Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal

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In August 2010, just past the waxing quarter moon, a bunch of strangers met for the first time in Rostrevor, a small town in County Down, Northern Ireland, nestled below the Mourne Mountains on the edge of Carlingford Lough that opens out into the sea. From all over the world — from Portland to Hong Kong, from Glasgow to Nashville — they gathered together to learn about peacemaking rooted in the Celtic sense of sacred hospitality and the holiness of the land.

It was my first time traveling alone, and my first journey ever beyond the borders of the United States. For me, the week-long retreat became a kind of pilgrimage, back to the land of my ancestors, and beyond the ninth wave into a place of conversation, connection and new friendships forged.

Day Nine — The World Become Small

...then I went back up to my room, kneeled next to my bed to look out the skylight — and felt this overwhelming sense of closure and peace, and a thrill at the thought of going home. I knew things were finally coming to an end.

~*~

The morning was foggy and damp, with low clouds clustering and rolling along over the mountains across the water. Every once in a while, a parting in the clouds would open and the opposite shore would be bathed with a golden misty light in a small area, as if the land were glowing all golden and green among the dark and the mists.

A rainbow. We stood there in silence for a few minutes, watching the broad ribbon of light and color thicken and take on, imperceptibly, a brighter presence among the dim gray clouds, above the dark, choppy waters. J. leaned over to me and quoted again that Bible verse, Isaiah 45:3, "And I will give you the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that you may know that it is I, the Lord, which call you by your name..." When she said this, I suddenly felt overwhelmed and almost began to cry. The rainbow continued to grow brighter and brighter, and I took several photographs hoping at least one would come out. Then J. said how it was funny, from here the land over there looked awash in so many colors, but they couldn't see that themselves — all they knew was that they were standing in the light.

Keeping the Days: Autumn Sepia

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Autumn Sepia
Frick Park, Pittsburgh, PA

The Pulse of Samhain

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There must have been an autumn when I was a child... But those days I remember as being full of the smell of sharpened pencils and graphite shavings, the rustle of notebook pages, the glint of bent spiral bindings and — sometimes — at the bus stop, a glimpse of horizon between the houses and the whispering golden pear trees, a full moon setting pale opposite the rising sun.

This morning, I glance out the window between sips of mint tea. The vines cascading down the garage have flushed to copper and rust, fading back into the old red brick. The sky is overcast, but the sun is low and spills in shifting rays over the tall grasses of the backyard, coming and going, light and dim again as it sinks. A neighborhood cat prowls, its black body slipping through the weeds that bend and shift in soft browns almost like wheat. The silent overhanging trees are limp with mottled yellows and golds.

Somewhere, a cloud changes. Suddenly the scene is awash in early morning sunlight, illuminated, every leaf translucent like a moving, living fountain of stained glass against the low, dull sky. The cat pauses, a dark shimmering shape stilled in a shaft of light, its ears and tail twitching. I can almost see the tips of its whiskers shining. Then, it hunches down again, head low, its form one long line of shadow slinking off.

Samhaim slips in. The dead among us rustle like dying leaves, or notebook pages.

Sunrise on an Autumn Morning

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Keeping the Days: Meditation in Autumnal Woods

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On a beautiful autumn day just before Samhain, I headed deep into the woods that border our neighborhood
for some meditation among the trees, rocks, wind and sunlight.




Music by Pamela Bruner, "The Surrender" from Circle of the Soul

The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual

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The sun has set, and twilight settles dark over the autumn landscape. In another half an hour a harvest moon, swelling but not quite full, will rise over the eastern horizon, but for now the grove is thick with gray mist and half-seen shadows. In the center, a thin white altar cloth drapes a low, square stone; the cloth shifts once in a while, ghostly and almost whispering with the silent breeze that barely moves the trees. The altar itself is decorated with gourds, dried pale aster blossoms and pressed fall leaves collected from the local landscape over the past week, bringing out subtle shades of yellow, orange, russet and deep greens that are, nonetheless, difficult to distinguish in the darkness. A small bowl of incense smolders and smokes, its scent mingling with the damp late-night fog, and in the center of the altar a small lidded cauldron sits waiting, the waters of life inside ready to be ignited. When the time is right.

Suddenly, the strike of a match and a flame flares into life, held delicately between the fingers of a white-robed figure. Opening the cauldron, she tosses the match inside and within seconds a column of fire is dancing and leaping upwards as if out of the very womb of darkness, lapping at the round, black lip of the iron pot. Flickering light illuminates the entire grove, revealing other figures standing poised on the threshold of vision, some dressed in white, others in the colors of the elements or of the autumnal season. As the cauldron fire grows stronger, the center figure raises her arms in a gesture of gratitude and exaltation, and those in the surrounding circle do likewise. Together, all begin to chant the familiar words of prayer, the syllables weaving and repeating, their voices cascading over one another in a rising harmony of sound and vibration. The energy is palpable, flowing through each tongue of fire, grounding in the deep earth and arcing towards the celestial realms — and each participant adds their own energy, opening themselves to the awareness of connection moving and dancing through the grove.

This is the cosmos recreated, the three realms meeting in a center which is everywhere at once.

The chanting prayer drops suddenly to a slow-whispered awen, and the grove falls once more into silence, the only sound that of the flames trembling and sizzling on the altar. Everyone waits expectedly, their skin shivering with energy, for the ritual to continue.

Water on Water's the Way: Blog Action Day 2010

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When it occurred to me that the animals are swimming
around in the water in the oceans in our bodies.
And another had been found, another ocean on the planet,
given that our blood is just like the Atlantic.

- Modest Mouse, "3rd Planet"


Everybody knows we're mostly water. But I remember the kind of mystic revelation that hit me the first time I read that scene in J.D. Salinger's short story "Teddy" where the ten-year-old describes watching his little sister drinking milk, how he suddenly saw that she was God and the milk was God, and "all she was doing was pouring God into God." David Suzuki echoes this startling but simple truth when he writes in his book, The Sacred Balance, that "we are intimately fused to our surroundings and the notion of separateness or isolation is an illusion." Our physical being weaves us intimately into the world of air, water, soil and sun, and as Suzuki says, "these four 'sacred elements' are created, cleansed and renewed by the web of life itself."

When we eat, we participate with Spirit and the gods in a dance of growth, death, decay and rebirth, as even our waste returns eventually to the land to nourish and enrich the soil from which our food grows. Plants transform the energy gifted to them by the sun into forms that can be absorbed and exchanged, and when we work, we release that energy again through the efforts of our hands, legs, mouths and minds to shape the world. Our breath is the breath of our ancestors, but also of the atmosphere and the weather, the winds and storms that encircle the planet and rustle the leaves of the tree just outside the window. And when we drink of those waters that well up from the earth, blessed, guarded and sustained by the gods and goddesses of the oceans and the holy springs and the caves of the underworld, all we are doing is pouring god into god.

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (4)

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In August 2010, just past the waxing quarter moon, I attended a retreat on Celtic spirituality and peacemaking in Northern Ireland. The hosts of the retreat asked us to respect the safe and sacred space created by the community, and refrain from attributing direct quotes to any of the attendants or speakers. With that in mind, the following are excerpts from the journal I kept.

Day Four — Poetry, Landscape, Lectio Devina

I sat to pray by the side of the water, and everywhere in the mountains it was morning. I could watch the sun creep down towards the shore, slowly down the sloping hills, down the green, down from the low clouds where they drifted like hardly-held breath.

I sat to pray, and no words came, except the sacred silence, the intake of breath, the slow and gentle rearranging of my body to open and let in just a little more sky. What kind of prayer could I utter after this? When what I wanted most was only to keep moving, to keep shifting in this way, until every part of me was open, and the waters and the clouds and the mountains in their shining came rolling in.

~*~

I wonder if the gods feel this intimacy too, and if, in coming with my ancestors to America, they feel the loss of it as well. Does the land seem larger to them, sprawled out and scaled up — do they miss the smallness of it? That such a small and intimate land could be so full of gods — how could there be enough room? — and yet such a large land have only one.... In some ways it makes no sense.

Three Realms of Druidry Travel Altar

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




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

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

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

Madeline, Praying

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

And On the Edge, Surrender

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Sometimes the world feels very small.

Why is it that sleeping on the hard-packed sandy ground of the campsite, a waxing crescent moon glimmering through the thin canvas of the tiny old tent half the night, leaves me so limber and light and full of buzzing energy? It must be three or four days since I've had a full night's sleep — still, here we are, lying awake beside each other in the dark a half-hour before the alarm is set to go off, lying so very awake and listening to the first few birds of the morning. I think you smile at me in the darkness, and for a long while we just hold hands. When the alarm finally rings it seems quiet compared to the birds, and we slip from our sleeping bags, rustling and feeling our way as best we can towards our shoes and the zipper of the tent flap — in another minute, the tent is empty and deflated on the ground, and you stuff the last collapsed tent pole into its bag as I load up the car and then busy my hands dragging a brush through my sleep-tangled hair before twining it back into a loose braid again. Everything is darkness and night still. Neither of us can remember what time the sun is supposed to rise, but even the blue shadows of the dawn twilight have barely begun to lengthen and ripen, so I guess we still have time.

The Politics of Clean(s)ing

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From the Pagan celebrations of renewing energies simmering below the surface between Imbolc and Beltane, to the purifying rituals and fasts of the Lenten season leading up to the Easter holiday of rebirth and resurrection, to the secular traditions of "spring cleaning" — it seems the topic of cleansing always pushes its way up through the muck and dirt and caked layers of old dead leaves during this time of year, much like the tulips and daffodils and, I suspect, responding to the same warm sunlight and cool rains.

My usual rituals of spring cleaning have been put on hold this year as I pack up to move from my old apartment into my new home with my partner. The process, a kind of ultimate spring cleaning (except with more cardboard boxes and lots of heavy lifting), has given me a new appreciation for all those past years of intense nook-and-cranny scouring and scrubbing and clearing out the cobwebs of the previous winter. I can immediately tell those places where the cleaning "took," and those hidden corners that I overlooked time and again, now revealed in all their glory of tumbling dust-bunny mountains. And of course, there really is nothing quite like the first deep-cleaning of the new season, with all the windows thrown open and the vernal breeze rich with hyacinths and the first hint of magnolia mingling with the citrus scents of eco-friendly cleaning supplies.

And so, I've been thinking a lot recently about cleaning, and cleansing.^[*] In particular, I've been thinking about the ways in which clean(s)ing puts us into relationship with others, with the landscape and with the Song of the World, or rather, how so often it fails to do just that. I call this the "politics" of clean(s)ing, in the sense that it concerns the how's and why's of living in community, and our responsibilities (and response-abilities) in such relationship.

About the Cleaning-Lady

To illustrate the importance of the "politics of clean(s)ing," I want to focus first on what I consider to be the epitome of an unhealthy relationship, a kind of cleaning dystopia. Now normally there are very few things that would provoke me to unequivocal judgment in this blog; I try to respect others' rights to think, behave and define themselves and their values each on their own, in hopes they will do the same for me, and I would rather engage in mutual discourse than a contest in condemning. But you are about to witness, dear readers, a departure from this general track in the following statement: I know of absolutely no reason (with the exception of those who are physically unable due to age, illness or disability) for anyone to have a housekeeper, ever.

My reasons for such a strong view are manifold, but they have their origins in my up-bringing by a strong feminist mother who also, as it happens, was an incurable pack-rat. The fact is that the title of "housekeeper" is for good reason practically interchangeable with "cleaning-lady" — it is a job still dominated almost entirely by women, almost all of whom are underpaid and overworked. My sense of social justice cringes at the very notion of patronizing and perpetuating such a horrifically sexist and demeaning profession (and I must reject the notion, as I've heard some Libertarians argue in support of prostitution, that by exploiting women who have no better options, we are somehow doing them a favor).

The logic that supports this degrading profession — and believe me, there are few jobs more degrading than cleaning up someone else's waste and filth — is that it would be ridiculous to pay someone a living wage to do work you could very well do for yourself (if you were so inclined, which of course you are not). It is the same logic that exempts severs and wait-staff from minimum wage laws (after all, you could have gotten your own food... though, of course, you didn't). The result is an ugly mess of unhealthy relationships lurking just beneath that gleaming surface that we would like to call "clean."

Consider the following: out-for-hire housekeepers are often paid according to the number of houses they clean, which gives them quite a large incentive to clean a given house as quickly as possible, and move on to the next. As a result, they often focus far more on the appearance of cleanliness than on actual, deep-cleaning itself. And can you blame them? The job of housekeeper rarely comes with job security or benefits, such as health care, and on top of that, you don't get paid if you don't show up. Which also means that housekeepers will often show up to work even when they are injured or ill, which is much more frequent in a job that involves hard physical work and dealing all day with other people's germs. Whether for reasons of speed or because she is feeling less than full of vigorous health, or quite often both, a housekeeper will likely cut every corner she can, wiping down that kitchen counter once with an already-used rag from the bathroom rather than wasting time prepping a clean one and scrubbing to kill all those invisible germs that we can't see anyway. And really, it's not her house, so why should it matter to her? There is, after all, a subversive logic that plays in the heads of the working-class housekeepers and waitresses as well, which is that if the client or customer really cared about the work, they would have done it themselves, and what you're really paid for is the task of keeping up appearances. Every once in a while, you might find that wizened Buddhist woman who treats waiting tables at the local diner like a Teahouse Practice; or the devoted housekeeper who sees the task of cleaning and sterilizing other people's homes as her small homage to Mother Teresa... but such saints are few and far between, and most folks are just fellow human beings struggling to make ends meet.

The sum total of all of this? We invite someone into our home — this place meant to be a family space of comfort and safety, rest and sanctuary and warm memory — and this person brings with her the systemic violence of lingering sexism and injustice and very often poverty; she brings with her the illnesses, frenzied stress and repressed resentment of a demeaning and difficult job; she brings with her all those literal germs from all the other houses she's cleaned that day, not to mention the harsh industrial chemicals that are just as bad for the earth as they are for the human body... and when she leaves, we survey our domain and call it "clean." And yet, how could this be clean? How could this truly be healthy? We have invited in countless violations of kindness, honor and responsibility — we have welcomed in a reality rife with invisible illness and imbalance for the sake of a superficial glimmering appearance, and in the very act of doing so we have relinquished our own responsibilities.

Why Cleansing Matters

In some ways, the argument that if you really cared about the work, you would do it yourself, though often bitter and self-justifying among those who work in the "service industry," has a deeply relevant point. Cleaning puts us into relationship with the places and objects that we clean — but more specifically, it is work that restores our relationship with all those things that we have used up and worn out with our daily living, often taking them for granted or overlooking them as our grime collects and our handling wears. The process of cleaning is our chance to re-attune with these, to demonstrate with our hands and our care, our time and concentration, the gratitude and respect that they are due. During this time we spend cleaning, we become willing attendants to those objects and places that have continually served us, patiently and reliably and without protest. For the Pagan who views all of the embodied, physical world as sacred, cleaning is a sacred act of cleansing, in which we purify our relationships with a space and its dwelling spirits (whether literal or metaphorical) by redressing the imbalances of carelessness and inattention that can so often creep into our lives.

This is the why of cleansing, but the how is also intensely important. The cleansing process puts us in touch and in tune with an object or space so that we can establish a healthy and respectful "working relationship." But as any good ritualist or spellcrafter knows, when we set about the work of clearing away the mirky or harmful energies and the lingering spiritual echoes of a place or object, we also engage in opening ourselves and emptying ourselves. We give ourselves a chance to start fresh with a new sense of freedom grounded in the present, the here-now. Household cleaning tasks are often slow and repetitive — the same sweep of the broom or swish of the mop, the same turn and twist of the dishrag, the same back-and-forth of the scrub brush on the shower tile — and so they can become a kind of embodied meditation similar to that of smudging a sacred circle or cleansing a crystal. They require and help to cultivate self-discipline, gradually quieting the riot of thoughts in the mind and bringing the attention into focus on the most mundane of details.

And so this is why, I think, it is in the spring that we find ourselves so often thinking about cleaning and cleansing. Not only is cleaning a natural and practical way to direct those energies that come bubbling up from beneath the long-frozen ground and pouring down from the ever-higher sun, but it provokes a kind of revery in the mundane. The freshly washed curtains sway in the breeze beside the newly dusted windowsill, on which sits the most mundane and common of things: a few fresh-cut flowers in a vase. And life urges us to stop and smell the flowers, to slow down, to give our attention willingly and reverently to those little things that are tripping and tumbling over themselves in offering, that give of themselves endlessly and utterly fill our lives, a glass that runneth over with the generous fecundity of spring and simple things.

^[*] The two words trace back to the same Proto-Germanic roots meaning "to gleam" or make bright, with cleanse retaining its older spelling and pronunciation and clean, once used only as an adjective, taking over in the common usage. I have noticed that cleansing often tends to evoke a kind of formality and sacredness that cleaning does not, and so I will use these two terms in this way: cleaning being the mundane process, and cleansing being cleaning with that extra bit of umph added in (let's say the "s" stands for "sacred").

Pagan Parenting: Presence and Void, and Other Rude Things

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An interesting topic came up over dinner this evening with the kids, and though at the time my mouth was full of spinach and gala apple salad, and the conversation quickly moved on to hide-and-seek and other things, I wanted to make a note here of some of my own passing thoughts. For I think that in many ways, we still live with the lessons of our own childhoods and, especially for women, these lessons have not always been the healthiest, physically, emotionally or spiritually. There are a great many things that, looking back, I wish someone had told me when I was a young girl, about how the world works and why people do what they do and think the way they think. And one of those things I wish someone would have told me is: sometimes it's okay to avoid a person, even if it's rude.

To remove oneself from unpleasant or unhealthy company is only one of many rude things frowned upon in women (yes, even today), but it's one that vibrates a sympathetic chord deep in the quiet center of my being, and I find myself desperately wanting to explain to my partner's two oldest daughters that it is, in fact, definitely and completely okay to avoid a person, especially if that person is mean, manipulative or expects you to think and behave in certain ways that you do not, in your heart of hearts, agree with or feel to be right. These girls are on the verge of preadolescence, and the thought that they might grow up thinking that women are expected to always be accommodating and easy-going in whatever company, without thought to their own personal boundaries, needs or self-respect... well, it bothers me. This is basic stuff, of the "say no to drugs/peer-pressure/bridge-jumping" variety. And yet, as I've mentioned here before, they have been raised thus far in a decidedly extroverted and in some ways very gender-traditional household (despite their mother being a self-proclaimed witch), which has left them with the impression that to decline social interaction is, especially in females, the height of rudeness. As both a feminist and an introvert, I feel the need to speak up and represent, for the sake of all my fellow kindly recluses.

Of course, it's a complicated matter. While avoiding a person can sometimes be the wisest and healthiest thing to do, it is different from merely avoiding confrontation, which is also something highly prized in women. It's important to understand how these two things differ. Avoiding oneself physically from a conflict can in some cases be the most radical kind of confrontation: the very "presence" of one's absence can provoke and challenge, especially at times when one is expected to be present (or at least go through the motions of presence). There are times when showing up and merely "walking through the part" — this kind of false presence of pretending social niceties — is the real avoidance, and what is sacrificed is not only self-respect and honesty, but the sacredness of real presence, and the meaningfulness of real absence.

And this is where the Pagan spiritual life comes to play an important role for me, though there are echoes of Buddhism here as well. For the Pagan parent embraces both the light and the dark of the natural world, the day and the night, the bright sunshine filtering in and filling every space, and the emptiness of the night's void gaping between the faraway stars. The void is not something to fear or shrink from, but has its own role to play in the dance of harmony and balance. And so too does avoidance, which once meant not just to escape or evade, but to withdraw, clear out or empty oneself. It is this same process of emptying oneself that gives us the precious space of solitude and the sacred capacity for connection, through which we can learn to open to our capacity to imagine, and to relate to others. Through ritual and trance, such as that of the shaman, it gives way to what we call "shapeshifting" and journeying through the Otherworlds. But this ability to seek solitude and empty oneself is also a source of stability and strength that can enable us to be kind and loving towards others as well.

In our solitude, we enter more completely into our own presence, we begin to know it better and experience its fullness and power. And we learn that our presence is something precious that we can choose (or choose not) to share with others. It is not something to be frittered away uncaringly or lived only half-heartedly, it is not something that can be demanded or expected, it is never obligatory or compulsory: it is a gift. When we realize this, not only do we appreciate ourselves more and protect more fiercely that sparkling individuality that gives our presence its uniqueness and meaning, but we also come to see that our being present — fully and truly and whole-heartedly present — can be a gift of loving-kindness and transformative connection that we give to others. We are less inclined to take it for granted, but likewise we are all the more capable of giving it knowingly, even to those who we think might not appreciate it, because we understand the real nature of the giving. But all this rests on our ability to give it freely, to choose to give our presence to others; or, through our absence, to demonstrate the withdrawal of our support for unhealthy conditions or to point to or illustrate an absence that we already feel is lurking beneath the surface of acceptability and politeness.

The Pagan life is chock-full of many rude things. Playing in the mud, laughing during religious ceremonies, going braless or barefoot or unshaven or skyclad, dancing in the firelight to the beating of drums, bragging, boasting, flouting, flirting, fucking, eating and drinking and wandering wild in the woods under waling moonlit winds, so many rude and naughty and socially frowned-upon things. Let us not confuse what is rude with what is cruel, or callous, or stupid, or wrong. Let us be rude to the utmost of our love, and seek silence, and sing, and be joyous and honest and present and free.

Goddess in the Details (in three parts): One

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"And too, bearing witness,
like a woman bears a child,
with all her might."
- Ani DiFranco, "grand canyon"

Spin Away, World

The world spun away for a time. I was so worried about getting through airport security — not because I'm a security threat, but because I must have my name on some list somewhere by now, with all the protests and peace vigils and poetry I've got under my belt — that I hadn't spent any time on the idea of actually flying. But I've been so busy looking at the sky lately, the moon huge and low in the twilight month after month, the clouds roiling over gray autumn horizons. I never stopped to think, really, that we would be flying. And then there I was, sleep-deprived and half-jazzed on compensatory caffeine, buckled tightly into my narrow seat in a tiny box of metal and plastic, each uneven crack in the runway's pavement jostling under me.

"Once there was a farm..." the airport billboards read along the moving walkways that we danced and jogged and stepped backwards down for a sense of levity and play. And now, an airport on some of the only flat land in the city, sprawling out in an even-armed cross of shops and bars and shiny things on the wrong side of security gates that moved you so fast through an assembly line of strip-down-and-scan that you were left on the other side — on the inside, now — hastily bundling your coat and bags into your arms, shoes half-on and shuffling off disheveled to look for a place to collect yourself. Instead, on every side were fast food signs smiling neon and drug stores slyly offering to sell you the things you weren't allowed to bring with you. Too much to take in. I admit, there are times when I'm sick with consumer culture. The rows of gunmetal-gray seats of Gate 82 were a relief, and the windows looking out across vast stretches of macadam crisscrossed with worn painted lines. Then, we were boarding, our seats on the Emergency Exit aisle, with only tiny windows to see out of, a view of the wing stretching away from us. And we sat patiently, as we taxied this way and that along the pavement, the rough patches jolting beneath us, the air inside the plane already seeming stale and cramped to my lungs.

But I wasn't nervous, even then. Not really. It felt like an unnecessarily tightly-built bus, was all, and I held my hands clasped in my lap and blinked my tired eyes and waited. We were at the end of the runway, cleared for take-off, and the little plane's engines burned and the noise, the humming and throbbing high-pitched ringing, intensified — and we were screaming down the concrete, faster and faster, but not fast enough, it seemed, how could we possibly go fast enough — and I waited for the lift, for the sense of being lifted....

It never came. What came, instead, was pressure. Enormous, amazing pressure from all directions, a pressure that sped up my heart and my breathing and confused my eyes, which saw nothing change in my surroundings, the sides of the plane, the seats, the ceiling, everything still just where it was, where it had been. But we were screaming, tearing away from the ground by sheer force of humdrum ordinary will, and it seemed for a moment as if the whole blessedly belligerent life-force of the human race was pouring into my head, pounding down through me, so that I was drunk with our arrogance and triumph — we were in the air, we were gods-be-damned flying, and there was nothing above us but sky. And all of us sitting passively in our little cushioned seats, our seatbelts fastened, tray tables and seat backs in their upright and locked positions, like our spines, our minds, our wills, we were all of us right there, plunged into the thrumming, whining ordinary reality of pressurized air thousands of feet up. And nobody else seemed to notice. But my palms were wet with sweat where I gripped the metal armrests, and when Jeff pointed out our tiny oval window, I forced myself to relax before looking, and try to breathe. I whispered a prayer and felt the firm, round stone of peace nestled in my solar plexus. And then, the world spun away.

The wing dipped as the plane turned, and below us was a view of the ground, the land rolling away, all spotted motley browns and ruddy shades of trees and fields in the winter and fog. And, if I had a thought at all, it was only, "That's the land," or maybe "That's the land from above." Then obscured by wisps and thick drifts of clouds lit, beyond comprehension, from behind us. I couldn't have said exactly what it was that caused it — the beauty, perhaps, or the persistence of nature, or just the rushing back of gratitude and humility — but I began to cry.

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.

Thoroughly Thurled

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In the dream, my old college professor feeds page after page of the Torah into the scanner, letters scrolling down a nearby computer screen in a kind of river-like matrix, flickering, converting to numbers and back again.

The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels; this is what my boyfriend and I discussed over lunch the day before, sitting in the cafe of the local natural history museum, munching on organic veggie wraps and grilled cheese sandwiches. The linguistics of thought, the shape of consciousness, mind itself, embedded with grammar, running over syntax like water over stone, plunging, eddying and moving on again. Breath, exhalation, that which is sacred and cannot be written. The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels. We asked each other, does that make a difference?

In the dream, the computer script searches for meaningful combinations of letters reconverted according to some obscure theological algorithm, a pulsating crossword-puzzle alive with juxtaposition. Now and then, a word in red slips by amidst the stream of symbols and nonsense text. "A red-letter day," my old professor jokes. Mundane words, articles and adjectives, verbs, nothing that coheres or speaks. One catches my eye, and I peck at the keyboard to check the software for bugs.

"There's something wrong," I answer my professor's raised eyebrow, "It's generating noise, now. 'Thurl,' for instance, isn't a real word."

"Yes it is!" He laughs shortly. In dreams, he's often laughing.

"I've never heard of it. Then what does it mean?"

"It is the time," he says, "in a TV Western pistol duel, between when somebody shouts 'Draw!' and somebody else shoots. Or, it is the time right after afternoon tea, but right before an early dinner." I can tell he's teasing me. I wake up scoffing and grinning.

Down at the park that day, I'm too enthralled by the moving surface of the stream to notice the hem of my dress darkening with muddy water where it drags along the rock's edge. I crouch, bare feet planted on the warm rough stone where it juts out into the middle of the creak, and watch the tangled green locks of algae wriggle in the current beneath webbed reflected sunlight.

"I looked it up," I tell my boyfriend, "and it turns out, it means, 'the hip joint of cattle.'"

"So you got that one wrong!" He dips a big toe into the water, saying, "It's not as cold as I expected--but slippery."

"Well, I don't know. So, the other definitions were, 'an aperture or hole'--or as a verb, 'to cut through, to pierce.' And then there's something to do with mining, 'a communication between two adits.' An adit is the long, horizontal entrance or passage into the mine."

"I still don't see what that has to do with dueling." He straddles rocks, gripping his way from one to another towards where I'm perched over the raw umber rushing water. The stream presses itself through a few cracks in the stone, becoming a small waterfall that churns iridescent and pushes an exhalation of soft-gray bubbles down to brush the bottom of the streambed before rising swiftly back to the surface. From where I sit, I can watch this happening forever, never growing old.

"There's a story--I think it's a Zen parable--about a butcher whose knives never get dull. Everyone thinks he must have some magic about his knives, or a special kind of metal, so that he never needs to sharpen them. One day, his young apprentice gets up the nerve to ask. And he explains, his knives never get dull because he doesn't actually cut through the meat and bone the way a less skillful butcher would. Instead, he finds the thin-spaces-between that already exist in the flesh, and he just slips his knife into them."

"That sounds like it's probably Zen," my boyfriend agrees. I stand to embrace him as he steps cautiously onto the rock where I've been crouching. It's then, straightening up, that I notice for the first time my skirt's hem, damp and heavy dragging along the rock, leaving a dirty streak where it slaps and clings to my pale lower calf. "Don't you feel as though winter is still hanging around?" he asks, looking out over the surrounding swamp. The noisy creak twines through last year's leftover straw-like cattails. The sky above is an aching hue of blue unbroken by clouds. A few overhanging trees have just begun to bud. He holds me close, and I can feel his diaphragm expand and contract, his whole body warm against me as he sighs.

"Maybe a little, but I can't really feel it when you're smothering me like this," I say to provoke him. He pulls away in playful defiance, teases and prods me until I recant.



"I think it was a story about the time between when you breathe in, and when you breathe out," I say, sometime later. "But the 'hip joint of cattle' reminded me of it, and then there are all those obsolete definitions about piercing and apertures, openings, entrance-ways, communications. And--if you think about it, that moment of a duel between the draw and the shot, that thin-space-between when nobody breathes. Or the time between meals, I think that was supposed to be a joke about just how wide that space-between can feel sometimes, when someone is hungering. And then, if Hebrew has no vowels, 'thurl' is just how you'd say 'thrill' without the 'i', thrll. Isn't thrill also a kind of moving through the thin-space-between?"

He looks at me with a mix of incredulity and amazement. "How is it that you can learn vocabulary in your sleep?"

"I'm just that good." I wrinkle my nose at him, which is my way of winking or raising an eyebrow.

"And this morning you were saying you were 'too full of words.'"

"I was--too full of words, my brain was noisy. I couldn't focus. But being out here..."

We're walking home, through the wooded ravine that will lead out of the park back into the cluttered urban neighborhood. The soles of my feet are still recalling the warm solidity of rock beneath them, my toes the quick sliding skin of water. We're still stuck smack in the city, the white-noise grind of traffic reaching us through the trees, but everywhere the birds are following each other, the scrappy chipmunks skittering over roots and the ruts left by bicycle tires in the mud. There are insects again, bees in the underbrush, and I feel as though I have escaped, finally, from some cold pressure that has wrapped my lungs for so long I had ceased to notice it. There is space again, movement in all directions that pull and stretch the landscape into distance, opening it up again. Everywhere, life is opening it up again under a high, bright sky. Birdcalls pierce the breeze, connecting one long, dark tunnel of mind to another.

"Being out here... I'm so full of thurl."

In Perfect Love & Perfect Jenga!

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You might not suspect it at first, but Druidry asks us to give up a lot.

I certainly didn't expect it when I first began exploring the Craft and aspects of nature spirituality back in college. At the time, I looked on the spiritual work embraced by Paganism as a release and an expansion of my artistic and creative work (which I had, in any case, always pursued "for the sake of the Divine"). I wanted to move beyond mere words and the music of poetry; I wanted the tools to transform my life itself, body and heart, spirit and mind, into an engaged, living work of art. The personal ritual, magic, meditation and prayer of Druidry offered me these tools.

I should have seen the inevitable coming. I was writing short stories as early as freshman year about the sculptor of Winged Victory chiseling away at all that was not goddess. I'd had intimate relations with poetry as long as I could remember, and had learned the tension and beauty of limits, those perfectly crafted lines and stanzas, the concise brute force of a few words juxtaposed. All that is not infinite has its limits, this is not a bad thing. It's nature. Limitation is so often descried, equated with restriction and censorship; but limit is only the daughter of form, that's all.

Druidry is, in part, about learning our own limits, celebrating our form and seeking out our boundaries, the edges of our sacred space, our nemeton. Without a sense of the beauty that resides in the liminal, along the edges of finite things, how can we know real intimacy, the lingering thrill of allowing others in or reaching out tentatively beyond ourselves? Music has form, song has limits--it has scale and progression, it has shape and movement. When we sing together, our voices in tune, our bodies are vessels sharing a vibration in the most literal sense. We move together, we share an imperceptible boundary that buzzes and blurs. Without limits, movement is impossible (where would we be moving to, and how could we be growing?). Druidry teaches us to sing our soul's song--to put the world to sleep for three nights, or provoke it into weeping or laughter--and to sing our spirit in harmony, with an attentive ear to the weaving, echoing melodies of the world. Love, too, has its form, and therefore its limits, though limit and condition are not synonymous.

Love--whether the "perfect love" of the Wiccan Rede or the "unconditional love" of Christian mysticism--asks us to give up a lot. If we love nature, the environment, the ecosystems of our world, we learn to move in sympathy with them, to find and feel a center and gravity other than our own. If we sing with the trees and the earth, it becomes more difficult for us to callously waste and destroy--we share an edge, we feel the limits and needs of nature rubbing up against our own, we overlap, and we flinch as destruction "over there" sends ripples of regret and anguish reaching all the way to the "here" of our own deepest beings. In love, limits are not "conditions" of restriction or rejection. They do not deny certain kinds of love to certain kinds of beings, nor do they negate or denigrate the self that loves. Instead, the natural limits of love--love as an activity, as a process of creation, as movement and form--make liminal experiences of intimacy and trust possible, and render meaningful our urge towards response-ability. In this sense, even as imperfect creatures living in a less-than-ideal world, we have access to the infinite potential of condition-less love, capable in every moment of responding uniquely to each infinitely unique being.

But our edges blur, the shore shifts between every tide and tiny snails take up residence in our crevices and unseemly dark places. Love asks us to give up a lot, including our assumptions about what we, as isolated individuals, need to survive and how justified we are in taking it.

Maslow has his (in)famous "Hierarchy of Needs," a pyramid built on survival, security, support, and respect. We human beings need food, water, shelter, air, sleep--we require basic physical conditions to be met, just to stay alive. And once we have these things? We want to know they will be there tomorrow, as well, and indefinitely into the future, or at least for a good long while. When our physical bodies feel sated and safe, the pattern repeats again on a socio-psychological level: we need to feel as though we belong, to a family and a community, and that our emotional and intellectual selves will find nourishment here; and then we need to feel respected, productive and accomplished so that this support won't suddenly be withdrawn and denied to us later. Only after all of these things do we come to consider what Maslow calls "self-actualization": creativity, imagination, contemplation and ethical activity. If we're lucky. Some of us never get there. Why? Because this is, after all, a pyramid--the higher we want to go, the larger the base. The more productive and respected we want to be, the more community ties we must maintain, and so the more security and basic material needs that must be met. Some of us will spend lifetimes building out our base, putting one block next to another on the first two or three tiers, until we have a man-made plateau that stretches wide around us on all sides.

Meanwhile, the snails are at their work, love wearing us down, smoothing away everything that isn't goddess or god. Love, and Druidry, ask us to give up a lot. To give up willful or careless harm; to give up eating meat, if our bodies can take it (which most of them can); to give up excessive consumption and energy waste; sometimes to give up the support and acceptance of a family or community that cannot understand our spirituality; in short, to give up many of the things that we've come to assume are fundamental to our survival. The "higher" we try to go, the more we seem to find the blocks of our life knocked out from under us. The work comes to seem less like the building of a Great Pyramid in a desert, and more like a precarious game of Jenga! in which our balance is our sanity, our spirit and our survival. How can we do it? How can we find it within ourselves to take the risk, to give up our assumptions and confront our fears?

Have you ever played Jenga!? I hope so, it's fun-for-the-whole-family, as they say. The strategy of Jenga! is essentially this: move slowly, calmly, and with trust. Test each block, push it gently with the soft tip of your finger--some will be stubborn and load-bearing, but others will slide free easily, as if by magic. Not only this, but as the tower grows higher, its weight will shift and some of those blocks that seemed impossible to move before may suddenly cease to be so important. In Ali's "Jenga! of Needs," the spiritual life is much the same--we move cautiously, with baby-steps, giving up what we can afford and, with each surrender, we also build, we reach further, higher, deeper. Where we find frightening emptiness, we seek new centers of gravity, the edges of others we love. We weave them intimately into our lives and allow them to lend us balance and strength. Furthermore: we create. We have no set number of blocks, we carve out our own, we not only build but we grow, and our own growth provides us with ever-new materials out of which to craft our life. Eventually, perhaps, some of us might grow to become like those mystics and saints, living high in the mountains on tea and yogic discipline, or deep in a monastery subsisting on prayer and consecrated bread. For some, love will knock us off our feet, and we will suddenly find ourselves able to fly.

But for now, baby steps: movement, limit, form, celebration and imagination, creativity and praise... in perfect love and perfect trust.

Altar Overhaul

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This past month of blogging has been heavy with abstraction and theory, but that's not all I've been up to. In those moments when I step back and take a look at myself, I'm still a bit stunned at this sudden surge of energy and focus I've had since the winter solstice.

It was a little less than a year ago, just after passing my First Degree Exam with AODA, that I decided to cease formal study with the Order for a little while. I didn't perform the ritual self-initiation to enter the first degree of Druid Apprentice at the time, since one aspect of the ritual was to describe what you had learned during your time as a Candidate; while I'd written twenty-seven pages worth of reflection for my exam on this very topic, I wanted to be absolutely sure, to gain some perspective about some of the fundamental ways that Druidry had thus far shaped and changed me, before I committed to formal membership and further study. The following year was quiet and contemplative when it came to my spiritual path. I kept blogging, thinking and spending a great deal of time out in nature. I read a bit of Celtic mythology and other texts that were beyond the "Druidry 101" types I'd been lining my shelf with up until that point. But for the most part I lapsed back into observer-mode, the role I had occupied for several years as a student in college, studying Neopaganism from the outside-in before finally trying my hand at this whacky nature-worship hoopla for myself. For the past year, I've done very little actual spiritual work. I've continued to go on walks and attend to nature, but I haven't prayed, meditated or even done much ritual on the holy days. I just... didn't feel like it.

I'm not sure what exactly changed this Alban Arthan past, but something sure has kicked back into gear. I've felt a sense of renewal and more solidified commitment. Along with the intense serial posts that I've spent a great deal of time working on, I recently determined that it was absolutely essential to address the issue of my altar, which had been bothering me for quite some time. Over the year--especially in the autumn, as a means of coping with some annual bad-memories-relived issues--I had turned my altar area mainly into a kind of shrine to the local landscape of the natural world, scattered with leaves, seeds, nuts and stones I'd collected on my weekly walks. But with this new spurt of energy, and a renewed commitment to regular meditation that I'd already started to make good on, I decided to sit down and work on an "altar overhaul."

Assessing Needs

First, I made a list of the ideal uses that I would like my main altar to serve:

• as a shrine, to display important and/or aesthetic objects (such as candles, statues, paintings, cards, other objects)


• as a space of offering, incorporating objects from nature such as leaves, stones, flowers, shells, seeds, etc., to be placed in an offering dish or among the other ritual items on display


• a focal point for meditation and prayer, with comfortable seating and an aesthetically pleasing balance in design, to draw me naturally and eagerly into the space

I quickly realized that my current altar set-up, in trying to meet all these needs, failed to meet any of them fully. I also noticed that I had no real interest in the kind of "working altar" and its tools that was commonly found in witchcraft and other kinds of magical practices, although this model of functionality (and elemental correspondence, especially) had been the first type I'd been introduced to and was still shaping my expectations in many ways.

Next, I tried to pinpoint some of the biggest problems with my current altar, to give me a clearer picture of what issues I would need to resolve:

• using the top of my bureau as a shrine meant having a mirror as a permanent backdrop; not only did this limit the amount of decorative elements I could incorporate (as well as providing a distracting full-view reflection of myself during ritual), but using the mirror for mundane purposes meant that I had to literally "overlook" the shrine on a daily basis


• a lack of comfortable seating (in particular a floor cushion that would allow me to sit in my preferred cross-legged position) discouraged me from extended or regular use; pulling up a chair required inconvenient furniture rearranging, plus the shape of bureau made sitting close awkward, with no room for my knees


• the shape of the bureau top was flat and long, so that my altar was broken into smaller areas some of which had no organized theme whatsoever; it often felt too long to be practical, and didn't have an aesthetic "flow" or coherence necessary to create an inviting or inspiring space


• at the most basic level, the area was impractical for activities such as burning candles or incense, or lighting small controlled fires in my cauldron; not enough space to allow for ease and comfort, amplified by my worries about wax or burn marks ruining a nice wood finish, provided too many causes for distraction or discomfort

With these problems clearly identified, I soon began to prioritize and scope out my apartment for possible new locations and set-ups for a more practical altar space. I found a corner in my bedroom that had become a kind of random-pile-of-stuff mess, so I buckled down and cleared it out, brought an old round end table up from basement storage, lugged a huge forgotten cushion out of the closet, and followed my instinct.

Over the past month or so, my most pressing priority had become a practical altar for meditation. I'd already begun meditating again before going to bed each night, sitting on my bed in my pajamas working at simple Sphere of Protection visualizations and occasionally going to my inner nemeton or sacred grove. But I wanted something more, something set off from the nightly routine: a candle to light, burning incense to mark the beginning of meditative time and permeate the space with a sense of quiet, sacred stillness. And for some reason, I really wanted to pour water over stones.

Cultivating Enchantment

I can't really explain this last desire--it is essentially nonrational. During family summer vacations in Acadia National Park, ME, in recent years, I'd taken to pouring out small amounts of water onto the ground when I stopped for a drink during long hikes. The huge granite slabs of the coastal mountain peaks, warm with long hours of sunlight, seemed to drink up the offering, glistening and growing darker where the water pooled and trickled between rough patches of lichen, into invisible fractures in the rock. I did it without thinking, as a way of showing my gratitude for the mountains, the earth, the pacing rocky shoreline and the sea racing out to meet endless sky. And now, thinking about my meditative practices and what my ideal altar would include, I found myself imagining the cairns and boulders of Acadia again, and seeing myself in a peaceful grove, kneeling and offering clear, fresh water (or maybe sometimes a bit of mead) to the earth.

This kind of nonrational ritual activity--pouring water over a small pile of stones, to soak into the soil beneath--had a strong aesthetic sense that enchanted and inspired me, so I decided to go with it. Rather than organize a new altar around the traditional four elements, I decided to focus instead on the Three Realms of Druidry: earth, sea and sky, represented by the bile (or sacred tree), the sacred fire, and the sacred well.

• My mother had given me a beautiful hand-turned clay candle holder for Christmas, a deep gorgeous blue that rippled around a carved image of the sun, so I set to work washing out a small jar in which I could safely burn a tealight; this would be my sacred flame, a symbol of the sky and solar energies.


• Next, I found a small blue bowl I'd bought more than a year ago, collecting dust in my kitchen cabinet. Filling it with sea salt infused water and laying a small mirror on its bottom, over which I scatter a few chips of moonstone and tiny snail shells I'd gathered along the beaches of Acadia, I now had my sacred well, to serve both as a symbol of the sea and of the lunar energies that would compliment and balance those of the sun.


• Finally, I filled a round, green tray (which used to belong to a decorative planters pot) with rich, dark soil and built a small cairn out of river stones and rough pebbles; this would be my symbol for earth, this dish with its tiny axis mundi reaching upwards, circled by decorative green boughs.

I arranged these three items on the circular end table in the corner of my bedroom, rearranged a few chairs and bookcases to open up the space to allow for both standing meditation and sitting cross-legged on a cushioned elevated platform (i.e. a sturdy old wooden kids-sized table from my childhood that has outlasted every piece of brightly-colored plastic junk I ever owned). The altar faces southwest, and I often feel the interplay of fire and water, grounded deeply in the earth, as part of its inspiration and enchantment. During sessions of meditation, I place a small stick of incense to the left of the solar candle, and a pitcher next to the bowl of water. I fill the pitcher with fresh water before hand and, during my meditation, I infuse this with a few drops from the bowl before charging it with intention and gratitude and pouring it gently over the stones.

Back to Work

Soon after completing the overhaul and set up of my new altar, sewing my new white cotton meditation robes and practicing regularly for a good week and a half, I decided that I was indeed ready to finally commit to AODA's first degree of Druid Apprentice through the formal self-initiation ritual. So, once again, I found myself in need of a "working altar" arrayed with the four elemental cauldrons of the traditional AODA ritual. My meditation altar proved unsuitable for these purposes, and the shrine-like altar on my bureau was utterly impractical as well (not least because it did not allow me to walk circles around it, being up against a wall). Then it dawned on me: I had a perfectly good table already available, the one I had been using as a platform for my seated meditations. I kept it intentionally clear of clutter during the day to minimize the need to shuffle and rearrange objects when setting up my meditative space each evening. How simple it would be to pull this table out into the center of the room, arrange a chair in the south facing north, and set up a temporary "working altar" for practical ritual that could be easily dismantled again after the ceremony had finished.

This is precisely what I did. The dish of earth set in the north and the bowl of water in the west were complimented by a candle and incense in the south and east, and in the center I placed the solar candle as a focal point. Rather than merely representing the sky realm, as it did on my meditation altar, here it could serve to symbolize all Three Realms together: the candle inside still represented the sky and sacred fire, but now it floated in the jar I had filled with salt-infused water representing the sea, while the pottery itself, sculpted lovingly out of clay, came to represent the realm of earth. This jar full of water, which had felt the warmth of the sacred flame, I would later transfer into the lunar bowl on my meditation altar, where it would eventually blend with fresh waters and bless the soil and stones of the dish of earth. In this way, the energies and intentions at the center of my working altar would circulate in a fluid dynamic among the Three Realms in the sacred space where I quieted myself to meditate and pray, forging and reminding me of the intimate relationship of exchange between my receptive stillness and my active ritual work.

Out of respect for the oath I have sworn to the Order, I cannot go into more details about the nature of the initiation ritual itself, but you can also see on the working altar the symbols of my Druid Apprenticeship: the red cord, the knife, the red stone or "Druid egg" (though some scholars believe the Druid egg, said to have been made from the spittle of a ball of writhing serpents, was actually a bit of coral, not in the literal shape of an egg), and the tiny crane bag. These special objects now, too, sit on my meditation altar when they are not being used for formal ritual, representing my store of potential and the essence of my connection with the Sacred hidden and kept safe within.

Autumn Altar

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For the time being I've ceased my formal, structured study with Druidry, in order to allow myself to grow a bit more organically along the path for a little while and discover where that leads. (This is one reason I haven't been blogging nearly as much recently.) My bedroom altar has taken on this organic aspect, too, and I find myself often picking up "found objects" on my weekly walks and incorporating them.

I love this process, because it keeps me in touch with the cycles of nature without having to flip through annoying reference books in search of seasonal correspondences decided upon by other people, correspondences that might not even relate to my own immediate landscape or climate anyway. By ignoring such reference sources and relying instead on the things nature offers to me directly, I find myself slowly learning about my own place in the land. If the leaves are already beginning to change in my local area, then gosh darn it, colorful leaves it is. If the chestnuts are falling but the gardens I walk past on my way to work still have roses in bloom, then I can celebrate both. This process reminds me that the change of the seasons isn't broken up into distinct time periods--it's messy and overlapping and intertwined.

With that in mind, my altar has become a bit more "cluttered" and idiosyncratic, rather than sparse and functional the way it used to be. I no longer use it primarily as a functional altar, but perhaps more as a "shrine" to the external physical landscape of the natural world, and the internal landscape of my own psyche and spiritual needs. Decorating with bits of nature brings that earthy scent into my home, but it also keeps me in tune with the natural turn of the seasons. As the flower blossoms dry out, or the leaves slowly brown and wither, or the gourds grow dusty and the shells of nuts begin to splinter, I can tell it's time to give these things back to the natural world to let them decay--and begin looking for new signs of the season to come. This serves as a subtle reminder to allow my own cycles to ebb and flow according to their natural energies, instead of trying to force order and conformity where they will not suit my own changing needs.

Working with my altar this way keeps me grounded in nature, but it also allows me to indulge my natural urge to "gather" beautiful objects that seem to resonate or capture my attention when I'm out walking. I often feel as though these gifts are offerings that the earth places in my path, and it's an important aspect of my spiritual life to feel willing and able to accept them--without getting home, saying, "O, now what am I going to do with all this?" and feeling like I have to just chuck them out before they being to rot and gather dust. A while ago, it occurred to me that the idea of making "offerings" to the gods and to the earth can be a little silly if taken too seriously--after all, what do we have that we have not first been given? I decided that what we have to offer is our intention, our attention, and our love--and incorporating "found objects" into my altar as offerings is my way of acknowledging the many gifts I receive, and transforming them through my intention and imagination into something new that I can give back to the world. Thus, one of the central aspects of my altar is the small blue offering dish. Right now, it holds a few wild local chestnuts I gathered during a walk in the park, a cardinal feather I found in the woods, a few daisy blossoms from a bouquet I bought at the local flower shop, and a striking (and a little out of place) rose petal I found just this afternoon on my way back from lunch, while I was wondering about the persistence and delicacy of love.

Dance Trance Revolution

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Remember how I had promised to write a few more poetic posts for the up-coming spring, instead of nit-picky obnoxious posts? Here's the thing about plans: uh....

This is not going to be an interesting or relevant (let alone poetic) post either. I'm coming down from a dance high.

Yesterday I spent twelve hours with a very good friend of mine, Jen, talking and talking about everything under the sun (and moon, by the time we were done). We met "around noonish" for lunch, then restaurant-hopped from Sam's to the place where I work to Starbucks (sadly, but it was next to the laundromat, and Jen had to do laundry and pack for her spring break trip that she left on this morning); we finally parted ways just after midnight. I have to say, it felt like one of those magical days when everything just clicked into place. Sometimes, so often surrounded by people who ignore me, don't understand me or make me slightly uncomfortable, I forget how absolutely freeing and refreshing it is to get into a groove with someone who knows and cares about you, and to have that groove last all day. Sometimes when this happens, I slip into a slightly manic stage--I've noticed this especially after long periods of relative restraint and stagnation, it's as if the energy has hit a block and backed up along the synapses until suddenly it all comes bursting out at once in a kind of noisy chaos. It's easy to feel ungrounded and a bit fizzy when this happens, and the best way to avoid it, I guess, is to try to keep the energy flowing smoothly rather than letting it build up behind a block.

Am I making any sense? One result of my long day yesterday was that it ran me almost dry for today, which happens to be gorgeous, sunny and warm. I'm not usually a very social person, and being around anyone, even a good friend, for so long and maintaining the kind of intense, animated discussion we were having--well, it exhausts me. When I got home last night, I realized my throat was tight and sore from talking, and that night I dreamed first of my right foot being torn into three pieces (which I had to staple back together and then have a healer wrap in gauze and numbweed) and then of being chased for miles by a slick, beautiful greyhound (that would be my gut-bunny dreaming, I guess). So all day today, instead of feeling ready and able to sit down in front of the computer and work, I've felt rather worn and bombarded by sunlight. Rather than center and focus in, all I want to do is splay (v. to spread out, expand, extend; to flare). Bumbling away the hours into mid-afternoon, I decided finally to walk to the grocery store and pick up some supplies. On my way home, listening to my iPod, I began to feel that internal beat that I love about punk rock music...

Which led to a two-hour dance-a-thon in my living room. Whew! Let me just tell you, I am a horrible dancer. Don't be deceived. I couldn't appear graceful on the dancefloor if my life depended on it. Which is why it's been so long since I really just danced for any extended period of time, especially without any self-consciousness at all (or running into the furniture because I was a little drunk). Sure, once in a while, I'll put on some music and dance for a song or two just to ground some excess vibes, but usually that's about it. Today, though, I really got into it. If I were feeling more poetic or focused now, I could wax philosophical about the experience, but the truth is, I'm still buzzing. I've heard of other Pagans talking about the dance trance, the rhythm of movement and breath (especially in, say, a drum circle or ritual setting); even my OBOD gwersu recommend using dance as a method of shamanic journeying or preparation for the celebration of the holy days in the yearly cycle. But I've never really tried it. Kind of like chanting, I just wasn't sure I "got" the point of it, or the knack of it for that matter.

As of today, that's definitely changed, and we'll certainly see about incorporating dance into future celebrations and rituals. This was in no way formal ritual or trance work, and the music wasn't always conducive to spiritual contemplation (being mostly angry punk music about rejected love and disillusionment), but I could definitely see the potential in the future for "dancing my worship." There were moments when gesture, movement, form--all seemed to meld and melt, and my upraised arms or stamping feet were not just willed actions of the body, but communicative experiences of Spirit itself. I think I'm going to work with that, see what unfolds, see where it might lead...

But for now, I have to go close my windows, because it's actually much chillier in here than I thought when I was working up a sweat.