Yesterday morning, I woke up to Christmas. Four in the morning, I was warm and buzzing nestled between soft pillows and a billowy comforter, the holiday songs from my dreams still echoing in my sleepy memory. What had I been dreaming? A tiled sauna and a room full of hot cascading showers, a shuffling choir, long curtains of fabric draped in folds and shifting gently in a warm breeze... My bedroom was cool and dark, utterly quiet, as sun, steam and bright colors wound ribbons of anticipation and giddy joy through my mind. Some days just feel like Christmas.
Another hour of light dozing and my alarm was going off. As I dressed and ate breakfast, I caught myself humming "Santa Baby" ...I really do believe in you, let's see if you believe in me... I walked to work through blue twilit dawn, the scent of the late February air--tense with chill, sparkling just slightly under each streetlamp in diffuse wisps of crystalline snow--seeming entwined with hints of peppermint and cinnamon; even the smell of cigarette smoke wafting down early morning city streets reminded me instead of smoldering hearth fires and sap reaching up lazily through the limbs of pines. All morning felt like a holiday. When I wasn't paying attention, I slipped backwards through the calendar, pulsing with gratitude and energy.
My first customer of the morning was a disheveled-looking woman with suitcases and overflowing canvas tote bags piled up around her in the tiny booth where she sat sipping her coffee and fingering an unlit cigarette back and forth across her knuckles. The waitress from the midnight shift shrugged and shook her head. "It's not like she's out of her right mind or anything..." I glanced at the woman grinning dreamily across the dining room. "When she came in, she threw up her arms in the air in a bear-hug," my manager chimed in, "I thought she was going to attack you!" I walked a fresh pot of coffee over and topped off her mug. The woman winked. "It's cold enough out there to shiver my timbers!" I smiled. "That's what we're here for," I said, gesturing gently with the steaming pot.
All morning, the woman sat in her booth, hunched over a newspaper, stepping out sometimes for a smoke. From behind the counter, I could see her bundled, hunched form shifting from foot to foot outside the hazy window, reaching sometimes to tap ash into the street's gutter. Another thin layer of dust covering the dusting of snow and gray hunks of sidewalk salt. Other customers came and went, the usual barrage of coffee, eggs, hot tea and homefries, oatmeal and bagels and french toast and fruit. Some were regulars, catching up on news, asking after my family and sharing stories from the weekend. Others were new faces, or only vaguely familiar, meeting strangers to talk morning business, or sitting alone with their palms cupping the smooth porcelain side of a grande carmel latte. Warmth radiated. My manager kept to the basement, going over the usual Monday morning inventory, and upstairs it was just the one sleepy cook and myself drifting through the oldie tunes playing over the muzak system. Sometimes I sang along softly to myself, feeling the roots of my hair prickle as though radiating heat in a halo of lazy melody.
Midmorning, a soldier came in, dressed in gray sweat fatigues, and sat at a table by himself in the far corner of the dining room. Soldiers make me a little uncomfortable, I admit. "Service" means something so different to me. Courage and loyalty, discipline.... I've known boys who went off after high school to become soldiers, often just for the financial aid or health benefits. Two of them have died because of it--one in war, one from sudden heart failure while training to pass his physicals. Another called me a "childish c*nt" and stopped speaking to me when I joked about anarchy and a community shaped by Gandhi's satyagraha, love-force, instead of a Big Brother military enforcing our interests overseas. These men--mostly men--sit in their uniforms and follow strict protocols of civility, refusing to eat until a commanding officer has begun on his own meal, calling us waitresses "ma'am" as though we were all mothers or teachers. But they have also been trained how to kill, to level a gun or swiftly drop a missile with the same precision and detachment. I am a pacifist, perhaps by nature; I cannot choose war, I cannot choose military even in its most abstracted and ideal form. And so soldiers--unlike police officers, or EMTs, or the local crossing guards--make me feel how deeply I am a civilian, how soft and far I am from a fighter.
I always wonder what they're thinking. As I dropped off this soldier's breakfast--a young man hardly older than myself from the looks of it, and sullen in the frozen morning sunlight cutting down through the long restaurant windows--I smiled and felt my own uncertainty lurking beneath my usual kind and eager inquiries about refills and condiments. I always want them to know that I respect them as human beings, rather than as soldiers. I always want them to feel the aching wish in my heart that they would one day just... give it up, that every one of them would give it up and come home and leave the weaponry to rust. National security be damned. Politics and power-plays be damned. In this small, cozy diner where every scent, every scrape of silverware or drip of the coffee machine, is familiar and resonant... I always want them, for a while, to cease to be fighters and become men again.
With barely a dozen words exchanged between us, eventually the young soldier picked his check up off the table and came to the register to pay. He stood, seemingly distracted and uneasy, as I punched in the amount and he rummaged for change in his wallet. Then from behind him, the disheveled woman was approaching, tapping him softly on the shoulder, muttering something too low for me to hear. "No, ma'am," he replied, looking down at his gray sweats, "Just standard issue." A moment longer the woman stood before him, her old body a good head shorter and a good deal wider and softer than his own muscled and rough beneath the worn gray fabric. Then, she threw her arms up in the air, and drew him into an embrace that seemed to grow long and quiet from the center of her being. For a moment, everything in the dining room stopped. I lowered my eyes.
Then, she shuffled back over to her seat and took up her coffee mug again. I watched the young man out of the corner of my eye as I counted quarters and nickels back to him; once or twice, he glanced over at where the woman sat, as if bewildered or shaken. I wished him a nice day, and he thanked me distractedly. He stepped away from the register, hesitated, then turned slowly towards her booth. "Thank you," was all he said. The woman looked up and grinned her awkward, tooth-rotted grin, split open with caring.
"Pass it on," she said, "Pass on love. We all have to try to become better people."
The young soldier nodded his head, or bowed it, as he walked back out into the cold.
Later, another coworker arrived, picking up my slack as business increased despite the ever-denser snowfall outside. Shafts of sunlight that had cast sharp, long shadows across the carpet earlier in the morning were replaced by monotone grays and whites in slow, low-lying clouds wending their way between buildings and alleys across the street. The old woman was back outside sucking delicately at a cigarette when my coworker glanced at her fort of battered, pudgy suitcases and asked disdainfully, "Who's at booth thirty-three?" thinking it was a bag-lady.
Perhaps she was. "Just a woman getting coffee," I said. I shrugged and shook my head, feeling tears stinging the corners of my wide, humming eyes. "It's not like she's out of her right mind or anything..."
This post was originally going to have a slightly different focus, shaped in part by my reaction to 
Which brings me back to the beginning. Love. As I mentioned above, in Hinduism, the path of bhakti yoga, of love and devotion, allows each individual to seek out her own ideal, the form of Divinity which best moves her, to which she can most fervently devote herself. Some Hindus have said that Christianity, with its emphasis on love and especially a personal love for Jesus as Christ, exemplifies the bhakti path (sometimes to the point of eclipsing the valuable role of philosophy, service and curiosity). Ian, of 
It's hard not to love those amazing, quirky Buddhists. The wonderful thing about this saying is that, besides being an implicit statement about the inherent sacredness of the world itself, it speaks to several different aspects of the spiritual life on a more practical level as well. The very first, and in some ways most important, is that regardless of one's spiritual growth, the mundane world goes on. Wood will still need to be chopped, and water carried, food cooked and houses cleaned, baskets woven and bills paid. The spiritual life cannot exempt us from these responsibilities, nor should we expect it to. A life devoted to the Sacred must lead us more deeply and lovingly into a relationship with our "ordinary" lives, not drive us to reject or disparage it. A spiritual life must ultimately be an integrated life, a life in harmony with itself as well as with the larger world. If we imagine, as Dion Fortune and others have described, that the manifest world emanates and expresses Spirit in a vast diversity of forms (as illustrated, for instance, in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life), then the spiritual path is not only a journey "upwards" back to unity and wholeness, but also a journey "down" to fully realize, express and integrate this Holy Unity in all aspects of our lives.
Perhaps it's because I came to Druidry through my poetry (which I've been writing since about the age I could first hold a crayon) and I continue to adore Druidry because of its bardic traditions, which embrace and celebrate music, song and the power of words... but I have never understood the kind of response that rejects book learnin' as somehow less important or more dangerous than direct experience. To me, reading and exploring ideas in books has always inspired and sewn in me the seeds of desire: desire to move ideas into the real world and bring their beauty into participatory being, and desire to meet the challenge of articulating my own experiences in meaningful ways that can sew those seeds in others. If it hadn't been for a few incredibly well-written books on Druidry, I wouldn't have ever bothered to begin the real life practice that has given me so much and opened me to so many experiences (I wouldn't even know what a [insert exotic sounding ritual here] was or why it might matter to other people, let alone what it might someday mean to me).
This past month of blogging has been heavy with abstraction and theory, but that's not all I've been up to. In those moments when I step back and take a look at myself, I'm still a bit stunned at this sudden surge of energy and focus I've had since the winter solstice.
This kind of nonrational ritual activity--pouring water over a small pile of stones, to soak into the soil beneath--had a strong aesthetic sense that enchanted and inspired me, so I decided to go with it. Rather than organize a new altar around the traditional four elements, I decided to focus instead on the Three Realms of Druidry: earth, sea and sky, represented by the bile (or sacred tree), the sacred fire, and the sacred well.
I arranged these three items on the circular end table in the corner of my bedroom, rearranged a few chairs and bookcases to open up the space to allow for both standing meditation and sitting cross-legged on a cushioned elevated platform (i.e. a sturdy old wooden kids-sized table from my childhood that has outlasted every piece of brightly-colored plastic junk I ever owned). The altar faces southwest, and I often feel the interplay of fire and water, grounded deeply in the earth, as part of its inspiration and enchantment. During sessions of meditation, I place a small stick of incense to the left of the solar candle, and a pitcher next to the bowl of water. I fill the pitcher with fresh water before hand and, during my meditation, I infuse this with a few drops from the bowl before charging it with intention and gratitude and pouring it gently over the stones.
This is precisely what I did. The dish of earth set in the north and the bowl of water in the west were complimented by a candle and incense in the south and east, and in the center I placed the solar candle as a focal point. Rather than merely representing the sky realm, as it did on my meditation altar, here it could serve to symbolize all Three Realms together: the candle inside still represented the sky and sacred fire, but now it floated in the jar I had filled with salt-infused water representing the sea, while the pottery itself, sculpted lovingly out of clay, came to represent the realm of earth. This jar full of water, which had felt the warmth of the sacred flame, I would later transfer into the lunar bowl on my meditation altar, where it would eventually blend with fresh waters and bless the soil and stones of the dish of earth. In this way, the energies and intentions at the center of my working altar would circulate in a fluid dynamic among the Three Realms in the sacred space where I quieted myself to meditate and pray, forging and reminding me of the intimate relationship of exchange between my receptive stillness and my active ritual work.