Solstice season, say the wights and spirits. Not just one day.
Ozoliņi, ozoliņi, sings the Latvian ensemble below. “Oaks, oaks …” A fine summer song, celebrating Jāņi, the Latvian summer solstice, June 23 and 24, and the strength of the oak.
TWO
I weave the cincture of protection, sings Caitlin Matthews in her Celtic Devotional for Wednesdays in the Summer, and for Winter Wednesdays, this:
I kindle my soul at the hearth-fires of Winter,
warmth of welcome,
warmth of working,
warmth of nurture,
be upon my lips, my hands, my being,
this Winter’s day,
till Winter’s night.
THREE
As distributors and sharers of the holy energies of the world, we forget to bless and offer them daily. I know I do. Just the recollection, the recall to do this, can become an essential part of a spiritual practice. Bless this day and those I serve, goes one succinct version. A helpful mantra in the middle of a tense situation, or one where I’m tired, stressed, irritable, and otherwise my tendency might be to snap, be short with another person. Instead — and how many “insteads” I find I need! — this recollection-habit can turn me at my less-than-best into a spiritual vehicle and an opportunity for blessing to happen. A space opens that wasn’t there before.
FOUR
WordPress obliges its bloggers with statistics and charts. Here’s one overview of the 9-year life of this blog as of this morning.
With 540 followers, and over 6000 visitors so far this year, I assume many find value in this blog. But how many of you have taken a few minutes to say it matters to you, in response to my recent request? Three. A lovely triad of supporters. But are there more of you?
This is, after all, a version of the ancient ritual wording whose Latin version runs like this: do ut des; da ut dem. “I give, so that you may give. Give, so that I will give (again)”. And so the exchange we agree to establish can continue.
For an explanation of this in Hellenic culture, as an example of ksenia, sacred hospitality, this article is excellent.
FIVE
Each of the four solar festivals in the ritual year, the solstices and equinoxes, is also a form of initiation. We can forget that planetary initiations come every year, releasing energy, subtly altering our spaces and awareness, whether we participate in them consciously or not. Spend any time out of doors and you can sense the shifts as they flow through us, and we through them, each year.
The same holds true with other initiations, sought and unsought, in the life of the cosmos. It’s through initiation that growth comes. From caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly, one form is not the same as the previous or next one. Changes and movement occur in steps and grades.
Rather than accept such statements as some kind of wisdom for the ages, it’s a good idea to question them. Test them, try them out. If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it? goes the quotation attributed to Einstein. Except a spate of research can neither confirm or reject that attribution. Sometimes we don’t yet know. Turn the words a little, and rather than worrying who said it, what value does it have of itself, for me, today? Time to keep trying out this amazing life for what it might offer next.
SIX
Follow a spiritual path for any length of time, and you’ll pick up pieces of things that may not always “fit” (now, or quite yet, or ever). What you do with those things, how you assess which have value and which you can wisely let go, will change as you move through your life. A friend traveling a theistic path has stationery with a heading that reads “What does this have to do with God-realization?” In a form that fits what we each do, in language that resonates fo us, it’s a good question to ask from time to time. Like the stack of pizza boxes and pyramid of soda cans after a party, it may be time to clear away, just to see that table again.
Here’s the nine-pointed star of Thecu I’m incising on a sheet of metal for one of my altars. It may rest on the north face of an outside altar for at least part of the year — that’s not yet clear.
What does my study of this portion of my path, of a possible goddess from the past, and her symbolism, have to do with the rest of it? Is it a piece of Druidry? Exploring that question is itself part of my experience of it. Or in the slang of the past decade, is the juice worth the squeeze? Creating the star is part of my working with possible answers. A capacity for following through is such a large component of so many things — relationships, jobs, creativity, awareness, self-esteem — that I sometimes think it should be a graduation requirement, and a prerequisite for bringing children into the world.
is perhaps the most venerated number of the Dekad, the number par excellence of the ancient world … A group of seven comprises a complete unit, a whole event. But a group of seven is different from other wholes we’ve encountered, particularly the Monad, Triad and Hexad. The Heptad expresses a complete event having a beginning, middle and end through seven stages, which keeps repeating. Seven represents a complete yet ongoing process, a periodic rhythm of internal relationships.
It’s well known that the regular heptagon is the smallest polygon that cannot be constructed using only the three tools of the geometer, the compass, straightedge and pencil, the tools that mirror the methods of the cosmic creating process. In other words, an exact heptagon is not (and cannot be) “born” like the other shapes through the “womb” of the vesica piscis …
Use a calculator to divide each number one through ten by seven. They each yield the same result: the sequence of digits 1-4-2-8-5-7 cycling endlessly, although they each begin with a different digit. Six digits, like the six days of the week, are set in endless motion around the unseen Sabbath.
The common saying “at sixes and sevens with each other” refers to seven’s aloofness … (pgs. 222-226).
As a book of lore, a wise guide to numerological insight, a companion to the Tarot, a counsel for ritual patterning and form, a practice, a set of stories and images, Schneider’s book is a Druidic feast for those attuned to number.
Now that I’ve got the melody of one of the fonn stuck in my head, I’m reminded yet again how we can establish new habits surprisingly easily, and can often re-program ourselves more readily than our rational “But-I-can’t-really-change” argumentative self will admit.
“… the interval created by if“, writes Robert Hass in his poem “Spring Drawing”*, “to which mind and breath attend, nervous as the grazing animals the first brushes painted, has become inhabitable space, lived in beyond wishing”.
TWO
Yesterday I spent time clearing out glossy buckthorn (frangula alnus), a fast-growing invasive in the north and northeastern U.S., along our property lines where it’s been trying to establish a foothold for the last few years. A native of much of Europe, and originally planted as a natural fence in parts of the midwestern U.S., glossy buckthorn’s invasive because it’s so vigorous. It stays in leaf longer, shading out native plants, it reproduces through both berries and runners, it has few or no natural enemies, and it tolerates wet soils and pollution. In some ways you might say it’s exactly a bush for our times, tough and adaptable, if it weren’t so successful. Bees, birds and even a specialized butterfly relish its flowers and fruit.
glossy buckthorn in leaf and fruit
The bush has value to humans, too — as charcoal it contributes to gunpowder production, and its dried bark has been used as a laxative. In older lore, the ancient philosopher and physician Galen asserted its protective qualities against against “witchcraft, demons, poisons, and headaches”. Even his name has an associated value relevant to today: Γαληνός, Galēnos means “calm”. A mini-ritual in the making — invoke Galen’s calm along with the purgative and protective qualities of buckthorn.
THREE
“Is muggle a real word?” runs one popular search on Google. Like most magical and spiritual things, the question holds the key to its own answer.
Consider proper names that have become known in the last few decades. Is Lady Gaga a “real name”? To me anyway, more interesting than the question is what a person will do with the answer. Realness often depends on aptness — on fit. Does the (new) name fit the thing it names? If it does, the name is likely to catch on. If not, it probably won’t. To put it another way, if it ignites interest and attention, it becomes real. This is a key to many insights.
We tend still, in spite of more than a century of training from many directions that should have helped us know better, to think of things magical as pure marvel, a kind of “conjuring out of thin air” — creation ex nihilo, on a par with what the monotheistic God does “in the beginning”.
But a mage, like any creative person concerned with manifestation, studies patterns, tendencies, and energy flows. J. K. Rowling builds her names out of tendencies, patterns, sound symbolism and existing English word-forms. An arbitrary word like zlimpk is much less likely to catch on in English than muggle — it violates English word formation patterns. Magic — and spirituality — follow similar laws or patterns. A quick online look at muggle lists a whole set of antecedent associations at play for Rowling to work with. And a further test? Plenty of people now know the word muggle who have never read a word of the Harry Potter series. A magical act: something there that wasn’t there before.
FOUR
I’ve written several times about Thecu and the runes of storm I received from her — “created out of thin air”, if you ignore section Three above.
Here’s the first image I have of them from my daybook where I wrote them, the entry from 19 July 2017 — nearly three years ago now.
We often surround manifestation with all sorts of coverings, labels, shrouds, mystiques, and shrines, even though in varying forms we all do it all day long. “Thus saith the Lord”, the Biblical prophets write. When the circumstances of manifestation are particularly powerful, it can certainly feel like an external source impels it. If you’re predisposed to think in terms of deity, then a god/dess is a convenient point of origin — and you’re neither “wrong” nor “right”. You made yourself available as a collaborator with the cosmos. The labels you choose to understand and account for your experience and its results may help or hinder you in dealing with manifestation and its consequences.
The next step for me is to incise the nine runes onto the metal sheet I mentioned in a post not too long ago. Eventually it will live on an altar — possibly the lichen-covered altar stone I’m in the process of shifting to my grove. I’ve been looking at the best way to inscribe a nonagon on the metal, and you’ll see my results in a subsequent post.
In part I’m writing this section to reflect on my own experience of manifestation in connection with Thecu, and to understand what it is I’m doing, as well as what it is Thecu wants me to do.
I also reflect that here I held a warning of coming changes three years in advance of their physical appearance. “Nine paths of storm” for “riding change” indeed!
FIVE
Tomorrow night, members of our OBOD Vermont seed-group will hold a virtual “moon-moot”. It’s a full moon later that evening, around 10:30 pm local time, and we’ll have the waxing moon at our shoulders during our gathering. OBOD suggests a peace meditation on full moons. I’ve held my own rites at different phases of the moon, and find the dark and new moons of equal interest to the full.
I don’t need to go any further than the daily, monthly and yearly cycles to find “transparent witnesses” for “what it all means”. One post from a couple years ago has been receiving surprising numbers of readers, I suspect because it contains the words “spiritual meaning”.
Spiritual meaning often isn’t separate from physical ones. The sun rises and sets, coming to its full strength, then diminishing, and returning again. So to does the moon. And the length of days follows the longer annual cycle. A triad of planetary and astronomical pointers toward spiritual meaning: things run in cycles, and have a natural cause or origin, a life cycle, and an end.
Of course spiritual traditions around the world also include expressions like “seeing the sun at midnight” (which isn’t necessarily the same thing as the “land of the midnight sun”). Physical events are always themselves, and may also serve as pointers to things beyond them — at least to human consciousnesses. A great deal of ink (and blood) has been spilt arguing whether these things are “real” — for one take on the matter, see muggle above.
SIX
“All I know is a door into the dark”, writes Seamus Heaney in his poem “The Forge”. Bards like to sound dramatic. Heaney’s both telling the truth and lying through his bardic hat. But if you read through the link above to the “sun at midnight” you might spy a connection.
All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
Any teacher knows the frustration of helping students move beyond thinking “Oh, it’s a poem. It can mean anything you want”. Of course: anything can mean anything. But try that out, and you quickly see such an understanding leaves you standing in mud. Rarely is it useful. It’s only when things mean something specific for us that they touch us, move us, arouse us to transformation and manifestation, those quintessential human acts.
Yes, quintessential: the five essences that underlie human activity. We know them as the four elements, and spirit — the pentagon, pentagram, pentangle or pentacle of both Pagan and Christian understandings.
Where is my real iron, to look again at the last line of Heaney’s poem? How do I do the work I need to do?
May you test and find your metal and mettle.
/|\ /|\ /|\
Hass, Robert. Human Wishes. New York: The Echo Press, 1989.
Heaney, Seamus. Door into the Dark. Faber and Faber, 1969.
Image: Frangula alnus — creative commons image by Sten Porse.
(I’ve posted rants before, and alerted readers up front. What follows is another, lit with caffeine, a dose of the cabin fever of a typical long New England winter, and maybe even some insight.)
What’s a spiritual path for?
We can say, using a mixed bag of traditional language, that its goal is to reconnect us with cosmic law, attune us to deity, re-balance us, align us with the flow of the Ten Thousand Things, show us God’s will, conform us to the ways of Spirit, and so on. (Sometimes it’s to save us. Other times it spends us like the prodigal sons and daughters we are. Either way, value gets exchanged.)
Or we can use the language of modern commerce and say we want to optimize our results, so we can increase efficiency, profits, and customer satisfaction. (Pay particular attention here: do you respond, like I sometimes do, more to this formulation of the goal than to the first? Ask yourself why, and then ask what follows from your response.)
If you’ve read the classic Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (maybe pausing to ask “Why seven?”), you know there’s little new under the sun. The magic of the book isn’t the habits themselves so much as it is its streamlining and re-ordering of principles we’ve always known, which is a magical act: to optimize flow, to organize what we need to understand and feel and do, all in ways our minds and emotions and bodies can recognize and put into motion.
We need and seek out such new re-formulations of old wisdom in every age.
Or if a book’s not your thing, you can find an even more compact form of the Seven Habits at the author’s website. They’re an excellent primer for whatever we intend to achieve.
Memes are another form of magic. If something “goes viral”, that means it’s found the optimal way to spread, to replicate, to make its mark. Using image and word, it shapes itself as a key to locks everywhere. It activates upon arrival. Like an object within range of the motion sensors on the sliding doors of our psyches, it opens us and enters.
Advertisers deploy music, light, voice, color, rhythm, beauty, movement and image — magical techniques, every one of them — and opening us, they implant desires in us for things we never knew we wanted.
Mages look with vast amusement at our materialistic culture that often mocks magic or “doesn’t believein it”, even as we encounter and often yield to magical influences every single day of our lives. In the process, magical techniques earn billions of dollars for their users, bending our thoughts, emotions, and credit cards to the wills of corporate and political magicians who’ve mastered some of the cruder techniques of glamouring other people. This isn’t paranoia but simple fact: what else is advertising for? What are political campaigns ultimately intended to accomplish? A catchy slogan, a memorable logo, an appealing face and even a dollop of charisma, and you’re halfway there.
You could say that beginning spirituality is nothing other than beginning to (re)build our “defenses against the dark arts” a la Harry Potter. Anyone half-awake (and I don’t mean “woke”) knows the need for such D.A.D.A. is at an all-time high today. Exhibit A: today’s headlines and media feeds any time we choose to look at them.
While carnival- and circus-owners and confidence-men long ago discovered “There’s a sucker born every minute”, we can (to mix a metaphor or two) learn not to suck. The old Hippocratic oath “Do no harm” may not resound in many ears like it used to, but everyone still needs to swear some version of it. We can update it to the jargon of a 21st-century version: Don’t be a jerk. This can be our Silver Rule, since clearly so many of us no longer want to know or practice the Golden version. The Medieval world and its Latin speakers had their own con-men, and their own cynical, world-weary warning: Mundus vult decipi. “The world wants to be deceived”.
Looking for a guide for electing government officials, choosing life partners, spiritual guides, car dealers? If you can’t find anyone who works with the habits of effective people, then “simplify, simplify”. Find one who’s at least trying to practice the new Silver Rule and shows some persistence at it. And with any discernment, and the blessings of even one small god or goddess, we can begin to practice it ourselves. (So I begin again, which is I suspect 9/10 of any spiritual path worth walking.)
/|\ /|\ /|\
Thecu and Brighid, storm goddess and triple goddess, both in their own ways forging, healing and inspiring us:
When storms pound the walls of the world, empower me with wisdom.
When thunder rages, forge my sinews into strength for myself and others.
When human contrivances fail and fall in tempests, illuminate my path forward.
When the bridge breaks, guide me to build a boat to cross with.
When fires blast, fix my will to continue what my ancestors began.
When the shores vanish, show me your compass.
When darkness shrouds my North Star, show me light within.
Now this is a prayer of petitions and visualization. (Adjust the pronouns at need.) But sometimes such forms can feel too demanding. I often like a more meditative version as well, one that encourages me to see these things already in manifestation, not merely waiting to appear. Just a few tweaks — acknowledging the presence of the goddesses already, of spirit at work before I even begin to think the words …
When storms pound the walls of the world, you empower me with wisdom.
When thunder rages, you forge my sinews into strength for myself and others.
You illuminate my forward path, when human contrivances fail and fall in tempests.
When the bridge breaks, you guide me to build a boat to cross with.
When fires blast, you fix my will to continue what my ancestors began.
You show me your compass before the shore has vanished.
When darkness shrouds my North Star, you show me light within.
Those of you who don’t already know and follow Lorna Smithers’ excellent blog may want to read her latest post, a lovely meditative poem she follows with a brief comment. “Hour One — Candlelit Illumination” conveys a feel for what we do when we listen, when we approach and sense spirit, when we follow through on vows, when we dedicate ourselves to a spiritual path. “I have no temple”, she writes. “Only a candle …” And that’s spiritual plenitude.
/|\ /|\ /|\
“It was winter’s tide, and the winter was grim and cold and frosty and with ice bound …”, writes Bede (672-735) in the Old English translation of his Latin History. But we really don’t need a translation in this case, especially with the visual of my snowy backyard about a week or so ago. Across more than a millennium, ancestors are speaking in older languages as well as newer ones, reminding us of a vast pool of shared experiences.
As we become ancestors ourselves, what are we contributing? (Does that feel like a difficult or awkward question?)
Sometimes it’s survival. We may not credit ourselves enough for that, but it’s a signal accomplishment all its own. (The Ancestors are cheering!) We’re still here. Yes, we may be losing things along the way — hair, dreams, relationships, sanity. But bards make sure we remember this turn of the spiral, too, not that we’re likely to forget — as we gain survivor’s wisdom, and survivor’s grace.
You know that grace when you meet it, more easily in another person than in yourself, sometimes. The other person looking into your eyes knows, and their eyes tell you they know — if you know. Then that mutual recognition flares up between you. They too are “acquainted with the night“, to shout out to another bard. And in spite of all, they’re still here.
No, we haven’t (yet) lost ourselves, though Things seem determined to tug pieces of us off and away. After the bigger tugs, you arrive back in your life like flotsam on a strange shore, unsure of your footing, the light, the press of earth beneath your feet, the weight and substance of your own flesh. You feel strange to yourself, as if you’re in your dream body. (And that’s precisely where you are, like you always have been. Now you just notice it a little more.)
Lorna documents her intense experience of a “winter of harsh descent” as she dedicates herself to her patron deity, in a second post from a year ago, which you can find here. The spiritual intangibles that arise from such experiences are things few other people may recognize in you, or be able to hear if you try to talk about them. But the Ancestors know them very well, and make a good audience. (They’re playing the Long Game, after all.) A journal entry, a poem, a song, a prayer, a meditation, a moment of silence “in their direction” — whatever level of dedication you offer, they will welcome.
/|\ /|\ /|\
I’m slow to answer to the vision from Thecu, or intuition or hallucination or whatever it was and is, and its directives. Slow, but I get there — partly because I’m curious. (If I build it, will she come?) The goddess certainly can’t count on me for very much, at least not yet. But outdoors in the snow for a few days of purification, I’ve set the metal sheet on which I’ll inscribe her runes. Tomorrow I’ll bring it in.
I’ve written before about Thecu [ 1 (1 Jul ’17) | 2 (10 July ’17)| 3 (11 July ’17)| 4 (18 Feb. ’18)| 5 (2 Aug. ’18) | 6 (16 Aug. ’18)], sometimes rather obliquely, recording the few details I’ve learned about this goddess. I had to look up the dates of the posts — three in close succession from two and half years ago, then three more, six months apart, over a year ago. After that, noting that my first experience with Thecu dates from 2015, it was easy to conclude that divine time just doesn’t flow like mortal human time.
Early this morning a little more material came through. Always a light sleeper, I tend to wake between 1:00 and 3:00 am most nights, often for just a short time. A few pages of a book usually send me back asleep till dawn.
This time, though, I was doing the writing I was reading:
Thecu Storm-bringer, Storm-rider, Storm-seeker … I needed to listen to her name — these three variations come through.
Thecu-yel “house of Thecu” — is this a temple or shrine? Brief visual impression of a stone vault in a high place, open to the sky.
offering of a cup of plain water
metal sheet incised with a nine-rayed star and the runes she previously showed me
I am her mov— a “house-beam” of Thecu-yel (???)
Here then are some things she’s apparently asking me to do: provide an offering cup or bowl, and prepare a small metal sheet with a nine-rayed star, each ray ending in one of the runes I’ve written about receiving previously. A few glimpses of cultural practice, some more words, names of things. No sense of urgency, and no promise on my part to see these things done. We’re in early stages yet, deity and human feeling out the terrain between us.
/|\ /|\ /|\
Creativity and gods? you may be thinking. Well, I’m right there with you. We can forget that every relationship is a creation, a set of gestures and responses on both sides, doing and saying this, not bothering with that. Phoning or texting or meeting at least once a week, or every few months, in that charming/ dimly-lit/ busy/ quiet little coffee-shop/ corner pub/ boulevard deli/ open-air market. Or standing in each other’s kitchens after ritual, plate of potluck balanced precariously in one hand as we wave with the other, underscoring a point we’re making.
One of the messy, creative parts is discernment. True, at this point anyway, it’s pretty clear Thecu’s not drumming up followers. Nor am I the sort who’d join them in carrying banners into the streets to announce her advent, transcribing her holy books, doing the talk-show circuit to proclaim her most recent dramatic revelation, and so on.
I am curious about the words and names that came through, even as I wonder how much of that is my conlanging self at play. As with Paganism generally, what matters more — at least to Thecu, apparently — than any belief I may have about all this is my response to it. I’ll either do or not do what she’s shown me.
Of course I could write all this off as over-active imagination. (How many doors of possibility do we not walk through, with just that excuse dangling around our necks?) Or — with only slightly less transparency of process, along with a great deal more ego — I could declare myself her duly appointed priest-on-the-spot, and launch the book-and-workshop thing, inflated with my own stuff to make up for the sharply-limited amount of material the goddess herself has provided up to now. Padding for the sacred …
Instead, my curiosity fired as she probably knew it would be, I’ll do what Thecu has intimated, and we’ll both take it from there.
To close, I’m re-posting the prayer below from the 2nd link above:
How do I pray to you, goddess of storms?
Let this my prayer be a litany of questions.
How may I best honor you?
You gave me a glimpse, no more,
of landscape, cliffs lapped with green,
mist-hung and mournful,
with this foreign name to call you.
What is your service, what
may I do for you? Why
make yourself known to me?
Unlikely am I, no familiar of shrines,
a god’s service, formal prayer.
Then, too, I know so little of you.
Does naming you for others answer
your purposes? How do I answer you,
goddess of storms? Here are words,
intention, listening. Let this litany
of doubts and questions be first prayer.
What? Well, we’ve heard a great deal, at least in the U.S., about trigger warnings— flags to alert you to media content that might possibly cause you distress.
(These days I find myself asking what doesn’tcause distress to somebody, somewhere.)
So why not look for trigger blessings instead?
You know — signs, clues, hints, flags that something out there (or in here) might possibly bring you joy, strength, inspiration, the will to carry on.
Do such things even exist?
They do. And often we mediate them to each other. Hello. I am your trigger blessing for today. Grandchild singing tunelessly, pet warm in your lap, neighbor waving on the way to work, kind stranger who lets you into line — many of our blessings come through persons. And we can be a blessing to others.
Not a bad goal, and prayer, for one day a week, to start: let me be a blessing to others. Then, having asked, watching for the moments I can make it happen.
Not for my sake (though serving brings its own rewards) but because it’s so clear others very much need blessing. Just as much, it turns out, as I do.
/|\ /|\ /|\
Since working with the Enchantments of Brighid, you could say I haven’t had anything remarkable to show for it. Led a workshop discussion on Past Lives, Dreams and Soul Travel. Caught a miserable sinus infection, along with my wife, after a weekend trip to celebrate her dad’s 85th birthday. (The old guy’s in better shape, in some ways, than I am.) Had a few dreams I’ll get to in a moment. Enjoyed the growing light that February brings to the northeast U.S., whatever the weather. Felt a stirring of creativity easily attributable to chance, or cycles of change. Nothing especially unusual here. Move along.
Except …
Enchantment often works best under cover. No one’s contacted Industrial Light and Magic, or WETA, or the local CGI crew, to mock up a trailer for the work of Brighid. The goddess, or our own life patterns if you prefer, can pull it off without the splashy special effects.
Though they’re present, if I look behind the glamours and bad mojo of our deeds, our headlines and our endlessly squawking media to all the other things, better ones, that are happening all the time.
My wife and I are making plans for a family and friends gathering to celebrate our 30th anniversary. An online Old English group I founded just held its first Skype meeting to practice the language, with 8 of us chatting awkwardly, with a good deal of laughter, for 40 minutes. Ideas are percolating, following on the Druid-and-Christian themes I’ve explored here in numerous posts, for a session at the 2nd Mid-Atlantic Gathering this coming May — a breakout discussion group I suggested will talk about the many intersections of the Druid and Christian experience.
Our finances, always interesting, continue to be interesting, but just in new ways. It turns out we won’t starve after all. (Or if we do, I’ll document it here.)
And the dreams …
In the first, from 31 January, I face Thecu, many-armed and -faced, pointing toward the east and to either the 4th or 3rd of her 9 runes of storm. Near her, a patch of intense darkness. My spiritual Guide and Teacher from my other path appears, says it’s always a choice: leave it alone or walk through. Bless the darkness — no reason to fear it. New fears, old fears: the old are a marker; the new, often, no more than distractions, unless I let them teach me something.
The second, from 4 February: I am warning others of an approaching tornado, but no one can hear me.
In the third, which my dream journal records for 9 February, I’m with a group of students from my former boarding school, though in the way of dreams I don’t recognize anyone. We’re talking about diversity, when one student shouts “Be careful!” Then I’m flying over trees, leading with my left toe. I arrive at an abandoned house somehow connected with my parents. I shout, “You never shared your pain with me!” and wake, at ease, reflective.
While going through old documents and photographs, I come on an image of my dad’s grandfather Albert whom I’ve never seen before, age and sepia blending, formal pose and 114 years all combining to distance him and bring him near. Yes, Ancestors, I’m still here, still listening.
Turns out more than enough is happening to keep any respectable Druid very well occupied.
Here’s a triad I initially wrote about almost two years ago:
“Three reasons for supplicating the Mighty Ones: because it is a pleasure to you, because you wish to be a friend of the Wise, because your soul is immortal” — traditional.
Lovely reasons, all of them. Long-time readers of this blog know I like to take out truths and proverbs and see how they fit my experience. Not to either “prove” or “disprove” them, but to try them on for size, share something of the results, and possibly add to my spiritual toolkit.
Supplication as a source of pleasure: does this apply to my interactions with Thecu Stormbringer? [blogpost links 1, 2, 3]
My first response is “up to a point”. When my fear of change kicks in, it’s less pleasurable to learn more. But what have I learned?
When I last wrote, I’d received nine runes of change. But instead of trying them out, I stashed them in an envelope, because I was living them. That was manifesting as a move to an out-of-state teaching job that included housing. And then a return move back home within the month, when the job proved a “poor fit” — an often wry educationese euphemism that, in the words of Shakespeare’s Juliet, meant the whole scenario turned out to be “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden”.
And Thecu alerted me well in advance of the whole thing.
We often think — or I do, anyway — that if we could only know the future, we’d be armed against it, as if change were the enemy.
But to choose just one element of the whole experience that I’m writing to my Ovate tutor about, it was in the month before my wife and I made the change and packed up for a year out of state that I’d finally found a solid link to the land here in southern Vermont.
So leaving it hurt. And returning felt like a reprieve, or a fresh start. At the heart of it lay the increasingly clear perception that where we live has at last become our spiritual home.
More change coming. That’s this morning’s word to me from the goddess. To anyone alive today, change shouldn’t come as a surprise, though of course it still does.
I draw one rune from the envelope, even as I make a new place on my shelf-altar for Thecu.
(Surprised I hadn’t already? That’s the human inertia we all work with, which helps ballast us against small daily changes that shouldn’t upset us, and yet paradoxically weakens us when the big changes come along, because we’ve resisted incremental adjustments that would have made the transition much smoother.)
American children in schools across the nation “pledge allegiance to the flag” — an inanimate representation of the U.S. Is it so strange to extend reverence for an energy or consciousness reaching out to alert me of change and storms to come?
The rune I draw is the sixth of nine, last of the second set of three. For storms, angular energy, and wind sheer. For changes, side factors that contribute significantly, but which I overlook. For responses and initiatives, avoid a frontal resistance, and seek out angles and directions that can use the momentum and energy of change to shift to a better state and condition. Scuttle sideways, crab-like. Crab totem coming …
“When in doubt, divine”, says a journal entry from just about a year ago. A fragment, a contemplation seed, a gift, waiting for me to accept and receive it.
As I note at the end of a previous post about Thecu and change:
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.
And likewise, a reasonable response to a gift is gratitude for what’s been given.
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Image: stormcloud — Pixabay “free for commercial use — no attribution required”.
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.
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.
Site statistics for the last post drew readers from surprisingly varied lands: Vietnam, South Africa, Argentina, Ukraine and Latvia among them. I highlight these simply because their national languages aren’t English (with the exception of S. Africa). Not only are readers there interested in Druidry, but they’re seeking out English-language media that talk about it.
“Show us applied Druidry and we’ll pay attention”, you’re saying.
Here’s a follow-up, an excerpt from my “post-mortem” journal entry after the ritual. Because “feels” don’t really tell the whole story, as you’ll see. How I think a ritual progressed, and the whole picture with every factor included, can be two different things.
First off is the ritual set. You know: state of mind, weather, time of day, preparation. Alert. Noticing many animal presences, especially ants, flies, aphids, grasshoppers. Slightly edgy, the way I often feel when stuff’s going on I know I don’t otherwise notice. (Material for later meditation there.) Weather sunny and clear, 73 F (23 C). Approximately 2:00 pm. Preparation minimalist, with a few objects I was led to choose in meditation earlier that day. (Barely visible, behind and below the cup to the left/north sits a black Cherokee owl cup, containing objects from my first OBOD initiation, along with a symbol of the wild boar, one of my animal guides. (Yes, in one sense this wasn’t “minimalist” at all; I’d pulled out all the stops for this rite.)
Below is an image with the fire lit, a little more than halfway through the rite. I began with a standard OBOD ritual opening: “By the power of star and stone, by the power of the land within and without …”
In the picture I’m facing East. Directly in front of me is the blue bowl of water for West. To the right, South, the dragon candle-holder, with a green candle.
“Green for South?” I hear the purists gasp. Yup. Why? As one of my friends might say (and spell) it, that’s the color of “the green fyre” of nature. I’d been nudged to use green at our Midsummer ritual. More than the sun, how the Land flourishes under the sun at the solstice says “summer” to me. Your climate and tools differ? Excellent! We’re both learning to listen to what’s in our faces and under our feet and in our hearts.
On the far side of the circle in the East is a deer-bone whistle from Serpent Mound. Its high pitch matched the cry of birds overhead, the wind in the trees. Finally, to the left and North is my Ovate anchor stone and one of several offerings, a cup of milk and a slice of bread (already offered by the time of this picture), white for the northern snow, for Lugh Lord of Light, and for Thecu Stormbringer*, for fertility and harvest both, how we are all nourished from the time we are born, “the fat of the land”. What is it that fire burns, after all?
Dry wood lay ready, kindling and newspaper, too. I’d just said these words “I ask your aid in consecrating this fire circle and the greater circle, that has its center here, its circumference everywhere.”
Out with the book of matches. One after another. Nothing. The fire wouldn’t light.
So back into the house for wooden matches. “Disaster! Bad omens abound! No fire means no passion, no energy for your work. AND you broke your ritual circle!”
Well, no. Remember the part above about the “greater circle”? I was still in it. I pondered the nudge to include this line as I wrote it earlier in the day. And if such “ritual breakage” distresses you in your own rites, you know what to do: cut yourself a ritual doorway, The circle won’t blow away during the few minutes you’re gone.
Sometimes a break in the ritual points to a specific focus for the ritualist to attend to. I took the need to get better matches as a ritual message: when I tend any fire — energy — passion — heat — will — decision — I need to pay particular attention to beginnings, to my tools, to an extra step that might be necessary to assist with manifestation. Fire spoke: any ritual worth its salt links self-as-home together with the ritual action. Fire comes from within as much as from without. Much more useful and to the point than irrational fear of bad ritual mojo.
“I kindle this fire in honor of all the elements, earth and form and north the altar, air and breath and east the means, water and cauldron and west the capacity.”
At length, after a meditation I’m still reflecting on, the closing, again adapted from OBOD ritual: “As the outer fire dies down, may it remain a pure flame within. This circle is closed in the apparent world. May its inspiration continue within us all, a gift”.
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*In the next post, an update on my work with Thecu of the Nine Paths of Storm.
“So how did the ritual go?”
A Druid Way 
