New Website in the Works

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For folks still following along at home....

No, I'm not gone or giving up writing. Yes, a new website is in the works, incorporating a more permanent/static structure in addition to a blog feature to showcase my writing and share news with readers. My hope is to have the new website ready to launch by my birthday in mid-June. (Though I'm not making any promises.) Stay tuned for announcements here and on Facebook (where I also now have an author page) as the months roll by.

If you can't bear to do without me and my startling wit till then — well, that's probably something you should have a doctor take a look at. In the meantime, though, I'll still be posting fairly regularly about Pagan and Druid themes over on my wedding blog, Wedding on the Edge, along with my partner, Jeff Lilly (author of Druid Journal). I'll also be making the occasional appearance over at Pagan+Politics.

So hang in there, my friends. And in the meantime, spend some time outside making peace with cold winter and dawning spring. Many blessings, and many thanks.

"We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us."

- Joseph Campbell

The Long Goodbye: Part Four

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It seemed I had two choices before me. The Page of Wands, a young, spontaneous and energetic form that could be the very embodiment of the internet as a medium, with its attention-grabbing multimedia and almost endless opportunities for someone to make a name for herself through charisma and laughter. Or the Ten of Pentacles, embodying formality, structure and an engagement with traditional patterns of expression that could lead to the fruitful, prosperous marriage of spirit and form characterized by generosity and exchange. And the third card? The choice that was not a choice?

Making a Clean Break

Last night, I had a dream. One of those dreams so vivid and blunt, it's hard to ignore the message. One of those dreams that just feels like a metaphor, even when you're in it.

I dreamt I was a student in college again, engaged in a class discussion led by a wise old professor. Yet this professor seemed to take particular pleasure in setting me up for embarrassment and frustration. As the discussion progressed, he would often interrupt himself or students as they explained their ideas or expounded on theories, and shoot a question at me. Being a dream, I can't now remember even what the subject was — but I do know that, again and again, I felt the frustration rise as I found myself interrupted, torn out of my focus on the ideas of others as they unfolded — forced instead to stand up to prove myself to these peers, to prove myself worthy of being there to learn. It wasn't enough to attend, to listen intently and consider carefully the concepts being shared. But more frustrating was that, each time this professor interrupted the flow of conversation to challenge me to a verbal duel, he allowed only a sentence out of my mouth before he veered back again, leaving me hanging there dumb, my words decontextualized and my thoughts unfinished. It felt for all the world like a goddamned Twitter feed — one hundred forty characters was all I got.

Until at one point, I finally managed to break out of it. The next question he asked me, I found myself speaking in paragraphs. Whole arguments cascaded out of my mouth in point after point, theories backed up by evidence and examples, counter-arguments considered and deconstructed. The professor seemed impressed, asked another question to prompt me... yet I could feel something slipping. The students around me began to talk over me in their own conversations. Someone behind me snickered. Mid-sentence, the professor interrupted me again, this time to tell me, "Well, at least you've finally demonstrated that you're not a complete idiot, which is a bit of a surprise. Some of your ideas were actually pretty sound. Of course, you're horribly boring, so boring that your dullness itself is offensive and detracts from the values of your ideas no matter what they are. You were more attractive when you weren't saying anything."

The Long Goodbye: Part Three

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The Seven of Cups indicates the paradox of choice, and the difficulty of choosing when too many opportunities and options seem to beckon. Unable to decide which course it would be best to pursue, we starve and waste away like Buridan's ass paralyzed into inaction by an unpredictable future. The card was telling me what I already knew, what I had been experiencing for the past few months as I tried to juggle an increasing number of obligations while fighting to keep down my frustration at not making very much progress on any of them.

Obligation and Divination

Throughout my life, I have been pretty good at following my intuition, listening for the cues of my subconscious to help guide me in making important life decisions. It was this kind of listening that led me to choose the college I ended up attending — where I met several people who would change my life, where I had the opportunity to do independent research that eventually led me to my Pagan path, and where I earned a degree as valedictorian of my college class. It was by listening to my intuition that I found myself moving across the state to the lovely city of Pittsburgh — where I first entered a graduate school program and then left it for being wholly unsuitable to my personality, where I found a job as a waitress (against everyone's hopes and expectations) and spent five years wandering spiritually and intellectually in ways I never could have if I'd settled down and gotten a "real" job. It was intuition that led me to seek out a connection with Jeff, who happened to have connections in Pittsburgh through both family and work and who eventually took a leap of faith of his own and moved here to be with me. And it was intuition that prodded me into taking a trip across the ocean to the land of my ancestors, despite being terrified of both airports and flying, and having never traveled alone or abroad before.

But these were all times when a singular opportunity presented itself, and I had a simple choice to make: stay, or go. Now, I found myself in a much more complicated situation, with almost endless possibilities any of which might be fruitful depending on how I chose to direct my energies. I also had more responsibilities and obligations, not least of which were the children to whom I'd soon become a stepmom. And so I also had a pressing sense that it was important to make a choice of some kind and follow through with it, rather than languishing passively and allowing Spirit to drag me along where it would. I had spent a lot of time cultivating my will and honing my skills — now, I felt a strong and definite call to step up and be active in my own destiny, to act out my gratitude for the blessings of my life by taking a more directive role in the work I would do in the future. But of course, that work still needed to be grounded in Spirit and soul-longing.

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

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

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

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

The Madeleine Syndrome: A Guest Post

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Today I'm pleased to feature a guest post by Marian Van Eyk McCain, editor of the new anthology GreenSpirit: Path to New Consciousness from O Books. Her post speaks eloquently to the theme of interconnection and interdependence, and celebrates the sensual embodiment that characterizes our relationship to the natural world. Enjoy!

The Madeleine Syndrome
by Marian Van Eyk McCain

The wild honeysuckle flowers are out now in the hedges all around where I live. My garden has a rosebush and it, too, is flowering, its scent so exquisite that every time I pass it I get stuck there for a while, sniffing each one of its flowers in turn and thanking it, my whole being awash with sensory pleasure.

Pacifism comes to Pagan+Politics

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I am pleased, proud and (incredibly) nervous to announce that I have been invited to join the ranks of politically-savvy bloggers over at the Pagan Newswire Collective's Pagan+Politics group blog. Many thanks to Jason for his invitation and his vote of confidence — I hope to rise to the challenge of writing weekly about pacifistic- and anarchistic-related news, without too many days ending in tears and wails of "why doesn't anybody understand me?!"

My introductory post is already up, but in case you need some enticement, here's an excerpt:

I have been writing publicly about pacifism for several years now, and it still remains a challenge to face down my own anxieties about misinterpretation, hypocrisy, judgement and impotence. It is not always fun to write about ideals and ethical principles that can make not only my readers but even myself feel uncomfortable, uncertain, inadequate, angry or sorrowful.

So why do it? Because I honestly believe that, despite our discomfort and uncertainty, despite our habitual resistance to the idea, the truth is that peace is easy and freedom is innate. Though we are surrounded today with myriad examples of violence, war, hatred and rage, though we have complicated systems of government control looming over us at every step — ordinary, everyday life for most of us is still characterized by spontaneous, consensual cooperation and moments full of the profound simplicity of peaceful relationship. Outside my window and here in this room, the world revels in this sunny spring afternoon, a spring that came without coercion or malice, that arose delicately and swiftly out of the interplay of countless creatures and forces, gods and forms, all organizing themselves through their striving and reaching and vying and dancing, rooted in the necessary rot of autumn, preserved through the inevitable cold of winter, and deeply engaged in the ceaseless process of becoming something beautiful.

Song, Three Realms and a Feast of Lights

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My partner, Jeff, and I are in Massachusetts this week to visit friends and attend Feast of Lights, which will be my very first Pagan festival! I'll have updates and thoughts when I return, but for now, please check out the following recent publications, and enjoy!

This month's Song of a Daily Druid column over at PaganPages.org features thoughts on Imbolc and how we can ride our frustration and cabin fever this coming month by "priming the pump" with simple daily practice and a sense of sardonic humor:

What we conceived on the darkest night, now begins to quicken within us, and we feel the inner pangs and hungers stirred by this change. Our bodies begin to awaken a little more, yearning to be outside despite the need for heavy coats and thick gloves. Mornings seem to come sooner, with a tantalizing freshness despite the overcast gray skies and the browns of mud and matted grass beneath the soggy snow. Though February begins with a burst of eager energy ready to delve into the spring season, true warmth remains a long way off.

Also, the spring issue of Sky Earth Sea is out and waiting! Here's a bit from editor Paige Varner about the SES over the past year and the future of the journal:

Winter rains have turned the star wheel,
Springtime is upon us.

So begins one verse in Chant for the Seasons by Rev. Mark Belletini. This year in the Atlanta area, we have most definitely felt the winter rains – far more than in a typical year for us. And yet, I am having trouble accepting that springtime is, indeed upon us. As I write, Imbolc is a mere week away. This Imbolc marks a full turn around the wheel for Sky, Earth, Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality. As I reflect on the past year, and my own journey with this journal, I realize just how much my own spiritual practice has been influenced by the materials that our wonderful writers, poets, and artists have submitted. Last Spring’s “Zen Like an Oak” by James Donaldson encouraged me to look at a natural area with which I was already familiar (Georgia’s Stone Mountain) through fresh eyes. In the summer, Anna Adesanya’s photos in “Being Still” fed my need for beauty, and her accompanying article helped me look at my own fears around creative processes. Poetry from the Fall issue still lingers in my mind. And in the months since our Winter issue, Alison Shaffer’s “Peace of the Three Realms” meditation has become a daily staple in my own practice. I can already feel myself being affected by this issue, as well. Jeff Lilly’s “On Fear” has given me much to ponder about my own fears and relationships. Hannah Thompson’s poetry has given me a fresh and moving perspective on community and ceremonial work. Alison Shaffer’s review of Susan Greenwood’s The Anthropology of Magic not only encourages me to check out the book, but stands alone as a valuable commentary on practicing magic. Truly, I have been enriched through working with this journal. May you continue to find here material that enriches, comforts, nourishes, and even challenges you on your own path.

Song of a Daily Druid: Practicing the Daily Simple

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January's issue of PaganPages is out; this month's Song of a Daily Druid column, Practicing the Daily Simple, tackles the question of what practical daily spiritual living looks like, at least in the life of this practitioner! Following up on last month's column about the elements of ritual, this month I explore three simple techniques that require no ritual whatsoever, but can be employed anywhere, anytime, as a way of incorporating spiritual awareness into everyday, mundane activities. Check it out!

One conviction that has led me so assuredly onto and along the Druid path is the conviction that no amount of philosophizing and debate can make up for a lack of daily, practical work in the spiritual life. It’s easy to forget that any one system can start to seem like the single Truth if you spend too much time within it, and not enough time allowing your body and its natural energies free range to roam. I can hypothesize about the nature of deity, the relationship between free will and destiny, the role of love and grief… and in some ways, this process of writing and thinking is indeed a kind of practical work, too. It does help to clarify, to enlighten, and just as often to frustrate and to reveal the stumbling blocks hiding just beneath the surface. I follow my words like hounds I’ve set loose on the hunt, never quite knowing where they will lead or what scent will send them howling.

But there is other work to do, as well. These simple, daily works are as much a part of my religious practice as the esoteric and exotic, the sacred “set-apart-ness” of much of religious life. I don’t always have the energy — or the time! — to go hunting through poetic imagery and the dense tension of metaphor, weaving my way through the lush undergrowth of belief, identity, paradox and process. Sometimes I have to come home to myself, sometimes I have to clean the hearth and feed the dogs.

......To read more, check out Song of a Daily Druid

Song of a Daily Druid: Elements of Ritual

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For those of you who enjoyed or were intrigued by the Samhain rite and subsequent ritual musings I shared here earlier in November, this month's Song of a Daily Druid (over at Pagan Pages) focuses on The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual and explores some of the theory behind creating powerful rituals and daily practice. Hop on over and check it out!

What is the purpose of ritual? In many Pagan circles ritual is seen primarily as a method of magical work or spellcraft, a way of raising and directing energy for a particular goal. This might take the form of blessing candles for healing magic, or invoking the presence of a particular deity to provide guidance or aid for a specific problem. In Druidry, however, though magic has a role to play, sacred ritual holds a far more poetic place in both personal and group spiritual practice. In previous columns, I have talked about the way poetry connects us to one another through memory, imagination and creativity, how it reaches beyond the tensions of duality and opens up in us a sense of metaphor, how it speaks to us of space and potential that can transcend and reconcile, clarify and illuminate. Although it can be used for specific magical purposes, Druidic ritual serves primarily as a way for us to live our poetry in the world of physical reality as well as in the world of words.

Just as the art of poetry requires a certain set of skills — a grasp of language, its rhythms and sounds, a strong sense of concrete sensory details, etc. — the art of ritual has three basic elements or aspects that a practitioner must come to work with and know intimately. These aspects echo the Druidic elements of calas, gwyar and nwyfre, found in everything, everywhere: the stability and solidity of stone, the fluidity and movement of water, and the "breath of life," the energy and life-force of wind (and fire). Learning how to incorporate all three of these elements into Druidic ritual helps to ensure a powerful and meaningful experience, more poignant, authentic and spiritually fruitful than the kind of melodramatic role-playing that Pagan ritual can sometimes risk becoming. But more than this, these three elements serve as symbols, a means of connection and a reminder of the three elements of calas, gwyar and nwyfre that dwell within all things. Likewise, by mindfully incorporating these elements in a way that is beautiful and aesthetically moving, we re-create or invoke the cosmos within the ritual sacred space — as above, so below — and so our actions in that space themselves become cosmic or mythic in meaning. What are these three elements of Druidic ritual? Put simply, they are: matter, sound, and energy.

......To read more, check out Song of a Daily Druid

Sky Earth Sea: Better Than Coffee!! (and other bits of interest)

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Hey there, dear readers! Shameless plug to follow, for those of you looking for some new high-quality reading material on Druidry and Paganism... Check out the latest issue of Sky Earth Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality. Not just for Druids and Pagans, this journal has something for anyone and everyone interested in spiritual practice and looking for ideas and guidance on how to incorporate Spirit into everyday life.

I'm particularly proud of my two contributions to this issue, if you don't mind me saying so. (So proud, in fact, that I'm planning on sending my dad a copy of the issue, just to show him once again that Druids aren't crazy tree-hugging hippies... or, okay, we're not just tree-huggers, anyway!)

"The Peaceful Warrior: Pagan Pacifism Without Excuse" is an article exploring the necessity of nonviolence to counter the rampant systemic violence of our modern consumer-culture world, and takes a careful look at the mythology and iconography of the ancient Celtic past to discover themes that help to guide our search for fearlessness and courage. How can a violent, tribal past be relevant today? What roles do vulnerability and individuality play in fearlessness? How can we step up to become "peaceful warriors" in our own lives? This article presents some potential answers to such questions.

"Peace of the Three Realms: A Daily Meditation" is a step-by-step guide through one of my favorite daily practices, a series of interwoven meditations based around the Druid Prayer for Peace. Using such techniques as daily prayer and visualization, we can each begin to embrace a new worldview, a new story about the role we have to play in creating peace in the real world.

This issue also features lots of interesting articles on other forms of meditation, including a few how-to guides to get you started. On top of that, enjoy great poetry and beautiful seasonal artwork! Visit their website and check it out! (You can subscribe electronically for a very modest price, barely more than a cup of coffee; or, if you're not sure, register to download an earlier issue for absolutely free and see what you think!)

Also, on a more somber note, take some time to read my recent guest post over at Druid Journal: On Grief and Connection: A Response to the Fort Hood Deaths. While Jeff’s last post illustrated very well the kind of divisive rhetoric utilized in most political speeches these days, language that takes for granted an implicit superiority of American citizens and soldiery, and that rejects understanding, compassion and forgiveness for fear that such things will lead to acceptance of and complicity in violence (that is, those forms of violence deemed unacceptable by the State). His post, by reversing the target of this rhetoric, raised a lot of hackles and provoked a lot of feedback, through comments and email, about the basic immorality of justifying violence and excusing killers. Now, with his gracious permission, I try my hand at rewriting Obama’s speech, not by reversing its aim, but by turning the rhetoric itself on its head, and speaking in terms of inclusion rather than exclusion, connection instead division. This is the speech I wish Obama had given, though for reasons that will become obvious, it is not one I ever expect any political leader in this country to give. 

Song of a Daily Druid

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The November issue of Pagan Pages is up, along with my column Song of a Daily Druid. This month's column, "The No-Time Before Beginning," confronts the sometimes less-than-ideal reality of sickness and loneliness during these times of increasing cold and darkness. I found it a bit of a struggle to write this month, struggling with lingering illness of my own, but I hope to return to the themes of poetry, bardic work and the ancestors in next month's column. For now, please enjoy:

We cannot always be rushing full speed ahead.

Druidry teaches us that there are cycles, seasons that turn over and shuffle through one another. At Samhain, summer's end, we enter a time of darkness, before the rebirth of light on the winter solstice. Now is a time of dissolution, and sacrifice. And bad chest colds with persistent, aching cough. Amber and rusted-ruby bleed through the tree leaves along their brittle veins, and I notice how they scab around the torn edges of old holes chewed out by summer insects now sluggish or dead. Outside my window, rain shivers down through the evening fog and clings to every surface, and slips, and falls, and clings again; each leaf wavers limply in the breeze, damp but still shining, ablaze like the sun's going-down. They are so devoted. They mimic her, like the rain; they fall. We are all going down, stepping gently into the dusk, into the coming dark.

Last year, I dreamt often of brilliant mountainsides, spattered with the reds, oranges and yellows of foliage. My dreams were suffused with autumn. I noticed the subtle shifts as the season moved, changes I had never noticed before. The blushing rouge at the beginning, like wounds or lips opening up here and there among the worn summer green, just beginning to spread from tree to tree. The quaking yellows and golds at the height of the season, the whole woods cut through by low, bright sunlight and seeming to glow, the limbs of trees dark like veins starting to show through a papery sky, reflected in the surface of half-hidden streams gliding through layers of yellow leaves that had already fallen. ...

To read more, check out Song of a Daily Druid: The No-Time Before Beginning.

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)

Song of a Daily Druid

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I'm excited and pleased to announce the publication of my new monthly column over at Pagan Pages: Song of a Daily Druid!

This month's column, "How I Found a Home in Druidry," serves as an introduction to myself and my personal approach to Druidry, tracing the spiraling journey of my childhood through poetry, philosophy, landscape and music which echoed what I would eventually come to call the Ways of Bard, Ovate and Druid:

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—my real destiny wearing a strange new face, a face of beauty and dignity, but smiling at me with the same old familiar affection.

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

In future issues, I'll be sharing some daily and seasonal practices of my own, and exploring how they incorporate and interweave the three elements, the three realms and the three "ways" of modern Druidry. I hope you'll hop on over to check it out, as well as the many other interesting articles, interviews and advice columns also on Pagan Pages.

*NB: At the moment, there are several formatting problems with the online publication of the column, but editors are working to correct these as quickly as possible!

Pagan Values: Go Play Outside!

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"Go play outside," my dad would tell us on nice summer days. And my brother and I would go tumbling out the backdoor, ready to climb trees or dance through the sprinkler in the backyard, eager to splash through neighborhood creeks, scale old wooden jungle gyms, or chase after frisbees in the wide meadowy fields nearby. Never mind the scrapes and bruises (and two broken arms in one summer!), the muddy pant cuffs and worn-through knees, the sunburns and bug bites. "Go play outside." What a simple, wonderful command!

And it's one I'm still as eager to follow, as I am to give. Sometimes I think that simple, earnest suggestion, more than anything else, has been the most valuable and meaningful gift Druidry has given me these past several years. The encouragement and the permission to go outside and play; it's something that we need more as adults when so many Serious Important Grown-Up Things seem to demand our time and attention. Just learning to lighten up, be silly, climb a tree or collect pretty stones and weeds in the park, run or dance or skip or throw my arms up towards the sun--I need those things, those moments and opportunities to be child-like and joyful, to revel with complete abandon in the glory of living in a beautiful, messy natural world.

I don't know if other Pagan writers experience this odd whine of feedback ringing in their ears, when one desire comes too close to another, one value rubs up against another.... There are times when I want to fill this blog with that single, concise directive, over and over: Go play outside! You lovely people, for gods' sake, go play outside! Step away from the computer screen, get up from your desk, open a window, unlock the door, step into the beautiful world and breathe deep. But on the other hand: read my stuff! Stay here, listen, let us sit and think quietly and seriously for a while, let us exchange stories and experiences, see what we can learn from one another.

Of course, I want you to read what I write. I want us to communicate, to converse, to share and explore and ruminate together. I love the outdoors, the shorelines and the horizons and the twilights where I can slip into the liminal wildness of nature. But I also love to write. I could spend hours in front of a computer, tweaking and revising and chewing on my lip, working to say what I really want to say. I love the gritty feeling of satisfaction when I manage to write something interesting, substantive, maybe even poetic or inspiring. It's like the grit of dirt that reminds you these vegetables come from your own modest garden. So of course I want you to read what I write. It's a gift, it's why I write, so that I can give what I have written away to whoever is willing to receive. But then.... o, but then. If you're in here reading blog posts instead of going outside to play....

Hear it?! Hear that whine? The harsh ringing of a microphone too close to the speaker....

This week I had the honor, and pleasure, of being a guest writer over at Druid Journal. My post, "Pagan Values: Ecology, Environmentalism & Practical Pacifism", took many hours of struggle, writing and revising, thinking and rethinking, but through that process I discovered and explored some exciting ideas about the nature of creative nonviolence and its parallel in the environmentalist movement. I'll be expanding on some of those thoughts in this blog over the next few weeks, but in the meantime I would love for you to hop on over to check out this first enthusiastic plunge into the subject.

I know, I know, there are so many interesting things to read right now, especially on the subject of Pagan values, virtues and ethics. How can I bring myself to ask you to read yet another article online, when green fields and blue skies and warm summer rains are just waiting to be enjoyed? But I promise, I'll do my best to make my posts worth reading, I'll cram in as much thoughtfulness and controversy and clever turns-of-phrase as I can; if you promise that, once in a while, you'll take a break to just step outside, stretch your arms wide towards the sun and give a great big bear-hug to your favorite tree. Do we have a deal?

Relationship & Story: Exploring Ethics from a Pagan Perspective

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The beginning of June marks the beginning of the first-ever International Pagan Values Blogging Month, and I couldn't be more excited! I also couldn't be busier, as I juggle schedules, arrange for my summer vacation, plan for my up-coming birthday and help my boyfriend move into his new apartment. So, I hope you will forgive me if I kick off this month's posts with a review of two excellent books on "Pagan values" already out there in circulation and well worth reading: Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics by Emma Restall Orr, and The Other Side of Virtue, by Brendan Myers. Within the next few days, I'll also be guest posting over at Druid Journal on ecology, environmentalism and practical pacifism, as an introduction to a four(ish)-part series on the role of pacifism, violence and warriorhood in Paganism. I'll be updating here again to let you know when that post is up, so be sure to hop on over to check it out! Until then, enjoy the following review, first published in Sky, Earth, Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality (Spring 2009).

"The greatest achievement of spirit: the ability to transform nearly anything--even our suffering and tragedy--into art."

- Myers, The Other Side of Virtue

As the Pagan community continues to change and grow, establishing itself as a thriving contemporary spiritual tradition (or more accurately, traditions!), the needs of this diverse and somewhat chaotic community also continue to develop beyond those of first-generation neophytes looking for initiatory experiences and basic how-to guides. One aspect of this evolving need for a deeper, more complex engagement with the Pagan spiritual path--so familiar to those who demand "advanced" Pagan texts that move beyond the typical "Druidry 101," for instance--can be seen in the community's desire to establish its own unique sense of ethics and virtue apart from the divinely mandated good-and-evil dualism of a monotheistic mainstream. From the earliest modern practitioners of Wicca and Druidry, we find examples of moral formulations: the Wiccan Rede, the Law of Threefold Return, and the collection of Druidic triads, to name only a few. And yet many of us can see that these simple codes often leave much to be desired, faltering under pressure or deteriorating into self-justifying rhetoric. Two new texts published recently by O Books, however, rise to the challenge and take on the complex, wild and vital questions of ethical action and virtuous living, seeking new ways of approaching such ancient problems: Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics, by Emma Restall Orr, and Brenden Myers's text, The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues come from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us.

Both texts center on the idea of relationship, more specifically that between the self and the world (and those in it), as the defining aspect of what we should consider an ethical or virtuous life. Emma Restall Orr sets out in her book, Living With Honour, to provide a clear basis for making practical (or "applied") ethical choices apart from the moral doctrines laid out by monotheistic religions and secular culture, which have tended in recent times to be dualistic and hierarchical. The result is a uniquely Pagan conception of ethics based on the primacy of "honorable relationship," an on-going, active engagement with the world and those living in it, guided by courage, generosity and loyalty. While Restall Orr focuses primarily on how this relationship with the world shapes our everyday choices and behavior in order to form a healthy interconnection with other beings, in Brenden Myers's work The Other Side of Virtue, the author trains his attention on the engaged individual, exploring how a self-aware relationship with Immensities helps each of us to discover, as well as to create, "who we are." For Myers, self-knowledge presents a philosophical "problem," and the work of resolving it cultivates a person's virtue in the form of human excellence. Both authors, however, recognize a core ambivalence about assuming such relationship with the world will always be safely benign, challenging the easy dichotomy between good and evil so common to monotheistic religions. In searching for an alternative ethical foundation, both Myers and Restall Orr evoke Pagan and Druidic notions of creative story-telling as the means by which we might shape our lives with a sense of meaning, beauty and truth.

Emma Restall Orr's text might be considered, for many readers, to be the more practical and down-to-earth of the two. She devotes the first half of this clear-sighted and articulate book to deconstructing common (and commonly misunderstood) terms such as "Pagan," "morality," and "honor", as well as developing a broad understanding of the many schools of thought that have contributed to the study of ethics over the centuries. Leaping over whole philosophical systems in a single bound, she is likely to leave some readers a little giddy with vertigo, but her treatment is invariably sharp and fair, seeking the central tenants and common threads that will be most illuminating without risking oversimplification. Her careful exploration of the multifarious foundations and processes that go into making everyday choices--from emotion and instinct, to reason and the rule of law--prepares the reader for the "applied ethics" of later chapters. Further, her brief description of various Pagan traditions and their unique moral formulations provides a place for the contemplative Pagan reader to find an initial foothold of familiar subject matter, while also clarifying (for Pagan and non-Pagan readers alike) how one can establish and maintain a functional ethical model outside of the doctrines of monotheistic religions and secular humanism. Scattered throughout these sections of analysis and dissection are Restall Orr's characteristic flashes of narrative--dancing in the rain, savoring an apple, reading quietly in the park--which give flavor and moving insight into the potential of engaged ethical living.

These more poetic moments become less common in the second half of Living with Honour, as Restall Orr buckles down to the nitty-gritty and addresses many contemporary social and political issues of our time. Exploring everything from suicide and euthanasia to animal rights and vegetarianism, parenting and romance to ecology and materialism, she applies her ethic of "honorable relationship" with intensity and consistency. Her approach puts the individual's ability to choose freely, no matter how difficult or convoluted the circumstances, at the heart of an ethical life, and eschews any reliance on socially-imposed "morality" or external rule of law. This text does not aim to rewrite the shared assumptions of a Judeo-Christian mainstream, but instead celebrates the anarchistic, pluralistic tendencies of the modern Pagan community as essential to developing a sense of individual responsibility ("response-ability") that relates more directly and receptively to a world that is always complex and in flux. Because of her intensity, however, some of her conclusions may make readers cringe (especially those passages which call for strict veganism or which challenge the usual notions of death); her thorough deconstruction of our potential for careless exploitation is pitiless, daunting, even at times overwhelming. One might wonder how it is ever possible to have enough knowledge or power to be capable of making truly effective ethical choices in the face of a huge and infinitely complicated world.

However, her unfaltering emphasis on personal, responsive relationship softens her own tendency towards moralizing, saving the text from becoming just another example of imposing doctrine. Instead, Restall Orr works tirelessly to remind readers that ethical living must be guided, above all, by an open and ever-changing experience of the world itself, here and now. In the third and final section of her book, she addresses the feelings of fear, impotence, inertia and confusion that often keep us from acting according to our own sense of ethics. As an antidote to such feelings, she suggests a kind of stubborn, loving integrity that seeks for a meaningful, empowering sense of self immersed in an infinitely beautiful world. In these final pages, she tells a story of scared awe and gratitude, in which the choice to act ethically is rarely ever a choice at all, but only the natural response that empathy and integrity evoke in a receptive individual willing to place honorable relationship above pure self-interest or familiar fears.

In some ways, this poetic conclusion to Restall Orr's work leads naturally to the first chapters of Brenden Myers's The Other Side of Virtue, which opens with a warm circle of storytellers gathered around a crackling fire, inviting the reader to join. While Restall Orr finds powerful, ecstatic inspiration above all in the wildness of the natural world, Myers is clearly moved and motivated strongly by the shared life and work of community and locates the beginning of his discussion of virtue in this setting. The first "movement" of the text (which is structured like a song or musical score) plays informally with images and metaphors to be developed more fully later on, asserting aphorisms and even making jokes. Reading along, it is almost impossible not to begin to engage the text directly, chuckling aloud or scribbling notes in the margin, developing a dialogue, a conversation of ideas and possibilities. While Restall Orr prepares the reader to enter into the thick of ethical analysis by first covering the familiar ground of Pagan tradition, Myers uses a different approach to his task of defining virtue: establishing a sense of community that will run through the rest of the book and give landscape and texture to the path it will trace.

In the following three movements, Myers proceeds to examine the historical development of the concept of "virtue," beginning with the tribal culture of Heroic societies, through the developing emphasis on reason in ancient Classical philosophy, following the various permutations over the centuries as they produced humanism, romanticism and contemporary examples, real and fictional, of honorable heroes and great men. Throughout this discussion, Myers includes useful details about the changes in society and politics, as well as myriad quotations from ancient texts, to give context and perspective to the evolving definition of human virtue. His examination of particular thinkers and writers, such as Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, provide stepping stones through history for the reader; however, at times they give the text almost too specific a focus, as though standing in for whole schools of thought without giving the reader enough perspective to see how these trends weave together in a broader theory. Meanwhile, the influence of Judeo-Christian morality and its redefinition of virtue as that of passivity and obedience, so intriguingly mentioned in the book's overture, is left almost entirely unmentioned. Here is one place where Restall Orr's sweeping but sometimes overly broad discussion of philosophical concepts can compliment Myers's more specialized focus and remind the reader of the "bigger picture" that might otherwise be lost in the historical milieu.

If the discussion of virtue's historical development, although very well-researched and highly informative, feels a bit dense or cobbled together at times, the fifth movement of The Other Side is where Myers really hits his stride. In it, he attempts to lay bare the "logical structure" of virtue itself, as he understands it, and the slowly-unfolding weaving together of seemingly disparate ideas from previous sections is by turns masterful, musical and mind-blowing. Here we are confronted in a kind of pure contemplation with some of the "Immensities" (Myers's term) that Restall Orr addresses more directly and practically in the later chapters of her own work: the Earth, Death (or Time), and Other People; as well as some of the responses their presence in our lives can evoke: wonder, integrity, and humanity. For Myers, the issue of relationship--the place of the individual within a community and landscape--comes to the forefront in "threshold" experiences whereby a person's sense of identity and self-knowledge is challenged, shaken to its core and thus transformed by an engagement with something both infinitely knowable and intimately overwhelming.

Unlike Restall Orr, who believes that an open engagement with the world usually renders the "ethical" course of action obvious and natural, Myers suggests that we develop our sense of virtue, or human excellence, precisely in those situations when an Immensity calls our most fundamental assumptions about the self and the world into question--that is, precisely when we are least certain of what we once believed to be obvious. His discussion of how these experiences shape us, however, is remarkably similar to Restall Orr's. He too emphasizes our inherent ability to choose as both a revelatory and creative act, at once revealing ourselves to our own self-awareness and helping to create those very selves. The choices we make are shaped by our sense of story (what sociologists might call, on a larger scale, our mythology, what Druids might call our "song") and the role we see ourselves playing as that story unfolds. There is no guarantee that Fortune will be kind or an Immensity benign--in fact, the potentially transformative nature of threshold experiences might be considered inescapably destructive, even traumatic to some extent. But with a strong sense of story, rather than a reliance on traditional definitions of right and wrong, we both discover and create meaning and beauty in our lives through the choices we pursue at such times.

Of course, the study of ethics and the exploration of virtue are not precisely one and the same. On the one hand, virtue is only one way among many to approach the question of ethics (including relativism, utilitarianism, deontology, etc.); on the other hand, there are certain amoral or nonmoral aspects to our understanding virtue itself (such as beauty, physical skills and even good fortune), so that it is difficult to see one as fitting snugly as a subcategory into the other. It may be a gross simplification to say that virtue concerns the effects of a relationship with an Immense world on the nature and knowledge of the self, while ethics is the study of how this relationship is expressed in our behavior and practical choices in everyday life. Yet it seems these two approaches are essentially the ways in which two remarkable contemporary Druid authors have chosen to explore a subject of vast complexity and vital relevance for every human being today. These two books, published so fortuitously within a few months of each other, should most definitely be read together, and read more than once. The questions they raise and problems they wrestle have continuing importance fundamental to our perception of ourselves and the world we live in with one another. And as our own stories change and evolve over the course of our lives, these texts will continuing to offer fresh new insight and possibilities for meaning, beauty, knowledge and truth.

• Brenden Myers, The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues come from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us, O Books, 2008.


• Emma Restall Orr, Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics, O Books, 2007.

Nobody Wakes Up Alone

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In her mind, the gods are moving. They walk quietly, like relatives before a wedding, their auburn hair entwined with wine-colored ribbons. She turns over in her sleep, in her dreaming; a dream in which the courtyard is brick and bronze in late afternoon sunlight, the magnolia buds still wrapped in their russet furs, the variegated, low-growing coleus softening the hard edges of the garden. A dream in which small, spotted shoots of arrowroot prepare for the vespers' prayer, only just beginning to roll up their leaves at the lengthening, passing shadows of the gods, loved ones who mill about the space, chatting and laughing quietly with one another. The gentlest of dreams, the color of old peat-fire glimpsed, flickering softly, in between familiar bodies, lovely, dear bodies—they all seem to be waiting, lining up serpentine. They count bricks with their eyes and toes, count stones and murmur among themselves, waiting for something to happen, waiting for it to begin. She turns over and out of this dreaming, into the dawn.

Compared to dreaming, the act of waking up is not gentle at all. She opens her eyes with the slow sound of a flame guttering in a sudden gust. That awkward, groggy fluttering as dawn goes small, blue and hot around her for a second, a tiny wild animal hunched around its wick, and then—gone. The moment between lit and snuffed, between dream and day, resolved in one quick exhalation. She's awake.

For a long moment, all she does is breathe.

The gods have gone inside to worship. Everything outside of her is blue and dim. Beyond the window is a haze that for a moment she always thinks is fog, but isn't. It's only dawn again. Inside, the singing has started; she can just barely hear the humming of her blood beginning. She turns, stretches, curls, and ventures a single thought. No. Not even a thought, yet. Her body still flushes slightly with rose-colored dreaming, cushioned in the folds of the deep down blanket and dark cotton pillows. She smolders like a peat-fire feeding on a silent blue wind. She breathes, and each breath says only: gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. She is a noun, a state of being, a creature all on its own, with one foot still sleeping and one stretching its arch, flexing from ball to heel. A toe creaks. Her gratitude stirs, but does not bother to go out, to move from one place to another. Not yet. It nestles down into her breath, and sighs.

Coolness seeps in under an open window and dawdles along the hardwood floor, working itself into the loose weave of the throwrug by the bed. Next to her, another warm body moves, sleeping or curling, pale with gathering blood. A body with its own gods. What is he dreaming? She rolls under the dark blankets and watches his back turned to her, the one shoulder rising and falling. The bed is small, but nowhere do their bodies touch. The soft bedsheets fall between them like a fog separating opposite banks of a river.

She closes her eyes again and listens; in his sleep, he works his mouth and makes a noise that sounds like chewing. What is he dreaming? What would she hear his gods saying if she pressed her ear to his skin, if she touched the nape of his neck with her lips or brushed his calf with hers? Her own gods are inside praying in hushed whispers, huddled in their pews. She can hardly hear them at all by now. This is all the gentleness she can withstand; any more would devastate her. To go utterly out of herself in praise, that transgression of boundaries, irreverent adoration—to learn secrets from the steady breathing of space, to open the doors and windows of the body to let the wind in, to kneel at his altar as it pushes his blood around, pulse of pushing outward, pulse of his praise, beating against her own—it has been too long. Waking to another warm body waking, its strange gods wild and achingly tender, provoking her own to dancing—it would be like getting caught between two sunsets. She is too vulnerable for so much gravity.

This is better; solitude is better. And in it, that memory of dreaming, a finger tracing the palm's lines, inviting the future to unfold itself like the arrowroot or the magnolia blossom, like something that has always been there. Like it was just waiting for this to happen. Better, this distance, this gradual becoming. To pull her self around her like a comforter against the chill of morning, instead of rushing off towards intimacy like a bird tossed out a window, legs still tangled clumsily in the bedsheets.

Her gratitude stretches, and rolls a long tongue out in a yawn—looks upwards, looks inwards, and says a small prayer. She curls around that movement, some fragile thing, the company of herself, and breathes over it, steady and awake. In a second, she'll have to look at the piercing red numbers of the alarm clock; in a second, the birds outside will begin to make noise, and the neighbors will drag their trashcans to the curb, and the sun will turn everything yellow and bright again. In a second, she'll swing her feet out from under the covers and knock her heels softly against the cool, rough wood of the floorboards.

Meanwhile, he will sleep another hour or two, dreaming his gods, not knowing she is gone.

This short story first appeared in The Particular, Summer 2008. If you're interested in checking out the rest of the issue, please email "the.particular.mag [at] gmail [dot] com" for a free .pdf download. Also, check out our page on Facebook.

Publication: Two Poems (EAP, November 2007)

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Exterminating Angels Press
Number 18: Other Points of View

The Naming of Prophecy and Wild Pear, by Alison Shaffer
(click here)

PUBLICATION : On-Going Twitter Project

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Aortography
That scarlet path burned white--devoted animal
etched on glass--teach me to be still
between this coming and going.



a·or·tog·ra·phy (n.) The radiographic visualization of the aorta and its branches by injection of a radiopaque substance.

A new poetry project experimenting with the 140-character limit for post length via Twitter. Receive updates on your cell phone or online.

For Readers

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I'd like to share two nifty new interweb toys I have discovered recently which I think regular readers of this blog might appreciate.

First, as you will note in my sidebar, I have created an account at Blogarithm.com. Clicking the "subscribe" button in my sidebar will take you to a page where you can sign up to receive email updates about new posts on this blog. The really cool thing is that this service allows you to subscribe to any blogs--or any webpages, for the matter--even if they do not already have an account. To test the service out, I subscribed to all of the blogs in my "Druid Blogs" sidebar list. Now I receive one handy email from Blogarithm that includes titles, short excerpts and links to the posts for any blogs updated that day. It's quite convenient, especially for someone like me, who doesn't know much about RSS and Atom feeds.

Second, I have stumbled upon LibraryThing.com, which is heaven online for a book nerd like me. The basic idea is an online catalogue of the books you own, which allows you to tag works according to subject/topic, and compare your personal library with those of other users in the database. I could go on for hours about all the different tools, toys and networking possibilities (you can see the neat widgets in my sidebar, displaying a random selection of my books and allowing you to search my personal library by title or subject), but I'd suggest you check it out for yourself. If you decide to create an account, and you're interested in Druidry, I've created a Druidry group that you might be interested in joining.

With supposed ease, and endlessly.

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If it is not too bold, I would like to share here two poems of mine which have recently been published...



Not Just Air : A Literary eJournal
Number Six: The Response Issue

La Belle Dame en Seul and If Once You Have Slept, by Alison Shaffer
(click here)


Today's Ogham: Coll (Hazel)
(wisdom, enlightenment, inspiration)