Laughing at Disaster

When the Gods close one door for you, they often make good and sure they’ve got your fingers in the doorjamb first.

Yesterday was just one of those days, watching thing after thing go wrong, fall apart, fall over, from the trivial – my punctured tyre – to the epicly bad – a promise dishonoured that puts us in an awkward position. When the final one came in, there was nothing to do but laugh at the sheer ludicrousness of it. I had said only that morning how little faith I have in any ideas of safety, security or things being dependable. Ah, the smug joys of pessimism!

The big, critical things I’ve needed to have go right, have done so. The last year or so has been an intense exercise in finding out what I can’t do without, and what is not so important. Every ‘disaster’ is a lesson in what really matters. Yesterday’s blow had really knocked my mother, but there I was, shrugging, figuring out the implications and how to work round them. Another day, another betrayal, another solution.

There’s been no shortage of blows and losses. With each one, comes a process of refining and clarifying. A paring down to the bone, that used to shock and distress me, but as there’s less and less flesh to hack off, it hurts less, and the bones underneath turn out to be strong and reliable.

There’s a strength and certainty that comes from knowing what is essential, and what is not. It’s so easy to be bowed down even by the small setbacks, the tiny losses that seem enormous if you don’t have them in perspective. I lost my home. Which is nothing compared to keeping my emotional freedom and keeping my child safe. Financially I’ve been totally compromised – but I’m still viable, and that’s all that is needed. I could go on, down a long list of things stripped away. The loss of community hurts, but I still have contact with people so that’s not all gone. Friendship holds even at a distance, and people understand why I’ve had to cut and run.

What can I not do without? My awesome bloke and my brilliant child. Beyond that, we need a roof over our heads, enough money for the basics, and the rest, if needs be, we can muddle through on. While we have each other, while we have love and friendship and plenty of imagination, we can get by without most of the toys and distractions, if needs be.

The Gods slam another door, fingers are bruised. We stop and swear, and we nod in recognition. Yeah, we see you. Fine, you’re sending us another one? We’re still standing and there are still plenty of doors. We’ve got what matters most – we’ve got each other. The rest really is just detail.

Druidry and Ritual

Think Druids and you may well be visualising the beardy guys in white out welcoming the dawn at Stonehenge. Ritual is one of the defining elements of Druidry in terms of how it’s perceived from outside. When I blogged at Pagan and Pen last summer about finding myself solitary as a Druid, a friend flagged up that her understanding of Druidry was very much that we ‘hunt in packs’ – the solitary Druid is something else. The more time I spend not with a grove, the more I ponder that.

The Druid rituals we have aren’t ancient, but a legacy from the Druid revivalists, with a dash of things appropriated from the wiccans (or by the wiccans, who can say!) inspiration taken from Native American spirituality, and the innovation of OBOD, Emma Restall Orr and others. We have a form, and we know how to use it. We make a circle. In some order or another, we honour the spirits of place, the four directions (or three worlds) the ancestors, and we make a call for peace. We do something hopefully meaningful, we share bread, cake, mead and the like. Then we repeat the honouring in reverse order on the way out. It’s reliable. Once you know how it goes, you can dive into any group and have a sense of what’s doing, and join in if you wish. That’s the great advantage of having a plan.

Some groups go beyond the plan, and into the realms of script. Fixed words for every occasion. Then everyone knows what’s coming and exactly what they are supposed to do. Or not supposed to do. You either have a bit to say, or you don’t. Which means some people may just be stood about like the proverbial lemons for much of the ritual. I’ve always favoured looser ritual structures, that enable everyone to get involved. They aren’t so vulnerable to going astray if someone is ill on the day, or forgets their bit of paper. Fluffed lines, or lines that can’t be read because the rain took out the ink on the lovely speech about the beautiful midsummer sun, can really ruin the flow. Nature does not reliably stick to the ritual plan, so being able to respond to the conditions on the day is a huge plus.

But that’s still a lot like organised ritual.

What happens if you ditch all the forms, frameworks, safety net and familiarity that is regular Druid ritual? If you start in the heat of the moment, with the taste of awen on your lips, can you make ritual that isn’t ritual, but is something wild, spontaneous, purely of the place and moment? Would it work? And would it be Druidry, or something else?

I’ve done a little experimenting with this wilder kind of expression. Enough to say yes, it can be done, and yes, it feels exactly like Druidry to me. I think it would need far higher levels of trust between participants than regular ritual. I think it needs time to evolve so that it’s not just an exercise in inventing a new form. There is a possibility out there, something unstructured and inspiration led, that can be shared or solitary, that I know feels exactly like Druidry, but may be going to infuriate anyone who is partial to those established forms and structures. But then, I’m not doing this in the hopes of pleasing everyone, only trying to find my own way, taking anyone with me who finds it resonant.

Feral, awen inspired Druidry. I feel like I’m shuffling my feet onto a whole new path here. As I find out where it goes, I’ll blog the journey.

Mentoring

What does it mean, to take a student? It doesn’t actually matter whether you’re a pagan, wiccan, druid, musician, or artist, the core issues are the same. Being a teacher is a position of responsibility, and not something to take on lightly. Your student is trusting you to know more than they do, to guide and direct them. If you don’t want to be that responsible, do not offer to teach. Students are going to question you, ask for clarification, come up with problems you hadn’t thought of, or reasons you’d not considered. If you don’t like being challenged, don’t teach.

Do you imagine that teaching is all about passing on your experience to another? Telling them how to do it? Showing them the right way? Producing a follower who upholds your beliefs, continues your traditions and gives you some immortality. If this is what you want, then you are, to be honest, going to be a dreadful teacher. I’ve been taught by such folk, and they are depressing, demoralising and restricting souls, the desire to make the student like them seldom compatible with enabling the student to achieve their full potential. Being a mentor is not about knowing it all. Instead, what is called for is the ability to hold a space in which the student is supported in their own learning. We can guide, offer advice, share experience, hand over facts, talk about technique. But when it comes down to it – no matter what we teach – the student will be the one doing, and if they can’t ‘do’ on their own terms, the odds are they will quit.

Of course we know more than our students, that’s why they want to learn from us. But what we know, especially in Druidry, is what suits us. We know our own habits and beliefs, our own assumptions, needs and methods. Does that make it best for our student? Maybe not. They’re a whole other person, and ‘best’ for them might look very different. They might not share our beliefs and priorities. If we try and force them our way, we may put them off entirely. The best students want to think for themselves. They will ask questions and expect answers. “Because I said so” is never good enough reason. If you’re asking someone else to always trust that you, magically, know what is best from them, that’s a frightening amount of responsibility to take.

I’ve done a lot of mentoring over the years – with varying degrees of success. I’ve taught writing and reading skills, meditation, Druidry, and singing, to name a few. I’ve also been taught, in assorted fields by numerous people, formally and informally. The same things have held true in all disciplines.

1) Teach your students want they want to learn. Be led by their enthusiasm, don’t try and force your agenda on them.

2) Answer their questions and do not be afraid to say if you don’t know the answer.

3) Accept their right to challenge you and their right to disagree.

4) Never use emotional blackmail or any other form of manipulation to try and make your student do things your way.

5) Nurture your student. Challenge them, but don’t push them to breaking point. You don’t have to take them apart, or belittle what they have done to make your teaching seem valuable or to bend them to your will.

6) Look forward to the idea of them being better than you. If you in any way resent the idea they could be, then you are not mentor material.

7) Praise their successes. Acknowledge their failures, and help them see where they can progress, but do so without totally demoralising them. If they lose faith in themselves, they will give up. It is not about survival of the toughest.

8) As far as possible, make them do all the work, all the running, all the thinking, all the conclusion drawing. What they figure out themselves will stay with them, and if the answers they find are not your answers, so be it.

There’s a belief out there in some quarters that good teaching is brutal and that good students are passive receptacles of everything you throw at them. This is total rubbish. Good teaching enables, good studying challenges the teacher. It’s not about gratifying the teacher’s ego, or turning the student into a mini-me. It’s about helping the student do what they want to do, as well as they possibly can.

The naming of Druid groups

This week over at Cat’s Druidy blog, she talked about names for pagans. http://druidcat.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/whats-in-a-name/ – it’s an excellent and rather funny post. It got me thinking about a parallel issue – how we name groups. When pagans cluster themselves together to do things, they tend to go for names, but finding the right name to muster under is not the easiest job in the world. So, how do you name a Druid gathering?

Many groups include a tag that says something of what they are, so here’s a quick rundown of those and what they mean, or might mean.

Order – in theory this is a big group with its own way of doing Druidry, likely to have member groves, formal membership. Think The British Druid Order, ADF, OBOD. Every so often someone with big ideas and a small following will call themselves an order too, even if technically they look more like a grove. This can cause confusion. In an Gorder, the founding grove may be called the mother grove.

Grove – a closed Druid group, usually has a defined membership, celebrates the cycles of the year and may meet at other times to study and socialise. May belong to an order, may be independent.

Seed Group – especially in OBOD, a group that aspires to be a grove but dooesn’t feel qualified yet.

Gorsedd – a ritual group meeting to celebrate, it may well not have a formal membership or gather outside of ritual. Again, may be part of something else, may not. Sometimes groves run gorsedd as part of their service.

Moot – a social gathering.

Learning circle – a study group, with a degree of equality and sharing, not formally led teaching.

Clan, tribe, circle – this kind of naming tends to denote a group with a definite identity who for whatever reason don’t feel the word ‘grove’ suits – they may be slightly eclectic, invite extended family, not want to seem to formal

There are other names out there, and they tend to reflect what the group is or does. It might use Bards, Ovates or Druids to designate it as Druidic.

Attached to your title, needs to be something to make the group individual. A significant number of groups will take the name of the geographical area they work in. They might name poetically, based on that, they might use a Celtic tribe name from their area, or something else that connects them to a place. Calling an old place ‘Caer’ is a tradition that certainly goes back to early revivalist Druids, so Avebury becomes Caer Abiri, Bath is Caer Badon – people in the know will know, it creates a dash of secrecy and mysticism.

Other groups draw on nature for their name, finding an emblem that resonates for them. These can be as simple, poetic or pretentious as anyone likes. Combining the two, gives you names like Clan of the Dancing Bears, Whispering Pine Grove, The Ancient and Very Serious Order of the Extremely Floppy Hats, (I may have made those up…).

Naming gives group identity, which is a great help when you’re trying to establish a group and give it a sense of self. It gives people a clue as to whether this might be the place for them. Equally, misnaming can create the wrong connotations, and draw the wrong people. A friend once described her first grove, named in a way that made people feel like it was a safe space that would hold them and mother them, which turned out to not be what she had wanted at all. If you invoke a deity, a creature or any kind of concept in your naming, that will inform the vibe of the group in entirely pragmatic ways, and you might also want to think about the kind of spiritual attention it could get you. Don’t invite other entities along unless you are sure you want them present.

Names matter. They create identity, and we pin a lot to them. It’s well worth taking the time to get them right.

Voices of spring

The change of seasons is a subtle thing, one day to the next, Buds fatten until the first hints of green peek out. Shoots emerge one by one, and the grass begins to grow, turning the faded tones of winter into fresh and vibrant shades. Birds pair off, their nest building apparent, and the days lengthen, getting warmer.

I don’t know why I wake before the dawn, but I do, lying in the darkness I hear when the dawn chorus begins. They are singing for longer now than they did in winter – the warmth and growing days giving them more energy to spare. Somehow they know the dawn is coming, and sing to greet it. Although my body seems to know too, based on when I wake, I don’t feel the coming of the light, but the song of birds is a comfort, and helps me wait out the darkness. It’s the loneliest time of the day for me, not wanting to disturb others who are sleeping, seldom feeling energetic enough to move. The darkness lies heavy and it’s a time when I’m most exposed to my own fear. But the bird song always eases that, and the return of light means a return of hope.

Where I’ve studied Druidry over the years, I’ve heard plenty of advice about how we should attune our own life cycles and moods to the seasons. Spring is the time for waking up, for new projects, fresh energy. As I spend significant time outside every day and don’t have much insulation from nature, I feel the cycle of the seasons keenly – the shifts in day length and temperature impact on me. I’m alert to the changes in plants and birds, and this year bats as well. But I’m not bounding with spring energy. I’m not feeling the thrill of a new season or the energy of new creativity. Emotionally, I’m still in the cold, hard depths of winter and there is a lot of ice on the inside.

This is not a new problem. I don’t lull into the gentle sleep of winter like a good little Druid – I can’t – winters for me are hard work, because I have little insulation from the harsh realities of them. Often the long days around midsummer give me a strange rush and a kind of hyper-energised insanity, but that’s the only time I ‘feel the season’ at all. Early on as a student I was actually told off for this and encouraged to perceive it as ‘Druid fail’. Which it isn’t.

The tides and seasons of our lives are unique to each of us. Trying to reduce them down and make them fit a perceived narrative of the year is unhelpful. I am not a flower to experience the year as plants do, entirely solar led. Nor am I a hibernating mammal or a migrating bird. Listening to the voices of nature and learning from them should not be a process of trying to entirely become what we are not. However we attune to sun and season, we are still human, and it is important to recognise and honour our own tides, which will not necessarily connect with any other natural cycle out there.

For creative folk, the seasons of our working and being fallow are not about crops or harvest. It takes precisely as long to incubate and birth a project as it takes. That can be minutes, months or anywhere in between. We might be caught in industrious energy through the autumn and winter only to find ourselves dying back in the spring and needing to retreat and rest a while. I lived for a while with a predictable six to eight week pattern of work and burn out, which didn’t relate to anything but me.

The tides of life do not respect our inner seasons. We might want to be resting in darkness, but other calls may be made on our energy. Reality won’t wait until a springtime of the soul to make demands on our selves and invention. We could be trying to die back quietly, only to find some other current has grabbed us and requires us to evolve into swimmers.

Celebrating what we have and honouring the sacred time that is now, is not just about recognising where the solar seasons are and trying to attune to them. It is good to be aware of what’s going on out there, but it’s also important to recognise that what goes on within us might not neatly correspond. It’s even possible to find that your thoughts pull one way and your emotions another, that there is no coherent narrative about where you are in your life and what any of it means. And that’s ok too. Sometimes it’s enough to draw breath, write ‘I am here’ as spirit graffiti in the air, and let it go.

The accidental counsellor

There are far more folk who find themselves in crisis than ever there are trained professionals available to help them. It can take months to get counselling in the UK, but people caught in the immediacy of their own grief, trauma or anxiety can’t really afford to wait. The official advice from the UK’s national health service for folk in crisis is to talk to someone.

So, what do you do if you find yourself the chosen ear of a person in distress? My brother found himself with one of these last week, which is what has prompted me to write today. Most of us aren’t qualified, but we still have to step up. And as a Druid, you may attract the need and distress of others, especially if you put yourself forward by running things. I’ve seen this topic discussed on pagan forums, where the fear of causing more harm than good, or inviting litigation, makes people wary about offering themselves. So, we’re not talking about being a counsellor here, we’re talking about being the person who gets the late night phone call from a friend who doesn’t know how to carry on, or being the one a family member confides to about some horrific experience. We don’t get to choose these, they happen to us. How do we deal with them?

The single most powerful thing you can do for a person in distress is listen to them. No matter how much it disturbs you, or whether or not you are able to believe what they say, listening and giving the space for them to speak is tremendously effective. Unless you feel there’s immediate physical danger to them, or someone else, go for listening. Make sure they know you are listening, by making affirming comments. “I hear you.” Don’t be afraid to acknowledge if you are out of your depth. If you don’t understand and can’t relate to it, say so. A person in crisis will not appreciate you claiming you know just what it must be like, if you blatantly cannot know. If you do know, it can be helpful to share.

In the short term, don’t think about trying to find solutions. Focus on the listening, and letting them talk until they are calm. Avoid any comment that in any way might be construed as telling them they shouldn’t feel as they do – they are feeling it, they need to feel it, if you let them talk it will pass. Ask why they are feeling a certain way, ask how you can help, what they need, and if the answer is ‘nothing’ then just keep them talking.

It’s not your job to find a solution. Any solution to the problems have to be the choice of the person in crisis. Making suggestions may be helpful, but be careful to avoid anything that feels like you taking control of things. Crisis is a loss of control, the person in crisis cannot afford to have more of their right to self determine taken from them. Support them, offer advice, but do not give instruction, or do things for them unless you’re down to very physical issues of preserving life, or making cups of tea.

Giving people food and drink affirms normality. People in distress may also be in shock, so make sure they are warm.

Often what people need is a sounding board, someone to test ideas on while they work out what they need. If that’s what you’re getting, questions like ‘will that work for you?’ ‘what do you need?’ ‘how do you feel about that?’ will help them with the process. Avoid anything that seems like you being asked to choose for them. You can say what you would do if it was you, but make sure it’s on those terms.

Sometimes people just need a witness or a cheerleader. They need someone else to believe in them because they’re having a hard time believing in themselves. Encourage them. Praise their courage and determination, acknowledge their difficulties, affirm that there must be a way through and that they will find it. If appropriate, remind them of things they’ve achieved before, of qualities in themselves that will get them through.

In this way, it’s possible to help and support a person without having to take responsibility for them, and without having to internalise their distress. This protects us from being drawn into crisis with them. It keeps control in the hands of the person who is in trouble. It’s very easy to do, and to remember, and is actually the underpinning of talking therapies used by councillors. Listen, encourage, ask and try not to judge. It’s surprising how big a difference these things can make.

Daily Practice

Listening to The Druid Podcast last month, and a very interesting interview with T. Thorn Coyle, she stated that anyone wishing to take their spirituality forward should focus on daily practice. What does this mean? Druidry as shared in ritual at focal festivals through the year is one thing, but we can hardly take the fanfare and faff of ritual into every day, can we? Or can we?

When we gather to celebrate the 8 festivals through the year, we’re focusing on the cycle of the seasons and a set of Celtic-derived dates with their ancestral associations. If you poke about online, you can find a pagan festival for most days in the year. Celebrating all of them would be a full time job, not to mention a disorientating process of hopping from one culture to another. We may find more festivals we want to honour through the year, but as a daily thing, it would be too much for most of us.

We can look at small private rituals honouring the day, the season, the rise of sun and moon, the wheeling of the stars. The passage of seasons is a subtle process that goes one day to the next, so we can make it part of our daily practice to explore what ‘now’ means and respond to it in a spiritual way. That doesn’t have to mean formal ritual. Contemplation, experience, celebration and creative response are also very much part of the Druid path.

Daily practice could mean taking the time to meditate. It might also be about dedicating time in service, to our gods, ancestors, land and communities. We might focus our daily practice on specific skills – herbalism, healing, studying the stars, learning animal lore, gardening, music, poetry, performance art… The Druids of history were not just religious figures, but arbiters of justice, keepers of histories and genealogies, and many more things. Exploring these aspects of the path opens up yet more scope for daily activities.

When it comes down to it, what makes an action ‘druidic’ is primarily that the person undertaking it, sees it that way. A person who goes for a run with their ipod piping music into their ears, and no thought for the land they run on, is not being a Druid. Someone who sets out in full consciousness, to run with the energy of the land and the wind, could well be undertaking their Druidic practice.

In making something an expression of Druidry, we bring our spiritual insights and ethics to it. We imbue the activity with soul and we understand it as meaningful because we have made it an expression of Druidry. Undertaking anything with consciousness of spirit within it, sensitive to the implications of what we do, the relationships intertwined with the action, the flows of inspiration… anything we do in that way can become Druidry. How we cook, how we dance our way across the surface of the earth. How we dream.

Daily practice doesn’t have to mean a formal ritual, or getting the incense out. We might improvise an altar on the side of a road, or pull litter from the hedge. We might walk and listen to the wind, sit with our ancestors in the graveyard, or share inspiration. What matters in the intent and the awareness we hold. Which begs the question, if we can make anything an expression of Druidry, can we push on from there, seeking to make everything we do a conscious expression of Druidry?

Yes.

And that doesn’t mean stepping entirely out of ‘regular’ life, it means bringing our Druidry to all the facets of our lives and trying to see where it fits, and figure out what to do if it doesn’t. That’s not something that can happen overnight. I’ve been pushing at the boundaries of my own experience for years. Where can I be more present, more conscious? Where am I not living in a way that expresses my Druidry? I have a suspicion there is always more to do, further to go, there is no point of arrival, no moment of ‘and now I am as druid as it is possible to be.’ Which is part of the joy of it really.

Land, Roads and Druids

from http://www.freeimages.co.uk/

For most of human history, we’ve walked, sailed, travelled at the pace of hooves if not our own feet. Roads were largely made by use, with no particular planning – apart from Roman constructions. And where the roads are walked and ridden on, and the edges aren’t defined in a hard way, it’s possible to get off the beaten track and go somewhere else, if you have need or inclination.

The fixed nature of modern roads has a huge impact on our relationship with the land. As most people only get about by car or on the roads, they only experience the places that are on roads, and only see from that roadside perspective. If you do walk, roads change the land too.

Here’s an example from my childhood. I grew up amidst hills. Between my home back then and the river, was a motorway, and a large road. Some of the nearby villages were on my side of the motorway, some on the other side. People who went to the same school as me, who lived on the other side of these parallel main roads might as well have been in another world. Bikes and feet would take us down country lanes, but crossing the big roads? We didn’t.

Amongst the hills I grew up in, are burial mounds, raised in Neolithic times. They were made of Cotswold stone and, I gather, left unturfed and visible on the edge of the hills. At a guess they would have been visible from miles away – especially when the sun caught them. There were people living all over the floodplain back then, and they could easily have walked from their homes to the barrows. I believe there was also a temple on the Cotswold edge, but details elude me. Today, the idea of living in that space, moving anywhere between the long expanse of river and the epic hill line on foot, is impossible because of the motorway. There are only a few places you can cross it, and so it cuts the land up, and radically informs how people in the area relate to it.

When I lived in the Midlands, the town I spent time in there had a duel carriageway running through it. There were places to cross, but the presence of the road restricted how people could move across the land. I think is pretty widespread.

Why does this matter?

Regardless of whether you believe in land energies, land has contours. How you experience and see it depends on what angle you come at it from, where you are able to stand. Roads push us into limited ways of seeing. Motorways preclude getting off the beaten track. Encouraged into restricted seeing, we have our scope for relationship reduced. Only a few generations ago, people would have experienced the landscapes they lived in, in wholly different ways. I think we need to reclaim that, to get away from these manufactured perspectives. Walking helps, but it doesn’t do everything.

We have to re-imagine the land. Where there is human development, we have to look again and see what the land beneath it is really doing. We can’t connect with the land unless we perceive it. Find places to stand and look. See how the watercourses relate to human habitation, how uses relate to angles. In the Lake district of the UK and other steep areas, people build on the steeper bits to leave the flat ground free for cultivation. Take the time to imagine the land as it was before the roads started defining it. Where would feet naturally go? How do the relationships change, if you imagine what it was like pre cars?

If we don’t pause and think, we’ll keep on doing more of the same. It’ll take a lot of people thinking and speaking to alter the direction of human ‘progress’ but it’s not impossible. We need to live on the land in ways that enable us to hold relationship with the land. When we do that, we also enable other living things to exist alongside us. Big roads isolate populations of wildlife as well as cutting up human communities. Green corridors benefit all life. But it’s not about exotic creatures in places whose names we cannot pronounce. It’s about here, and now, where we are and how we live in our own spaces. We need to reclaim our landscapes, somehow.

Sambar Deer

Such large and pretty fearful eyes

In knowledge you are loved to death,

Wanted to destruction, hungry adored

Flesh from bone, a lifetaking appreciation

You are feast, beloved food source

They will hunt you.

Pretty eyes, anxious wide and wary

I have seen you on the deer faces

Of hunted women, troubled children.

Victim eyes, large and sweet with sorrow

I have greeted you startled in mirrors.

They hunt you still.

He asks why you evolved to be tasty

As thought the prey has some right

To choose not to be eaten.

Deer eyes, gentle eyes, did you intend

This body to be so fatally appealing?

Did any of us choose?

Sambar deer are a favourite prey of tigers, and it was seeing footage of them, sad eyed and anxious looking, that inspired me to write this – some months ago now. That and the question about why they are tasty.

Facing fear, seeking justice

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to escape from things that frighten me, trying to get some control over my life, myself, and my feelings. I think I knew at the outset that you can’t run away from fear – that just feeds it. Sometimes it is however, necessary to hide and draw breath for a bit before you go in for another round.

There’s a scene in Miyazaki’s ‘Spirited Away’ where one of the spirits gets hungry, keeps consuming everything thrown to it. Those around it become more fearful, feeding it ever more urgently as it keeps getting bigger and more dangerous, and then starts eating them as well. It takes a small girl facing it down to get the spirit back under control. And there’s a perfect metaphor for fear, if ever there was one. If we feed it, it gets bigger.

I went through a thing today, that I’ve thought of as nightmarish for months. I entered a room with someone I never, ever wanted to see again. The experience made me shake physically and also made me want to throw up. Fear does that. But so does nausea, and when it came to it, disgust was the prevailing emotion, not anxiety. Not that sources of disgust aren’t dangerous or threatening, but it creates a degree of distance, a sense of where the balance of power might truly lie. To be disgusted is to have a sense of self and worth, whereas being afraid, sometimes it seems like you have nothing at all.

Facing the fear, I see more clearly that what I really needed to tackle was my own sense of powerlessness and futility. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be enough – not strong or clever or good enough to get things right. Each round of getting something right tells me otherwise, helps me hold a belief that I can keep getting right, and that eases the fear.

I’ve thought a lot about justice in the last year or so as well. What it means, how you find it. I’m starting to think that, like everything else, the justice that matters most is inside, not out. It comes with the recognition of our own rights, and where we have been wronged. If we can’t hold that within ourselves, no one can give it to us from outside. Facing the fear is also an act of seeking that inner justice. It means acknowledging the wrong, and refusing to be ruled by it. Once you start denying power to the fear, you stop feeding it and it will very likely start to shrink. Tell the fear it has no power over you, no right to power, no authority, and watch it get smaller.

The fear in my life was born out of lies. Like a bloated spider spinning sticky webs to trap victims, it had me, all tied up and confused. Lies are not powerful things, but they suck at the life of the one who creates them, requiring constant effort and attention. Telling the truth is easy, you just have to remember what happened. When you’ve got to adjust and adapt the lies to try and work around truth, life is hard work, I imagine. I see the lies for what they are, and I can break them as easily as I would the threads of a spider’s web. In seeing what they are, I feed that sense of justice that lies inside of me, my own sense of truth and integrity. Every time I strengthen that awareness, the fear gets a little bit smaller.

Once again I find myself coming back to The Druid’s prayer – Grant oh spirits thy protection, and in protection, strength. And in strength, understanding and in understanding, knowledge, and in knowledge, the knowledge of justice, and in the knowledge of justice, the love of it, and in the love of it the love of the gods and the goddesses, and in the love of the gods and the goddesses, the love of all existence.