Three Realms of Druidry Travel Altar

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Handcrafted by Ali herself, this travel altar contains: a decorative carry-all box, three wooden three-realms plaques, three holders for fire, water and earth, a white handkerchief altar cloth, a sachet of herbs and acorns, a tea light candle, an incense holder, several cone incense, small book of matches, a small bag containing peace prayer beads, a miniature heart-shaped compass, stones and tokens representing the three realms.




Visit Meadowsweet & Myrrh's Facebook Page to see more photos.

Ali's Summer Vacation: Announcements, Guest Bloggers, New Features, O My!

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Hello, all of you lovely and beautiful readers out there! I hope your summers have been full of smooth sunlight, cool waters and copious green. I know mine sure has! And there's more to come, as I pack up and ready myself for a month-long hiatus from the blogosphere.

During the sweltering dog-days of August, I'll be traveling north to the rocky shoreline cliffs and wooded mountainsides of Acadia National Park in Maine, where I'll spend a week with my family and my partner Jeff, hiking, biking, swimming, reading, wining and dining. Soon after my return, I'll be off again, jet-setter that I am, on my first ever trip abroad to the emerald and mist-strewn coast of Northern Ireland, to attend a week-long retreat on Celtic Spirituality and Radical Activism, led by Gareth Higgins and Carl McColman.

But never fear! Though I'm taking the month of August off to do some sun-soaking and soul-searching, I've been working hard in the meantime to make sure readers here at Meadowsweet & Myrrh have plenty to keep them engaged and entertained.

Cú Chulainn and the Queen of Swords: Reflections on Reason and Nakedness

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One of the ways that I clothe and shelter my nakedness in the world is with my intellect, which always seems to be churning away sometimes even in spite of myself.

Don't get me wrong, I value reason highly as an expression of Spirit in the human animal; it is a wisdom-weaver and pattern-dancer, it is one of the meaning-makers of human experience that can serve to highlight and elevate, to shape and navigate. When used in this way, reason and critical analysis can exercise the mind, stripping it of falsehoods and obscurities and laying it bare to the world in all its complexity and sublimity (and when applied with a devotion that borders on bhakti, reason can be a terrible and awesome thing that shakes the world ruthlessly down to its rattling joints).

But too often, reason can be wielded as a weapon. I find that I do this far more often than I like, and it always leaves me feeling uncomfortable, disturbed from the dwelling-place of naked presence that I am continually seeking in the world. When I feel threatened or misunderstood, I can swing my intellect like a sword, cutting down hesitant, half-formed or poorly-articulated arguments where they stand — without regard for the meanings they are striving towards or the complexities they, too, are trying to navigate. The fight becomes the thing, and I get caught up in the thrill of parry and thrust and the heat of my own mental muscles tensed and flexing as I dodge and turn and feel the bite of my blows striking home.

Naked in the World

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"I reckon we're doing this 'cos we are goin' to die, d'yer see? And 'cos some bloke got to the edge of the world somewhere and saw all them other worlds out there and burst into tears 'cos there was only one lifetime. So much universe, and so little time. And that's not right..."

- Cohen the Barbarian, from The Last Hero, by Terry Pratchett

There is a difference between a hero, and a bully. We all know this, we know it in our bones, in the marrow that makes our blood and the heart that moves it. There is a difference between a warrior, and a grunt-for-hire. Between an act of courage, and an act of arrogance, ignorance or cruelty. And that difference does not lie in nobility, or honor, or wisdom, or even mercy.



Last night, Jeff and I finished reading Terry Pratchett's The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable. With illustrations by the marvelous Paul Kidby, the book is more an homage to the fans of the Discworld novels than anything else. Though my favorite character in all the Disc — Captain Samuel Vimes of the City Watch — sadly did not make an appearance, cameos by Vetinari, Mr. Slant, Ponder Stibbons, the Librarian, Leonard de Quirm, Rincewind, Offler the Crocodile God, a few sad-eyed swamp dragons, and Great A'tuin herself, a giant turtle swimming through the black, starry sea of space carrying the discworld on her back, kept us in giggles for the past several nights. Still, I had been looking forward to some piercing satire and cultural commentary, and for most of the book had to rest satisfied with friendly, conspiratorial winks towards Pratchett fandom instead.

But not last night. In the final pages of the book, Pratchett's genius for story-telling flexed its muscles once again, pulling all the threads of humor, character and destiny tight, weaving a climactic show-down with the gods themselves (and a face-off with the many-eyed Blind Io is not something to sneeze at!). The blurb on the book's dust-jacket sets the mythic tone of the book, introducing the ancient and increasingly decrepit Cohen the Barbarian, who has watched most of his friends die soft and senile of old age, and who is angry, very angry, at the gods. So "the last hero in the world is going to return what the first hero stole" — Cohen intends to bring fire back to the peak of Cori Celesti, right into the halls of Dunmanifestin. And he plans to bring it back with a bang.

Contemplations on Polytheism and Gods of the Land

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There was a lightness of being in my solitary walk to the library this morning, after yesterday's long-rumbling thunderstorms growling out of the dense haze and heat of the city.^[1] For the past two weeks I have been getting up early to hillwalk through the wooded park down the block, and even in the dawn hours everything hung heavy and damp, dark green, sticky, slick with heat, heat, heat. The pond was a low patch of thickening mud, the stream in the ravine a gully of trickling gutter-water between the tree roots. The mulberries from the neighbor's drooping tree were slowly fermenting on the sidewalk, and giving birth whenever someone walked by to a swarm of iridescent flies. This is not exactly unusual for July around here (certainly not as out-of-character as the hotter weather farther north). But the cloudless domed sky fading to muggy gray on the horizons unbroken for so many rainless days became a little disconcerting in a city centered on three rivers and so near a great lake, where the mountains rising to the east back up the westerly winds carrying their rainstorms over the land. We get a lot of rain here in Pittsburgh, but for the past two weeks it seems we've had nothing but hot, thick, hard-to-breate damp — sliced through with burning arrows of sunlight.

So yesterday was a blessing. An early twilight by midafternoon when the storms rolled in, and it was finally cool enough to fall asleep a few hours before midnight for once. For the first time I felt refreshed when waking up this morning, as if I had slept well and without that constant, unidentifiable anxiety that the body seems to absorb and store up from the enforced stillness of long, hot summer days. And the morning is beautiful. During long weeks of constant heat, coolness becomes a kind of abstract in a sun-fogged brain. Jeff and I kept talking about our upcoming vacation in cool, ocean-hedged Acadia National Park, and my trip soon after to Ireland — the misty green lands that my skin and bones remember, like a gift from my ancestors, without ever having been there — but I don't think I could really believe in these things or imagine them with any kind of realism.

Ah, but this morning I can almost taste the very first hint of crisp, cool autumn, sneaking in just after the high, bright peak of the solstice! Walking down the streets of my neighborhood, I had flashbacks to that feeling I used to get during the first weeks of a new semester back in college, when everything was light and fresh and free, with new classes (and, glory be!, new books to devour!) and new faces roaming campus, and a new year ahead. And in all of this, that special kind of solitude, the aloneness of stepping out and away from home, cut loose from routine or rather in the early stages of a new one when it still feels wide and spacious and full of possibility. It was as if heat had become my home, and I thought it would go on being home forever. It is hard to describe, but I could taste it like gentle sunlight — after two weeks I'd almost forgotten that sunlight could feel gentle and smooth, not always burning and oppressive — and light wisps of clouds that go skipping now from horizon to horizon in a cool lake of blue sky, awash in relief. And I am so thankful that my gods, if I have any, are changeable, full of movement and utterly beyond me.

Readers, Lurkers, Fans: Come Out, Whoever You Are!

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As I've mentioned, I injured my wrist a little while back — now, don't worry, I'm doing better, I'm able to feed myself, brush my hair, and even spend some time on the computer now (after a whole week of less than an hour a day! how did I survive?!). But yesterday, after typing a long post for Pagan+Politics, the aching stiffness had crept back up my arm from wrist to elbow. So while I have things I'm dying to write about (like how Columbia has seriously shaken my as-yet-scrawny and fledgling faith in polytheism)... I'll be taking it slow for the next few days.

In the meantime, another blog I read sparked an idea, and I decided it might be fun to encourage all you readers to chime in! I know there are a few hundred of you out there, and so I invite you now to leave a comment, say hello — even if you're just a lurker, even if you've never left a comment here before, why not share a little bit about yourself? To that end, I pose these two questions (adapted from the original meme):

1) Tell me about yourself. Who are you? Do you have a spiritual or religious path that you are walking? What was it that drew you to this blog, and why have you stayed? What would you like to see more of here at Meadowsweet & Myrrh? Let loose with those comments!

2) Tell someone else about this blog. Perhaps try to seek out someone who's not a Pagan or Druid but who you think might be interested in the kinds of things featured here. Send them a link to your favorite post, and let's see what they say!

I look forward to hearing from all of you! And if you haven't already, why not "Like" Meadowsweet & Myrrh over on Facebook and leave a comment or review over there while you're at it!

Madeline, Praying (a short story of quiet and mystery)

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A hand injury has cruelly kept me from the keyboard for the past week, and in the interest of healing I am still taking the typing very slow and easy. So that my lovely, loyal readers won't feel abandoned, however, I offer you something from the stockpile. The following is a short story I wrote seven or eight years ago, way back in college, before coming whole-heartedly to the Druid path, during a time of grappling with (dis)enchantment, death and mystery. Oddly enough, it features a girl named Madeline (more cynical and angry at Spirit than I ever was), and a hint of flowers. I thought it would be an enjoyable follow-up to last week's guest post. Reading it now, I can only remember hints and shadows of what I was trying to grasp as I wrote it. But I hope you enjoy it, despite its uncertainty.

Madeline, Praying

Entering the abandoned church, she felt as if she were entering the glen of a deep forest. Etched stained glass windows filtered light like entwined branches arching out from the thick columns, trunks of stone. Normally so hard, so brittle, the glass just like any glass, fragile and easily shattered, splintered by a brick or baseball. The marble and granite unmovable, chiseled perhaps, but otherwise worn only by time stretching into future eons of unwritten histories. Yet as she entered the church, she felt as if she were entering something alive, something breathing, momentarily transformed from brittle, breakable, into something delicately living, moving with the breeze, shifting colors of sunlight through branches of trees, seemingly so still and yet growing, always reaching, imperceptibly, in all directions for the sustenance of warmth, of earth and sun, of water, air and light with which the world of this stale chapel was suddenly transfused.