The Long Goodbye: Part One

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The golden cups
are in his hand,
his hand is on the knife
and the knife is
above my head.

- Taliesin*

Three times I drew the Seven of Cups, card of soul-wrought dreams and tempting fantasies beckoning, and possibilities so numerous they seem to paralyze all ability to choose. Three times I drew the card in daily meditation before I finally agreed to seek for further guidance.

Where It's At

Things have been all tangled up lately. The puzzle box or wrinkled seed that was planted in my heart during my time in Northern Ireland — the small, mysterious thing curled in upon itself that I had all but forgotten about as things returned to normal — has been creaking and clicking as one by one its latches unhook and slip open... or it has been germinating and putting down roots that slip their sly tendrils in to pry open the soil of my soul. It all sounds very dramatic when you put it like that, but the truth is that I have been growing increasingly dissatisfied and frustrated with certain aspects of my work. And when I say work, I mean the soul-work of my writing, that strange little hobby that cannot make me a living but is indispensable to making me alive.

I've started to have serious doubts about blogging as the appropriate medium for my writing. It takes a huge amount of pride-swallowing to write that sentence, considering it was only a few months ago I was raving about how Meadowsweet & Myrrh was like my online "home," and scoffing arrogantly at people who easily abandon their blogs and let them lie fallow and un-updated for months at a time. I take my writing — and thus my blogging — very seriously, perhaps too seriously at times. I am as slow to abandon a project as I am to leave behind a faith path that no longer meets my spiritual needs (and it took my nigh on half a decade of dilly-dallying to do that before I finally dropped the Catholic label and admitted to myself what everyone else already knew).

Discovering Druidry

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I have, like others before me, discovered that Blogger now hosts "pages"... and I've finally broken down and decided to play with this feature to see what it has to offer — a longer biography, perhaps, or a list of useful books and resources? Links to popular and interesting past posts, maybe one or two longer essays of general interest? If others have any ideas, please don't hesitate to share! Eventually these pages will appear as links (in a relatively boring format, until I can tweak things) just below the header. For now, please enjoy my first page, Discovering Druidry, which serves as a kind of combination memoir and overview of my personal approach to the threefold, interweaving Druid Path. I have shared it below as a post on its own, but it will also be permanently available here. (Also, I'm honored and excited to see that Philip Carr-Gomm stumbled across it today and quoted it in his blog! Thanks so much, Philip!)

In the beginning, I was a wild child, a woodsy child, a child who could concentrate all of my attention on holding perfectly still so as not to startle the robin in the grass. I could disappear into the tense air of rapt attention, forget my own little body completely as my eyes widened and my breath stilled. Once, the robin's twitching eyes turned towards me, and I thought I heard it whisper... Cheer-up. Cheer-up, calmly, almost with amusement, you know, I can see you.

That was when I was a very little girl. As sometimes happens, eventually I grew up and stopped listening so closely to the world, to the landscape and the wilderness. It would be years before I rediscovered the rapture of stilled breath or the ecstasy, the going-out-ness, of listening closely and attending with reverence to sacred nature. Druidry would restore my sense of connection and intimacy with the natural world; it would open me to new ways of living with creativity and wisdom, playfulness and respect; it would bring me home to myself, to this person dwelling in my own particular body in my own particular place in a vast landscape infused with Spirit. Druidry was a home-coming for me, as so many Pagans and Witches before me have described their own rediscoveries. One day, I would look into the eyes of the world and discover — like some startled scullery maid or the only daughter of a widower out of a fairy tale — my real destiny wearing a strange new face, a face of beauty and dignity, but smiling at me with the same old familiar affection.

But first, I had to learn about poetry.

Secrets of the Spring

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I am so incredibly bad at keeping secrets.

By which I mean, I'm quite good at it... but usually it requires some kind of sound-proof booth. Nothing gets out. And I mean, nothing. Not a peep.

So think of these past few weeks here at Meadowsweet & Myrrh as a kind of metaphorical sound-proof booth into which I've stepped as exciting potential projects percolate in my brain. Imagine me stepping into this booth and drawing closed the door behind me with that satisfying ssthwumphsshhh... then hunkering down to work at a nice, wide wooden desk, scraps of paper and photographs sprawled everywhere, with scissors and glue and paintbrushes and bits of wire and, yes, gods forbid, perhaps even a little bit of glitter I think. And every once in a while, I'll look up from my intensity and reverie... and what you will see is a pantomime of crazy, as I shout and wave my hands in happy frenzy and maybe sing a little song... while other times, you might witness my little freak-outs of stress and frustration, my paper-cuts and my bottles of glue tipping over and spilling sticky, gooey translucent ick over the gorgeous wooden desktop and pretty much just getting everywhere. Hence the need for sound-proofing. If I hadn't stepped into my little booth, by now you would all be privy to a few really joyous, really cool bits of news... and not a few unsavory tantrums.

Suffice it to say, I hope soon my spontaneous spasms of inspiration will eventually subside into something workable and soon this blog will return to its usual, regularly-updating schedule. But be forewarned, it seems this happens almost every spring: my energy demands that I be out and away from the computer, planning and plotting the next fabulous year in my ever-glowing life of homebody adventure and dancing gratitude. This spring-to-be so far has seen Jeff with a broken foot, my Cu Gwyn drugged up and groggy at the vet after his little snippety-snip, my apartment snapped up by a future tenant with permission from my landlord to begin the process of packing and moving (fat-lotta-help Jeff will be on that one). I have painted rooms, I have rearranged furniture, I have made phone calls and set up careful budget plans. I have (hold your breath!) gotten along exceedingly well with my mother (who, though she might fight like hell with me when it's between the two of us, is also the first one with her claws out and her teeth bared when it's me against the rest of the world).

And all the while, I have been praying and listening and contemplating, and the gods have been near, whispering in the winds and laughing in the branches and slipping along the slowly-melting icicles like late afternoon sunlight. I do not like when I read people's blogs and they say something like, "Sorry for not updating, but life has gotten too busy for Spirit." Rest assured, my lovably languishing readers, it is Spirit that has gotten too busy for me these days, and these past few weeks have been a bottleneck as all the animals and egregores I have made here in my little sound-proof booth have rushed headlong for the open door at once and gotten stuck half-in, half-out, with all their mouths panting open and all their tails wagging.

Ah, but let me not give anything away just yet! Bare with me a little longer as I pretend life is the same old dull and cold of winter and spring hasn't crept up behind me like a poet in dark. Brigid's eyes are smiling into the back of my neck, and I'm bending down to concentrate on the tasks at hand. I have yoga to practice, and bathtubs to wash, and furniture to move, and secrets to keep, and miles to go before I sleep...

Peace-Making, Despair & Resolution

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I will finish my book manuscript.

I will, in fact, begin my book manuscript. And I will finish it. This year.

That is my resolution. And it's a difficult one, because I've been wanting to write this book since... well, since forever, it seems. And yet, there's always something standing behind me, as if looking over my shoulder, throwing a shadow across the page. I might call it fear — fear to turn back to look over the past several years and delve deeply into the frustration and loneliness that brought me to this place, or fear to share this part of me in a form that strangers and, worse yet, family members might freely peruse, giving perhaps only cursory thought to it, not understanding. O yes, there's the old fear of misunderstanding skulking there. But I think the truth is, what I'm really afraid of is what I might ask of others. I'm afraid of asking others to face despair.

Because in some ways, that's the worst of what I might do. There was a moment — a moment that now lingers in my memory like a haunted hillside where no one ever goes anymore and the stone footprints of some forgotten foundation lie half-hidden in the overgrown weeds, outlining where the ancient house once stood — there was that moment. When I rested quietly beneath the crabapple tree and willed my body to dissolve into mud, willed the worms and flies to turn over my flesh into compost, willed the rain to wash the pulpy heart muscle from its cage of bone so that I would be empty, so that I could empty myself finally, once and for all, into the world. That was despair. And it was, in some ways, beautiful. In some ways, like a surrender, a submission to the force of life and spirit that kept this mass of molecules and neural twingeing cohering in form when everything else seemed to have dropped away. God was not there. Love had not saved me; it had only intensified my sense of longing and separation, my impotence. I cannot choose, I am not free. Let me dissolve, let me give myself up to this tragic beautiful mess of hungry nature... so that my love might, somewhere, do somebody some good. Echoes.

First, you have to love something that much, you have to want something like peace (or God) with your entire being — and I don't mean the "rest in peace" kind of escape from responsibility and pain, but the active, squirming interconnection of creation that throbs through everything. You have to want it so much that you would die in order to accomplish it, or just to get out of its way and let it happen. And then, you have to know that it doesn't matter, that it's too big for you, that you are, either way, too small and careless and fragile. Because that is love: love is touching something bigger than you, too big for you to control. If you cannot touch that hugeness and feel your life like a flicker of sardonic laughter on the edge of chaos, then it isn't love. If you do not reach out with all of your ridiculously insignificant being and seek for it knowing full well your ineptitude and failures, it isn't love. It isn't love, if it doesn't drive you to despair.

This is not some teenage-angst love poem. It's not that kind of despair. It's the despair of ecstatic helplessness, the utter out-going of surrender. You cannot live your life this way, and so you don't. You give it up — and yet somehow, it goes on anyway. Even your life doesn't need you. I made a resolution then, too, that I would eat and drink and work to pay for shelter, and I would wait. I would let my life go on, if that's what it insisted on doing. I would stand up from under the crabapple tree and go home, and I would keep the body fed and healthy, I would exercise and think and breathe and meditate and write (because these things were a necessary discipline), and besides that I would simply wait. I knew who would win out in the end, after all; suicide by living well is still suicide. There were days when I thought maybe this was something like what Christ had felt (or Jesus the historical person, if that's all he was, some poor sod who'd had his body broken on account of his for-so-loving the world): wanting, whatever the cost, for my existence to contribute even one minute particular to the overwhelming Divine Loveliness of Being, and more than that, wanting painfully to just Not Screw It Up.

And somewhere in that despair, I found freedom. Not go-kill-some-foreign-jerks-who-object-to-imperial-capitalism-to-protect-our-freedom kind of freedom. Not even freedom the way I'd always thought I had it all along, that freedom of free will, the freedom to think and experience thinking, to be aware and to experience self-awareness. No, I found a freedom that exists within the tension of Perfect Will and Perfect Love, within the paradox of that loneliness of being a being who longs to unite with Being, and that loneliness of being a being who is already and has always been united with Being. And it is because of that freedom that I can believe in peace, in the possibility of pacifism as peace-making, as creativity that weaves a world of beauty and integrity and breathless, messy Spirit.

And so I've been trying for a while now to write a book about peace. My blog posts last June (and recent articles published in Sky Earth Sea) are ways that I have tiptoed around the idea, trying to work up my courage. But the truth is, I do not know a way to peace-making except through real love, and so too through real despair. (The man who invented the peace sign says he wanted to evoke the image of a person holding their hands outstretched in despair, the peasant before the firing squad.) And the idea that I might not be capable of writing a book that can give to someone this necessary love of existence, of being, of Spirit, is hardly terrifying at all compared to the possibility that I just might succeed, even the least little bit, and suddenly find that what I have given is something painful and heart-dissolving and... awful. Can we make peace without experiencing despair? Can we skim the surface and come away mostly unscathed but still better for it and ready with our hands clean and our tongues ready? (Can I even make any kind of sense to people when I'm bogged down by poetry, rhetoric and convoluted sentence structures?)

And then there is the part of me that feels (please, Pagans, forgive the Old Testament reference) like Job after the game is done — a bit of me that is scarred over and will probably always carry a certain amount of resentment and hardness for what I went through, a part that might not ever completely heal or cease mourning for when I thought I was innocent, when I was not yet burned up. There are people who love me deeply now, better than I have ever been loved — but this part of me that used to really believe I deserved it and could revel in such love, that part is slower to respond and may be a permanent cynic. (And so there is also joy, the disbelieving shock of discovering, over and over, that love, too, comes whether you believe in it or not, that like life itself, love doesn't need your faith in order to be real.)

But peace-making isn't about being joyful or feeling good all the time. And if I made a resolution once, I can do it again. So I'm giving myself a year, a year to write the book I'm afraid to write, a year to churn out whatever terrible drivel and agonizing truth might be left over lingering in my skin from that afternoon under the crabapple tree. This year.

This year. I will begin my book manuscript.

And I will finish it.

Announcing: Prayer for Peace Giveaway Winners!

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Before I announce the three winners of Meadowsweet & Myrrh's first-ever (and hopefully not the last) Prayer for Peace Giveaway, I want to thank absolutely everyone who entered the drawing over the past several weeks. I received emails from readers all over the world, and it warms my heart to see how many folks out there are working for peace in their daily lives and reaching out in unique and amazing ways to help resist violence and indifference. Thank you, all, for reading, sharing, and engaging in the creative art of peace-making!

I must admit that, at first, I was tempted to weight the drawing towards those folks who have been active readers of this blog in the past, continuing to share their thoughts and ideas in the comments and helping to make this such a thriving and challenging little online community. But then, I am just as grateful for the newcomers and one-time readers as I am for the "old-timers" and familiar faces. The more we work to spread kindness, compassion and creative pacifism in our daily lives, the more we will continue to encounter the strangers that live on the edges of our awareness. These chance encounters with the Other are as much moments of potential peace-making as the daily grind of engaging family, friends and coworkers in honorable, loving ways. And so, in the end, I decided to let chance roll the dice, and with the help of the completely-truly-random List Randomizer, I selected the names of our three winners out of the internet-ether.

And those winners are: Natrina Lawson, Lori Maddox, and Edie Hansen!

Congratulations Edie, Lori and Natrina! Within the next few days, I'll be sending your way a complimentary set of handmade prayer-beads, along with a copy of the Peace of the Three Realms meditation! I hope you enjoy working with these beads and exploring themes of peace, creativity and love in your daily practice — remember: we can change the world with the stories we tell!



To everyone else, thank you again for entering! In the future, I'm hoping to host more drawings for prayer-beads (potential ideas at the moment include: a monthly blog post/essay contest on themes of peace, pacifism, honor and justice, art or poetry contests, and coordinated group rituals).... so please come back and visit, and keep your eyes peeled in the new year!

Dona Nobis Pacem

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There is no going back. We consent to our own destruction, with the passing of time, with the changing seasons, with the restless intensity of living and breathing. Above the cold concrete and glass of the city skyline, sharp-wedged forms of birds wheel and tip in the dark, blustering sky. I find myself thinking again that it takes an awful lot of courage to live in this world sometimes, knowing that winter is coming, the dark is coming, and death, too, will eventually arrive to claim us. It takes courage to release ourselves, to enter willingly into the wild dance that whirls in this liminal space between life and death, creation and destruction. In my mind, the image of birds crashing through wind currents and swift-driven clouds commingles with the image of the warrior, poised in grace on the edge of chaos. The face of that warrior is not violence, but fearlessness. And the culmination of fearlessness, the height of its realization, is peace.

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods
by Mary Oliver

I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.

This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them— I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

November 5, 2009

The Peace Globe Gallery

Dinnertime Dualism: You & Me & the Tree Makes Three

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"Imagine yourself hanging by your teeth from a tree over a cliff. Your hands can grab no branch, your feet can touch no limb. A man from below you asks a question your life depends on answering. You cannot remain silent, yet if you open your mouth, you fall to your death. What do you do?"

- Philip Toshio Sudo, zen guitar

The kids had been shouting "I fink, derefore I am.... I fink." Over and over all through dinner, a joke they didn't understand from a satirical children's book, Where's My Cow?. "What do you think that means?" I asked them. When they said they didn't know, I told them, "Guess. What might a person mean if they said they exist, because they think. Just take a guess..."

"That you know you're you because you're doing the thinking?" one of them hazarded.

"And do you think that thinking is the only way you know you exist?"

"No, you know because you can feel yourself."

"That's right — but there was a man, named Descartes, who decided he was going to question everything he absolutely could, to see what was real. So he might look at that tree outside and say, 'I think there's a tree outside because I can see it and hear the leaves rustling — but maybe my senses are wrong.' Haven't you ever seen or heard something in a dream that wasn't real? What if he was just dreaming the tree?"

"That tree?" the littlest one asked, pointing. "But there is a tree, I can see it!"

"That's right — so Descartes thought, 'Well, even if my senses are wrong, other people see the tree, too. But what if I'm also imagining the people?' You've had dreams with people in them who aren't real people, right? 'In fact,' he thought, 'what if I don't even have a body at all and I'm dreaming this whole thing, the world, my body, other people, the tree? How do I know anything at all actually exists?!' And on and on he went, questioning everything — until he got to the very end and he said, just like you did, 'Well, one thing I'm sure of: I know I exist, at least, because I'm thinking. If there's thinking going on, somebody must be doing it, and that's me!'" The kids sat and seemed to consider this, slurping their tomato soup. "Do you think he's right?"

"No," said one, "because... because I can feel I'm real, and I can go up and feel the tree."

"Do you think he's right?" Jeff asked me, one eyebrow raised.

"No," I said, turning my attention from the kids for a moment, "Because Descartes adopted a policy of radical doubt — doubting everything, even those things which he had no reason to doubt — and such absolute, unconditional doubt in everything is a form of insanity. It led him to a fundamentally dualistic view of the world, in which the mind is trapped inside itself and the world, if it exists at all, is stuck outside it with no way in."

"But the Buddhists would say differently. They'd say there is no self, only the thought," Jeff said.

"Well, yes. It's the phenomenologist's view that the senses can be trusted, that the phenomenal, perceptual world of 'intentions' and experiences is the place from which we must start, because trying to start anywhere else misses the point. The phenomenologist says Descartes went too far. The Buddhist view is that he didn't go far enough. The Buddhist would say, why stop at the self? Question the self, too, try to find the self that's doing the thinking." The kids were growing restless again, the littlest twisting in her chair to make faces at the other two. "And when you look for the self doing the thinking, you're like a dog chasing its own tail — right, guys? Going round and round and round, chasing after nothing at all..."

The kids laughed. "Until you give up! That's what most dogs do."

"Now we're talking about animals, and not about people" the littlest one piped up, "that's what I like."

Later, clearing the dishes from the table while the kids went up to brush their teeth and change into pajamas, I talked to Jeff about the differences between the Western approach to mysticism and the Eastern approach.

"Well, now," said Jeff, "I'm not a Zen Buddhist, and this is why.... 'The mouse has cut the wire. Goodbye!'"

I laughed in surprise, catching the bizarre reference to another children's book, this one by Dr. Seuss, about two people in the same room talking on the phone about how they cannot hear each other.

"I'm kidding. But that's very Zen, by accident, isn't it? They're always saying things like that..."

"It reminds me of something I just read in that book, zen guitar," and I told him the story about hanging off a cliff by the skin of your teeth, when someone asks you a life-or-death question you absolutely must answer, so that either way, you die. "I don't remember what point Sudo was trying to make — mostly because I didn't get the story, I didn't know the answer. But I know what I'd do if I was hanging desperately off a cliff and some jackass asked me a question..."

I mimed dangling by my teeth, glaring irately down at the imaginary questioner then slowly, emphatically, lifting my middle finger.

"I've been thinking.." Jeff said as he came in from reading the kids their nightly bedtime story. I continued to practice my guitar, and he closed the bedroom door quietly behind him. "Your response to the Zen riddle about hanging off the cliff — that's exactly right."

"How so?" I asked, fumbling on the strings, taking a breath and starting again.

"Well, it's creating an alternative. Your answer rejects the very assumption that there are only two options. You make your own."

"Yeah... though I was really just being snarky. But I see what you mean. And that's what Druidry teaches, too. That when faced with dualism — whether the mind-body duality of Descartes, or the phenomenologist-Buddhist duality of trusting the senses versus questioning the self — that the Druid way is to find the third, to complete the triad that pushes us to the next level where opposites are not only compromised, they're reconciled."

"And," Jeff said, "If there seems to be no third, then you create one. Just as the poet creates new meanings through metaphor and juxtaposition, by throwing together and connecting things that don't seem to be connected."

We both sat for a moment, musing, and smiling.

Setting my guitar aside for the night, I looked up at him. "Jeff... I really like being a Druid."

Song of a Daily Druid

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The October issue of Pagan Pages is up, and with it the second installment of my column, Song of a Daily Druid. This month's column begins to explore the subtleties of the Bardic way and the role that poetry can play in the spiritual life, working with the relationship between creativity and imagination and the importance of memory, experience and the physical body.

All poetry begins in the dark. In the cave of memory, the new poet lies awake, wrapped in the simple, loose-fitting shift of a sleeper, listening to the echoes of her own breathing and the whine of her own blood in her ears, the only sounds. The close stone walls are damp with her exhalations, sighs of longing or uncertainty, muffled sobs or murmured joys. She can see nothing in the darkness, not even the low ceiling above, but in that senseless obscurity her memory moves, conjuring up fleeting images of apricots, water spigots and firelight, half-heard sounds of bare running feet or the rubbing of tree branches against brick. Sometimes the dank, unmoving air of the cave seems to bring her scents of autumn leaves rotting in the riverbed, or tangled woolen yarn, or muddy earth turned over and mixed with the smell of blossoms. These memories are in her, and they are the beginning of her art. She must seek out the language—its rhythms and articulations, the shapes of its vowels, the teeth and tongue of its consonant stops—seek out the words that evoke and mirror sensation.

In the unlit recesses of the cave, her mind works as her body lies still, remembering. The small round stone rests heavy on her belly—she can feel its weight through the soft fabric and the way it rocks gently as each breath lifts it and lets it drop again. Her mind travels the stumbling, sometimes frantic pathways of the past, aflame with inspiration; she brings it back again, turns it over and over to the weight and solidity of the stone. Fire in the head, anchored in the earth. When the night is over, the waking world will come for her. She must find a way to bring poetry into being, to carry it forward, to bring it from the empty depths of the cave into the morning sunlight. To carry it like the stone: concrete, real, substantive in her hands. Light moves behind her eyes, and the stone wobbles on her solar plexus. All poetry begins this way: an image in the mind, a feeling in the gut, a moment in the dark.


(......To read more, visit Song of a Daily Druid)

Comfortable with Crazy: The Dis-ease of Trusting Truth

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"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

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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...

Pagan Values: Relating to the Wild

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If you thought my last post ended kind of abruptly, you're right! Plugging away at my discussion of pacifism, defining ideas like violence and destruction in order to talk about Just War theory and environmentalism, I hardly noticed how long and how far afield I'd gone until the clock chimed eight (metaphorically, anyway). It was time to call it a night, and leave the rest for another day. For today, actually.

When I last wrote, I'd set out to find a workable definition of "violence" that would give us some insight into the fundamental principles of pacifism and how they're reflected in the modern environmentalist movement. Opponents of pacifism would like to blur the distinction between destruction and violence and back advocates of creative nonviolence into a corner defending the straw-man view that we can somehow avoid all forms of destruction. Of course we can't, nor would we want to! But luckily, we've seen that this unsubtle approach fails to address how we actually experience the world around us. When we define violence as the rejection, denial or diminishment of the unique and meaningful individuality of being, distinct from destruction as a natural and inevitable aspect of the manifest world, we see that we can strive to avoid violence, against others and against ourselves. Cultivating honorable, reverent relationships and recognizing the utter uniqueness of all beings as meaningfully interconnected is something that we most certainly can accomplish, right here, right now. It also transforms the way we relate to the natural world, and challenges us to reconsider the initial myth of an inherently violent "human nature" at war with each other and its surroundings.

Violence Without Spirit

Our contemporary Western culture suffers from a kind of schizophrenia or sociopathy when it comes to our relationship with the natural world. Exceedingly, almost irrationally anthropocentric, we have come to view almost any check to human well-being, longevity and prolificacy as a kind of malicious rejection of our assumed right to thrive. Under a definition that mistakes all forms of destruction as forms of violence, human beings not only act violently against the wheat field, the deer and the tree; nature itself acts violently against us. The natural force and power of storms and quakes, the inhospitable landscapes of desert, jungle and tundra, even the annual withering and hibernation of winter, all of these become not merely forces of destruction with which we strive, but ways in which the natural world acts out violently. Against this violence, we assert our right to survive, aspiring to tame and control for the benefit of our species.

But reducing destruction and violence to synonyms has another effect: it confuses our perception of indwelling spirit, allowing us to ignore nature as animate and full of divinity whenever it suits us. Only today, when we have employed our knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology and other sciences to subjugate vast realms of the physical world to our needs and desires do we feel secure enough to set aside protected lands and national parks for recreation and aesthetic pleasure. In these places set-apart and roped off, we can open ourselves up to the sacredness of the natural world, we can perceive nature as something with which we might enter into relationship in a meaningful way. But outside of these designated spaces, we slip back into an attitude that treats the natural world as spiritless and empty, something which we can control and use for our own purposes.

The wild tiger is merely an amoral predator mindlessly acting on its base instinct; it can be hunted down, or protected, according to our current sentimentality. When a tiger attacks within the "safe space" of a zoo, however, we perceive it as a being capable, at least in some truncated way, of relationship and so we seek to "punish" it, as though killing the creature might serve as a lesson for other tigers or obtain justice for the victim of the attack. Likewise, we tend to react with horror to those who suggest floods and earthquakes are vengeful acts of an angry god, labeling such views superstitious and ignorant. Yet we respond with apathy or even reluctant acceptance to the pervasive ecological destruction happening around us on a daily basis. We step in to prevent it most passionately only when it mars our "national treasures" or favorite recreational spots. In this way we foster a disconnect between our perception of "wild" nature as senseless and dangerous, and "tame" nature as charming, revitalizing, and sentient only to the extent that it is also relatively safe.

As with many other attitudes of modern culture, we project these assumptions back in time onto societies quite different from our own, and draw odd conclusions. We quite rightly recognize that for most of humanity's existence, the wildness and wilderness of the natural world was a very real and constant danger. Yet we fail to grasp how our ancestors were able to relate to the wild as sentient and radiant with immanent divinity without reducing its force or controlling its power. Instead we assume that ancient peoples, surrounded as they were with danger and challenge, were themselves more prone to violence and less capable, in a milieu of fear and hardship, of developing the mindfulness necessary for peaceful, "civilized" living. The pacifist sees violence as "mindless" because it involves the willful forfeit of mindful choice to respect and honor unique Spirit in all beings. But a mistaken view of human nature as inherently violent attributes that same mindlessness to the complete absence of our ability to choose. The closer we come to nature, in other words (either by looking back in history to when our ancestors lived entrenched in it, or by sloughing off the social assumptions and restrictions that keep us civilized and safe), the closer we come to our own inner mindlessness. When we leave the confines of the zoo, we once again become ruthless predators. Like the natural world itself, we are wild, dangerous and a bit senseless at our core. At our very heart beneath the layers of civilizing influence, implies this view, we lack the capacity to make mindful choices, to relate "face-to-face" with other beings.

Old Stories of the Hunt

As a pacifist who believes that people are not only capable of peaceful, reverent relationship with one another but supremely and deeply suited to such relationship, I don't accept the view that our core is empty of empathy and spirit. Rather, it seems to me that the closer we come to nature--our own and that of the manifest world in which we live--the more capable we become of real connection and understanding. I suspect that our ancestors, living in more intimate contact with wildness and wilderness on a daily basis, were probably less violent than we believe them to be, perhaps even less violent than we ourselves are today. Our modern tendency to sanitize and depersonalize violence with technologies that also allow us to commit horrific acts on a massive scale can fool us into believing we live safe and peaceful lives, but this illusion only lasts as long as we can maintain our ignorance of the real consequences of violence and war.

Among ancient tribal cultures, on the other hand, life-threatening wildness and bodily conflict and destruction were always lurking at the edges of ordinary awareness. Because of this, ancient peoples learned to build relationships of honor and appreciation with the potentially destructive forces and powers of the wilderness, both outside and within themselves. Their stories and myths can show us even today a way of relating to the wild with reverence instead of fear, affirming a mindful relationship with Spirit rather than a senseless battle of instincts. These stories speak to us from a time when human beings remembered, recognized and imagined our roots as deeply entwined in the natural world, when we had only just come into our power as a species capable of cleverness and creativity. A time when we still appreciated these traits in ourselves as an aspect of our own unique individuality within an expansive and inclusive world, and not as qualities that set us apart from and above the world.

From the Cheyenne, for instance, comes the myth of the Great Race, a contest among all creatures to determine who would eat whom. The story goes that long ago, the buffalos, who were huge and strong, used to eat people instead of the other way around. But the people cried out that this was unfair, and so the buffalo proposed there be a race between the four-legged and the two-legged animals to decide the proper relationship among them. The buffalo chose the strongest and fastest of their kind to contend. The people, meanwhile, enlisted the help of the birds of the air who, although only two-legged like the people, outstripped the buffalo on their swift wings. From then on, people hunted buffalo for food, though they would not consume the beard of the buffalo because it was a reminder that once they had been the prey.

Among the Blackfoot, there is another legend about the hunting of buffalo. In this story, no one could induce the buffalo to fall to their deaths over the edge of a cliff, and so the people were slowly starving and wasting away. In the kind of desperation that gives way to jest, one young woman promised that she would marry one of the buffalo, if only they would jump; and soon they were running and tumbling down the cliff, while a great bull, master of the buffalo, came to claim her hand in marriage. The girl's father, outraged and afraid, went on a journey to rescue her and bring her back to her family, but he was soon discovered and trampled to death by the herd. As the girl mourned, the bull pointed out that such was the sadness of the buffalo, too, when they watched their relatives plunge to their deaths in order to feed the people. "But I will pity you," said the bull, "and make you a deal. If you can bring your father back to life, I will let you go, so that you may return to your family." And so the girl found a shard of bone from her father's shattered remains and sang a secret song that restored her father to life. The bull honored his agreement, but said, "Because you have shown that your people have a holy power capable of bringing the dead to life again, we will show you our song and dance. You must remember this dance, so that even though you hunt us and eat us, you will afterwards restore us to life again." This is the story the Blackfoot tell about how the Buffalo Dance began, with its priests dressed in buffalo robes and wearing bulls' heads shuffling along and singing the continuation of life for the massive beasts.

In both these stories, we see a new relationship with the natural world, one that respects its wildness and potential danger without rejecting meaningful relationship. The people who told these stories were buffalo hunters, in relationship with the animal not as domestic stock but as great, untamed creatures perfectly capable, through death or deprivation, of hurting the people who depended on them. It would be easy to say that these legends simply serve, like our modern justifications, to excuse violence as inherent or necessary. From the perspective of Just War theory*, the hunting of animals for food can be considered a form of "just" violence. The needs of the people and the practical benefits of killing outweigh whatever negative consequences the people might suffer, as well as the needs or desires (including the desire to live) that the animals being hunted might have. When an animal has the power and potential to be dangerous and even life-threatening to a human being, the case seems even more obvious; after all, there is no reasoning or other "peaceful" means of reconciling with a senseless animal. Such stories of contest and exchange might amuse or reassure us, but for the most part they're just superstition, overlaying the reality of pragmatic survival.

But what if instead we take these ancient myths at face-value? In Just War theory, the enemy or opponent does not consent to his own destruction, but at the heart of these myths is the awareness of nature, as well as people, as capable of consent and choice. The buffalo himself takes initiative, proposing conditions of equal exchange and just, honorable relationship with human beings. He consents to the terms of the great race or the marriage, accepts the consequences and even, in both stories, demonstrates empathy with human suffering. In the Blackfoot legend, especially, through intermarriage human beings and buffalo come into more intimate understanding, recognizing their common "holy power" to create new life through music and ritual. These stories are not a rejection of "face-to-face" relationship, but a celebration of it. Rather than a prize wrestled from the flesh of unwilling prey, the survival and fruitful life of human beings becomes a gift, in which nature gives of itself by its own consent with the understanding that we, too, will give of ourselves in return. And so, even though the end result is the same (the people still hunt and kill the buffalo in order to survive), a potential act of violence is transformed into an act of mutual empowerment and renewal.

This transformation is what practical pacifism can help us to realize. It puts us in touch with our awareness of relationship, and where there is relationship there is the possibility of generous giving and of gratitude, even in the most difficult, dangerous or destructive circumstances. To hunt a species to extinction dishonors the gift of life that creature has given us, but it also means we rob ourselves of that gift. When we diminish others, we also diminish ourselves. But when we see ourselves as connected to and concerned with the prosperity and protection of others at our most fundamental level, we become more care-full in how we act and react, how we live in and respond to the world around us. We can longer turn a deaf ear or blind eye to others; we learn to listen to them closely, to reach out to them in connection and communication, so that we might know what gifts they offer and how best to honor those gifts in return. At its simplest, pacifism asks us to care for other beings and preserve them from the callousness and diminishment of violence. For when we empower and appreciate others, when we recognize in others the capacity for choice and consensual relationship, we also empower and elevate ourselves and honor our own potential.




*To be fair, Just War theory is rarely if ever actually applied to anything other than literal warfare among humans; however, its implications about the nature of violence and our relationship with potentially destructive forces can be more widely considered and applied.

Pagan Values: Violence, Destruction & The Difference

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Is it really the case, as I claimed earlier, that there is no equivalent to the "just war" theory when it comes to understanding our relationship with the natural world? With a moment's thought we can soon list lots of occasions when an individual or group of people have had to hunt or harvest, plow fields for food or cut down trees for shelter, in order to survive. To say that people are not sometimes "at war" with or struggling against their local environment treads dangerously close to the naive view of nature as benign, beneficent, even tame.

The truth is, the natural world is anything but tame; it is wild, it is the epitome of wildness and wilderness. Forces of the natural world--the ferocity of a wildfire, the upheaval of an earthquake, the very barrenness of a desert or the pummeling pressure of a river's relentless current--can be sources of terrific destruction and obstacles against which we struggle every day. Meanwhile, the "red in tooth and claw" reality of predator and prey certainly seems founded on an inherent relationship between violence and survival. How can we choose to live by principles of pacifism and creative nonviolence in light of this wildness? How can we apply pacifism to environmentalism--let alone to our everyday, social and political lives--when violence appears ubiquitous, especially in the natural world?

Violence in Human/Nature

Really, it has always been the apparent violence of nature as a whole--more than that of humanity alone--that has been the greatest stumbling block for the philosophy of nonviolence. Most arguments against pacifism as an unrealistic ideal only rely partially on the actual history of human violence; after all, there are also many examples in human history of our capacity for empathy, kindness and near-infinite adaptability. Opponents of pacifism more often use nature as the best evidence against its practical realization. Projecting back in time an imagined pure or fundamental "human nature" imbued with all the base self-interest of the animal world and drenched in the blood and strife of continuous struggle against competitors for the scarce resources needed to survive, they argue that people simply cannot overcome an innate tendency towards destruction. The closed system of the earth itself means there is only a finite amount of land, food and other resources to go around. We continually find ourselves in conflict, destroying when there is no more room to create, surviving and thriving at the expense of our rivals and our prey. Even those rare individuals, the argument goes, who can overcome or mitigate violence do so through suppression or denial of their own nature. But this requires extraordinary discipline and strength of will not available to most of us. Pacifism might be an option for the inhumanly committed with unwavering focus, but as a general goal for the average person it just doesn't work.

The flaw in this view is that it takes for granted that destruction is synonymous with violence, and where the former exists the latter must also be present. To kill a neighbor to gain his prosperous fields is, from this perspective, hardly different from the act of eating the harvest of those fields, or hunting down a stag, or chopping down a tree to build shelter. In all these situations, one life is destroyed for the sake of another. We might say that killing a fellow human being is worse because, by some unspoken measure, human beings are better or more important than a stag, a tree or a field of wheat. But this objection relies on a rather flimsy judgment of value. To make a distinction between violence against human beings and violence against non-humans misrepresents our own intuitive relationship with destruction. As soon as we acknowledge that humans are not inherently "better" than the rest of the natural world--something many Pagans find obvious already--we lose what ground we've gained towards a nonviolent philosophy and find ourselves again faced with the overwhelming presence of destruction, and therefore (supposedly) violence in nature and humankind.

Natural Empathy & Our Need for Destruction

The more appropriate and useful distinction that we need to make is, I believe, between mere destruction and violence. That is, between destruction as a natural and inevitable aspect of the manifest world; and violence as an intentional form of destructive dishonor or irreverence towards the unique individuality of being. Not only does this subtle shift circumvent the false dichotomy of humanity-versus-nature, but it reflects the difference between destruction and violence that we experience intuitively and reveals exactly what it is about violence that makes it so damaging and undesirable.

As self-aware social animals, we human beings have developed a natural tendency towards empathy, evident even in early childhood. This ability to connect imaginatively and emotionally with the "other"--not just with other people, but any being that we perceive as animate and aware, from pets, to plants, to landscapes and weather--allows us to function well in supportive communities, but it also means that we feel a visceral discomfort when witnessing others in pain. When cornered by our own urgent needs or fears, however, our capacity for self-consciousness and imagination can come to serve violence rather than empathy, encouraging us to invent convincing justifications for inflicting pain on others. These justifications--self-defense, punishment, deterrence, and preemptive force, to name a few--hold in common a typical diminishment of the "other" into a being less worthy of our empathy, less capable of suffering, against which we can direct destructive force guilt-free.

Sometimes this diminishment portrays the other as a less-than-complete being, not merely an animal but a vicious, repulsive, uncomplicated thing that cannot be trusted to live peacefully and behave civilly, and must therefore be either contained or exterminated. Other times, we diminish the other by viewing it as an abstract destructive power against which we have every right to strive for life. The mugger with the knife looming up out of the dark is as impersonal as the tornado or the virus that threatens us, and we react with a similarly reflexive defense. The criminal condemned to execution is, as Ani DiFranco says, "a symbol, not a human being; that way they can kill [him], and say it's not murder, it's a metaphor." An excellent example of diminishment comes from Jared Diamond's book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal:

[I]n 1982 one of Australia's leading news magazines, The Bulletin, published a letter by a lady named Patricia Cobern, who denied indignantly that white settlers had exterminated the Tasmanians. In fact, wrote Ms. Cobern, the settlers were peace-loving and of high moral character, while Tasmanians were treacherous, murderous, warlike, filthy, gluttonous, vermin-infested, and disfigured by syphilis. Moreover, they took poor care of their infants, never bathed, and had repulsive marriage customs. They died out because of all those poor health practices, plus a death wish and a lack of religious beliefs. It was just a coincidence that, after thousands of years of existence, they happened to die out during a conflict with the settlers. The only massacres were of settlers by Tasmanians, not vice versa. Besides, the settlers only armed themselves in self-defense, were unfamiliar with guns, and never shot more than forty-one Tasmanians at one time.

Such justifications, listed emphatically one after another, bely the utter absurdity of such attempts at diminishment. As Cobern's explanations grow more and more bizarre and unlikely (the Tasmanians had a "death wish"? the settlers "never shot more than forty-one" at a time?), what becomes obvious is her desperate need to prove that the deaths of the Tasmanians were, one way or another, inevitable.

Choice & Consent

Why this desperate need to prove inevitability? Because destruction really is inevitable, unavoidable. It is, in essence, simply another aspect of creation, that which breaks down before it can build up, making room for the new and letting the old and stale lapse back into the void of potential. We recognize this basic fact at gut-level, so deep is this relationship between destruction and creation, dark and light, winter and spring. Destruction is not always undesirable; sometimes it can even be a welcome relief. And so, what every form of diminishing the other has in common is our need to justify violence by transforming it into a form of destruction.

These justifications would not work so well, or even be necessary, if we did not already understand on an intuitive level that destruction and violence are not the same. We would not need to deny the relevance of empathy and reverence, to deny our own active participation in destruction, if we did not sense on some level that these things make a difference. What we already know is that some deaths, some break-downs, some sources of pain and suffering, are not inevitable. What we already know is that, unlike destruction, violence is always a choice. It is a choice to destroy, to induce pain, to allow our own needs and passions to overshadow those of the other and to force our will upon others without their consent. The word "violence" itself comes from the Latin violentia, which translates as vehemence or impetuosity. Both words suggest the application of force without thought or consideration, without empathy for the suffering it might cause. Related is the verb violare, which gives rise to the English "violate" and means "to treat with violence or irreverence, to dishonor."

When trying to understand a philosophy of pacifism or nonviolence, therefore, we can define the word "violence" broadly, without making the absurd claim that all destruction should or can be avoided. Personally, I define "violence" as: a rejection or denial of the unique and meaningful individuality of a being. Rejecting that another being has a unique and meaningful individual existence independent from our own can lead us to impose our wills or passions on them by force. Such force can be physical and cause physical injury or even death, but it can also be emotional, psychological or even spiritual. In her book Living With Honour, Emma Restall Orr talks about the Welsh and Gealic words for "face," and invokes the notion of "being face-to-face" as at the heart of what honor means in Celtic society. An act of violence against another is an act of dishonor, refusing to come face-to-face, diminishing and disempowering others, alienating and isolating them and denying them relationship with us, denying our interconnection.

We can also act violently towards ourselves; this kind of self-violence is more often emotional or spiritual than physical and so less often acknowledged. But if we remember the definition of violence, then we realize that any time we reject our own individuality as unique and meaningful, any time we deny our capacity for creative engagement with the world, we commit an act of spiritual violence against our own beings. This diminishment of our own being is why we so often seek to justify violence, insisting that it is actually inevitable or necessary destruction in which we had no choice or active participation. When we have the capacity and opportunity to choose, and yet forfeit that choice thoughtlessly, rejecting our capacity to act as a unique individual "face-to-face" with another, we act violently not only against the other, but against ourselves. For every act of violence, both victim and violator become "faceless," both are dishonored and diminished.

Shaman & Priest: How America's Cultural Landscape Shapes Its Religious Institutions

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This morning, I was up at quarter of five, a good half-hour before my alarm. My bladder full, my abdomen cramped and my lower back stiff with tension, I shuffled to the bathroom to begin my daily ablutions and stem the oncoming moontide. I steadied myself, blinking awake, washed my face and hands, brushed my hair and bound it into a tightly-wound bun pinned high against my skull. Not a hair loose, an earring glinting in each ear. I slipped on the smooth black slacks and polo shirt, the work uniform, the ceremonial costume. After a quick bowl of cereal and some juice, I sat in the dark living room, my only light a flickering candle amongst the clutter on the coffee table. I sat still. I gazed into the flame. I prayed for heat, for the warm fingers of the coming day to work the tension out of my body, to loosen the muscles of my womb around its loss of lifeblood, to soothe the ache. Then, as the dawn beyond my window slowly lightened, I grabbed my apron and my name tag, threw on a sweater and headed for the door. Stalking the twilight of early morning, slinking through intersections, startling the rabbits still grazing, dark round figures shivering in wet front lawns.... I was off to the hunt.

The Hunter & The Farmer

For several years now, I have thought of waiting tables as a hunter-gatherer kind of job. Each morning, I stalk my prey at their usual watering hole, serving up coffee and eggs with a sleek and casual smile; I am quiet, unobtrusive; I bide my time. My earnings are gifts from the gods of generosity and good luck, coming in unpredictable floods and trickles. I gather the silvery coins from the tabletops, I fold the bills into my apron pocket, and I move on again, cleaning, preparing for the breakfast rush, the lunch rush, the next herd to come and go. I'm no agriculturalist. Most of my houseplants are scraggly at best, clinging to life despite my ineptitude and reaching for those few hours of sunlight that slip in among the surrounding apartment buildings looming tall on all sides. My parents would have liked to think they were preparing me for a steady-income career, what with my good grades in high school, a solid list of extracurricular activities, distinguished honors at the top of my college class. But in all this cultivation, they never quite understood: I was hunting, always hunting, stalking my passions, following my bliss, lingering long hours in the familiar territories of my needs and desires, hoping to catch the scent. And so, when money became necessary, I found a job that let me hunt it down, working for the customers rather than the company, relying on my skill, speed and patience to get me what I need.

Recently, Jeff and I discussed the nature of serving as a kind of entrepreneurial career. Although waiting tables is usually a low-income working-class job, many contractors and consultants these days can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each year taking on projects and hiring out their services to individual clients, juggling several commitments at once, balancing workload with financial goals. With global online networking and increased mobility and travel, people rarely spend a lifetime working the same job at a single company. They're far more likely to change careers, holding three to five different jobs over the course of their lives, while continuing their education or pursuing hobbies that can lead to small business opportunities. The days of gradual progress up a single corporate ladder, putting down roots, prizing stability and rewarding loyalty... these days are giving way to the hunt. The cultivator has again become predator, the agriculturalist has become quick-witted, light-footed. Risk and fortune hum taut between the skilled hands of the hunter, drawing his bow and holding his breath.

The Shaman & The Priest

Is it any surprise, then, that the priestly orders of our familiar organized religions are giving way once again to the prominence of shamanistic traditions and individual spiritual experience? Joseph Campbell, in his book The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, writes that in agriculturally-based societies,

There is a rigid relationship not only of the individual to his fellows, but also of village life to the calendrical cycle; for the planters are intensely aware of their dependency upon the gods of the elements. One short period of too much or too little rain at the critical moment, and a whole year of labor results in famine. Whereas for the hunter--hunter's luck is a very different thing.

To plow, to plant, to cultivate and harvest, at precisely the right time, in obedience to the seasons and the cycles of weather--such practices require the discipline of a community, and the knowledge of tradition, of the cycles and seasons of the past. The religious life speaks to and reflects this cultural structure. Ordained priests carry on the traditions of the previous generation, preserving the knowledge of the changing moods of the gods, remembering the appropriate rites and rituals needed to please, praise and appease them. The priest is the shepherd of the flock, the good farmer cultivating and reaping souls.

But the shaman--the shaman, like the hunter, goes out into the wilderness, alone, to seek her own truths. Practiced skills and passed-on techniques may be helpful, but in the end, what matters is the moment, the immediate presence of the here-now through which Spirit, the prey, is moving. No amount of community support, structure or tradition can replace her personal experiences, her individual capacity for attention and response, receptivity and creative activity. In a hunter-gatherer culture, people's spiritual lives naturally echo the needs of their mundane lives, shrugging off organized tradition in search of meaningful personal experiences. The individual, the present moment, the activity of the hunt itself--these become nodes of meaning in a chaotic, often unpredictable world.

Warrior, Shaman, Lover, Queen: A Druid Priestess

While I was at work waiting tables this morning, stiff and flinching against the noise and fluorescent lights, my boyfriend sent me the following email:

In my dream just now, you had climbed up a little way into a tree, and were wearing a gorgeous white and cream colored dress covered with flowers, and white flowers were in your hair, and the garden and the air and the light all around were like the perfect afternoon of an impressionist painting, and you said to me, The central question is, 'Is Druidry Earthly?'

Is Druidry Earthly? The stereotype of the old, bearded Druid priests in white robes, collecting mistletoe from the oak with a golden sickle according to some mysteriously complicated astronomical timing, catching the harvested plant in a white cloth so that it would not touch the ground... such an image might raise some doubt. And yet, even the structure and tradition of organized religion grows and evolves out of culture, out of our relationship with the land and its seasons. The growers, the farmers, are no less connected to the earth than the wild huntsman tracking deer through the woods. The vision of me, dressed in the impractical white of purity, suspended among the branches of the tree like the lightning-seeded mistletoe itself, gives me pause. Am I earthly? Do I sometimes try too hard to be that ideal image of the priestess? What is my connection to the land, to the community and to the past? But the dream also makes me smile, for it reminds me of another vision, one that I myself had several years ago during meditation when I first embarked on this Druid path:

I was wandering through a dense woods, the trees all thin and straight and touched with the bright, young green of full spring. Entering a clearing, I sat down in the mud and grass, spreading my gray-green dress around my folded legs. I stretched out my arms, feeling the wind raking my unbound hair, and felt--for an instant--the fiery blue lines of energy, interwoven connection spinning out in all directions around me, dodging and twining through the trees, opening to the sky, sinking deep into the earth and arcing all the way to the sun.

There is room in Druidry, I think, for the shaman and the priest. In a culture that still clings to the social traditions of agricultural society and dismisses hunter-gatherer lifestyle as inherently "primitive" even while adopting some of its characteristics, Druidry can find a place of balance and harmony, acknowledging everything priesthood and shamanism have to offer. Individual experience, the intensity of the moment, the essential nature of creativity and spontaneity and play; and the deep roots of tradition, the ancestors, the accumulation of wisdom and meaning, the vital participation in community. The Druid priestess can be lover and warrior, shaman and queen. She can weave these roles together. She can become something new.

Ode to Finitude

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What follows is a poem I wrote just after completing the first draft of my previous post, which I hadn't been at all satisfied with. The title of the piece is rather self-explanatory. I hope you enjoy, and that you've been taking full and joyful advantage of April as National Poetry Month!

Ode to Finitude

Limit, you goddess, daughter of
        Form, overcome me, overtake me
        again with sweet extremity!
Rope me to the glory of your
        monstrous bones, rigging
        for the dancing world--
I will dance, my feet hard and rolling
        because I have feet; I will
        slap my hands to your gusty
rhythm, because I have hands; I will sing
        from a quivering throat, vibration
        mother of voice, because
I have voice--I will praise you, my
        maligned divinity, my shapely
        sublime, Limit, I will run
my tongue along your edges,
        I will kiss your every limb,
        for I have tongue, lips and limbs,
my own sweet utter skin, I have
        a wide pale body with which to
        billow before Spirit, grandmother
Mind, old Ever-Present, too ancient for
        dust. I have known her, too,
        dreaming, she is soft and fat with the dark
openness of space--but you! Limit,
        my lovely, my little boat,
        we will skip, we will go sailing
quick and bright
        over the long silent waters of the Real.

Dream the World Awake

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The idea that "life is but a dream" seems to be cropping up a lot in my life recently, and when this kind of synchronicity happens I usually try to pay attention, think carefully and keep my ears pealed. Often a growing obsession will draw me on with a certain fascination or magnetism, increasing in intensity until I reach a moment of triumph or break-through, when the struggle to comprehend resolves into an unexpected and unexpectedly easy clarity. But this time is different. Whenever someone mentions this idea that life is a dream, that we are the dreamers dreaming the world, that our goal or purpose is (or should be) to "dream the world awake"--I feel repelled, repulsed even. Far from wanting to pursue the idea, I am constantly backing away, insisting no, no it isn't; and yet, the theme keeps appearing suddenly, slipping around some corner like a stubborn ghost. So for now, I'd like to take a moment to articulate for myself--and for you, dear reader, if you care to tune in--where this sense of repulsion and objection comes from, why I feel so invested in the "realness" of this life and world. Perhaps by doing this, the reasons for this unwelcome haunting may become clearer.

Dreaming the Persistent Other

Don't get me wrong. I am not your typical secular Westerner who eagerly dismisses dreams as the randomly generated nonsense and noise of a tired brain in rehash-and-recovery mode. There is of course that problem, when comparing our existence to a dream in a culture that refuses to take dreams seriously, much like the metaphor of the amusement park ride that Bill Hicks uses in the video clip above. Such a comparison can, intentionally or merely by implication, express a certain nihilism. "It doesn't matter--it's just a ride," Bill Hicks assures us immediately after mentioning our tendency to kill off good people, those with the wisest souls and kindest intentions.

But it does matter! Doesn't it? In a dream we might experience a tragic and horrifying murder, one that has us shaking and sobbing and slobbering into our shirt sleeves, only to wake up the next morning to a real world washed with dew and full of life. It doesn't matter, it was just a dream, we breathe with relief, and smile. It wasn't real. But we can say this precisely because those dream-people, whether they die in dream or not, cease to be when the dream has ended. They have no unique or independent existence from the dream, and so in a very important sense they simply aren't real. But even the most level-headed, down-to-earth Miss Practical-Shoes might pause to phone up her brother if she dreams that he has died or fallen gravely ill; perhaps not because she believes her dream to be true or accurately reflective of reality, but maybe simply because she recognizes her brother as a unique being with an independent existence and her dream reminds her of her interest in and concern for his well-being. On the other hand, when dream-people reappear or persist from night to night, they can grow to have a semblance of independent existence. Ask any child suffering from night terrors, any grown adult struggling with recurring nightmares: the anxiety of repeated dreams can be very real, indeed, with powerful effects on life in the waking world.

The importance of the dream-world in our "real" lives increases tenfold when you believe, as I do, that dreams are a way for us to connect with aspects of ourselves and our world that we can't normally access in "ordinary consciousness" while awake. In dreams, intuitions and extrasensory perceptions take on concrete symbolic forms that we can interact with and even, potentially, influence. We may travel to places we've never been, only to arrive there the following day with a sense of familiarity. We may anticipate the needs of others, their vulnerabilities or fears, before we have consciously acknowledged them. We may even encounter nonmaterial creatures, beings of energy, emotion and thought, guides and gods, ancestors and children not yet born. In amongst the chatter and noise of our sleeping brain's reverberating chemistry, we might discover revelation and prophecy, if we are listening attentively, respectfully and with a hint of healthy incredulity. In short, it's rarely true that a dream is "just a dream," even when it is. Rather, dreams have the potential to connect us to a vast interwoven, multilayered reality that penetrates and transcends our ordinary experience as individuated material selves.

So what do people mean, exactly, when they say "life is just a dream"? Do they mean that somehow suffering and pain as we experience it in this life is illusory, unimportant, irrelevant? Even if such a view can free a person, to some extent, from his own suffering (especially if it is self-generated through fear or guilt), it is unlikely to help him cultivate compassion for the suffering of others. After all, their pain isn't real. When we wake up, we'll discover we are God, and then won't we all have a good laugh. Besides which, not only is the pain of others not real, but perhaps even the other itself is not real. Perhaps, like the people populating my dreams, I'm making you all up and one day I'll wake up to discover that I am God dreaming the World dreaming Me (and I've been talking to myself in my sleep). In which case, all the more reason to shrug off strife, pain and death when it happens to other people and focus primarily on my own happiness and self-fullfilment. I might as well make it as enjoyable a dream as possible, right? And thusly whither away concepts like self-restraint, sacrifice, altruism and even love beyond that of self-gratification.

Dreaming the Creative Act

Granted, most people who talk about the world-as-dream have, I think, a more sophisticated concept in mind. If I understand it correctly, the metaphor is meant to illuminate our role as "dreamers," that is, creators of our own realities. We have all experienced in dream the strange freedom from ordinary causality: a painting we see in our dream reminds us of our old childhood family farm, and suddenly we find ourselves again at the farm itself, just as we remember it. Or, we want to get to the theater faster, and suddenly we are not running but flying, gliding, leaping buildings. People morph into other people and back again. We play out a scene as we simultaneously watch ourselves playing it out from some external perspective. These are all common-place in the dream-world. The usual laws of gravity and time do not apply. And because of this freedom from physics and normal cause-and-effect, our wills are raw with power, the dream-world seems to respond readily to our stray thoughts and passing whims. Not only are we, as the dreamer asleep, creating the entire dream-world as we experience it, but even within the dream we sometimes have a sense of heightened control. Even nightmares--of being unable to run or scream, of being displaced out of context or willfully misunderstood by everyone around us--can evoke a sense of irrational lawlessness that, if only we could master it with a stronger will!, we feel sure would sway just as eagerly in our favor.

Because this is true of dreams, people who compare the "real world" and our existence in it to dreaming often strive to emphasize our ability to shape our reality, to influence it through intention and focused willpower to an extent far greater than we usually believe possible. As a philosopher-poet type myself, who has fostered a life-long love for art and creative work of all kinds, I came to my belief in the fundamentally imaginative-creative aspect of our existence many years ago. And yet, there are aspects of the world-as-dream metaphor that nag at me, striking me as sloppy or inaccurate. Besides the problems of suffering and the collective or Other that I mentioned above, if we take the world-as-dream analogy too seriously we soon run up against a major stumbling block: science.

I have written before about the relationship between science and magic, in response to the ponderings of other skeptics. The world-as-dream approach may seem to circumvent much of the conflict by suggesting that the physical "laws" of hard science, being just another aspect of our dreaming the world--are thus only as inflexible as we believe them to be. Suddenly, we are free to believe whole-heartedly and without complication in things like synchronicity, intention manifestation and mysterious action-at-a-distance. The problem with this view is that we also succeed effectively in turning science into a collective delusion, in which we all agree that free-falling objects accelerate at exactly 9.8 meters per second per second and the earth revolves around the sun rather than the reverse (though this has only been true since most of us started believing it).

Although I am far from a materialist, I do have this odd knack for befriending atheists and science geeks. Because of these friendships, over the years I have developed a tremendous respect for the scientific process of discovery and analysis, as well as an acute appreciation of its natural epistemological limits. In other words, although it may be true that science can only describe this one tiny little aspect (that of the material, physical world) of a greater transcendent reality, it proves to describe that particular aspect with surprising clarity and consistency. Much more lucidly and reliably, I would argue, than one might expect of a human species still unable to agree about things like whether yellow American cheese is yellow or actually orange. (Certainly, we can come up with all sorts of elaborate theories about a guiding superconsciousness or Spirit that sets limits on how our own chaotic willfulness ultimately manifests, but most of these prove cyclical and self-justifying, with no way of gauging their validity, likelihood or relevance.) Furthermore, because science has set for itself the goal of dealing uniquely and specifically with the physical world, and we have all experienced either directly through experimentation or indirectly through the by-products of science such as technology and medicine, to call science into question as mere delusion calls into question these experiences themselves and our ability to trust our most fundamental intuitions about the world in which we live and move and have our being.

For some, this notion is not disturbing at all. Of course we should mistrust our senses and experiences of the world; Descartes, Father of the Scientific Method, said so himself! (Although he may have only said it as a sneaky way of getting the Church off his back.) But as an artist, the thought of being so fundamentally disconnected from the physical world around me as I experience it not only frightens me, but shakes my notion of meaningful engagement to its very core. I engage with the world creatively, through writing, music and art. But as Annie Dillard points out, "an artist lives jammed in the pool of materials," even while the philosopher roams the realm of ideal forms and the mystic soars deep to the seat of fiery love and union. The shape and limit of matter, its particularities and idiosyncrasies, its movement and resistance, all of these aspects of the physical world are absolutely and utterly essential for the creative artist. One is not creative in spite of but because of them. I know and trust the power of words--and my own creative power in working with them--because I have come to respect them as having a kind of existence and life of their own, a reality that reaches beyond my own will and so can also grab hold of me and yank me suddenly beyond myself. I am not a master or maker of words, I am a friend, a companion, a lover. In the same way as a musician finds a companion in his instrument or a sculptor in her stone or clay. These things must be real at least in some sense, and we must be able to trust our experiences of them, if our creative work is to make any connection, to have any meaning.


And so, it seems to me that, even if these world-dreamers are right, even if life in this world really is "just a dream," this is one of those times when, as they say, "the only way out is through." Rather than dismiss our experiences of a stable, scientifically-comprehensible physical world as merely the self-perpetuated shared delusion of a people asleep, we must seek to engage this world deeply and passionately, cultivating attention and presence in all aspects of our lives with the playfulness, creativity and trust of children. By doing so we discover that, like our dreams themselves when we stop reducing them or explaining them away, the world will reveal to us an infinite potential for deeper connection, understanding, evolution and awakening.