Of course, I'll be honest, most of those opinions are about other people's opinions. The run-down of my own initial reaction to the news, which I read about first on The Pagan and The Pen goes something like: Hey! That's fantastic! Good for them! Even though I'm not a member of TDN because (a) I don't agree completely with the definition of deity that Emma Restall Orr outlines in her book Living Druidry
, and (b) it seems like the Network is mostly focused on the UK more than the US — I still very much respect the organization's leadership and the projects they promote. Plus, their anti-hierarchical anarchic tendencies are pretty cool, and Jeff and I really enjoyed doing the freely-available-on-their-website Perennial Course in Living Druidry over this past year. Maybe this news will help them grow and inspire more people to take a serious look at Druidry and what it can offer as a modern spiritual tradition. Whereupon I forwarded the news and link on to Jason at The Wild Hunt to perhaps be included in the regular "Pagan Community Notes" feature... because at that point, it was of note to our community, but not actual news.
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"Let me get this straight," this Other Ali would say. "You're telling me that our government, the government of the United States of America, invented an elaborate lie about global warming as early as the 1970s, then conspired to spread this lie all across the world, convincing scientists from every industrialized nation to 'independently verify' such a concept through hundreds of studies, all conducted independently. Then, when the rest of the world has completely fallen for this thoroughly convincing lie and everyone begins signing silly Kyoto Protocols and such nonsense, you know, cutting emissions, designing more energy-efficient vehicles, the U.S. government--the same government that supposedly conspired to tell this Lie of Global Warming in the first place--refuses to play along and instead decides to reject the whole idea, to reduce regulations and to encourage hugely wasteful and backwards industry models that only serve to put our manufacturing and technology industries far behind foreign competition. Despite this, our government persists, cleverly, in being very vocal in the fake denial of the lie they conspired to create and disseminate, and this goes on for decades and decades (meanwhile, the country's weathermen and meteorologists are in on it, too, reporting on the ever-increasing number of 'record-breaking heat waves' and extreme weather conditions all over the world). All of this, so that now, when even fellow American citizens have finally come to believe the lie the government has been telling them by way of everyone-except-the-government, they can make a little money off the fad of shopping for organic tomatoes and driving foreign-built hybrid cars. This is the story you want me to believe?
Perhaps it's because I came to Druidry through my poetry (which I've been writing since about the age I could first hold a crayon) and I continue to adore Druidry because of its bardic traditions, which embrace and celebrate music, song and the power of words... but I have never understood the kind of response that rejects book learnin' as somehow less important or more dangerous than direct experience. To me, reading and exploring ideas in books has always inspired and sewn in me the seeds of desire: desire to move ideas into the real world and bring their beauty into participatory being, and desire to meet the challenge of articulating my own experiences in meaningful ways that can sew those seeds in others. If it hadn't been for a few incredibly well-written books on Druidry, I wouldn't have ever bothered to begin the real life practice that has given me so much and opened me to so many experiences (I wouldn't even know what a [insert exotic sounding ritual here] was or why it might matter to other people, let alone what it might someday mean to me).