking for a definition of Spirit these days, that works pretty well — “where balance originates”. You can see from that definition that working out its consequences in each of our lives may well take different forms. Your balance isn’t mine, just like your diet isn’t. But your balance is much larger and more encompassing than what you put into your body — than any one element — and we can see common threads and components when we compare our journeys.
What does all of this mean in practical terms?
1. I can take an “elemental inventory”. Where has my attention been recently? Does any particular element seem to dominate my experience, concerns, actions, feelings, thoughts? Is that element one that I need to cultivate and bring into play, or one that’s already present and may need to be scaled back?
2. I can explore a solar and lunar inventory as well. Is there a time in my day that needs attention or love? Are mornings hard to get going? Are evenings lost in fatigue? Has a quick “pick-me-up” started to “put me down” instead? Are there monthly — moon — issues that keep recurring? How can I recognize and address and honor some of the larger cycles in my life? What does my birthday mean to me and bring into awareness? What elemental features does it highlight or emphasize? How about other anniversaries and yearly cycles?
3. What ancestral forces are at work? Ask for insight into ones you might be overlooking. How are you yourself becoming an ancestor as you live your life? We’re all working on it — we hardly waltz into exalted ancestor status just by dropping this physical form in death.
4. What “either-ors” and binaries in your life need a good Druidic ternary or third component to open them up and remove them from a cycle that no longer feels productive? What’s a missing third component? What tensions include an overlooked factor that may clarify and illuminate them? What’s one small thing I can do differently? And what difference does that make?
5. How’s your dream life? Yes, many people think they don’t recall their dreams, and that may well be true, so how is the dream content manifesting in other ways — since it always will? Our hidden lives want to connect with our apparent lives and vice versa, and not be left out or ignored.
6. What numbers or other patterns and dynamics are manifesting in your life? Are you seeing a lot of fives or threes or sixes? These can show up anywhere — odometer reading on your car, dates on the calendar, telephone numbers, billboards, license plates, etc. (I just got a new cell phone number yesterday, and am working out the waking dream of its numeral significance.)
7. What ways and avenues and channels do you have in place in your life for answers to any of these things to reach you? We each develop strategies to cultivate insight and intuition and discovery, and we can each find and explore new ones, too. Maybe you daydream in the shower, or maybe music helps you open up to non-verbal wisdom. Maybe a song lyric or meme reaches you with an insight that resonates. A friend’s casual comment, or a divination your carefully work with. A dream practice, or daily ritual, or fortune cookie. Prayer, meditation, chant. The “chance” detour on your way to somewhere else that brings you a new encounter, road sign, time for reflection, etc.
8. With so much attention on “waking up” and “wake-up calls”, how about some “sleep down” time as well? As one hemisphere of the planet moves deeper into the dark half of the year, even as the other is waking up into spring and summer, how can we use this shifting dynamic that is always taking place in ourselves as well? What parts of us need to make this shift, into rest and restoration, as well as animation and activity? Each hemisphere isn’t one thing only — both these tendencies still manifest. As above, so below; as within, so without.
9. Where (and how, and when) does Spirit manifest in my life? It’s present for everyone, and despite some millennia of bad theology and teaching, Spirit isn’t — or need not be — a matter of “belief”. My stomach digests and my liver purifies my blood without any need for “belief” on my part, thank the gods. Spirit manifests quite as concretely and specifically for each of us, and in ways it pays to seek out and honor and relish.
A year ago in October 2020 I added that flag-counter widget to this site, and it’s been illuminating to me to see where you’re from. Not surprisingly, the majority of you hail from somewhere in the English-speaking (and reading) world. But I deeply thank those of you who make the effort to read in what is a second or third language for you.
A blogger appreciates return visitors, but some of you may have followed a link to a particular article, or the passing comment of a friend, and found what you wanted in a single visit.
Pinnacle Hill Trail, southern Vermont
Beyond where the counter records you, I also know from WordPress analytics which individual posts draw the most visitors. Certainly my blog isn’t “representative of Druidry” in any conscious way, and I write what I darn well please. But in light of those qualities I still try to draw conclusions about how the ideas and inspirations of Druid practice have spread around the planet. So it’s good to see that the countries that would most benefit in making changes in lifestyle and consumption and re-connection to the natural world — challenges Druidry tackles head on — also show up prominently in my readership. And you might extend that further and note that if we “follow the numbers”, the U.S. tops the list and outnumbers any other nation by many times in its need for Druid practice, and the immediate value and applicability and benefit of its ways of living and being in the world.
With covid, wildfires, floods and political turmoil, the U.S. exhibits profound imbalances in all four Elements. With air transmission of the virus and a mental haze surrounding our responses, with fire in the west and our over-heated rhetoric, with water leaving its channels in flood and drought, and our emotions swamped, and with disagreement about whose land this is and how we can best inhabit it together, Druids, we have our work cut out for us.
If we look only at nations with visitors in the triple digits or more, we have in descending order (after the U.S.) the U.K., Canada, Australia, Ireland, Germany, Brazil, Netherlands, France, Italy, India, Spain, Russia, New Zealand and Turkey. I particularly appreciate the opportunity to connect with you because I assume many of you are returnees, and so I’m grateful you find value in what I write here.
Se téoða mónð, October, Winterfylleð, swá hine cíg[a]ð íġbuende, Engle and Seaxe — Menologium. “The tenth month, October, Winterfylleð, as the island-dwellers call it, Angles and Saxons”, notes the medieval Old English Menologium.
No, not “filth” as in dirt or foulness, but “fullness” — the moon of October that signals the start of winter.
Tolkien, master scholar of Old English, uses many of the OE month-names in his Shire Calendar.
TWO — Samhain
What is there to say about Samhain that hasn’t been said already? Well, it’s always new, each time it rolls around. Part of the newness lies in the perceptions we bring to it. This year, the OBOD celebration of Samhain puts members of New England’s Mystic River Grove front and center as celebrants for the online event on Saturday, 6 November at 3:00 pm EST. You can find more info on the OBOD Facebook page and website.
THREE — Free While Living
Jivan mukti, as it’s called in Hinduism, “liberation while still alive”, is a curious mix of qualities and characteristics that many Druids might well aspire to, as well as perceptions or goals many might shun. Such a person, as the Wiki article describes it, is “humble, high spirited, of clear and steady mind, straightforward, compassionate, patient, indifferent, courageous, speaks firmly and with sweet words”. The jivan mukta, or liberated one, does no harm to living beings, is indifferent to praise or blame, and is as comfortable alone as in the company of others. Insofar as we think of the “ideal Druid”, many of these qualities fit.
How well does my practice illuminate some or any of these qualities, or others? How can I assess whether I even find these qualities desirable?
FOUR — “Into the Woods”
No, it’s not Sondheim, and it’s not so recent (2013), but it deserves wider viewing. Three-quarters of an hour worth spending with the words and images here — a Druid group active in the Chiltern Hills in England, with a Samhain celebration in the final third or so.
FIVE — Stretching the Seams
Pick up Thoreau’s Walden, and scarcely do you begin when in the second paragraph he lobs a request, a “burn”, a dedication and a metaphor at us:
I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
It’s both bracing and disorienting to read writers like this, who disdain ingratiating themselves with readers, and instead set off on their course expecting readers to have sense enough to follow.
The request and “burn” I mentioned go together — a sincere account of our lives, and the rarity of such a thing. Then a dedication: to poor students — and we can number many thousands in that category, though they may never read Walden or ponder its wisdom, or its author.
Whom does the “coat” of the book “fit”? If we work not to stretch the seams, Thoreau appears to be saying, then it will fit. The readers need to engage; the author will not hand everything over. Perhaps the more valuable the contents, the less they can be made to order. In a certain sense, the world is indeed a kind of “one size fits all” dwelling. We all find ourselves here, somewhere on the planet, whether the place where we find ourselves feels very hospitable or not.
“Those who would learn must want to learn in the manner they will be taught”. No customer model of learning, where we cater to student whim and prejudice and ignorance. What is the ‘poverty’ of the ‘poor students’ which Thoreau wishes to address, especially in Walden’s first and substantial chapter, titled “Economy”? Economy, oeconomia, oikos + nomos + –ia — “laws of the household”. Does a well-run, smoothly operating world-house or cosmos follow principles, laws, patterns? Many Druids think so, and to varying degrees we attempt to match and harmonize with those rhythms, patterns, and principles.
I’m posting this update in part because one of the videos on my first post about Romuva is no longer available. The several hundred views that original post enjoys each year say you’re still interested. The video below celebrates a handfasting/wedding with image and music in the tradition of the revived ancient Romuva faith (Wikipedia link) and practiced in Lithuania.
From the outdoor ceremony on a wooded hilltop, to the symbolism of the rite and the lovely handcrafted objects and garments of attendees and participants, to the presence of the Romuva priestess officiating, this wedding video is both a smooth professional production and an illustration of the vibrancy and appeal of much Pagan practice. The first six minutes in particular capture the ritual. (The rest of the video continues the celebration with friends and family, dancing and cake.)
As with so much ritual, Pagan or otherwise, it’s useful to reflect from time to time on what still carries meaning, and what we may have retained simply “because it’s always been done this way”. The potency that ritual often celebrates may merge with elements of the ritual itself, and we can end up revering the elements over the original potency. At times we may find ourselves noticing that the ritual begins to feel flat, dim, empty. (It’s the same principle that underlies sympathetic magic, which we’re witnessing in weakened forms in vast swathes of current events, as influences bleed almost uncontrollably from one person and thing to another and another, like a pandemic or flash flood or wild fire. These are both metaphors and realities that have much to teach, if we could begin to listen.)
Regeneration so often occurs from the roots, so it’s good to examine what these are, and whether we’re caretaking the dead leaves of one season, or nourishing a vital root-stock that sends out green shoots and runners each spring.
For care-taking is a large part of what we’re called to do, less in the way the word gets used today, where we’re “merely” standing in for the “real owners”, and more in the literal sense: a taking-care, a cherishing and nurturing.
Give the fear and stress and suffering of much of planet, we might begin with taking care of ourselves, and as it grows, let that care flow outward. Like any valid spiritual practice, Druidry offers tools to do just that.
The commitment of the two people hand-fasting in the presence of the community assembled as witnesses, and with their love and support for the commitment the couple undertakes, and the acknowledgement of the mirth and reverence, the beauty and mystery that characterize the event, offer useful models for action. Which of those elements can I practice today in my life?
The third card of my draw is Temperance from the major arcana. Here again Kat Black’s collage of medieval art has assembled a remarkable image. How is temperance winged? Not why, but how?
As the final element and resolution of the first two in a series, the third component of a triad is not merely a combination but a transformation. Analytically: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Spiritually, something more. We are all much more than our components, being living conscious beings.
The Page of the second card has brought word to the seated figure of the Four of Coins, a representation of where I began, or where my consciousness was when I drew the cards. Already I’ve moved on, of course — we all do; we don’t sit still, though sometimes it can feel like it. What manifests as a result? A winged feminine figure. More than a third of the obligatory tarot booklet that deck creator Kat Black includes in the boxed set gives sources for the composite photoshopped images. The figure is initially a nun, and the wings come from another source. The addition is literal inspiration — the consequence of opening to an elemental energy for transformation, something we each do every day in one form or another (that’s how we live).
If the Four of Coins can release the materiality of his outlook — and he’s seated, pretty firmly entrenched in it, by all appearances — he can transform into his winged potential. Between Death and the Devil is Temperance. Moderation in all things, counsels the deck booklet, a common enough reading, very appropriate, too. A time to enjoy equilibrium. Flanked by death and the devil, two strongly transformational cards, temperance is an apex of seeming calm. The Page as middle card is the hinge, its gifts (as I noted in the previous post) youthful animal energy and change, transformation, travel.
Winged. So for a start at least, I pay attention to birds. We’ve let our small rural lot grow wilder this year, the berry-bushes spreading, the variety of birds greater, mosses heavy in the shaded areas, with all the rain of the past two months. (The eastern imbalance is too much water, with flooding and loss of property here to mirror the drought and fire of the western U.S.)
Birds heard, often, but with so much tree cover, less often seen. Listening, the counsel echos. Keep listening. What we hear so often precedes what are able to see.
Josephine McCarthy in her Magic of the North Gate observes:
Remember, your imagination is only an interface, it sends out signals that spirits can decipher and creates a window in your consciousness whereby the beings can interface with you (pg. 111).
I know I tend to think of imagination as “mine” rather than a shared space we offer — or we can offer — for connection and service. The care-taking I mentioned at the beginning of this 31-day series doubly applies to imagination. I know I have to attend to care-taking my consciousness. So many beings and forces these days want a piece of me. (We can easily locate and identify people who have agreed to be nibbled and snacked on by forces they’d never let in their front doors, if they shone the full light of their consciousness on them.) All the more reason a regular spiritual practice, whatever form ours may take, is essential for sanity and survival.
With all the talk about “freedom” these days, we frequently ignore our own spiritual freedom. Sometimes I’ve made fun of the state motto of bordering New Hampshire: “live free or die”. More accurately, it’s live free and live — it’s the only way we truly do live, as free spiritual beings.
The second card of three, from Kat Black’s marvelous Golden Tarot. I don’t read frequently from this deck, but it always offers unexpected richness when I do.
The second in my three-card spread:
To the image of myself sitting outside the city walls (see yesterday’s post) comes the page on foot, three rabbits nearby on the road — the nearness of animal life. His staff is coming into leaf — a living staff. Behind him, fire. Youth, animal spirits, fire, travel or journeying, all coming to challenge the sitting figure to own his royal potential, his crown with three points — matching the three rabbits?
This is a useful prod — I’ve been feeling dis-spirited. To get re-spirited has become an increasingly clear quest I need to undertake — it will not (or not any longer) happen by itself.
What do I need to attend to? Fire, symbolic and literal. This fire festival season is an apt interval — all four of the Celtic festivals of Imbolc, Beltane, Lunasa and Samhain are fire festivals, after all.
The Lunasa meditation for Sunday in Matthews’ Celtic Devotional includes this self-clarification: “May the tides of change sweep away all that is outworn and strengthen whatever is eternal in my life” (pg. 110).
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Welcome to the newest visitors from Bolivia and Macedonia.
Here’s Kris Hughes in his most recent book, writing about the goddess Cerridwen, and also about how we can meet halfway whatever it is that we aspire to. Rather than lamenting no post for yesterday, or beating myself up about it (no fun unless masochism inspires me), I can collect a number of really helpful pointers:
I cannot see Cerridwen physically–she does not possess a carbon-based physical body–so the manner by which I develop my relationship with her must somehow address these limitations. Nothing beats heading over to Bala for an afternoon spent at her lake, for there is a sense there that is different to anywhere else on earth–there is a tangibility to her presence in that location, as if the landscape holds a different kind of lyric. However, Bala is just over an hour from my home, and my schedule does not permit me the luxury of going there every day. Therefore I have re-created a sense of what I feel at Bala at home, and it is centred around my altar … (pgs. 264-5).
First, acknowledge limits — something still not fashionable these days, in spite of broad hints and clear evidence not just from the day’s headlines but all of human history. Often what I want to connect to doesn’t have a physical form, “so the manner by which I develop my relationship … must somehow address these limitations”. Nothing beats direct experience, the right location or doorway or person — “as if the landscape holds a different kind of lyric”. But working with my “howevers” may mean among other things re-creation of the remembered ideal in a new setting, and a focus helps immensely. In Kris’s case this re-creation is “centred around my altar”.
But we all do this already — we re-create in so many ways. No one starts from zero. The trick is to open the tap even incrementally — to increase the flow even a little. Commit to 31 days of blogging. Commit to a cat, another person, a goddess, a garden. The point, after all, may not be to get there, but to get here — more fully.
I cannot see what I desire, but let me marry earth with fire … Often a rhyme will launch me toward where I wish to go. Self-enchantment is a delightful skill. I happen to do it with words, but your preferred mode may be other: a walk, gardening, cooking, some other craft, martial arts, a relationship. The fire of the imagination, a south to the north of earth, balances the path to recovery, discovery.
I take the word “howevers” from earlier in this post and play with it: “who-verse”. In the world where I currently reside — or one I wish to (re)enter — what verse will take me to who I’m looking for? The “who” may be a version of me, the verse may be the song I can’t stop singing. So many pointers, so many paths. Or the “who” is a deity knocking, knocking to make herself heard over my human noise. Who cares if I don’t believe in a god? It’s enough some days that she believes in me.
You see, I know how much I talk myself into many experiences and states of being, unawares, or unintentionally. Like most of us, I’m (still) just starting to claim my power and trying do it a little more intentionally. This blog is my trail, my track, my spoor. It’s true that the more personal I get, the more universal I become. Up to a point. Sometimes, though, I just turn oracular, and have to wait until I can untangle what I wrote in order to interpret it to myself, let alone anybody else.
Sometimes you just need to show up, not bump into the furniture any more than you must, and grow whatever your equivalent is to a suitable Druid beard. In other words, stall for time. Make sh*t up. Because when you do, I’ve noticed, something always turns up. We accumulate momentum with even small efforts, and that carries us into the next moment. With any luck, singing — and no apologies to the naysayers, the donkeys braying. But even if not, there we can pick up the trail again, climbing to see what’s over the next hill, what the vistas reveal, how we may serve a greater vision than before.
With Raven poking his bill into things, Boar shows up to remind me it’s been some time since we’ve run together.
You might think I’d be more mindful of a guide that stalked me for decades until I finally took notice, a guide notable for access to healing (who doesn’t need that from time to time?), and an all-around lively companion to take with me on walks and into meditations. I run my hand along her back (sometimes it’s him, this evening it’s her) — our preferred point of initial connection, and re-affirm the link that’s always there.
Sometimes I can’t quite reach the inward space I need to inhabit for healing. But I can reach for my inner guide, through long familiarity, and touch the bristly fur on his back. Touch was one of my first experiences of my guide — totally unremarkable to me, when I was looking for something more dramatic — and less “mundane”, less physical. For whatever reason, I can readily feel his fur, his pleasure at our connection. Only later, as I note in the post linked in the previous paragraph, did I read in the Druid Animal Oracle the entry for Torc, the Boar: “… he is a representative of the Goddess — his skin can heal you” (Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm, The Druid Animal Oracle, Fireside/Simon and Schuster, 1994, p. 39). And I began to appreciate this “earthed” mode of access for what it was, a priceless gift. Once again — you’d think I’d know this by now as one of my ongoing biases — I overlooked the obvious, minimized a non-flashy spiritual connection.
Long-time readers know I often try to convey the ups and downs of a spiritual journey, the human tricks and quirks of consciousness, the ironies and paradoxes and eddies of the life-current that sweeps us along. We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate, Rilke reminds me. All right, Bard, I mutter. But what about returning?
Mara Freeman writes of the imagination needful for working with our own lives in her Grail Alchemy:
… the imagination is the language of the soul. It is the equivalent of our most important sensory organ — sight — only turned inward rather than outward. Every non-physical thing that exists expresses itself as energy, or Force. The imagination is a creative mechanism that enables us to give Form to Forces of the non-physical planes. (Introduction, Kindle location 349).
I love that: imagination “enables us to give Form to Forces of the non-physical planes”. And no, it doesn’t have to be visual. Look at Boar, not choosing my default, strongest sense, but reaching me through touch instead.
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None of this, without the impetus to write these daily posts for a month. The struggle to re-establish a flow of writing, after long drought. The richness that starts to emerge, a droplet, a smallest trickle.
Part of the point of this series is to put in a period of steady writing. As a spiritual practice, it has much to recommend it. The commitment gets things into words that wouldn’t otherwise arrive there. And if you’re a Druid on top of that, you naturally get at least some things that are Druidic into words, too.
The theme I thought would jump-start me was berrying. But all day, nothing was stirring. I found myself avoiding this blog altogether. (Just day three and he’s dead in the water, mutters the inner censor.) Yes, I probably could have gone out to our half-wild blackberry bushes in the back yard, taken a picture, and found in that interaction at least my triggering subject. Poet Richard Hugo writes in his delightful 1979 book The Triggering Town:
A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or “causes” the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing. That’s not quite right because it suggests that the poet recognizes the real subject. The poet may not be aware of what the real subject is but only have some instinctive feeling that the poem is done.
Young poets find it difficult to free themselves from the initiating subject. The poet puts down the title: “Autumn Rain.” He finds two or three good lines about Autumn Rain. Then things start to break down. He cannot find anything more to say about Autumn Rain so he starts making up things, he strains, he goes abstract, he starts telling us the meaning of what he has already said. The mistake he is making, of course, is that he feels obligated to go on talking about Autumn Rain, because that, he feels, is the subject. Well, it isn’t the subject. You don’t know what the subject is, and the moment you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain start talking about something else. In fact, it’s a good idea to talk about something else before you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain.
As with so many human crafts and skills, each has much that wise observers learn they can transfer — or maybe transpose — to living a life. The equation isn’t always one-to-one. We’ve become accustomed in the last century to photographs. We point to an image of ourselves frozen on a a flat phone screen or hard-copy print-out and declare “that’s me” without thinking much about how strange such a statement is. I can be both “here” and “there”, in the same way that human beings in the Hebrew Bible are made in the “image of God”, both divine and not at all. The image both is and isn’t the same as the thing it images. The triggering subject often works similarly, pointing us beyond. I start a blogpost about berrying and I know at this point that the title and possibly some ghosts of ideas will linger in the draft folder on WordPress. That idea got me onto my blog. A starting point, a seed crystal. A prompt. But that’s not the current title.
My wife and I were sitting out back eating diner an hour ago when we heard a series of gronks emanating from the front yard. She hadn’t paid much attention to such calls before, though I know she’s heard them, and she couldn’t identify the creature making them. What IS that? she said. As the calls became more insistent, I knew that Raven was asking for my focus. One call probably wouldn’t have been enough to break through. But a series of them did. What made the conversation even more interesting and significant is that we’d just been talking about ravens, among the other birds that frequent our hilltop, including waxwings as they migrate north and south, bluebirds that occasionally nest here, and an assortment of woodpeckers.
As a bird with world-wide associations and symbolism, the Raven naturally lends itself to varied interpretation. While we needn’t discount such ready hints and clues, we don’t need to ascribe to them invariant significance either. Google “the name raven” and you’ll dredge a surprisingly muddled set of potential meanings and mis-meanings suitable for any bias. Your best friend means something quite different to you than to his parents, children, co-workers, the pedestrian he or she cut off in traffic, and so on. An actual being interacts with so many others, and picks up meanings and interpretations like carrion attracts flies. The simile is intentional — the Raven is a messenger or guide between realms in very many cultures, including the realm of the dead. But as Hamlet quips to his mother, “Tis not alone my inky cloak … that can denote me truly”. Meanings can be slippery things. Check it out before you check it in.
This particular raven was going about his own business. While simultaneity put us both in proximity and brought my wife and me to hear his cries, the raven doesn’t have to “mean something” to have profound significance. What did my conversation with my wife “mean” to him? Is he now divining in a book of Raven Wisdom to learn what his recent interaction with two humans meant? (Maybe he is!) We were brief interactions in a cosmos stuffed with them every instant. Wisdom can help us learn from our interactions.
For one thing, a raven close by could be a sign that the owl pair nesting up the hill from us hasn’t decimated the local bird population. For another, “Crows, ravens, magpies, and jays are not just feathered machines, rigidly programmed by their genetics. Instead, they are beings that, within the constraints of their molecular inheritance, make complex decisions and show every sign of enjoying a rich awareness”, notes the Wikipedia entry for common raven. My inclination, rooted in decades of practice, is to remain alert for future appearances, other coincidences, (dis)confirmation of speculations, and direct inquiry in meditation. Raven, what do you want to say to me?
Call this “Raven divination” if you want to. It’s also a form of creative play. The universe seems to play catch with meanings, tossing them towards us to see how many we’ll even notice, let alone return.
As with the other “Great Eight” days of the Druid (and wider Pagan) calendar, I find the festivals are more whole seasons than individual days. While a full or new or dark moon is an obvious time-marker, for the rest of the month, time-keeping often isn’t exact. Our modern time sense that seems to require us to celebrate “on the day” can miss the larger energies of the season.
In this, I know I’ve been influenced by Caitlin Matthews and her Celtic Devotional, which also supplied the title for this post: “As you travel through the country of Autumn, relate your spiritual journey to the rich gifts available at this time” (pg. 97).
Of course, early August isn’t autumn yet in many ways. It’s still “high summer” with days of heat and languor and vacation for children and teachers before school resumes. But this country of a season, with its borders and boundaries different from its interior or far realms, still announces autumn with its first harvests, its shortening daylight hours, its subtly altered and shifting rhythms.
My go-to magical tree, our front-yard guardian Rowan, already has reddening berries, though the overcast sky dulls their hues. And as if to announce the season, I recently received from New Hampshire Druid friends a lovely personalized gift of a leather offering-pouch, crafted by AODA archdruid Dana Driscoll, featuring “my” Rowan in full red-berry mode. The Rowan dons its spring-in-autumn guise, having something to say in all its seasons, whether or not I’m listening.
Relate your spiritual journey to the gifts of the season. Wise counsel. I find as I age I need to resist a tendency to veer off on curmudgeonly tangents, defaulting to wry cynicism. The gifts of the season ARE my spiritual journey, and vice versa. A friend on an Old English site I moderate posted an excerpt from the Old English Herbarium on betony, which advises us to harvest it in August: þus þu hi niman scealt on Agustes monþe butan iserne “thus thou shalt take (or harvest) it in the month of August without iron”. Magical instruction, to forgo that metal hateful to the realms of otherkin? No knives, in other words. Harvest by hand.
You can usually wring both instruction and a laugh from the old herbals. The London herbalist John Gerard noted in 1597 that betony “maketh a man to pisse well” — a diuretic, if you need one. But the Herbarium is more to the point, suggesting different preparations for a range of ailments and maladies: Wiþ egene dymnesse genim þære ylcan wyrte … “against the dimness of the eyes, take that same herb …” How has my vision dimmed, or what afflicts my sight? Culpeper’s The English Physician, later named the Complete Herbal, ascribes substantial powers to the herb: “it preserves the liver and bodies of men from the danger of epidemical diseases, and from witchcraft also” and “this is a precious herb, well worth keeping in your house”. I’m not looking to betony for a physical panacea, but the spirit of betony may well be a potent ally to explore. Use your powers of discrimination, my guides whisper to me.
Yesterday, water: the image of the waterfall. Today, vision, across the elemental circle, from west to east, and air, intellectual activity and acuity. Is tomorrow north, or should I be particularly attentive to images of earth, the body, groundedness? Or let them come of themselves, if they will.
Blessed Lughnasadh to you! And a Blessed Imbolc to you in the South! This post begins a 30-day series for August 2021.
A theme that came to me in meditation this morning is caretaking. We ask others we cherish to “take care”. And these days, to take care of themselves. If you’re like me, you tend to think of taking care as a kind of opposite of passionate engagement. You take care when things, including yourself, need tending, need slowing down and nurturing. Caretaking becomes a form of caution.
The god Lugh for whom Lughnasadh is named has always manifested to me as a figure of passionate engagement. He’s given the epithet samildanach in Irish — equally skilled (in many things) — for a reason. Not much room for caution, when I consider the god. He throws himself into experience because that’s how you harvest it for what it offers. His caretaking is involvement, is testing himself against others — against the spiritual status quo?
When I don’t connect with one deity among a pantheon, it’s helpful to look at another. Longtime readers here know I’m not really polytheist so much as animist. The whole cosmos is talking, and different voices find me at different times. I’ve noted in previous posts how the hemispheres teach us to look at what’s happening across the world. As the north arrives at Lunasa, to give the more modern spelling, the south greets Brighid at Imbolc, as winter begins to yield to spring. The Lunasa harvest feeds awakening earth, awakening consciousness of Imbolc. What do my harvests feed? What do the fruits of my words, thoughts, deeds and feelings earn me and nourish in me? What awakens as a consequence? Where has my life shaped me to become more samildanach, more equally skilled, much as I may resist it at the time?
I include this image of the Middle Falls at Letchworth State Park in western New York because it’s my childhood spiritual home. A friend just took this shot on 26 July. A 20-minute bike ride from my father’s farm used to bring me to one of the park entrances, and another few minutes would bring me to this cascade. I’m a Druid today in part because I was blessed with such beauty in my youth.
Waterfalls signal abundance for me. The excess, the vast volume of water over a large falls like this one, reminds me how much happens every moment beyond my little circle of awareness. One of the benefits of ritual observance is its enlarging quality. We’re lifted, even if only briefly and momentarily, into larger worlds.
A Druid Way 