Bringing the Rain

Share

"When the dragon wants a rainstorm he causes thunder and lightning. That brings the rain."

- Chögyam Trungpa

"You know," I said to Jeff last night after closing the laptop and setting it back on the bookshelf, "the cool thing about this whole idea of 'cultivating an environment of truth' is that you don't have to actually know what the truth is. You just have to make room for truth to enter in."

"I'm still not sure I know what Trungpa even means by an 'environment of truth,'" Jeff said, yawning a little.

"An environment of truth--you know. So, suppose you want to teach. Whatever subject. You can try to pour in all the information and skills into the student that you yourself know, right? But if that's all you do then your student will never quite surpass you; the best you can do is teach her everything you know but not ever more than you know. Or, you can cultivate in the student an aptitude for curiosity, inquisitiveness, careful observation, coherent reasoning... You can cultivate in the student an environment of truth, and show the student how to create such an environment for herself, the internal environment of her own attitudes and thought processes, and the external environment of encouraging, supportive and challenging peers. And with such an environment, she is receptive to truth in whatever forms, not only those forms you've discovered yourself already. She might learn things that even you don't know.

"An environment of truth, an environment in which truth can take root and come to full bloom. An environment that does not punish or discourage or dismiss truth, but is open and receptive to the discovery of new truth, as well as the preservation of old, familiar truth.

"And that's actually very freeing. It doesn't require you to know everything, the complete truth, before taking action or making choices; you can still act and choose in ways that reveal truth, even before knowing what that truth is. All you need to know is what kind of environment and relationships give rise to truth, to the revelation or realization of truth; you need to develop a talent for recognizing truth when it comes and attending to its circumstances and context. Then you work to create that environment and those relationships.

"In fact!" I continued enthusiastically, "In fact, in some ways it's like making art, or the process of writing: by creating an environment of truth, you are actually cultivating the circumstances of your own continuing discovery. I don't always know what I'm going to say before I say it--writing is a process of finding out and elaborating on what it is I truly think about something, just as much as it is a way of communicating with others. Sometimes the work of writing reveals connections and ideas I hadn't anticipated, but because I'm listening to the work and not trying to restrict it to some predetermined concept of what I want to write or what I think I should write, I can allow that truth to speak to me as well as to the reader.

"It's the same thing wherever you cultivate an environment of truth--in writing, in art, in the classroom, in family relations, in life in general. When your focus is on cultivating that receptive, fertile environment, truth can well up within it and flow freely through it, naturally, seemingly effortlessly even. You don't have to worry about controlling truth, you just... let it happen. The dragon wants a rainstorm--wants truth--so he creates thunder and lightening, he makes the things he can make because he knows he cannot make the rain itself. He prepares the way. And preparing the way brings the changing, falling rain.... You know what I mean? ...Jeff?"

I looked at Jeff. His nose half-buried in his pillow, he snored, a snore deep and rumbling.

"Speaking of thunder..." I muttered to myself, and smiled.

Cultivating an Environment of Truth

Share

"Truth is generated from its environment; in that way it becomes a powerful reality."

- Chögyam Trungpa

The man is a regular. He's a thin man, with dark hair and a work-worn face stretched from years of cigarettes and morning coffee and whatever it is he does to earn a living during the day, and he sits at the counter sipping slowly from his cup. Some of the other servers have complained about him in the past, about how he rifles through the pile of discarded checks next to the register, looking for unused coupons that other customers have carelessly left behind. Why does he need two dollars off? All he gets is coffee and toast... A cheapskate, some of them call him, even though he always tips a dollar, just to sit and read the newspaper and joke with the other regulars.

This morning, I'm wiping down the metal knobs and syrup dispensers before refilling the small red buckets of sanitizer and replacing the old used rags with fresh ones. It's early, before seven still, and dawn is flat like a diorama beyond the restaurant window. Behind me, the regular complains to his buddy. "They're shutting down half the city for the G-20, I don't know if we'll be able to get any work done. Maybe they'll give us the week off, but I doubt it. Anyway, you won't be able to get anywhere..." His buddy makes some amused grunt and pours one tiny creamer into his own coffee mug, delicately pinching the white plastic between his large, grubby fingers. "Well, hopefully the cops'll beat up some protesters anyway. And catch it on film, so they can play it on TV, over and over..."

I barely even flinch or pause in my cleaning. It's no surprise that the man is a committed conservative. He once complained about Obama perpetuating fraud against the U.S. government because he wasn't born inside the United States (I did not bother to point out to him that Hawaii is, in fact, part of the United States, whereas McCain was born in Panama). To complain about such matters when the previous administration allowed wire-tapping of citizens, torture of unjustly detained prisoners, and an illegal war based on false evidence... well, it was already clear the man didn't derive all his political priorities from careful reasoning and unbiased sources.

But I struggle to get over this last remark nonetheless. During my college days, and occasionally afterwards, I had been a protester. I had "turned my back on Bush" at his second inauguration, only to come face to face with a fat little man wearing an "I Salute Dick Cheney" baseball cap and baring his teeth through spittle at me and the thin, hippie-dressed girl beside me as we raised our fists in peace signs over our heads. I had marched in D.C. just a week after the Iraq War had begun; I had stood among others at peace vigils in the chill of winter and the reawakening of spring alike during the following years, holding stubby candles in flimsy paper cones to catch the dripping wax. I had swallowed tears of frustration and anger over Katrina and the slaughtering in the Gaza Strip, attended talks, lectures and poetry readings, wandered through galleries of photographs bearing stolid, unflinching witness to the things human beings can do to each other.

For all the man knows, I could be protesting come September, when a handful of the obscenely rich come to meet in my city, a city half-empty and struggling from collapsed industry, trying to rebuild with dignity, culture, art, medicine and education. I could be in the streets soon, holding up signs or handing out pamphlets asking why we still believe, so gullibly, that these men of power have our best interests in mind and not merely their own. I could be protesting, giving voice to the incredulity and hope in my bones. I have thought about it. Even though the papers say that G-20 protesters are struggling against government opposition for their right to legal permits for protest space. I've thought about marching in the streets, adding my voice to those who object, who say "no" when so many others hunch up, keep their heads low and try to avoid trouble. I am lucky, in some ways; I have very little to lose.

"Fucking protesters, man." The man chuckles to himself as his buddy finishes adding creamers to his styrofoam cup and leaves two dollar bills for the coffee at the front register before heading out the door. Then the regular is left alone at the counter, one hand wrapped around his warm mug, the other playing absent-mindedly with the edge of a napkin. I see him almost every morning I work, and sometimes I pass him on the street as I walk the neighborhood on my days off. He always greets me with amiable familiarity, trusting in the gentleness and civility that I have cultivated in my work as a waitress. To him, I must seem like a Nice Quiet Girl, and he's not really wrong in thinking so.

"Did you hear me honk, this morning?" he asks me as I'm refilling his cup. "You were walking up Monroe Avenue--I honked, but I didn't know if you heard me."

"O, that was you?" I smile, though my mind is still churning silently over his last comment, imagining the officer--maybe one I know, maybe one who comes in for breakfast and gets his meal for half-price--imagining the raised baton, or the mace or taser, imagining the officer approaching a row of us pacing along the curb, signs wavering and drooping as we wonder whether we should run...

"You walk alone to work like that every day, in the dark? You'd better be careful..."

"O, it's not really that dark, it's early morning by the time I'm walking to work, except in the winter when it's too cold for anyone else to be out. And this is a good neighborhood, I've never had any problems."

"Still, I hope you carry something--a handgun or something. There are a lot of crazy people out there."

For a moment, my sarcastic sense of humor whispers like a friendly devil in my ear, No shit, I'm looking at one... Carry a gun, for gods' sake!? This is a family neighborhood, with children, and dog-walkers out before the sun comes up. I know my neighbors, medical students, and grandparents whose grandkids visit on weekends, elderly Jewish ladies whose families have owned houses on this hill for generations, and young yuppy couples biking through the wooded park to their yoga classes. Carry a gun! But even this man, this regular who sips coffee and munches on his toast for forty-one cents on someone else's coupon...even he isn't the "crazy" people I might fear, if there are such people. He, too, is part of the neighborhood in its stability and community. I don't believe for a second that he would wish me harm, and as he looks at me over his coffee, I can tell that even his cautions and advice come from a place of goodness and caring for my welfare, no matter how mistaken they may be.

I wonder if that would change if he knew my political views. I wonder how he would feel if it was me on television being beaten by the cops, if it was my slim, defiant body huddled against the pavement, arms bracing against the blows. He didn't believe I was at the Superbowl riots in Oakland last winter, standing quietly in the snow completely sober and awake to the night, as students raged around me smelling of beer and sweat-dampened scarves, setting broken furniture on fire and tipping over cars. I watched the new horned moon set between buildings and let the pulse of city energy run through me, allowing it to swell and subsided into stillness again. I seem small, maybe even fragile, but I am hardly ever afraid. There are people much bigger than me, much less sure of their own power, who carry fear with them everywhere, like a handgun. He doesn't believe I could be a protester, some messy liberal pussy with nothing better to do than make trouble, someone who deserves a beating, sport for the hard-working, entertainment for the up-standing. I have worked to become gentle, kind, self-disciplined--he likely believes I am both too weak and too sensible to be caught screaming and waving my anger in the air under a banner of anti-anything.

It's not so much that he's wrong about me. He is wrong about protesters.

"What is wrong with spelling out the truth? When you spell out the truth it loses its essence and becomes either 'my' truth or 'your' truth; it becomes an end in itself. But by implying the truth, the truth doesn't become anyone's property.

When the dragon wants a rainstorm he causes thunder and lightning. That brings the rain."

- Chögyam Trungpa

Protesters aren't some special category of crazy leftist hippies. They're just people, of course, but then it depends on what you think of people. Despite some of my experiences in this world so far--watching unjust war, corruption and greed, fear-mongering and propaganda, starving children wasting away to support extravagant lifestyles for the wealthy on the other side of the world--despite this, I trust in a fundamental goodness in human beings. There is a beauty to the mess and flux of the world, and people share in this beauty, striving in all kinds of ways, through stupidity and ignorance, through kind intentions and fears of failure, to become better, to do what is good. I have never had reason to doubt this, never in my experience come upon a person who did not have some good in them working its way out.

The regular, sitting before me at the counter with concern on his face, is not an evil man, not a person who would sincerely wish violence on another person. When he jokes about cops beating marchers, he does so casually, almost as if it doesn't actually happen, not in the real world, not to real people. He has forgotten how to really look at other people, to see in them the complexity and messiness that reflects his own. He sees people--or, anyway, some people--merely as means to an end, as the irritable causes of effects in the political world that he does not like, causes that should be stopped, gotten rid of. I cannot agree with him on this view of people, and because I can't agree, I also can't hate him for it. He is not a Reason This Country Is Going to Hell... he is just a man, foolish and messy, with good in him working its way out.

So how do I correct him? Can I spell out the truth for him? No doubt there have been plenty of people dictating the problems of war and corruption, putting forth arguments and making passionate pleas. Sometimes I add my voice to this crowd, crying out for justice and peace and compassion. I am someone who speaks out, who acts to demonstrate my commitments and my ideals. But I am more than that, more than a voice in the crowd, more than a protester and conscientious objector, more than a mind twisting and twirling facts into the strong ropes that hold together an argument for peace and local community building. I am also the young woman who serves this man coffee four mornings a week, and helps him sort through two-dollar-off coupons.

When a person discovers the basic goodness in herself and in others, she discovers fearlessness. She discovers that there is no reason to be afraid, even when destruction and death threaten. Destruction isn't personal, and there is no cause for resentment. When a person discovers this inner strength, this courage within her, she becomes gentle with others as well as herself, she does not worry so much about correcting every wrong view around her. She trusts. Because she knows that the way to remedy fear is not to render life docile and harmless through explication, but to encourage others to discover the goodness in themselves. How to do that? It takes courage to face this truth (though why it should be so hard to admit to ourselves that we might be basically good just the way we are I've never quite figured out). But you cannot just tell people about it; to explain it would rob them of the opportunity to embody courage themselves, to face this truth on their own.

In the end, I don't say anything to the man at the counter. I cannot change his view of people except by being most truly myself, by treating him with respect and gentleness, holding up a mirror that he might see his goodness belying his prejudices, revealing his blindspots. In the end, I don't say anything, this time. There is nothing I could say that I am not already saying with my being, with my presence there full of everything I am--pacifist and intellectual and poet and mystic--all crammed into the body of some unassuming waitress, coffee pot in one hand, clean rag in the other.

Comfortable with Crazy: The Dis-ease of Trusting Truth

Share

"Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude."

- Robert Anton Wilson

I am not postmodern when it comes to my view of truth. I believe, as Fox Mulder did, that the Truth is, in fact, out there. Somewhere. I also tend to believe that "in here" and "out there" aren't as starkly distinguished as many people think, and so I spend a lot of time looking for truth within my own heart and mind, within my own body and bones and the concrete senses that used to inspire me to write teenage poetry about iced-over duck ponds and the spinning shadows cast by ceiling fans on hot summer afternoons. I trust in the world, in reality, and in my relationship with reality. That relationship, like most relationships, includes a lot of give and take and mutual influence, and it demands respect. The world is real. And, unlike that narcissist control-freak ex you've been avoiding for a year, I know full well that the world will go on without me. I believe in truth and reality, but I am not so arrogant as to think that I know them definitively.

So when I read a post like the one written recently by Sean Carroll (my cherished punching-bag stand-in for Scientific Atheist Fundamentalists everywhere), I find it hard to work myself into a sympathetic state of outrage and disgust over the ignorance of Creationists and their grabs for intellectual legitimacy in the media. Truth will work its own way out. You might say I have a kind of evolutionary approach to truth, in fact. A "natural selection" of ideas, in which clearly false or ultimately unsustainable, unsupported notions of pure fantasy will collapse under their own weight and reality will, once again, reassert itself. It always has. The world does not need us to believe in it in order to exist (though our belief in the world may be necessary if we are to go on existing, or living in any meaningful way).

Carroll divides the world into two kinds of people: Sensible People (who can be either friends, or worthy opponents in debate), and Crazy People (who are, at best, embarrassing allies, and at worst, crackpots). The Crazy People, Carroll suggests, should never be given even the appearance of legitimacy or credibility, should not be engaged with in debate. (One wonders why, then, he even bothers to keep a blog.) They can occasionally be mocked, in moderation, as a natural and healthy outlet for the frustrations of Sensible People, but that's as much attention as they deserve. In short, Crazy People should be isolated. Kept away from us (it's always an "us") Sensible People. And this attitude works well, if you believe that insanity and sensibility are absolute and exclusive characteristics. If you believe that truth and reality rely on the relative sanity of their believers for their meaning and value, then this perspective is just fine.

The problem with the view that Some People Are Just Crazy, of course, is its corollary, Those People Aren't Us. The certainty that Sensible People have the monopoly on truth, that they always know what's really going on around here and can safely make decisions not only for themselves but for the Crazy People, without input from the latter... that kind of certainty gets us into trouble. Trouble like the holocaust and global warming. That kind of certainty obscures all kinds of old habits--habits steeped in denial and disconnection, habits with their own special kind of insanity--habits that plenty of Sensible People stick to even despite all scientific evidence that a lifestyle of consumption is fatally unsustainable, despite all appeals to the bravery of compassion and loving kindness for fellow beings.

Last week, a man walked into a fitness club in my city and opened fire. Four women were killed and eight more badly wounded before the man, desperate, lonely and steady-eyed, turned the gun on himself. In his blog--in which he'd written detailed plans for the event and recorded his deepening frustrations at being unable to connect with women despite following lots of dating advice--he wrote that his pastor had thoroughly convinced him that "you can commit mass murder then still go to heaven."

Reality reasserts itself. Sometimes in painful, devastating ways. There is chaos in this beautiful world. The question is, how do we respond?

Some of us respond by locking down, by devoting ourselves all the more rigidly and strenuously to the certainty of our sensibleness and the danger of others' lack of sense. When we find ourselves confronted with sorrow, stress and insecurity, we tighten our grips and we try to increase our control of the situation. With the world divided into Sensible People and Crazy People, salvation can only come from the Sensible ones--they shoulder all the responsibility, they must carry that weight all on their own. When things go wrong, the Sensible People step in to fix it, to fix the mistakes others have made, to fix those Others, too, if they can.

This is the disease of Truth, of the one right way. This is why people like Carroll spend much of their time trying to control who gets to speak, why they expend energy censoring and shutting down debate when it doesn't seem to play in the favor of what is true and correct. And it's why the people they're trying to shut up--the Crazies, the fundamentalists and creationists and right-wingers--do the very same thing. Carroll would probably say the fundamentalists try to monopolize or shut down debate because they know, deep down, that in honest, open debate they would lose. But why should truth--the really real Truth--need such fanatic defenders as Carroll? Why isolate the Crazies? Isn't truth strong enough to withstand their insanity, maybe even rub off on them a little with time and exposure? It's almost as though Carroll is just a bit scared--maybe, way deep down--that Craziness rubs off, that Sensibility isn't as impenetrable a stronghold as he'd like.

What is the definition of "crazy" after all? How do we determine who is nuts and who isn't? Society has traditionally defined insanity as the condition of being unable to function adequately in the world--to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, relate to others, do the simple things necessary for survival. And yet billions of religious individuals the world over, even including quite a few creationists, continue to eat just fine, raise children, hold down jobs. So what if they believe the universe was made whole-cloth six thousand years ago? They're quite likely wrong, of course, and holding a wrong belief may sometimes be a symptom of some underlying problem, or a cause for any number of unraveling negative consequences. But being wrong about the world is not, in itself, insane. Especially when those trying to correct you so clearly hate and fear you, and so can hardly be expected to have your best interests in mind.

The world, I have found, continues to exist regardless of my sanity. I have gone through times of depression and suicidal contemplations, times when neuroses and anxieties threatened to overwhelm me. I have had moments of profound clarity and connection, too, when I glimpse shifting patterns that seem to ease my way. Yet the world persists, in its messy beauty, giving birth to dancing stars while others die to dust. Almost as though my sanity didn't matter one way or another. This is the dis-ease of truth: the essential discomfort of knowing that your own strivings to live ethically, peacefully and rationally do not guarantee a safe and rational world to live in, and the humility of learning that your own missteps into irrationality and senselessness cannot overthrow the basic functionality and goodness of the world.

It is also an immense comfort. Knowing that we each have chaos and craziness within ourselves frees us from our need to control others with such a tight grip, it gives us permission to relax and reconnect for a moment, to give the larger wisdom of the world a chance to lift us clear of the fray. Indeed, there may be times when the Sensible People are marching calmly and rationally towards destruction, when we need to seek the chaos and creativity of our deep selves. Sometimes, doing what is good and ethical may seem a bit crazy, may seem futile or pointless; sometimes the way through a bad situation is obscure and beyond reasoning. Craziness offers us the gift of intuitive, creative engagement, fluidity and flexibility. It opens up our crazy pink hearts to tenderness and sorrow and allows these things to run their course without channeling them into systems of tension and pressure and stress.

This past Saturday, one of my best friends got married. The wedding was beautiful, a simple and hastily-planned ceremony and reception nestled among the sheltering maple trees and holly bushes of her new mother-in-law's backyard. Paper lanterns hung suspended among baskets of flowers and twinkling strings of lights twined the dark branches where fireflies, too, drifted lazily in the summer night heat. As the ceremony began, a few drops of rain began to fall. Watching my friend's lovely upturned face--her eyes shining with joy and tears--I remembered the murders from a few days earlier, I thought of the unwieldy institutions of consumption, denial and repression pervasive in our culture that can sometimes make us feel alienated and alone, I thought of how both the bride and groom had divorced parents and how half of all marriages these days end that way... I thought, you'd have to be crazy to want to get married, to believe in happily-ever-after and lifelong love. And my heart filled with happiness and gratitude.

Later, my boyfriend and I sat together at one of the tables left empty by everyone else who had sought shelter from the rain under the large white canopy. He'd forgotten his dress shoes and wore sandals with his slacks, and a purple tie that matched my dress. I sipped from the half-dozen abandoned champaign glasses, by now watered down by the weather, each reflecting the candlelight in a million different glimmerings of raindrops along their smooth curves and spiraling stems. Rain speckled our warm shoulders and smudged our eyeglasses, and we laughed each time the elderly usher came over to us, smiling kindly and almost knowingly, offering us wine, fruit and cake. Then, we would bend our heads together, my beloved and I, and murmur crazy words of gratitude and praise--for the night, for each other, for the lovely newly-wedded couple, for the children tottering around among the folding chairs, for the minister and his wife dancing slowly in the grass in front of the DJ's table... for all the craziness and love in the lovely, crazy world.

Song of the World: Some Things We Know

Share

Firstly (and bestly, I think): below is an amazing video from the World Science Festival, held in New York City last month. The clip comes from a lecture on "Notes & Neurons: In Search of a Common Chorus," and in it, the famous a cappella singer Bobby McFerrin demonstrates just how ingrained music is in our bodies and brains by leading the entire audience in a spontaneous sing-along.



I doubt the rest of this post can compare to just how cool that was.

Maybe it's just me, but group experiences of music have always moved me powerfully. This clip reminds me of the many times I've been blessed to be part of spontaneous rounds and sing-alongs (these always seem to happen especially at family holiday reunions and on long bus rides to high school marching band competitions). But in particular, I remember the high school football game I once attended, when the student singing the national anthem to open the game was so nervous that she stumbled and faltered no less than three times on the words "what so proudly we hailed" and had to begin the first verse again. On the third time, without any hesitation, everyone in the entire stadium raised their voices to meet hers and carried the song through, the collective murmur of hundreds softening the harsh tinny notes screeching from the loudspeakers, lifting the melody gently into the autumn evening sky as though on a just-visible cloud of exhaled breaths. I'm not patriotic--but I love people, and their spontaneous basic goodness, and the memory still brings a tear of gratitude and pride to my eyes.

So I can believe that, to some extent, music--literal music--is hardwired into our brains. But I think there's something more to it than that. In Druidry, there is this idea that everything has a Song, and that the world, too, has a song. The Song of the World is something like a Divine or True Will, I suppose, and we join with it our own voices, the music of our bodies humming, pumping blood, inhaling and exhaling, neurons and nerves buzzing and vibrating. The air we move through shifts around us with every stride, and our laughing and crying shape it, too, creating leitmotifs, bridges and bass lines. When we sing and move and live in harmony with the World Song, our own songs are amplified, modulated and carried along--our lives become beautiful, our hearts become soft and permeable, our minds become nimble and familiar with the patterns of how things dance.

This idea--that we each have a song, a soul-song, and that everything, the landscape and the gods and the world itself, has a soul-song as well--underlies a kind of lovely animism that permeates everything, everywhere, and fills it utterly with life and movement. It bestows a special sacredness to space, to limits and the separation of necessary absence through which limited, finite beings move. The Song of the World offers us a way to understand our unity and community without sacrificing our individuality and uniqueness, our creativity and our freedom. For all of these reasons, the Song of the World is an absolutely fundamental aspect of my Druidry, that shapes a great deal of my spiritual practice as well as my theological and ethical ponderings.

The Song of the World is so essential to my Druidry--and yet, I can't remember where on earth I heard of it. It must have been in one of the many Druidry 101 books in my perky little collection, or maybe in some article I read online, or in some email message group or discussion forum. One thing's for sure, though: the World Song isn't mentioned in my historical books on the ancient Celts, or in my books on Celtic mythology, or in my books about the archeology and iconography of Celtic religious art and ritual objects. (In fact, the only Celtic-ish reference I can find to the phrase are two poems in the Book of Taliesin, neither of which mention the soul-song as an animistic/pantheistic theological principle.) Recently, I began reading Ronald Hutton's newest book, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain; no word about the Song of the World on any of its almost five-hundred pages, as far as I can tell. But Hutton's writing brings home, as it always does, just how shaky our historical-fact footing is when we try to talk about Druidry and Druids at all.

This drives some people up a wall. Sometimes that wall is plastered with fantasy novel-like posters of flowing hair and horned staves and huge oaks and bonfires and magical chants and such. Other times, it's a wall studded all over with personal equivalents of the Ninety-Five Theses, carefully nailed into place, complete with footnotes and academic citations in MLA formatting. Cynical scholarly types especially like to equate accurate facts with intellectual depth, and accuse those with a relaxed attitude towards the former of being totally lacking in the latter. On the other side of the argument are people who grasp on to any remotely "Druidic" peculiarity--the Ogham, the Coligny Calendar, the white robes and golden sickle--and make their spiritual lives about Druidry, instead of living and practicing as Druids. Each old text is parsed and analyzed for either ancient Celtic or Medieval Christian influences, each new archeological find subject alternately to skepticism and acclaim, scrutiny and hope. For some people, it is incredibly important to prove whether or not the Druids of old were real, or really what we believe.

But to me, Druidry--and indeed, any spiritual life in all its many forms and paths--is about learning to be present, in the blessed here-now. As I struggle to live authentically and deeply with my self and the Divine, I just can't find the relevance of nit-picking to pieces bits of historical data. It doesn't tell me anything more about people--or about myself, or the gods, or the world--than I already know by being present in the here-now, attending and listening carefully. What it tells me is that, the bigger the picture and the finer the focus, the more uncertain "facts" become, with every scholar, then as now, contributing their own ideas, visions and inspiration as well as their own assumptions, prejudices and ignorance. But this isn't history at all! It's not confined to our understanding of the past, it's what each of us do in the here and now as well, as we struggle to think about our world and engage with it.

Cynics watch the video at the beginning of this post, and say with a smirk, "Well that is amazing--look how clever, look how well trained we are." They assume that all this spontaneous singing is just so much automation, a kind of brainwashing following paths laid down ages ago in our mammalian minds. They wink at each other about the persistence of the past, its apparent dominance. But I see something else. I see the present, full of singing. I see a single man who, without instruction, without a single word, can coax a whole auditorium into song just by humming a few notes, hopping around on stage and waving his arms. I see attention and response, liveliness--I can practically feel the amusement and engagement as the audience follows along, tries to guess what note will be next, listening to his body as it leaps and turns, listening to his voice as it plays off theirs.

We are not puppets wound up and constricted, pulled one way or another by the strings of history. We are so full of the present, so full of imagination and creativity in this very moment that not only can we shape our future, but our past as well. Our engagement reaches back as well as forward. The past is something we share, like a language or a story, not something we're bound by. The present is spacious and full of absence, full of uncertainty. Through that uncertainty, we move, we vibrate, we make music with our bones and the old bones of our ancestors. Why should we always be trying to dig our way back into the dense strata of historical fact, settle down inside it like a cocoon or a coffin? As though certainty about the past could protect us from having to be creative and responsive in the present...

Maybe there were no Druids at all, back then. Maybe until now, they existed only in imagination, amorphous and fluctuating . But there is something--an idea, a story, a familiar pattern of notes to make a scale--that shapes us today. I used to be called "Catholic" and "Christian", because that was the name for our family religion as my parents gave it to me. Then, I was called "Pagan" by readers of this blog, long before I had even relinquished the first. But "Druid" is the name I chose; Druid is what I name myself. I sing a melody to myself that seems to drift in from the mists of history, and the melody is Druidry, here, in this very present that we're living together. I am the song I'm singing, I create it from familiar notes in familiar patterns that I draw, prompted by dancing and encouragement, from the depths of my being. And the song goes something like: Were there real Druids in the murky landscapes of far away and long ago? If they weren't real then, they sure are now. I am that; that's how I know...

Lughnasadh: Burning In, Burning Out

Share

In the small open space of the gallery, I find myself stopped in my tracks by a painting--thin shining layers of oil on canvas--entitled, "Song of the Sun." I remember this, I think ruefully, shrugging my sweater closer around my neck. Chill mist drifts in even now from the harbor, sliding in under the door. The floor boards in the silent gallery creak when I shift my feet. The painting is like a memory of summer, it feels warm and salty to the eyes. Stunted pine trees list out of frame, their dark trunks obscured by moss and rough branches, their roots draping red and raw over the hard corners of granite cliffs that drop in short bursts and end abruptly at the sea. The sunlight is golden and long, casting satisfying shadows to every edge. I feel as though I remember summers like this, watching the sunlight linger on the stone, watching it seep into the deep spaces of tree bark like the godmother of sap and, much later, of autumn. These were days of long views, evenings when the ocean seemed to curve infinitely towards the horizon, when mountains loomed throwing their bulky shadows over lake bottoms. Sunlight got into everything, into muscle and bone, leaves, water and rock--heat and light lurking just beneath the gritty flesh of the world. And you could extend the painting forever beyond its frame, and still never come to the sun itself.

My summer vacation this year was early, damp and ribboned with fog. I spent much of it in small, carefully cultivated gardens and sparse art galleries, rather than hiking the usual rough trails that wound up the granite mountains lurching along the Eastern seaboard of Maine. Each morning, I went out onto the deck of our rental house to wake myself up gently with my own deep breath and a bit of yoga, pressing the heels of my hands into wood planks that were dark and spongy with dew and overnight rain. Each night, I lit a candle and sat in meditation while the bug-repellent scents of lavender and citronella wafted around me, incense smoke indistinguishable from the mist in moonlight beyond my window. The earth was so green, every limb and nook of tree carpeted with moss, every square inch of the forest floor thick with ferns. Everything so silent, so dim and so glistening that they seemed to almost shimmer with an unseen light. I'd almost forgotten.

It's been close to a month now since I got home, and the quietness and smallness of that week has slipped away again. The summer is hot now, and the sun always seems to be breathing hot down my neck like some intruder trying to eat my skin off. Each morning, I have to slather on a coat of spf 50 sunscreen to preserve my spiraling blue tattoos from fading away. I have to tie up my hair so that it doesn't hang limp with sweat plastered between my shoulder blades. I have to seek shade (us pale Irish types do, you know) and remind myself to drink water before I feel thirsty. And meanwhile, it's like the sun is egging me on: I'm in busy-busy-busy mode, taking on projects and cramming the days full of plans and bullet-point lists of things to get done (painting Jeff's apartment, building do-it-yourself furniture, helping my best friend move, organizing shelves and shelves of books, dinners and weddings and movies in the park and rollerblading--and in all of it, hardly time to write a word). "Make hay while the sun shines," the high white-burning hole in the sky whispers to my twitching nerves. And those moments of stillness and solitude, those gentle mornings, have all but burnt up under the intense gaze of dogged days.

I want the harvest, I want autumn to come, finally, I want it to arrive with all the force of an apple breaking open. I want the sun, with all its heat and light, to set with the color of apples, the moist fleshy fruit inside the fragile skin holding that memory of sunlight when the source has ceased to burn.

I think this is the nature of the Divine in its transcendence, its limitlessness. When the mystics talk of union, sometimes they speak of rain plunging forever into the ocean, dissolving, losing definition, uniting perfectly and indistinguishably with the source. But sometimes, they talk of light. Blinding brilliance, burning purification that strips away the skin and bleaches the bones. Sacred fire. The kind that consumes the self, reduces it to dust and ashes. The holy is ruthless; it could utterly devour you. I haven't met with this ruthless burning light in the polytheistic deities I've worked with (at least, not yet), nor did I find it in Christ as a practicing Catholic. But I found it, then, in God as Father, the Godhead, pouring itself relentlessly into every bursting, buzzing atom; and I find it now, as then, in the world, in the landscape and the seasons. When I meet it there, I think I understand a little better the trembling awe of Old Testament psalms, the songs of praise, of triumph so complete it could be heartless.

Sun and sunlight. Their relationship always changing, with every fire festival. At Imbolc, the sun seems small and fragile in a vast shivering dome of air; at Belteinne, we close our eyes in ecstasy and invite the sun inside, into our blood and breath, warm on our tongues while our eyes are closed. But by Lughnasadh, it's been burning in our bodies for months now. It's time we begin to let it go again, or it will burn us out. We need this mitigation, this separation from the sun--the sun is blinding and will make us a desert if we try to cling too long. We cherish memories of sunlight soaking the rocks, dust motes floating in front of a grimy window, long evening twilights dotted with rising fields of fireflies. We love these shafts of sunlight, these bits of light and heat embodied in the world around us. They let us come close to the sun, to the Divine, to the Source, without burning up. I think this may be why the gods I've known have been gentle and loving: they are particulars, immanent and close. They hold within them the light of the Source, as we all do, but they are kind and nurturing with it, restrained, not devastating, not cruel. This is why the apple nourishes us, when the unmitigated sun might burn and eat us to ashes. The world of intimate particulars, of individuality and diversity and limits, refreshes and renews even as it darkens and veils.

And all the while, holiness is burning within us, deep inside the soft earth of our bodies, fueled by our breath, washed with the tides of our sorrows and joys. The harvest is coming, darkness will settle as the apples drop, and soon we'll have the space and quietness to remember that we, like the sun, also shine.