January's issue of PaganPages is out; this month's Song of a Daily Druid column, Practicing the Daily Simple, tackles the question of what practical daily spiritual living looks like, at least in the life of this practitioner! Following up on last month's column about the elements of ritual, this month I explore three simple techniques that require no ritual whatsoever, but can be employed anywhere, anytime, as a way of incorporating spiritual awareness into everyday, mundane activities. Check it out!One conviction that has led me so assuredly onto and along the Druid path is the conviction that no amount of philosophizing and debate can make up for a lack of daily, practical work in the spiritual life. It’s easy to forget that any one system can start to seem like the single Truth if you spend too much time within it, and not enough time allowing your body and its natural energies free range to roam. I can hypothesize about the nature of deity, the relationship between free will and destiny, the role of love and grief… and in some ways, this process of writing and thinking is indeed a kind of practical work, too. It does help to clarify, to enlighten, and just as often to frustrate and to reveal the stumbling blocks hiding just beneath the surface. I follow my words like hounds I’ve set loose on the hunt, never quite knowing where they will lead or what scent will send them howling.
But there is other work to do, as well. These simple, daily works are as much a part of my religious practice as the esoteric and exotic, the sacred “set-apart-ness” of much of religious life. I don’t always have the energy — or the time! — to go hunting through poetic imagery and the dense tension of metaphor, weaving my way through the lush undergrowth of belief, identity, paradox and process. Sometimes I have to come home to myself, sometimes I have to clean the hearth and feed the dogs.
......To read more, check out Song of a Daily Druid
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