Archive for the ‘spiritual toolkit’ Tag
I’ve written intermittently about links between Druidry and Jesus, though of course other traditions have riches of their own that overlap and can nourish Druid practice. I post about them less because I know them less, but one mudra or ritual gesture from Buddhism is asking for some time today. That’s the Bhūmisparśa Mudrā (approx. boo-mee-spar-shah moo-drah), literally the “earth-touching” gesture Buddha makes, calling on the earth to witness his enlightenment.
every level matters, none superior or inferior, all one greening
We need and benefit from witnesses. Legally of course they can help build a court case, but they matter in so many other ways. Friends witness our lives as they unfold, and they participate in that unfolding, just as we do in theirs. We know as we are known. The spiritual witness others offer helps us remember our lives and actions, and help them to matter more. Druidry is an earth religion because our spiritual witness and practice is where we find ourselves right now, here on earth, breathing and eating, sleeping and waking, dying and being born. Living.
Multiple Buddhist websites offer bhumisparsha mudra as a significant ritual gesture than anyone can try out. (Check out number 2 on this site). It features in Buddhist art and makes numerous Buddhist “top-ten” lists as a practice.
With this simple ritual act, Buddha touches the earth, or gestures towards it, with his right hand, all five fingers pointing downward. The other hand, the left, is palm upward in the lap. This is prajna mudra, or the wisdom gesture. Left hand palm up, resting in the lap, is a relaxing gesture. Try it and see.
Together, these two form an appropriate mini-ritual pairing for a person looking for “practical practices”, ones with immediate benefit, simple, easily incorporated into daily life, elements in a spiritual tool-kit that can be combined with other practices.
What you do with your attention as you practice the gestures is yours to explore. Prayer? A blessing? An offering of greeting, gratitude, salutation? Stilling of thoughts and emotions? Attention to birdsong, wind, your breathing?
Looking to calm yourself after too much social media, remembering the earth, opening to our innate human wisdom, these gestures can help us home. (You don’t need to include the lotus posture!) Sitting comfortably in a chair, on the floor, outdoors if you have even a bit of yard, can all help center and align you. If you have an altar, a grove, a ritual space, a candle — whatever scale of acknowledgment that your life is linked to the whole and the holy — here is another place to begin.
By such small steps we can approach and know the sacred (our life task) yet again.
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Images: (1) terraces –John Renzo Aledia — Pexels.com (2) Wikimedia Commons–bhumisparsha mudra–photo by Biswarup Ganguly.
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What you are going through today is training for tomorrow. You need today to reach tomorrow, says my teacher.
OK, I say to myself. I’ve got today. Heavy headlines. Death. Hate speech. Unrest. Fear. And even seeing the “big picture” can offer little comfort sometimes. Week, day, year? It’s been a hard couple of centuries.
A few years ago, the late Toni Morrison ended an essay for The Nation like this:
This is precisely the time when artists go to work …
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.
Information that can lead to knowledge–even wisdom. I’m so there. It’s a Druid thing, reads the t-shirt I imagine myself wearing this morning. (After all, can you accomplish anything without the right t-shirt?) But what is this “information” that I get from failure and chaos? I’d really like to know.
A first step is a “refusal to succumb”. (And one secret: even if I think I’ve succumbed, I can stop. If I find that’s hard, well, that’s my “work of today” that will get me to tomorrow.)
It’s good and right to grieve — that’s not the same thing as succumbing. Maybe because we often censor our grief — “it’s just not American!” — we don’t grieve well — we refuse the difficult work of grief. Grief blocked can feel like succumbing. Sometimes we spend our energy blocking grief and have little left over for much of anything else.
Make a plan to turn negative energy to advantage, says my teacher. At this level of creative imagination, you’re in a condition of survival. The lesson of these worlds is to develop your ability to ride the crests of life.
If there was ever an art, it’s riding the crests of life, I tell myself. Isn’t that what all my vaunted talk of “spiritual tools” is about?! Be not simply good, but good for something, says my go-to guy Thoreau. On this blog, among other things I do, I want to be good for something. Most of all for myself, because if it doesn’t work for me, I have no business offering it to anybody else.
But sometimes I hear spiritual counsel like “Make a plan to turn negative energy to advantage” and I feel like I’m already succumbing. It feels like too much work.
Where am I grieving failure and chaos? After large-scale events like the recent white supremacist massacres in the States, we see people earthing their grief in flowers, pictures of the dead, and other rituals of grief. Grieve, yes. But also leave some energy for making that plan.
The creative part, the part where we “artists go to work” — and that means all of us, not just those wearing a hat or a self-label that says “artist” — means there isn’t any one plan that fits everybody. Teasing apart the question above — where am I grieving failure and chaos? — that’s part of my plan. It may or may not work for you.
I heard myself talking with my wife this morning over breakfast, still processing some less than ideal aspects of my last two jobs — I still carry anger about how I was treated, for one thing. I’m also still grieving other personal failure and chaos, even as my country reels and deals with its much bigger public versions. New grief can spark older griefs.
As a writer, much of my plan circles around writing. It’s one of my principal tools — a way to ground and earth my life sufficiently that I can take a look at it, celebrate the victories, and with any luck, and through the gift of the gods and the blessings of the ancestors, turn negative energy to advantage.
Because we’re all spiritual transformers — it’s our human specialty. That’s how we all survive, how we’re still here at all. So much flows through us, and we parcel it out to the different elements and to combinations of elements. Some of us ground it in particular forms — our families, jobs, talents, relationships, community service. Some of us let it inspire new ideas and thoughts, which we may or may not later ground and earth in forms and shapes and things. Someone else may pick them up and run with them. And so on. (We haven’t even gotten to fire or water yet.) The point is that a plan taps our unique identities, situations, talents and strengths and amplifies them. We don’t have to do it all. We do have our part, our portion, that no one else can do.
Just where am I sending energy? And how much?
There is usually a struggle when we move to a larger state of awareness, and that is natural, says my teacher. Often we swallow the belief that we’re doing it wrong if it doesn’t come effortlessly, if our growth doesn’t move forward like a hot knife through butter. We feel like frauds even as we hide the hassle, when sometimes that’s one of the more valuable gifts we can offer others — let them see that our achievements cost us something.
If you’re a certain age — if like me you had parents who came of age during World War II and the Depression, you probably heard variations on there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Lost in all that well-meant advice is the point that there is a lunch, and a breakfast and dinner, and feasts and fests besides. Yes, they come with a cost, but they do exist.
It’s gonna cost you, leers the gangster figure or Mob boss, the loan shark, the street dealer, the manipulative partner or blackmailer. We hear the words with a sinking heart, feeling for our heroine or hero. Don’t do it! we may be tempted to shout at the screen. Run away now! Get out while you still can!
In the movie of our own lives, we may have learned half the lesson so well we forget the other half. Nothing kills the Awen-Song from the Deep.
Where and when and how we sing, though, and who we’re singing to — that’s up to us.
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For an example of another’s response and plan, here’s a link to John Beckett’s blogpost.
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The Tree is a world-wide wisdom-glyph, a potent symbol of connection and energy and life. The Tree features significantly in Druidry, among its many other appearances, with one reasonable explanation of the meaning of the word druid linked to trees, to a derivation from two reconstructed Indo-European roots *deru/*doru/*dru-, with its cluster of related meanings — “tree, oak, rooted, sturdy, true” — and a second root *wid-, “know, see, perceive, wise” [see the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots]. This names — and challenges — Druids to be “wise knowers”, “truth-seers”, “tree-sages” and so on.
So the list of “Seven Trees” in this post is a selection from a vast root-stock alive in a metaphorical and literal First Forest, whose roots reach everywhere. Nonetheless, throughout time humans have found such selections to be useful, because their specificity nourishes inner seeds of creativity and encourages them to germinate. We lift a bucket from the wisdom-well and drink from it, marveling as it answers a deep thirst in us. A sapling puts forth leaves in the human psyche, so that new cultures, discoveries and insights can emerge. Choose your tree(s).
1) The Tree of Dreaming
Dreams often link us in unexpected ways to much that we push out of waking consciousness. Desires, fears, hopes, inner truths we deny or secretly suspect, creativity, inspiration, wisdom and insight and encounters with non-physical beings, enemies and friends, guides, companions, challengers and initiators and teachers. Each night we climb a branch, and we may retain something or nothing on waking. The leaves of the Tree brush against us, we drink from its sap, its branches lead to new possibilities, and we stir and wake and dream again.
I drink each morning from the forest pool, imbibing the wisdom of my dreams. What offering do I make in return? Gifts of self, gifts from my worlds.
As a meditation practice, I can commend this for recall and for wonder. The trees are mirrored in the pool, and their leaves blanket the forest floor beneath my feet. I sit on a tree trunk, and eat from the fruits and nuts around me. Before I return, I give thanks. A favorite tree nearby helps this manifest and concretize in my life.
2) The Tree of Kindred
The image here is obvious: the family tree. Linked as we ultimately are to everyone else on the planet, descended from common ancestors, we are this season’s leaves on the Tree, budding, greening, fading, falling and re-emerging on branches immemorially old. But because it is difficult to do more than express a general love for all things, we can begin more fruitfully if we love this leaf and that twig, slowly expanding our circle as we live and encounter new beings and extend our connections. The individual is a powerful key. Which ancestors have particular resonance and teachings for you in this life?
3) The Tree of Transformation
Humans transform trees into useful objects of wood, wood is a workable substance, and we respond to the beauty of the grain and warmth of wood in our homes and other structures. A tree is a living thing, growing throughout its life, which in some species can be very long indeed. All trees have their seasons, of fruit and flower, youth and maturity. Many species connect with other nearby individuals, and botanists are beginning to discover the central importance of tree species and individuals in the ecology of forests and woodlands. Trees are human cradles and coffins, doorways and walls, and have come naturally to represent all the experiences and choices that face a person in life. Christ was a carpenter, and died on a wooden cross, or in the language of some Christians, “God died on a Tree” — the most incorporeal linked to one of the most physical of living beings. Trees are doorways to other worlds, thresholds (also made of wood) to change and growth. In the distinction between transient leaf and lasting tree we have an image of what immortality might mean, the leaf of one personality among thousands, and the deeper link to the World Tree.
Yggdrasil, one example of the World-Tree
4) The Tree of the Worlds
In many cultures, trees link worlds, three or five, seven or nine. (In Norse mythology the World-Tree Yggdrasil links the Nine Worlds of Niflheim, Muspelheim, Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim, Vanaheim, Alfheim, Svartalfheim, and Helheim.) We live on Middle-Earth, between upper and lower — or many other — worlds.
Many other regions and cultures also express images of a World-Tree, including Siberia, China, many African tribes, the Aboriginal Americas, and so on. The Tree holds the worlds together, and also keeps them distinct, and as a perceptual image makes travel between them possible. As below, so above: once you know where you are, it becomes a lot easier to go somewhere else. Abandon cultural markers, and I forsake a ready cultural visa — ignoring the admonition of the popular credit card advertisement, I “leave home without it” and not surprisingly, I may run into all kinds of trouble at the borders.
5) The Tree of Wisdom
In the Garden of Eden, the serpent tempts Eve with fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Unlike mere knowledge, wisdom transcends polarities, and is rarer and all the more valuable for that reason. We cannot stay ignorant, but we do pay a price on the road to wisdom, often through pain and suffering, individually and culturally. Because unlike so much knowledge (nowadays increasingly accessible to anyone with an internet connection), wisdom must be earned. In the Biblical story, the two trees of Knowledge and Life grow in the center of the Garden, twinned expressions or manifestations of inner realities.
6) The Tree of Life
The “brain-stuff” of the cerebellum is called arbor vitae, the “tree of life”, in anatomical terminology, because of its branching structure. Several tree species popular with landscapers share the name arbor vitae — they’re ever-greens, always green, and so appropriately named. The medieval arbor vitae, tree of life, was deployed in Christian theology, linking human and divine worlds, the World or Cosmic Tree with the tree(s) of Eden and the tree of the Cross. In the teachings of the Qabbalah, adopted by Western magical traditions, the Tree of Life is a map of creation.
As one of my students once remarked, “Eve’s mistake wasn’t one of eating but one of sequence, paying attention to the right order of things. Eat from the Tree of Life first, and then eat from the Tree of Knowledge”.
7) The Tree of Silence
As I mentioned above, there are many trees we could include in any list like this, the tree being such a powerful collection of understandings, physical beings, symbols, images, experiences, and cultural and spiritual markers and maps. Those on quests often find themselves needing silence, retreat, withdrawal, fasting from superficial human interaction in search of deeper, more meaningful connection.
Both religious and secular literature abounds with stories and images of the sage, wise woman or man, spending a period of time, or an entire life, in a wilderness, desert, or forest. And the young initiate, seeker of wisdom, or adventurer, often must traverse the wilderness, venture into the forest, only to discover she or he is never truly “out of the woods”. The lessons, growth and discovery always continue. But then the rest we seek, the repose and restoration, are so often found in silence. Over and around and in these silences rises a tree, in whose shade we rest, listening to its wisdom. In the rustling of its branches, which only helps the silence deepen, birds and bug and beasts peep out from time to time, kindred on our way.
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Gratitude to you, my readers, for the 401 of you who follow this blog. Numbers both don’t matter at all and also matter deeply. Some of you visit briefly, and some stay longer. Knowing you’re reading and thinking about these things helps me keep writing. A blessing on you and your houses, you and your dear ones, you and your own walks each day and always.
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Image: Yggdrasil.
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Fake Druidry and OGRELD and OGRELD Redux are two previous semi-satirical posts taking a look at an imagined “One Genuine Real Live Druidry” (OGRELD). The prompt — and the acronym — come from a comment from J. M. Greer quoted in the first post: “… none of us have any right to claim possession of the One Genuine Real Live Druidry …”
With post titles like that, of course, it’s hard to be surprised when they provoke some predictable responses, from careful readers, and from careless ones, too; from readers assuming I was saying modern Druidry is somehow fake or invalid — or more offensively, that I was somehow saying their particular flavor of Druidry was fake, etc.
After all, if we’re indulging in reaction-mode to contemporary headlines, we know how “fake” gets bandied about as an attack word, almost superseding the “original” F-word. “If in doubt, try both out” — in public (or, worse, on Facebook or Twitter) and see which raises the general temperature sooner.
I submit that if you’re looking for spiritual guidance, a sense of your life’s mission, social media may not be your ideal first pick or best go-to.
What then are we to make of the expression “fake it till you make it”? Are we so provoked by the word “fake” because in fact so many of us feel slightly or very insubstantial, a “thing of nothing”, and we need the sense of outraged ego to weigh us down and keep us from floating away entirely?
Might there possibly be better ways of grounding and centering, of returning my ego to a sane place, where it can serve the whole of me?
We’re in the process of making, and in particular of self-making, and fakery (like bakery) does begin with experimentation. But if I’m polite, I just don’t subject others to my practice unless they ask. (You visit this blog, and you’ve asked.)
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So how do I go about faking it till I make it? What tools lie at hand?
This coming Saturday I facilitate an afternoon discussion, third in a series, this one on the topic “How to Bring More Love into Your Life”. This is an opportunity for service on my other path, and as I’ve noted, my paths intersect constantly. So, Druid self, standing in the intersection, what do you witness?
In the way of such things, I start to hear questions in reply to the implied question of the topic. (Answer the question with a question.) A week or so before such an event, I begin to pick up on clues, and gather impressions. If I’m alert, I get them down, longhand or in a computer note. Or, to put it another way that sounds less woo-hoo, “it just occurred to me that …” And yesterday, I also asked my wife.
Often she doesn’t like to be ambushed by big questions out of the blue, especially if she’s in the middle of a weaving project (which she often is), and her focus in on patterns, and thread-counts and the young weaver she mentors each Friday. But I also find she often gives the best answers then, spontaneously, so I keep asking, at the risk of occasional spousal fallout.
A pause. Then she says, “Before I look at anything, or put my attention on anything else, I try to focus first on the highest I can find”. Do you see why I married her?
The “highest I can find” is a worthy meditation topic. Then a practice, one I can keep enlarging. And I don’t mean all abstract or “light only”. The highest this morning may well be the chickadees and returning songbirds singing outdoors, the steady drip of snowmelt off the eaves, the slant of light that says longer days, yes — and also the nights, with their stars and a waxing moon. Often it takes night to see fire best.
One way to bring more love in, in other words, is to honor and cherish what you have. If those words recall for you as for me the now old-fashioned marriage service, that’s worth pondering. We’re each married to the cosmos, after all. We’re always “in a relationship”. Why let my carelessness diminish it?
What other ways can I open the door to a greater flow of spirit, which is another way of saying the same thing?
Make room for it. If more is to come in, it will need a place to call its own. “Standing room only” doesn’t appeal much as an invitation. What can I clear away? “Room, fairy: here comes Oberon!” says Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What access do I offer spirit to the heart of who I am? What practices can help me be more grateful and open?
Much of what I do each day, like washing dishes, building the fire, doing laundry, is a ready opportunity. If I “do it till it sings”, I might even find myself singing along with it. “Pure cheese!” screeches my censor, my inner cynic. Well, cynics and censors need love too.
Singing points to another clue. Like all things, we vibrate in harmony with the things around us. Vibrate with love, and we invite love in, we make room for it. (If in doubt, I whisper to my inner cynic, try it out.) That may mean playing music rather than indulgence in a sad mood. Though sadness can be instructive too, if I don’t overdo it. With so much light and singing in the world, I want to let more in.
On an Old English Facebook group I co-admin, I posted a brief entry earlier today: On ðǣm forman dæġe Hrēðmōnaþes sēoð wē fulne mōnan. “On the first day of Hrethmonth, we (will) see a full moon”. (Hrethmonth is the month of the goddess Hrethe about whom not much is known. If you’re looking for a meditation topic, there’s a new one. Hrethmonth is also “Wild Month”, and the month for Mad March Hares. Practice wildness often. Druidry is, after all, wild wisdom.) The full moon brings the time for the monthly Peace Meditation that OBOD encourages. Lunatic, lover, poet, the gods and the wild world know your name.
Yes, we each practice our One Genuine Real Live Druidry. That is, we each respond to the unique circumstances as we live these lives on earth, making bad and better choices and ignoring or learning from the consequences.
If you seek counsel, friend, do what opens your heart.
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One of the Enchantments of Brighid is openness to possibility. The goddess specializes in healing, poetry and smithcraft — skills of change, transformation and receptivity to powerful energies to fuel those changes and transformations. We seek inspiration and know sometimes it runs at high tide and sometimes low. As this month draws to a close, we have a moon waxing to full, an aid from the planets and the elements to kindle enchantments, transformations, shifts in awareness.
A day ago we finished a box of wooden matches. The box holds 250, and since we use them only for lighting our stove, that means we go through just part of a box every year. Emptying a box doesn’t happen that often, so it’s noticeable.
I like the imagery of the “empty” box. Though combustible itself, its main purpose is to contain matches and provide a strike surface. An old box has a worn strike surface, and one might be tempted to toss the whole thing in the fire. But I’m keeping it for these 19 days of Brighid, and it occurs to me now that it deserves a place on my altar. The sacredness of the everyday? Well, where else can the holy mystery abide in the worlds of matter, energy, space and time. As a friend likes to say, a mest (or messed) world can be a good and powerful stage for life and joy to happen.
Not to stretch things too far — how far is that, anyway? — I am a box, and so are you. Our spaces can hold all manner of things, and it’s our intention that determines what those might be. Insubstantial in itself, the box is nevertheless a potential locus for fire and mystery, or scores of other things. We take from the box a mood or a match, strike it and lay it to paper and kindling. We don’t create the fire, but without the box, the match, the intention and the movement to bring fire and kindling together, we don’t get flames.
To me the empty box is a “found” spiritual tool (my favorite kind), one I can work with physically and also in the imagination from where magic pours forth. Kitchen magic, or woodstove magic, if you will. What belongs inside it? What are some of the matches I wish to light? Where do I find them? (Where have I found them in the past? What new sources of them open up each day?)
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On a small piece of paper I write a prayer to Brighid, and I fold and close it in the box.
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What would you teach a young person asking to apprentice with you for the wisdom, skills and insights you’ve gained in your life? And how would you go about teaching these things?
The season itself encourages me to be mindful of such things. With its focus on harvest, completion, the Ancestors, and with my own middle age upon me, it’s natural to take stock and ponder what’s most worthwhile out of all the experiences and insights a human accumulates over several decades.
Before going any further, why not take a few minutes and write down your responses to those questions in the first paragraph above?
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What follows is one half of a possible conversation with the other person.
“Thank you for asking. You honor me by bringing these questions to me. In turn, I’ll start by asking you what you’ve learned so far. We build on what we already have discovered, so this is a good starting point. Let’s go for a walk — you choose the direction.”
“One way to begin to answer these things for yourself is to look at times in life when you are happy, or totally engrossed in whatever you are doing. What were you doing, and what did the experience feel like? No need to hurry toward an answer. We can talk again in a few days. Time for a cup of tea or coffee, right?”
“What would go on your ‘favorites’ list? You know — favorite colors, places, animals, people, activities, etc. These things can be a source of comfort, encouragement and energy when you need to recharge or rebalance. Turning to them consciously and gratefully and making them a regular part of your life can assist you greatly. And they can be keys to explore further, and develop as part of your personal toolkit for living. For instance, carving out space and time to practice them, and making a physical space where they are represented, can make a surprising difference in our experience of each day.”
“For some people, these can become doorways to a profession or career. For others, they become rituals and practices to restore and rebalance. For still other people, they can become spiritual symbols and subjects for meditation and insight. Here on my table altar is a hawk feather I found while my wife and I were looking at property here in Vermont. It was a teaching symbol that continues to remind me to pay attention to small signs. Because way beyond random probability, they can often turn out to be big signs.”
“What kinds of things are you good at? If you don’t know or aren’t sure, start asking and paying attention. Everyone has certain latent strengths, talents and abilities. It may be that others have already helped you find some of them, or have encouraged you if you’ve started showing or practicing them, but you can find them on your own as well. They may not always be things that others value right away, but you probably practice them anyway. In fact, some of the things we can be shy about are often things we deeply value and don’t want to expose to others’ opinions or judgments, so we keep them hidden. In spite of what Western culture tells us, there are such things as good secrets. Respect your own sense of when to open up about them, and when to keep them private. Or if I’m listening to the wisdom of plants and trees, build my root system first, then flower second.”
“If you’re wondering about what we’ve been talking about so far, or if you’re thinking they don’t seem very spiritual things, you’re partly right. We often undervalue such things, or think they don’t matter, or overlook them when we’re considering ‘matters of real significance’. Yet all these things make up part of the value of each individual. Each of us has importance, and each of us has core purposes we can discover and fulfill.”
“One powerful way to grow and learn is to serve. You hear a lot about service, and about ‘selfless service’. But I’ve found that the most balanced service is one that we may enter knowing we’ll benefit along with others, but not worrying about that either way. We serve because it’s another way to be grateful for what we’ve received. But we also serve because the universe makes us curious, and service takes us places we can reach in no other way. It connects us to people and places and other beings who we can help and who can help us. Service builds relationships. It’s a form of love. Though it may sound very strange to say it, loving another person can be a form of service. That includes loving ourselves. If we think about the numbers of unhappy people in the world today, loving ourselves is truly a vital and desperately needed form of service.”
“Finding something larger than myself and connecting to it is the only lasting source of happiness and fulfillment I’ve found. We long to feel deeply that our lives matter, and that kind of connection brings meaning and purpose and a deep sense of rightness. We may connect to a craft or art or skill, and we may connect to another person or organization or movement. During my life, I’ve moved around a bit among these at various times. Some people find one way to connect and spend their entire lives with that single way. But like everything else, there’s no single ideal way for everyone, but simply the way that works best for you right now. This isn’t something to believe, though you can if you want to, but it is something to test and try out and determine its validity for yourself.”
“Extending these insights into the practice of a craft, an art, a religion or spiritual path, an organization or cause or profession, are each natural developments of the initial urge and instinct to serve and to express our talents and abilities. A god or gods may help us focus our service, or become the center of what we do. But our service may not take that particular form. Our judgments about others’ choices will always be incomplete. To know our own purposes and priorities is the task of a whole life. We can honor others’ choices and give them the freedom to choose just as they give us that same freedom. There’s a deep test: does my practice afford others the freedom to choose? And does their practice offer me that same freedom?”
“In this world of time and space and change, there is a spiritual adage whose insight I’ve learned the hard way, repeatedly throughout my life. And it’s this: each day’s rhythm means we must re-win our spiritual freedom for that day. It’s an ongoing practice, not a single achievement. In fact, it’s the substance of our service.”
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In the previous post I said I’d talk about prayers and praying. If there’s a blogger’s equivalent to stage fright, I get it at least 50% of the time. I commit, I step up, and — yup, there it is, running its paws along my spine. (It helps keep me paying attention to guidance I receive.) Who am I to write some of the stuff I’ve written? I’m a person like you, alive today. That’s all the authority any of us needs.
front yard, hydrangeas, 17 August 2017
Anne Lamott’s Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers offers a helpful starting point for prayer and fasting. Because each of the three kinds of prayers in her title combine both: I can’t ask for help if I don’t fast from pride or despair. I can’t be grateful if I’m caught up in fear and anger, and so on. Prayer IS fasting, and vice versa — a magical choice to place our attention not where anybody else wants it but where we choose.
Sometimes all I can do is ask for help. Often asking — even trying to ask — opens a door, especially if I can shut up before and after, even if it just means hearing the hinges squeak. Something’s in motion that wasn’t before.
After a three-year job search, I despaired of outside help. Persistence and patience between them do gather up tremendous reservoirs of energy. But you get in line, one of my wife’s go-to techniques, and you advance until it’s your turn just wasn’t working for me.
Until it did. Last week I received a solid job offer to do just what I’d been asking for. But because it was out-of-state, because it meant a move and other changes — because it asked me to grow into it — I immediately found several reasons to say, quite loudly, NO! Fortunately, just not to the person offering me the job. As U. K. LeGuin so gracefully puts it, I had to enlarge my heart to accept the gift.* And I had to recognize the gift as gift before I could even do that.
I ask you — what can the gods do with such mortals?!
Often, a lot.
Hemlocks, north property line, 17 Aug. 2017
Other times you just want to say thanks. If I haven’t done so for a while, I can tell by how it feels to start up again. Like I’d forgotten a key ingredient. But now it’s back in the sauce, the mix tastes sweeter, the glue sticks, the paint dries to an appealing hue.
This blog offers guarantees very rarely, and for good reason. But practice no other prayer than gratitude for a year and a day, then get back in touch. I guarantee this triad: transformation, wonder, and a new conviction in you.
Wow is a third kind of prayer. If you choose, you can perceive awe as a form of tribute, a gift at the altar. “The finest emotion of which we are capable”, Einstein exclaimed. “is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science”. Even if we scale it back for the sake of the skeptical among us, who doesn’t appreciate awe? How else to feel so small and so connected at the same time?
In a post from a few years ago I looked at a “prayer prompt” I still find valuable.
The prayer serves as a starting point for how I try to pray for others in difficulty without mucking things up further for them with what I think they need. It’s also more eloquent than I can usually manage to be, which never hurts either.
In the excerpt below, from Mary Renault’s splendid evocation of classical Greece, The Last of the Wine, a friend of the main character Alexias is speaking, near the tail end of the suffering that much of Greece experienced during the three brutal decades of the Peloponnesian War:
We have entreated many things of the gods, Alexias. Sometimes they gave and sometimes they saw it otherwise. So today I petitioned them as Sokrates once taught us: ‘All-knowing Zeus, give me what is best for me. Avert evil from me, though it be the thing I prayed for; and give the good which from ignorance I do not ask.’ — Mary Renault. The Last of the Wine. Pantheon Books, 1964, pg. 344.
Can I pray for what’s best for me, can I keep alert for its first stirrings when it arrives, even or especially when it’s not what I thought I wanted? If I can answer yes even some of the time, change can open my heart to possibilities I’d otherwise turn away from, if not actively shut down. Then maybe I’m ready to pray for others, too. (We won’t mention changes that come to all of us anyway, unasked for. Welcome, travelers of all realms, whisper the gods, to these worlds of time and space. Buckle up.)
Other times prayer means simply immersion. I go for a favorite walk, I sit with a favorite CD, a song or chant for meditation, or I follow a theme in a series of meditation sessions, and I’m in it. Borne away from here-and-now to there-and-then. Sometimes I only know when I return, like waking from a dream, that wherever I was, it sure wasn’t here. And I’m better for it.
Formal prayer has its place, too. As many do, I find Iolo Morganwg’s Gorsedd Prayer, also called the Druid Prayer, which Morganwg first spoke publicly at the 1792 summer solstice, a comfort:
Grant, O God/dess/Spirit/etc., thy protection,
and in protection, strength,
and in strength, understanding,
and in understanding, knowledge,
and in knowledge, the knowledge of justice,
and in the knowledge of justice, the love of it,
and in that love, the love of all existences,
and in the love of all existences, the love of God/dess/etc.,
and all goodness.
You may turn to other prayers, or you’ve written your own. I’ve mentioned sources like Caitlin Matthews’ Celtic Devotional. Sometimes all I can manage is the spontaneous cry of the heart, standing at my backyard fire circle, facing an indoor altar, or stunned to despair while I stand in the shower, hot water indistinguishable from tears. You go with what comes.
Sometimes it’s stillness I’m called to. In the stillness I may receive much. The blessing of turning off the monkey mind. Intimations of the future. A nudge towards or away a choice, a pattern, a practice, a person. Or any of a range of still small voices that will never shout to be heard, that have waited patiently for me to listen once again.
Sometimes it’s a reminder about a commitment I’ve made. In that case it’s a god invoking me, rather than the other way round. How have I answered, how will I answer, now? The offering I made was for my own good as well as a gift. The service I vowed transforms me in the doing of it, even as it fulfills a request by guide or god or spirit I have promised.
Sit, sing, and wait, counsels one of my teachers, if I need things to clarify, and no other path seems clear. And a book that same teacher delights in offers two additional pieces of advice, opening and closing the same paragraph: “Hold all and wait … Drop all and start over again.” Both valid, both true, both potent for good. How to know which to practice, other or either, if not both at once? I turn once again, I return, listening, praying, fasting. Don’t we all?
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LeGuin, U. K. A Wizard of Earthsea. Bantam Books, 1968, pg. 69.
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An offering to Thecu Stormbringer:
Hail, Goddess. I will go with what I know,
with what you show: you give me
nine runes, nine paths of storm;
you tell me their wisdom lies in riding changes,
walking the storm-paths. So I ask how
I may serve in return for your gift.
Speak how, instead of squaring the circle,
to try circling the square. Not to share
exact shapes [of the runes], but their greater principle
you may share. [For] they form a sequence:
linear as you received them, but also
a circle or spiral. Four by three, and three by four:
ending and beginning lie side-by-side,
or — you will understand it —
directly above and below each other,
[on] different rounds of the spiral.
The Runes of Thecu combine straight lines
and circular shapes — lines of force
and vortices or whorls [of energy in motion].
How to ride changes?
Practice [with the runes] to find out.
And I will guide you.
How to transcribe what you receive in such instances? Well, the obvious answer is this: you do the best you can. And you ask, usually more than once, for clarification.
Let me puncture any mystery here: the words I attribute above to Thecu came during three intervals. The first and second, along with runes, over the past week, in two separate periods of meditation. The first led to the insight that Thecu was offering guidance on how to walk “nine paths of storm”, and a preliminary sense of what that might mean. The first five runes also came then, drafts scribbled on scrap paper, as I tried to get their shapes to match the different flows of energy my inner experience felt like it conveyed. The same thing a second time, two days later.
Then this morning: I already knew I was going to write about this, and I’d made a draft, along with the admonition I’d received not to share except in general terms the insight of the runes. So in about five minutes the above lines came, as I attempted to pull together fragmentary notes about the runes and render the impression of those meditation sessions into something more like continuous speech.
Are they “the words of the goddess”? Sure. Also, no and yes. In keeping with the deep wisdom of unverified personal gnosis (UPG), they’re meant to be tested and tried out, to see how their truths work for me. One key to practice, and it can be disconcerting, is to shift from “UPG mode” to “critical thinking mode”. I get this stuff in ways similar to how I get pieces of poems and stories. And it’s the same kind of thing: then you have to figure out what to do with them. Sometimes the message, image, metaphor is clear. Other times, it needs shaping or untangling. And to keep honest about proportions of these things has indisputable value, but not — it needs to said as well — spiritual primacy. The impulse-message-insight-inspiration needs to get recorded before, like such things do, it flows away like cloud.
And I share this experience for what it’s worth to others who may encounter similar impressions, nudges, doubts and insights. What to make of such things? For me, it’s to see how and where they might fit in living my life, and whether their usefulness, if any, merits passing along anything about them to others. So I serve notice here most of all to myself. Any value to this experience will emerge, or not, in and over time. And I will try to report that here.
/|\ /|\ /|\
Image: stormcloud — “free for commercial use”.
We can of course take an a-gnostic approach to all of the above as well: I sense changes coming (no surprise at all, given the state of the world!) and my imagination/subconscious is throwing up images, ideas, tools, hints to help me deal with them. Useful, wholly apart from the nature of their origin, because they’re intended to be empirical: their value lies in what they can do, what I can do with them. Who says the imagination or subconscious has no practical value? In some ways, that’s the ONLY thing it has.
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In English (and other Germanic languages) there’s a cluster of words related etymologically in “deep time” and beginning with tr-: true, troth, trust, tree. The meanings they convey branch outward — the metaphor is no accident — in other European languages, with similar connected meanings. In some Indo-European languages it’s specifically the oak that’s the quintessential tree, its hard wood most reliably “true”, able to hold its shape, resist warp and rot, or honor the gods like the oaks at the Greek oracle at Dodona, sacred to Zeus. Druids aspire to be “people of the trees”.
It’s no surprise then that speakers of these languages tend to think of truth in similar terms. Languages offer such networks of related meanings, idioms and imagery that shape and direct our thoughts and our cultures in both subtle and pervasive ways. The resource of words, like any resource, can be spent well or ill. We can draw on it to nourish and enrich human lives, or abuse it to twist, enervate, and destroy. We are, as older culture put it, only as good as our word.
In the archaic “troth, betroth, plight one’s troth”, we encounter truth in another sense, as a promise, something time will help fulfill, yes, but primarily a human action dependent on fidelity and effort. To betroth is to promise “by one’s truth.” Here, truth doesn’t just happen. It’s an outcome of a commitment. We enact truth. We say of something that it “holds true” — it meets the tests of time and other forces colliding with it. If this intrigues you, start a list of other expressions like it, and work with it in meditation.
So we have two related senses of truth: a quality often inherent in experience, and a human way of perceiving, choosing and acting. But in both cases, when something is true, it exhibits a quality similar to a good carpenter’s labor — the pieces fit, align, work together harmoniously, possessing strength and beauty and utility. Hence our sense of truth as something that is often beautiful as well. English idiom also gives us the lovely image of things that “ring true”. Truth, then, also “sounds right”. While a true thing may not exhibit all these qualities every time, it frequently does in surprising ways.
So I offer this as another subject for meditation: in how many ways does a truth appeal to the senses and offer its qualities through numerous images and metaphors in making itself accessible to human consciousness?
I’m always looking for techniques, for strategies and methods. My pragmatic streak longs for good ways to do things. (That’s not to say my lazy and selfish streaks don’t play their parts all too well. What’s new there? We all deal with limits worth exploring and working with creatively.)
These two related senses of truth offer what I’m looking for in the form of three challenge-questions I can ask: (1) Does my experience of a person, thing, idea or course of action offer these qualities of harmony, fit, rightness, alignment? (2) If I enact a commitment in my own life based on these qualities as indications of its truth, do I achieve results with similar qualities? (3) Does a possibly true thing “hold true”? That is, do its qualities persist over time?
Apply these observations at will to your own choices, commitments, beliefs and the actions of others. Do they hold true for you?
/|\ /|\ /|\
Images: Wisdom Tree; Tree World.
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A Druid Way 
