Alison Shaffer February, 2010

February is the hardest month. On Alban arthan, the winter solstice, we celebrated the rebirth of warmth and life, always new but also familiar; we rejoiced in the now-lengthening days and what we hoped they would bring. Yet in many ways this solar festival was merely an anticipation, as we looked ahead to the fire festival that begins the month of February: Imbolc, (from Irish, meaning “in the belly”). 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.

The legend of the serpent (or badger, or groundhog) that sneaks cautiously out of its earthy den on this day speaks to the irony and frustration expressed, honored and released in this celebration. The creature, startled in the brightening light by its own shadow, dives back underground for “six more weeks of winter,” and we must wait until the solar festival of the vernal equinox, Alban Eiler (Welsh, “light of the earth”), for another celebration anticipating the exuberant blossoming of spring in May. In temperate regions all over the world, it takes at least four months, sometimes closer to six, before the promised renewal comes to full fruition in warm sunlight and golden-green tree canopies. The time between can be frustrating and difficult, with our intuitive awareness of the growing light constantly rubbing itself raw against the reality of sharp winds and freezing rains.

Many Witchcraft and other Pagan traditions focus on these festivals as fertility rites of the turning year, seeing this period of time between Imbolc and the vernal equinox (which some call Eoster or Ostara, after the Germanic goddess of spring) as the gradual movement from cold and dark to warm and bright, the steady growth of the Goddess into maidenhood and beauty, and the God into manhood and potency. Druidry, however, also embraces approaches that are more ecstatic or mystic in nature, emphasizing the role of inspiration and creativity, and the harmonious uniting of the self’s song with the Song of the World. The story of the serpent, an animal associated strongly with the Celtic fire goddess Brigid, belies the easy assumptions about the coming spring and speaks instead to the uncertainty, danger and sense of hidden potentials that must be both encouraged and respected.

Coming into Light

Inspiration, or awen, can be both beautiful and dangerous, powerful and overwhelming. The pan-Celtic goddess of inspiration, Brigid, was one of the most widely-worshipped and highly-honored deities of the ancient Celtic world (some scholars even suggest she was the equivalent of Ana or Danu, the Mother of the Gods according to Irish mythology); her name meaning “exalted one,” she was said to be not only a triple-deity of poetry, smithcraft and healing, but also to have a dual nature, one side bright and the other dark. This sacred ambiguity reflects the nature of inspiration itself, that can both lift a person to heights of wisdom and beauty, and yet also threaten to burn away or drown out one’s sense of selfhood and stability. Our relationship with such a goddess within the Druidic tradition is not one of mere subservience, of course, but one of reverence and respect for the nature of deity itself as capable of both blessing and destroying. Although it is likely that Imbolc first came to be associated with Brigid because of her ties to motherhood and the healing arts, this tenuously balanced engagement with the sacred source of inspiration has echoes all through the fire festival as well.

The story of the serpent crawling from its resting place deep within the earth on this day is perhaps one of the most intriguing, especially as it has been preserved in various forms all the way to the present and is now celebrated as the secular, somewhat silly holiday of Groundhog’s Day. It may seem strange that a bright, sunny day at the beginning of February would be a harbinger of many cold winter weeks yet to come, but if we consider the story as a metaphor for divine inspiration, we may begin to understand its underlying significance. After weeks of living in darkness and cold, our longing for light and warmth can push us restlessly away from our comfort zones as we seek creative outlets and energetic release. Yet when we finally break through into the warm sunlight, so often we can be overwhelmed and frightened: for every light also casts a shadow, and the in-spiration that leads to our in-sight might also reveal to us ugliness and flaws that we had not noticed before. Like the startled badger or groundhog, we might flee back into the safety and familiarity of darkness once again and hide there for quite a long time before risking another venture. But in the story of the serpent, we find not this cowardice and retreat, but an affirmation that “I will not molest the serpent/Nor will the serpent molest me.” If we respect and honor both aspects of inspiration — the warmth of sunlight, and the shadow it casts — we can establish a reverent relationship with the serpent of wisdom and insight, and Brigid its goddess.

Priming the Pump, Doing the Work

And so, the fire festival of Imbolc is not merely a fertility rite to celebrate the birth of lambs and the blooming of snowdrops and crocuses; it is also a time to think about our relationship to the light and heat of divine inspiration. In our mundane lives, we can feel our frustration and spring-fevered restlessness. Our resolutions for the new year may still be going strong, but more likely they have petered out as our resolve has ebbed and our energy waned. That first thrust towards new life that brought us into the light of the waxing year may have by now revealed to us the shadows of difficulties and obstacles we had not expected, and of flaws and shortcomings in ourselves that we have not yet accepted. And so, it is incredibly tempting to retreat back into darkness, comfort and laziness, to try to silence our restlessness with distraction and ignore the promptings of Spirit “in the belly” insisting that we wake up and shake life back into our limbs.

But because our relationship with Brigid, and with the inspiration of awen, is not a one-way connection but a mutual engagement, we are responsible for doing our part, for doing the work necessary to prepare us for the warmth of spring and the light of Spirit. While the three other fire festivals in Druidic tradition usually center around a sacred community bonfire, Imbolc is classically associated instead with the smaller, more intimate burning of candles. Blessing and lighting candles on this day, we remember and honor the act of bringing light into the small dark places in our lives, preparing us for the day when we step into the full light of the sun.

Because so many Pagans and Druids use candles as part of regular private meditation and prayer, this simple ritual of candle-lighting also evokes the importance of daily work as part of an on-going, gradual process of growth in both spiritual and mundane aspects of our lives. Just as a healthy body means a commitment to regular exercise and balanced eating — and cannot be obtained through the frenzy of crash diets or intense, injury-inducing workouts — a healthy spiritual life is one that sustains us through the dark, cold days of winter as well as the energizing, warming days of summer. If we want to integrate our spirituality most fully into our lives, we have to do the work, engage with the small details of living in relationship with Spirit. We have to light our candles and prepare ourselves, working to become the kind of people who can live in the light unafraid. In other words, we have to allow our eyes to adjust.

I like to think of this work as “priming the pump,” a metaphor that is also appropriate for Brigid as she is associated with sacred wells and springs and the flowing of healing waters. We must engage in the process of the spiritual life with commitment and hard work, so that our energies can find healthy forms of release that will not blind or distort, but will instead restore, heal and inspire. We light candles, little man-made bits of illumination, and we settle down to prayer and meditation, inviting awen into our lives. Our work may be silly or uncertain at first, but we move forward, inch by inch, day by day, as the sun climbs higher and we grow more accustomed to living a life of spiritual integrity and self-giving, sharing our light with others and appreciating and engaging with the darkness that surrounds it.

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Charlynn Walls January, 2010

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Alison Shaffer January, 2010

“I don’t really know how religion works as a functioning part of a normal life. It is still something separate, something different, something set aside.”

- Juni, Living the Path of Mist

Practicing the Daily Simple

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.

Engaged Presence

Sacred attending is, perhaps, the most important aspect of my practical spiritual work as a Druid, because it is something that can be done anywhere and at anytime — but furthermore, right here and right now. You, in front of your computer screen, take a moment to attend. Notice the shape and color of the computer, the dust that may have collected on it, the desk and its odds and ends, the creaking chair, the window outside of which the rain is sometimes loud and pounding, the snow sometimes too soft to hear above the buzz of fluorescent lights.

How did I learn to engage the present, and to make it such a natural part of my everyday awareness? Honestly, I’m not sure, though I have a suspicion that writing poetry helped. Especially writing poetry while sitting in the back of my high school math classes, recalling the weather, the smile of a boy, the lace slip peeking out beneath the hem of an elderly, enthusiastic English teacher as she raised her arms for emphasis, the smell and feel of chalk, the deathly activity of the eraser across the black-gray board… When you’re a teenager trying to learn how to write poetry, what can you turn to? Not long years of memory, not exciting experiences of foreign, exotic places… When your boredom forces your irresistible creative impulses into poetry — or doodling — or playing the guitar — what else can you do but attend to the dull but bursting world around you? I’m not sure you can learn to attend in any other way. Maybe that’s why mystics of the past have so often retreated for a time into the boredom of the desert, the hermitage or the dark.

Meditation

The Eastern (and in particular, Zen Buddhist) tradition of meditation seeks to empty and quiet the “monkey mind,” to burn away the false sense of self and attain to the nothingness of Holy Void, which is itself not anything. Many people never quite find the knack of this approach. Rather than being restful and revitalizing, they discover that they have to exert a great deal of energy to keep themselves centered in anatman (no-self). Druidry offers another approach to meditation, rooted firmly in Western rather than Eastern spiritual practices. Well-known author and AODA Archdruid John Michael Greer writes, “In Druid meditation, by contrast, the more common path is to train and reorient the mind instead of shutting it down. [...] In this form of meditation, which is called discursive meditation, the thinking process is not stopped but redirected and clarified; thoughts are not abolished but made into a vehicle for the deeper movement of consciousness.”

When I first began working with this form of Druidic meditation, I quickly found myself enjoying both the practice itself, and its benefits. Rather than a strain, it became an exercise in unifying and harmonizing myself, working towards a more complete spiritual integrity. In some ways, this method of meditation takes the engaged presence of attending to the “outside” world and turns that attention to the mind itself. Rather than trying to deaden or quiet the mind, one can watch its processes, trace its pathways, and ride the activity of reasoning itself, learning to hone and clarify it. While it is certainly beneficial to set aside time regularly throughout the week for meditative sessions, the process of discursive meditation can be employed fruitfully during the course of the ordinary day as well, whenever the mind needs a boost of energy or a new perspective.

Creative Visualization

In some ways, having a visual-poetic kind of mind by nature, the practice of discursive meditation led me into the technique of creative visualization. Many people use this technique to visualize goals or positive outcomes, to go on prescribed “guided visualizations,” and the like. I found these uses to be a bit too specific to make for practical daily use (though I will sometimes take a moment over breakfast in the morning to visualize or imagine myself having a stress-free, prosperous and enjoyable day at work). I most commonly use creative visualization for sensing or “playing with” energy. When walking somewhere, I run my fingers over passing shrubbery, chain-link fences, the bark of trees or even the brick walls of buildings — experiencing the changing energies each thing radiates. When the wind is strong or the sun warm, I’ll open “wings” out to gather in the power, and when it’s cold outside, sometimes I’ll send down “roots” seeking solidity and warmth within the earth. And every once in a while, I’ll be sitting at my desk, or curled up reading a book, or even at work bustling around, when I’ll open my hand, palm upwards, as if to hold a gently glowing, floating “ball” of energy before me, as if to concentrate and activate it before reabsorbing or dissipating.

To call these activities “visualizations” might be a bit misleading. I do not close my eyes, I do not call up stark images in my mind as if looking at a movie screen behind my eyelids, and I do not actually see anything other than the physical reality in front of me. But in the same way that complicated philosophical ideas will sometimes present themselves all at once in idea-maps charted in spatial relations which then take paragraphs to delineate and describe, so too can someone experience this “sense” of space, energy and movement that extends beyond the physical boundaries of the body — a sense of space that is not auditory or olfactory, but which seems very much a visual sensation, though it is far from literal. These experiences are what St. Theresa of Avila described in her work as “intellectual visions.” Though her understanding of such visions were as revelations from God, the principle of experiencing and cultivating them seems, to me, to be much the same. They become daily reminders of the nonmaterial or transmaterial world, moments at a stoplight or waiting in line at the grocery store when we can remind ourselves to “look” for the interconnective energies we have believed in and experienced before.

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Alison Shaffer December, 2009

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.

The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual

“Ritual is poetry in the realm of acts.”
- Ross Nichols, founder of OBOD

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.

The element of calas in Druidry can be understood roughly as “stone.” It is an element of solidity, firmness, stability and even resistance. It corresponds most closely with the realm of land, or earth, as that which provides the basis and foundation for everything else. In the body, you might say that calas is bone, the hard inner core, the structure and scaffolding. In ritual, calas is matter, the physical materials utilized during the rite. These include the various tools and decorative elements, such as the altar cloth, offering dishes, candles, crane bags, wands or oracular stones, as well as the altar itself. Indeed, the sacred space, or nemeton, of the grove and the surrounding landscape all play a part in the ritual, for they provide the physical context for our spiritual activity. The bodies of the participants, too, are physical aspects of the rite. All of these things can be considered an aspect of the calas of Druidic ritual, and they can be engaged in ways that heighten the power and meaning of a given rite as its performed.

If ritual is poetry in the realm of acts, then the calas, or physical matter, of ritual serves as symbol and metaphor. While in a poem you might speak of the “fires of inspiration,” in ritual you can choose a way to incorporate a physical flame — whether a candle, cauldron or bonfire — to represent this concept. Likewise, a poetic “wellspring of healing” may take the form of a small bowl of water placed on the altar. Because your body, too, is part of the ritual’s calas, how you interact with and engage this physical fire or water is also part of the metaphor of the ritual. Do you leap in unison with the dancing flames, acting out your receptivity to inspiration and your willingness to incorporate its energies into your life? Do you drink the cool water, taking healing literally into yourself in order to cleanse away sickness or harm? While many Pagan traditions will emphasize that magic can be done without any tools whatsoever, entirely through the directing of energies, ritual is something uniquely embodied and acted out in the physical world. It celebrates and engages the body and the world of matter. In this way, it not only involves us as whole beings, body, heart, mind and soul, but it speaks to the subconscious in the symbolism of the five senses with which it is most familiar. And as anyone can tell you who has tried to light a candle on a windy night, it also puts us in a position to confront literal as well as spiritual forms of resistance, obstacles and unexpected circumstances that come with living as embodied beings in the material world.

The Druidic element of gwyar is understood generally as “water,” but while calas has a coolness that comes from its stillness, the “water” of gwyar is warm with movement and flux, and for this reason it corresponds with the blood of our physical body. Gwyar is an element of movement, flow and change, but also of interconnection and communication. As the waters of the world cycle through every landscape in the form of rain, mist, oceans and streams, so gwyar connects and moves through all things, sometimes bringing vital resources and sometimes washing them away. In ritual, gwyar takes the form of sound: the voice of chanting, singing, prayer and invocation, the rhythmic beating of drums or shaking of rattles, and the music of many different instruments with potential for ritual use, such as flutes, harps, guitars, and so on. Anything that makes sound — even our own breathing, or the noise of our dancing, stamping feet — is part of the gwyar of a Druidic rite.

Though you might think that sound and voice make more sense as an aspect of nwyfre, an element of wind and air, if we pause to consider the nature of sound we see that gwyar is a better fit. Sound is, after all, a form of vibration, and voice and music move through the air in ripples and waves, lapping not only at our eardrums, but humming and flowing through our entire bodies. The pure ringing tones of a singing bowl can fill a space with its cleansing voice, like a cool spring bubbling up from the earth. When we sing, we seek the sympathetic harmonies that our own bodies make so that, whatever our size, sex or age, we sing in tune, moving to the same vibrations. In this way, music is an aspect of ritual that quite literally connects us to each other, asking us to participate directly in a dance of changing harmonies. The change and connection of gwyar is present in sound, and so is its ability to circulate, to carry or transfer. The spoken words of an invocation or prayer communicate, bringing ideas and images with them. Like the water that flows freely through all three realms, connecting them in relationship and exchange, sound is at once a physical thing grounded in the calas of the bodies of people and instruments, and a more ephemeral essence that connects us and moves us towards nwyfre, the third and final element of energy and life-force. Although silence, that momentary stillness when change and motion cease, can also play a part in ritual, words spoken out loud, the harmony of song, these sounds are vital in working with the vibrations of a space. In ritual, it is important that we not merely read, or remember, or think — we must speak, for speech, too, is an act from which the living poetry of our ritual is made.

In Druidry, the element of nwyfre is difficult to pin down, and this in itself suggests part of its meaning. If we try to match up each of the three Druidic elements with the four of classical philosophy — earth, air, fire, and water — we see that calas matches fairly well with earth, and gwyar with water; however, nwyfre has a meaning that is similar to both air and fire, and yet unlike them in other ways. It easiest to understand nwyfre as breath, and more specifically the sacred breath of life, that which is enlivened and animate. Thus, we see that it has both the airy quality of breathing, and a fiery, lively quality that we associate with “vim and vigor.” In many religions, indeed, the word “spirit” is related to words for breath. For instance, when a person “ex-spires” she stops breathing, while “in-spire-ation” is literally the breathing-in of divine insight and energy. In the body, nwyfre is the breath which keeps us alive and thriving, but it is also the “divine breath,” the spiritual essence that animates us. Thus, we can understand nwyfre in ritual as energy, and more specifically the spiritual energy that moves through and fills all things, giving them life and meaning.

While the tools and physical materials of ritual are pretty easy to come by these days, and even the use of voice, song and music can be practiced and developed over time, the nwyfre or energy of a rite is perhaps the most difficult to grasp. Yet it is also the most essential. It is the thing that keeps ritual from becoming all dull memorization and empty gestures. And so, to work with the nwyfre of Druidic ritual, we must first come to appreciate the energy and alive-ness inherent within the calas and gwyar aspects of our work. We can spend time developing our sense of connection and spiritual engagement with our altars tools, seeing them not as dead objects but responsive beings with awareness and purpose; we can similarly work with the surrounding landscape and the space of the grove, listening to its moods and messages. We can learn to appreciate the spiritual energies of music and song, the ebb and flow of its essence carried on the wind. And we can turn our attention inwards, to the spiritual energies of our own bodies, developing a practice of disciplined meditation and breathing exercises that put us more deeply in touch with our bodies and the spirit that dwells within us. When we bring all of this together in ritual — our openness, attention and discipline — we discover that we can work with these energies, moving and shaping them in powerful ways, knowing when to heighten them and when to release them effectively.

This is when magic comes into play, with the directing of energy to accomplish certain purposes, but Druidic ritual is so much more than this. Ritual is also a way of teaching ourselves how to touch divinity, how to ready ourselves for true, meaningful relationship with the gods and other spirits of the world. Just as a poem works with sound and image, rhythm and metaphor to create tension that can lift us to a new level of understanding, involving the dynamic elements of calas, gwyar and nwyfre at the heart of our work can create a humming tension of ecstatic beauty that will raise the “living, enacted poetry” of our ritual activity to higher and higher (or deeper and deeper) realms.

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Alison Shaffer November, 2009

The No-Time Before Beginning

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. And then, even towards the end, how beautiful and subtle the browns became, some deep like wet bark, some light and feathery like sheaves of wheat or rustling like straw, the ochre, russet, everything in sepia tones. There was a stand of sycamores outside the local library that everyday seemed to have life, each day different, moods that hesitated and seemed to revise themselves shyly, while no one was looking. Sometimes they were bright against the backdrop of concrete buildings and city skyline, sometimes faded and gentle, hardly distinguishable, but quiet and present. It would be hard to explain how these sycamores alone seemed to be, for the first time, so real to me, so very much alive.

This autumn, I’ve spent too much time sick in bed. The wind elbows its way through the darkening evening like a disgruntled old man too proud to admit he feels ignored and forgotten. I have missed too many sunsets; I have slept restlessly, wheezing, through too many dawns. The brilliance and color I remember from last year? Replaced with cold-shouldered windows rattling unkindly against every draft, and a body that just cannot find a comfortable position amidst piles of pillows and layers of blankets. Sometimes, autumn is not romantic, or brilliant, or even eerie with the smell of old blood, the smell of ancient slaughter to thin the herds for winter, the smell of our ancestors, the memory of their warm bodies moving and sweating and churning just on the other side of the thinning gossamer veil between the worlds. Sometimes, autumn is dull and cramped, a voiceless throat and the practical drug store necessities.

We spend a lot of energy these days trying not to be sad, trying to avoid the risk of becoming sad, or sick, or vulnerable in any way. We do our best to placate, ameliorate, mitigate. We believe in a steady, if not perfect, state of health and happiness, despite the evidence, despite the change and flux that surrounds us constantly.

Sometimes, what we really need to learn is how to walk through sickness, and sadness, and come out the other side. Not singing or laughing, perhaps, but mindful and fully present all the same. We need to learn that this pressing onward, this walking through the thick of it, the heavy darkness, dense with grief and dissolution–this process is not beautiful, or romantic. Sometimes it is annoying and a bit mucous, and there is no moment when suddenly the way is clear and everything resolves into celebration and relief. Sometimes, we simply recover, gradually, so slowly that we barely notice, each day a little less difficult, each night a little easier to sleep through.

??

So I’m less-than-perfect tonight, with a sore throat and a headache that makes concentration difficult, let alone philosophy or spiritual musing. And I am wistful for last fall, for the home in that season I left in order to make a new home on the other side of sickness and frustration. But we make homes of our bodies all the same, in all their imperfections, as we make our homes in the landscape with its cycles and rhythms, its withering and renewal. But perhaps this is why birth, too, is so amazing — that we can make of our very bodies a home for an innocent new being — that, like those physical houses constructed out of sacrificed trees and broken stones, we can build that kind of sanctuary. We gestate within these old bodies a new self, like the god descending into the dark womb to wait the rebirth of light. A warm hearth, a place from which new happiness on this side of loss and hardship can begin again. Even when we have passed through illness and loneliness, been shaped by them and scarred by them, that we can still become a bridge to the new, to the newly born, to the beginning.

Now is a time of dissolution, and sacrifice. Now is the no-time, the end of one year, before another begins. We press on, through the darkness, the breath of our ancestors barely stirring us. The rain falls, in imitation of the leaves, the leaves who slide loose and fall as the sun goes down.

Blessings, readers, on this Samhain. See you on the other side.

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Alison Shaffer October, 2009

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.

Bardic Practice, Then & Now

Those walking the path of Druidry today can learn a great deal from the practice of poetry, both ancient and modern. The two central aspects of poetic (and indeed all artistic) work, imagination and creativity, hold a significance far deeper than they are usually attributed by our contemporary society concerned primarily with the zero-sum equations of producing and consuming. Far from the mere fanciful cleverness of a child or the amusing eccentricity of a starving artist, they have a potency and power that moves deeply through every person and can unlock our sacred relationship to the larger world. Creativity and imagination—often mistaken as one and the same, but each with its own unique role to play—are the means by which we engage with and shape our world. As a spiritual tradition grounded in the sacredness of nature, the physicality of its movements and moods, Druidry locates a sense of the poetic at the very heart of its worldview. We learn this poetic sense partly from the study of ancient bardic tradition, but just as importantly from our endeavors to create meaningful work of our own.

In poetry, value is both more substantial, and more elusive, than the kind of material wealth we are taught to cultivate by modern Western society. It cannot be counted up and traded away, and yet it springs again and again from the most mundane spaces and experiences. This is an expression of the inherent creativity of life, the continuous coming-into-being that is always occurring around us and can always be rediscovered at any moment. Part of our own creative capacity is the ability to experience the present moment fully and freely, giving ourselves permission to feel passion, fury, fear and joy like tides of energy washing through us, but also allowing ourselves the silence and space we need to listen, to notice the small details hidden within the larger picture. When we engage deeply with the world, the world responds with new diversity and variation, and we in turn cultivate new ways of experiencing the world in a creative, engaged exchange. Both intense feeling and quiet observation find a place in the well-crafted verse, held together in a tension that lifts the piece beyond the literalness of prose and creates ever-new meanings for itself as a poetic work.

Because of this tension between intimacy and distance, between intensity and calm, William Wordsworth once said that poetry was “the outcome of emotions recollected in tranquility.” The ancient bards of Celtic tradition may have had a similar insight. Records of shamanic-like “caves of initiation” preserve the memory of a time when poets and storytellers learned their arts through long hours of intense study, followed by a retreat into silence and darkness. For these students, learning and memorizing the familiar lore of the tribe provided countless opportunities for creativity, as each retelling and recollection reverberated and evolved into ever more meaningful understanding. Some of these verses held within their lines unique insights into the interconnection of life and spirit; others recorded and passed on the knowledge of bloodlines, or the praise or mockery of those in power. In the dark and silent caves, students had to learn how to engage with their art creatively, allowing these meanings to develop and flow into new forms.

To do this, however, they also had to develop the strength and flexibility of their imaginative faculty. Laying quietly as they rehearsed the stories and songs they had been taught, they strived to provoke the sensations and emotions of these events and relationships, learning the patterns and limits of language and how these can be worked to stir the senses and invoke the sacred. Eventually, they would compose their own poetry in that noiseless night, working with their memories of the world, of nature and of the past (and sometimes their premonitions of the future as well). In a non-literate culture that prized oral performance and passed down tales of heroism and records of lineage through song and story, bards carried the knowledge and history of their tribes forward for future generations in a great corpus of learned verse. But a truly skilled bard was also expected to possess a mastery of language and a sharpened mind that enabled him to compose and recite new pieces without setting the sacred work to writing. Sometimes the bard retreated to the dark cave of initiation and memory to compose these. On other occasions, he would try his skills in contests against other poets, improvising as he drew spontaneously on both his experience with composition and the energies of the gathered audience and the present moment.

When we delve deeply into story and song ourselves, we too discover their vital meaingfulness: they communicate, carried across the borders between past and present, between the poet and the reader or listener, without being diminished or lost. This is part of poetry’s imaginative quality, too. An effective poem gives itself as freely as the scent of apple blossoms or the sight of a sunset to anyone willing to listen. In poetry, we capture the fleeting abstraction of thought and ideas in the concrete forms of imagery and sensory details, things that the imagination can grasp with strength and to which it responds with enthusiasm and mutual emotion. A poet who understands the nature of her own mind, the rhythms and weather of her own inner landscape, can work with this knowledge to fire the imagination of others, sharing a sensual experience through language that augments the awareness of the listener and the bond that forms between them. The meaning of poetry expands and evolves as it is shared.

Poetics of Spiritual Living

On the Druid path, we find echoes of poetry in every aspect of our spiritual lives. Imagination and creativity work together to lend vitality and relevance to our work as we seek the meaningful and sacred in everyday experiences as well as those precious moments of ritual and meditation.

When we understand the power of poetry to connect us to the universal, the realm of ideas and ideals through small particular details and carefully chosen words, we also begin to understand the role that imagination plays in our grasp of sacred Spirit dwelling within the physical, natural world. Our imagination allows us to remember and relive the experiences of our senses: the blessed fragrance of fresh cider being poured, or the color of light glinting off old grass as it bends in a wind we too can feel pressing and slipping around our bodies, or the sound of a screech owl in a dark wood. These memories are always available to us, and so we use our imaginations not only to evoke such experiences within meditation and during ritual—as we might recall them within the lines of a poem to paint a scene or provoke a certain feeling—but also to remind ourselves to watch and listen, to value our physical senses as a way of connecting to numinous spirit. Through imagination, and poetry, we learn to always anchor ourselves deeply in the present moment.

Creativity must also play a role in our spiritual lives, however, for the Druid path is not merely one of passive appreciation. In Druidry, it is not enough simply to sit quietly and lose ourselves in our own reveries. Like the poet in the cave of memory and initiation, we must find a way to bring our understanding and reverence from the darkness of dream and desire into the light of conscious day where it can be fully realized, made manifest and shared with others. We recognize this creative process occurring everywhere in the natural world, where the life-energy of the three elements expresses itself in diverse ways. We can’t help but long to participate ourselves in the active process of creativity, moving and shaping our world guided by our imaginations and our gratitude. We write poems, sing stories to each other, play our hands and breath over musical instruments, or take up the paintbrush, the knitting needle or the cook’s measuring cups and paring knives.

Sometimes we spend time in meditation, attending to the patterns of creativity and destruction in the world around us, and these teach us new ways of understanding the universe. When we struggle to express our knowledge through words or evoke a sense of sacred presence through spoken or written language, this too is an act of creativity and not one of restriction or disrespect. We do not damage or restrict the reality of Spirit when we try to speak of it through poetry and story, even if we feel we have only touched one small part of an ineffable whole. All forms of creativity are inherently limited because they require a medium, a material for their expression; yet when creativity is paired with imagination, these limits become the very means of expressing and experiencing the sacredness inherent in nature.

Just as a single shaft of sunlight may be an experience of deity, our poetry and music, our art and ritual, and our lives themselves are unique particulars, beautiful and evocative in their limits, which hold within them the expression and experience of the numinous divine. Druidry recognizes and celebrates the individual, and the unique ways each of us experiences the world and responds creatively to bring life and meaning to our imaginings. No two love poems will ever be exactly alike, and no two Druids will choose to engage in the life of spirit in exactly the same way. Practicing poetry as part of our spiritual journey encourages us to explore our individuality, to value the uniqueness in ourselves and others, to seek out ways we can participate freely and fully in the world—in short, to listen closely to our own soul-song and discover how we might sing it with a voice that is sweet and true.

Tags: bard, druid

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Alison Shaffer September, 2009

Song of a Daily Druid: How I Found a Home in Druidry

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.

But first, I had to learn about poetry.

Way of the Bard

As an angst-ridden teenage girl, I began to write. A lot. Falling in love for the first time, the tension of the unnoticed witness–the tension I had first learned from the robin–returned in full force as I gazed longingly after my latest crush. Details became sacred; the color of an iris beneath eyelashes, the upward twitch of a sardonic smile, warm sunlight accentuating the heat of a blush, the smell of newly-washed clothes and teenage-boy-smell lurking underneath. Relationships, not just romantic love but connections of all kinds, became things of mystery and awe. How things were in themselves, and how they fit together. The world took on a new vitality and importance. Teenage love made it hard to figure out, difficult to navigate. I read poetry the way someone drowning grasps at complex molecular equations about the buoyancy of water. I was learning about the nature of the unexpected, the curious and the strange. Juxtaposition and concrete details revealed the power of words fitting next to each other on the page, evoking memory and sensation separated by space and pause and breath.

I read Mark Strand’s poem, “Keeping Things Whole,” the first lines: In a field, I am the absence of field. There was the field, and there was myself; I thought I knew, as a child, what that was like. I thought that was all there was to it. Then suddenly, there was something else that was neither the field, nor me as I had known myself up until then. There was absence. Absence was a thing, too, a kind of presence. poetry taught me about the invisible, the barely-there spirit that filtered through all things, the life-force that bound up all our edges and clung like spittle, sweat and mud to our beings. Druidry has words for this: animism, and pantheism. The belief that divinity is imminent within the material world, that spirit is like water and breath that pervades all of reality from the highest reaches lost in cloud to the mundane vulgarity of homework and screaming matches with parents. One day Druidry would teach me these words, but first I learned from experience: Wherever I am, I am what is missing.

And from the writing I’ve learned about metaphor: how one thing can embrace both is and is not, how two things held in tension create a third that is not either, not both, but something new. I was becoming something new then, too, holding a past and a future in suspension within the present, within my own adolescent presence of mind and body. Druidry would teach me about triads, the sacredness and mystery of the third. I would learn to recognize the dualism so prevalent in our culture, where spirit and matter were always divided and distinct, kept in isolation as though belonging to two different realms. From out of an either/or situation, a war between opposites, I would learn to find a third that could unite and transcend them.

But long before I’d heard of these things in Druidry, I worked my way through poetry, studying carefully, creating new poems from familiar words, new worlds from common images and everyday details. I didn’t know it then, but I had already begun along the Druid Way. I was learning what the bards and poets of my ancestors had learned. I was learning to value the individual, the particular, and to find in it a path to the community, and a glimpse of the universal. In Druidry, the first phase of training is that of the Bard–the keeper of history, the story-teller, the verse-maker of praise and satire. The Bard holds past and future in tension, bringing both powerfully and fully into the present, the sacred here-now of story and song. Out of memory and anticipation, loss and hope, something new is created. The Bard embodies the magic of imagination–working with words and images, working with matter as a blessed medium. And the Bard embodies the power of creativity–engaging with the here-now with playfulness and freedom to make something new in the world.

Way of the Ovate

The deeper I sank into the practice of poetry, the more often I found myself stumbling again and again across a sense of vastness and openness. If poetry taught me first about triads, triads soon taught me about space and the sacred sense of place. As any mathematician can tell you, two points make a line, but three define a plane. Discovering that third point, the point of divergence and difference, is the discovery of landscape.

In his poem Mark Strand wrote, we all have reasons for moving. Within space, movement becomes possible. Dance becomes possible. Without space, we are stuck, trudging back and forth along the same dull old line. Without a sense of space, we know only what logic can tell us, the conclusions all bound up and inevitable within the premises. We know only what cause gives rise to what effect along the line of controllable variables and repeatable experimentation. Without room to move–around, over, under, through–every limit of the material world feels like a restriction or imposition, an impediment to freedom. Without a sacred sense of space, I marched along my life-line from past to present into the receding future, never glancing around, excelling in grade school to place well in high school honors classes, excelling in high school to boost my college applications. When I finally made it to college, I made a mistake, I faltered along the line: I chose to major in a subject that, people joked nervously, had no practical future. I studied religion and philosophy.

I could have lost my footing, then, if it hadn’t been for my grounding in poetry. I could have slipped away into abstraction, the expansive mental landscape of exacting rational thought, where I might run myself ragged from one fascinating theory to another until I was left only with the exhausted Cartesian formula: cogito ergo sum. I could have agreed with the dualists who insisted that the only real freedom was freedom of the mind, cut loose from the restrictions of the material world. Instead, I grew very quiet while the storm of thought and knowledge raged thrillingly around me. And as I grew quiet, things around me began to happen. One day, I sat on a blanket in a field, mourning my well-adjusted-middle-class-white-girl state of being, a status that defined me as “normal,” as having no unique insight to contribute to the world unless I came down with cancer or backpacked across Europe. Why doesn’t crap ever happen to me? I was thinking–when it did. Out of the vast space of open sky, a robin let a perfect globule of white-speckled excrement fall; let it fall through a hundred yards of still air to land, thick and gooey, in the middle of my forehead on my third eye, dripping down my temples like a blessing. My spirit leapt up along the line of that fall and there high above, my still little body far below on the blanket in the grass, I discovered space, and began to laugh.

Space gives us room to move, room to dance, room to navigate life’s difficulties. Without space, limit is wretched. But without limit, space would be overcome, would be bloated and useless. Without limit, we would all be pressed flat against the ideals of heaven, or reason, all the time. But landscape is full of limit–for limit is just the natural expression of form, of matter, which is sacred. Druidry would teach me this sacredness explicitly, celebrating the uniqueness and individuality of all life, the inspiration of physical being. From Druidry, I would learn of the three realms–the realms of land, sea and sky–and the three elements–nwyfer, gwyar, calas; wind, water, stone; breath, blood, and bone. I would learn how these elements moved and worked creatively, dancing through one another, creating the realms of earth, ocean and atmosphere, and giving birth to the liminal spaces, the in-between places of mist and stream, cliff and cave. I would learn my own reasons for moving, oddly enough, through practices of stillness such as meditation and prayer. From Druidry, I would learn the art of journeying through dream and other inner landscapes–the art of the shaman and the oracle.

In Druidry, the second phase of training is that of the Ovate. The Ovate stills the chattering linear mind, and centers deeply in the immediacy of place: this very place and this very body in this very moment of time. Centered this way, space opens up into a vastness through which possibility and potential dance and weave. The Ovate studies landscape and how the beings of landscape live together, and live off one another. She learns the ecology of spirit as well as of physical life. She searches the shadows for the Shining Folk, and reaches her hands out to touch the hem of the Gods’ veils as they pass. She sees the future not as something solid but as the coalescing of patterns and potentials. The Ovate knows the currents and eddies of energy, and learns to navigate them gracefully, following a path that spirals in and out of simple causality, leaping from plane to plane through the joyful splendor of space and void. And because the Ovate has a sacred sense of place–because she knows the bounds of her own self and her own landscape intimately–her insight into the liminal places can sometimes seem uncanny.

Way of the Druid

But before the mysteries of the shamanic Ovate or the poetic Bard, I had to discover Druidry itself, the path that would connect it all. In my scholarly studies, I had learned about modern Witchcraft and, to some small extent, the greater community of Paganism with its many diverse and sometimes befuddling groups and labels. Nature spirituality appealed to me, but Wicca didn’t seem to fit quite right. It didn’t feel like home.

First of all, I was no agriculturalist. I was a poet, a philosopher, perhaps a bit of a mystic. Born in the suburbs on the edge of a wooded park, I was drawn to wild spaces more than gardens and farms, to the bluffs overlooking a rhythm of ocean waves, to old trees growing gnarled among ferns and mossy stones. I had learned, as I’d learned about landscape, the cycles of the seasons. But the summer storms and winter snows, the bursting colors of autumn and muddy fingerprints of spring–these did not leave me with a sense of fertility and harvest, so much as changing harmonies echoing through the great halls of hills and valleys unfurling beneath a weathered sky. Echoes of wild things growling in my marrow and tendons. When after college I moved to the city, I tried to grow window boxes of herbs, but the heat reflecting off tall apartment buildings soon baked them to brown dust. Meanwhile, through cracks in the pavement, weeds reasserted themselves and the sycamores loomed over every broad boulevard, rabbits left footprints in the snow on sidewalks overnight and crows picked through the garbage.

Here again was juxtaposition, the kind of tension between urbanity and wilderness that might make a poem, or a dreamscape. Within this landscape, I finally found this odd way called Druidry. The ancient Druids, as some imagined them, were not only priests, but scholars, judges, advisors, poets, historians, and mystics in their communities. They lived integrated lives devoted to wild wisdom, truth and peace. And they were political creatures, not living in social isolation; they were respected and accepted, rather than rejected or feared for their thriving spiritual lives. These were not domestic elders spinning yarns and brewing herbal remedies for foot fungus, or cast to the edges of town for being too outrageous or seductive. These were inspired lovers trembling in adoration of the world, who felt deeply not only the music of the mountains and trees, but the piercing harmonies of the celestial spheres. These were warrior-bards and philosopher-poets, who understood landscape as space and movement as vibration, who saw in the refraction of light and the migration patterns of geese myriad reverberating melodies. These were the peace-makers standing calmly declaring truce between two armies, those who saw the weaving interconnection at the core of each being which makes trust and mercy possible, for whom justice was a kind of balance and harmony, never to be mistaken for condemnation or rejection.

In Druidry, I learned that everything has a Song, and that the world, too, has a soul-song. The Song of the World might be called a Divine or True Will; we join with it our own voices, the music of our bodies humming, pumping blood, inhaling and exhaling, neurons and nerves buzzing and vibrating: the songs we cannot help but murmur to ourselves as we go along our way, same as the heron and the oak and the rain and the stars. The air we move through shifts around us with every stride, and our laughing and crying shape it, too. When we sing and move and live in harmony with the World Song, our own songs are amplified, modulated and carried along. Mark Strand wrote, we all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole. The Druid listens for the song her soul is singing, and she attends with reverence to the part her soul-song has to play in the greater whole.

Tags: bard, druid

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Rebecca Sommers August, 2009

Druids Stone Circle – Kenmare, County Kerry, Ireland

Founded in 1670 and cradled in the heart of Kenmare Bay, Kenmare has been titled Kerry’s first Heritage Town. Its breathtaking scenery and unique charm make it a worthwhile stop while in the Killarney area. For the traveler willing to take a longer look, Kenmare abounds with archeological sites. Set among the artisan shops and spectacular views are ancient roots, for this town has one of the largest stone circles in the south-west of Ireland, and it is also the only monument of it’s kind to be situated so close to a town.

The pamphlet we obtained from the Kenmare Stone Circle tells us that “the Cork/Kerry Stone circles may have some relationship with the famous monument at Stonehenge”, and that in the center of the circle is a type of burial monument known as a “Boulder Dolman” which are rarely found outside of Southwestern Ireland.

This monument shows occupation in the area going back to the Bronze Age (2,200-500 B.C), when it was constructed. The circle has 15 stones that are made of greenstone or brownstone and form a large egg-shaped circle with a boulder dolmen in the center. This is an impressive boulder-burial with a giant capstone that weighs almost seven tons. Stones of this type are not found for many miles and were undoubtedly moved to this location. It is unclear as to what the meaning of this monument is. It may have been used for rituals by druid priests, hence the local name “Druids Stone Circle”. It may also have been used as a primitive calendar, or a burial site, beneath the center stone.

Stone circles were built during the Bronze Age for ritual and ceremonial purposes. Some studies have indicated that they were orientated on certain solar and lunar events, such as the position of the sun on the horizon on a solstice.

Visitors to the Druid Stone Circle conducting a ceremony.

When we arrived at the Stone Circle, we found another group holding a ceremony there. We stayed in the background observing their ritual, quietly lending our own energy to it. As you look around the landscape you’ll notice that a grove of trees surrounds it, giving it a sense of privacy, even though it remains a scarce few feet from the modern world.

As they finished, the woman who was leading the ceremony came over to us and offered a blessing and a smudging. Moved by the kindness we gratefully accepted. It seemed a shame to break the silence and inquire where they were from, so we shared in the beauty of the moment.

Celebrant offers a blessing to a traveler

It was only a few days ago that I realized who this lovely woman was, certainly serendipity connected us and I was able to thank her for her gesture of welcome and the blessings that came with it.

Observations from the group of travelers,

Inside this circle, one would find a very massive center stone, which we gathered was used for an altar stone. A ritual had just been held there, and in that spot, I felt a source of energy. Very interesting. The energy didn’t seem at all alarmed that we were there.  Perhaps it was not even aware of it.  Perhaps it was on its own plane of existence.  Stepping into that circle was like stepping back into time if one opened their minds and closed their ears and eyes.

On Friday morning we visited another stone circle just outside of Kenmare. This one seemed powerful to me, perhaps because the stones, taller and broader than the ones at the lake, stood like the ghosts of the people who once worshipped there. I breathed deeply as I stepped through the invisible boundary. These stone circles date to around 2500BC, well before the time of the Druids, though the two have become linked in our minds. We know that the Druids performed ritual sacrifice, but we have no idea about the Neolithic people of 4500 years ago. Nonetheless, it was disconcerting to see the large, flat boulder smack in the center of the circle. Maybe for sacrifice, maybe not, but it still gave me the chills.

Highly recommended place to stop if you are visiting the Killarney area of Ireland.

Rebecca Beld

Just a short walk up the hill from Market Street you will find Kenmare Stone Circle, just follow the signs on the left side of the road. There is a small structure at the entrance where you can get information about the site; there is a sign that asks for a small donation.

Resources:

Kenmare Stone Circle Information Booth

Rebecca Sommers

Tags: circle, druid, Ireland, stone

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Michele Burke February, 2009

What is the Ogham? And where do they come from?

The Druid Ogham alphabet fits flawlessly into the mystic culture of the Celts. The rareness of the Ogham alphabet makes it easy to see why the Celta believe that it was bequested to them by the Tuatha de Danaan God Ogma (the God of Eloquence).

The source of the Ogham is shadowed in mystery. Unclear as to where and when the ogham alphabet began to be used. It has been said that Julius Caesar, (first century BCE), aknoledged that druids used the Ogham in Gaul, nevertheless, scientistific research to date has not been able to find any evidence of Ogham carvings previous to 300 CE. This gap in time shows to be mysterious and furthers the belief that the Tuatha de Danaan may well be responsible (this is my belief). Nevertheless, putting all mysteries aside let us move on to the important question of what we do know about this mystical alphabet and the individuals who used it?

Primaraly carved onto wooden staves this practice can be seen in Bardic Irish literature, and in fact by the names given to them (named after trees)early in th Oghams history. In the medieval manuscripts of Ireland the Ogham alaphabet known as the Beth-Luis-Nion referring to the first three letters of their Galic names, which coincedentaly are also names of trees. Beth is the birch, Luis mountain-ash or rowan, and Nion the ash tree.

In addition to the Oghams being used and recognized by their names they were also used in the Celtic Tree Calandar. These Druid Oghams comprised the Celtic calander in which it had  thirteen months, the extrady in the Celtic calandar was observed as a day of ritual to renew the year.

And inturn created  the druid calandar in association with the trees that the Oghams were linked to.

Shone the sunset red and solemn: Muirgen, where he leant, observed
Ogham

Down the corners of the column letter-strokes of Ogham carved.
“Tis, belike, a burial pillar,” said he, “and these shallow lines
Hold some warrior’s name of valour, could I rightly spell the signs.”
Letter then by letter tracing, soft he breathed the sound of each;
Sound by sound then interlacing, lo, the signs took form of speech;
And with joy and wonder thrilling, part a-thrill with fear,
Muirgen read the legend plainly, “Fergus son of Roy is here”.

~ Sir Samuel Ferguson, (1865)

So in conclusion one can see that even though there may never be a scientific explanation as to where and when th Ogham first came to be thouse of us who believe know it came from Ogma God of  the Tuatha de Danaan.

Bibliography and Works Cited:

Daugherty, M. (2006). The Celtic Tree Calendar. Irelands Own. Retrieved January 21, 2009, from http://irelandsown.net/celtictrees.html

Sir Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael, 1865.

Tags: alphabet, celtic, druid, ogham

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Michele Burke December, 2008

Gaelic Healing Water Spell

Acquire equivalent portions of violet, rosemary, and lavender. After give power to them boil them in approximately one quart of water over a medium flame. Once the water has a rich color and the herbs begin to emit a scent throughout your kitchen, drain off the water off into a jar. An organic coffee filter works well for this. Leave the jar in the sunshine for an entire day to take in the glowing energies from the sun. (To add the healing powers of mercury to the spell do this on a Wednesday) Occasionally gaze into the jar to add your own energies to it.

Just prior to twilight bring back the jar from outside and clutch it tightly between your hands just beneath your naval. Feeling your yearning to be in good health filling the jar, with your mind’s eye envision the jar shimmering as brightly as the sun. Repeat this chant until you have filled the jar with such an overabundance of energy that it can hold no more.

By the sun and by the herb
wellness and I are now as one
spiraling energies now are merged.
Destructive energies now be purged…

Anoint the body where the infirmity lurks if you are uncertain as to where the foundation of them discomfort lies, pour contents into bath water.

Bibliography and Works Cited:

Davis, G. G. (1908). Celtic Healing Water Spell.  Retrieved from great grandmothers Book
Shadows.

Tags: celtic, correspondence, druid, realms, three realms

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