Druid Orders

A Druid Order is a group that offers a defined philosophy and a way of doing druidry derived from it. There are many, many Druid Orders out there. Some have membership in the thousands and include many groves within the organisation, others are very small. If you are looking for a place to start in Druidry, the Orders can be both tempting, and disorientating.

So I thought I’d blog more from the perspective of how to look an Order over to see if it’s the right place for you. I may come back another day and share what I know about some of the specific ones, possibly.

Do you need to be in an Order? No. Orders provide network, support, they will likely offer some teaching, and a way of doing things. If you crave structure, Orders are likely to be more your thing, if you like to improvise and hate anyone telling you what to do, membership of an Order probably isn’t the way to go.

Some Orders are international – OBOD teaches by post and you can access it from anywhere. Many have an online presence. However, I’d recommend that the first port of call is to see who is active in your geographical area. Nothing beats being able to connect with real people, in real circles and share real mead. You may find there’s no one locally who suits you, of course. You may find another Order really speaks and that you want to sign up with them and be the person who starts your local grove.

Geography considered, the next thing to look at is philosophy. What does the Order put first? The Reformed Druids of North America have one tenet – Nature is Good. Simple on the surface but very complicated when you start thinking about it. ADF have a strong ethos of service and offering public ritual. OBOD focus on teaching and have specific ways of doing ritual. The Loyal Arthurian Warband is all about eco protesting and action. Smaller Orders will all have their own focus. Being part of a wider Druid context, all Orders are going to be Druidy, but it’s a big umbrella to be stood under, and there can be vast amounts of uncommon ground!

If you don’t like an Order’s philosophy, you are not going to be a happy or productive member, so best not to go there, even if they do turn out to run the best parties.

The final thing I would recommend exploring before you sign up, is the structure. Who runs the Order? How did they get the job? How much say do you get as an individual member? How autonomous are groves? How tight are the rules and requirements and what happens if you don’t stick with them? What are you being asked to sign up to, at what cost, and how readily can you leave? Answering these questions will tell you a lot about the nature of the organisation and whether you will fit. There are no right answers (usually) only the ones that will work for you. For example, many Orders are run by the charismatic and enthusiastic person who founded them, and will only exist for so long as that person continues to lead. Others are democratic, electing elders or a chief for terms of office. Some are a loose configuration of likeminded folk, others are rigidly structured with grades and promotion opportunities. There are all shades.

There are of course also ‘Orders’ that consist of one ‘Archdruid’ and their dog, and are designed to extract money and/or ego boosts from whoever signs up. I spent a couple of years looking after the Druid Network’s directory, and although I ran into the odd ‘witchwar’ and the odd self important nutter, the overwhelming majority of Orders and their leaders I encountered seemed like lovely people with a genuine intention to do some good Druidic work, on their own terms. Not all of it would suit everyone, but that’s fine, that’s why we don’t have The Big One Church of Druidry for Everyone. Be cautious, because there are idiots and predators out there, and because you need to find a place you actually fit, if you’re making a commitment on this scale. If you don’t find ‘home’ I wouldn’t recommend rushing out to set up your own Druid Order – for a start it’s a lot of work, but look round for like minded souls, and if it turns out that there are more of you than a one Archdruid and his dog scenario, it is a thing to consider. I get the impression that’s where most of the Orders we now have, started.

Green Hair

Look at the list of ingredients of most shampoos and you’ll see a lot of chemical names. I’ll freely admit I don’t know what half of them are. Since my teens, I’ve struggled to find anything that would both get my hair clean, and not result in scalp itching hell. There is also the issue of not wanting to pile potentially hazardous chemicals into the water system.

The substances used in beauty products have all been tested – on animals. That’s a great big ethical discomfort all by itself. It’s also flawed. Short term animal testing does not tell us much about the long term effects of use on humans. It doesn’t tell us what these chemicals are going to do when we mix them up with a whole bunch of other stuff, wash them down the drain and send them off into the water system. There are all kinds of things we know perfectly well are ok in small doses and deadly or damaging with longer exposures. X rays. Chemo therapy. Sunlight. We’ve been assured chemicals used in farming were safe, only to find out years into the real world experiment, that they were killing high level predators. As soon as we wop the ‘science’ label on our beauty products, or anything else, a frightening number of us seem to imagine nothing bad will happen. The truth, as illustrated by thalidomide, organophosphates and other things that have since been banned after first being though fine, is that we the users are where the real scientific research happens. Slowly.

Hair is just one issue amongst many. I’m flagging it up because I appear to have found a good solution. Green, light on chemicals of uncertain effect, no sign of scalp irritation and resulting in clean hair. Having tested this on me for a while, I am reasonably confident in suggesting it.

Just washing with water may get sweat and dust out, but it doesn’t give you much to sort out hair oils. When you first stop using regular shampoo, even if that’s just to move to a milder, greener product you may find you produce a lot of grease. You probably always did. Regular shampoos strip out a lot of oil and thus stimulate oil production. Giving them up means grease.

I spent a lot of time pondering what other creatures do to maintain fur and hair. Licking was straight out. Water I’d already got. What I’d not tried, was a dust bath. Pick a flour you are fine eating. I’m currently using rice because I hate cooking with it, but any fine flour will do. Take pinches and rub it into your hair, thoroughly. This takes a while and gets flour everywhere, just to warn people. Brush it out. The flour combines with the hair grease and off it comes. I like to follow through with a water rinse, because that feels really nice. If you brush the worst of the flour out, you do not then clog up the sink. If you buy organic flour, you’re about as close to green hair as I think it may be possible to get. I have long hair, of a tangly, misbehaving disposition. It comes out smooth, clean, silky and looks good for quite a lot of days post dust bath. It’s slightly more fiddly and messy than regular washing, but uses far less in the way of chemicals, uses far less water than conventional hair washing, costs far less than shampoo and works better than anything else I have tried so far. It’s also a great way of using up flour that is past its best and smells nice, in a ricey sort of way at the moment.

I can’t claim this is fool proof, allergic reaction proof, or absolutely guaranteed to work for everyone. I mention this in case anyone tries to do it to a llama, resulting in terrible consequences and a desire to sue. That should cover me for llama misuse. It works on me, I suspect it will work on other people, I also think if it doesn’t, it probably won’t kill you.

Art about issues

I’ll start by sidestepping the whole issue of whether art, music, words etc need to mean anything. What I want to talk about is how to handle it when you want your bardic expression to reflect something you consider important. When you are working this way, there is a balance to strike between getting the point across and creating good art. If the meaning takes over, and the art is purely a delivery method, you can easily turn people off rather than communicating with them. Bard work is all about communicating, and if people don’t hear the message, the message has not been served.

Forgive the dash of ‘plug’ here, but I’m going to talk around this by using an example – a recent story of mine under the Bryn Colvin name – The Taste of Her. For a long time now I’ve wanted to write something around the issues of domestic abuse and its consequences. It’s a huge, complex and under-represented issue. For a long time I didn’t write it because I couldn’t see anything that wouldn’t be too preachy. To portray an abusive relationship in fiction might get the point across, but would be miserable reading. I could have pulled it off perhaps in the context of a murder mystery or thriller, only I very seldom write those genres and can’t claim to be any good at it. Plus, doing that puts the emphasis on high drama, on something out of the ordinary, not the kind of every day, smaller scale abuse I’m particularly wanting to highlight.

What I plummed for in the end – without giving too much away, was a second hand perspective, people who see from the outside but are not themselves victims. There was room to give a voice to the victims and put some stories in there – stories based very much on truth. But at the same time the main thrust of the narrative is not entirely about one abusive relationship, so it’s not a hideous grind to read. Anything that fully represented the daily reality of the issue would be no joy for a reader, and good art should be entertaining. Grinding people down does not solve the problems of the world.

I think this is a critical balance to strike. Flagging up the issues without making the audience feel like they are being beaten over the head with them. Telling stories around issues so that they become part of the action, rather than what feels like a sales pitch. The traditional solution of the druid is satire. People always like to laugh. If you can flag up a wrong and encourage mockery, then you can tackle it without demoralising the audience. Satire is very powerful that way. But some subjects just do not lend themselves to it. How could we talk about extinction, child abuse, torture, or climate change in a satirical way without somehow lessening the issue? Another balance to strike. A skilful satirist might be able to handle such emotive subjects, but not me. I can point and laugh at the selfish idiocies of certain individuals, but when I want to weep, my capacity for satire dries up.

Banging on about an issue doesn’t make for a story. You need to tell it through the eyes of real people. Characters in a situation, are emotionally engaging. You don’t need to show everything to make a point – often less is more. A sense of the aftermath, a hint of the consequences and let the reader or audience do the work, put the pieces together and realise something.

There is nothing wrong with weeping, or with making your audience cry. A good story, song, poem or picture can fill people with grief and sorrow in order to make a point or tackle an issue. The problem is, if you keep doing that relentlessly, people move away from it. The crying has to give something back to the person who is moved. It needs to be cathartic, or go alongside a feeling that there is indeed something we can do about this. To make people weep and then empower them to find solutions is amazing, if you can pull it off. Just making people weep can demoralise them such that they become ever less able to act, and that’s no help at all.

My personal feeling is that good art should be about something, there should be meat on the bones and more to it than just a pretty surface. Art, in all its forms should affect us in some way, change us, leave us thinking or feeling things that might not otherwise have occurred. If it shows us the issues rather than lecturing us about them, it works better. So, polish off the soap box, and make your words do something in the world!

Nature as teacher

Having no core texts, practitioners of the Pagan religions will often talk about nature being our book, our teacher, our source. The trouble is that like any other book, how we let ourselves be taught and what we choose to understand, is very much down to us. I believe in nature as teacher, but to learn it’s important to understand the limitations, and know where the pitfalls are. If all we want to see is our own belief, prejudice or assumption reflected back at us, we can very easily find it, just like the people who can find a biblical quote to justify anything.

For a start ‘nature’ is very diverse. It covers not only all the living things, but the seas, sky and land as well. What makes perfect sense for one is a nonsense for another. We can take inspiration from the solid, steadfast nature of rock, or from the shifting, unpredictable nature of water. We can learn from both, they are equally valid and real, and they will tell us totally different things.

For many urban pagans, coming out to a natural space is a relatively unusual experience and may well only happen for the festivals. Standing in a beautiful bit of landscape with a bunch of other pagans, enjoying the beauty of the day, may feel like communing with nature. And this is a good thing, it is soul nourishing and of great benefit. People should get out more, not just pagan folk. But at the same time there’s a danger in taking that happy, pretty space as being ‘nature’. The ritual is peaceful, the trees are lovely. You stay long enough to see something, and you go. You miss the details, the drama, the bad weather. You don’t see the teenagers tearing down saplings for fun, or the hunting of one creature by another. You don’t see anything freeze to death in winter or a badger starve because the summer was too dry and there were no worms. Taking snapshots of the pretty bits, we can miss the complexity.

Landscapes, seas, trees, plants and sky can seem peaceful. Maggots in a dead bird less so. Which lessons are we choosing to learn? Are we watching the mice who eat their own young, or the cute lambs in the field? Are we seeing the moment, or the lifespan? Are we seeing a solitary thing, or its place in a wider pattern?

On the flip side if all you perceive of nature is the roadside slaughter of innocents, the hunting, the sudden death and short, brutal lives then you can learn that the world is a harsh, bitter and unjust place. You can learn fear, grief, and the pointlessness of everything.

To take ‘nature’ as your teacher means the whole thing, in as many different ways as you can find. It calls for actively seeking out and exploring many different aspects of the natural world. Not by imagining them, or watching them on the telly, but through active and conscious engagement. If you fixate on one thing, you lose that precious balance and any scope for seeing a bigger picture. Balance, systems, context and relationship are all important druid concepts, not to be overlooked in favour of too much specialisation, or too much skimming of surfaces.

To learn from nature is to learn to judge things on their own terms. What was disaster for my coot family was a happy snack for the passing gull. Neither creature has more or less right than the other to exist. What gives advantage to one species may undermine the viability of another. Cinnabar moths are very pretty, the ragwort they entirely depend on is poisonous to horses. Do we keep or destroy the ragwort? We have the power to choose. What is nature teaching us to do here?

I think the only easy conclusion to draw is that there are no easy conclusions. Nature is complex, full of subtle interdependencies, unlikely bedfellows. What you see on the surface is never the whole story. Two miles downstream the implications could be totally different. What might seem pretty today could be the makings of tomorrow’s disaster. Nature teaches us to look deeper and wider, to think, to question, and to accept a huge variety of ways of being, doing, living and dying. And more. But we can’t learn it hypothetically. Only in experiencing and contemplating for ourselves can we be taught anything by the natural world.

Honouring Midsummer

There is no one right way of honouring midsummer, or the summer solstice. Some groups like to meet for the sunrise, some will sit up all night to greet it. Others favour midday gatherings when the sun is at the height of its power, or will keep watch through the day.

These long days at the light end of the year can be intense, wakeful times. There’s a process of moving through the longest days, so I think of this period – from the 21^st to the 24^th as being the summer’s solar festival time, rather than focusing too much on a specific date. Beyond this short span of days lies the inevitable slow slide back towards winter. It’s the turning point of the year, the time that many sources will tell us we should be feeling high energy and making our plans into reality. Of course in practice life does not always follow the seasons that neatly. The seasons, for that matter, don’t always follow the seasons.

In previous years I have sat up on hillsides to greet the dawn. It’s a soulful thing to do, with long hours in which to contemplate. I considered doing so this year, but the amount of rain round here would have made the process physically hard, and I don’t feel equal to it. Some years I’ve been able to handle the lost night, but I’m sleep hungry, so I went with that. The birds work me with a chorus at dawn – they don’t always, but this morning I surfaced and listened. On a high hill with no tree cover, you don’t get much of a dawn chorus, but at Stonehenge on Salisbury plain, the larks rise up and sing with the sun – which is an experience all by itself.

What am I celebrating? Without ritual, without a working group. I’m very attuned to the light and each passing day resonates with me – I’ve always lived closer to nature so I don’t personally need the festivals as reminders to tune in. The height of the sun’s powers might be a thing to honour, except mostly it’s raining and my solar panel is not gathering much juice today. April felt more summery than this. The St John’s Wort is blooming though, along the sides of the roads, and the chicks who survived from early clutches start to look like adults.

Every day is an event in the life of the sun, part of the cycle, and a moment worth marking. I find it increasingly hard to work up enthusiasm for ‘focal points’. It’s different when you have a group to work with – shared celebration being as much about community, bardcraft and joy as it is about nature. In terms of private practice, I’m not honouring the sun any more today than I did yesterday or will tomorrow. I shall be very glad when it shows up to be honoured in person! It’s been a June monsoon for me.

Whatever you celebrate, and however you choose to do it, I think the most important thing is to know why. Don’t go through the motions because some book on paganism or Druidry told you to. That’s hollow. Celebrate what you find meaningful. And if it doesn’t speak, don’t be afraid to admit it. The eight festivals do not make a Druid. They are a thing to start from, to be aware of, but not to be ruled by. You could turn up to every one of them and never feel anything akin to Druidry stir within your soul. Or you could wander the fields at the times when you feel called to, and find your own truth. Do what works.

Finally, there’s a bit of blue sky out there, and perhaps the gods of sun and solar panels will smile on me, and let me do a little work today.

One for the boys

I suspect there always has been a subset of teenage males who don’t know how to behave. Every so often I get a run in with one of them, or more usually a whole gang. They evidently feel braver in groups and need to show off to each other. I find them heart breaking. I know they are not entirely representative of young humans, but even so, that anyone could live with so little self respect, so little capacity for empathy or compassion, chills me. How did they arrive at this point? Why, at so young an age, are they so jaded? So self important? And most critically, why do they take such obvious delight in causing pain and distress to others?

These are the boys who are going to go on to other, crueller, more antisocial things. They are the ones who will rape and beat girlfriends, and feel entirely justified in so doing. The ones who will bully and intimidate their own children. People with no values and no respect are not good to be around. Perhaps not all of them, but some will turn into absolute monsters. One or two may get a wakeup call, chance to see there is more to life but many are heads down and racing towards a future in which they just don’t care. They will cost other people a great deal, but the harm they do to themselves is immeasurable.

I wish I could sit them down and explain to them what a life without care or value actually does to a person. It takes away so much. You can’t have any real relationship or any meaningful engagement with anything, if you don’t care. It’s a life of jaded cynicism, and it sucks all the joy out of you. It’s very hard to be happy when you don’t care. It’s nigh on impossible to feel good about yourself.

The mental gymnastics you have to go through every day to justify why you have the right to take, use, abuse, damage, humiliate and injure, suck up a lot of energy. You’d be surprised just how much. There are so many things you just can’t afford to think about or explore, in case you see what’s really happening. So you hold to the thought that it’s all shit, all worthless, pointless, meaningless rubbish, and that’s all you have. You might manage to feel fleetingly superior to all the stupid naive people who care about things, but that’s a very hollow sort of life.

It takes courage to care. It takes a real man to show compassion. It takes strength to act with honour. Guys who do these things, and know they do them have far more pride in themselves than the ones who bully, strop and shout. They know they are real men, adult men. Other people respect them – not in a loud, superficial, meaningless way but genuine and heartfelt. How do I tell that to a self important kid who thinks that insults make him look clever, theft makes him look hard, lying gives him kudos and being an asshole will make his friends respect him? There is no time to sit him down and explain that there is so much more to being alive.

I did get to say ‘if you have any pride or sense of self worth you will behave like a decent human being’. Maybe one of the boys heard me. Just to have that get through a single set of ears would be a win. Boys in a country town who imagine they are street hardened gangsters. Boys who would not last five minutes in a city, or a war zone. Children.

We won’t persuade them to grow up by ignoring them, nor by shouting at them. Some of them are too jaded and know it all, already to be capable of hearing anything else. I didn’t think ‘hug a hoody’ was any kind of answer, but how do we get through to them? How do we make them hear that the future is theirs, and the power to change the world for good or ill lies in their hands? The terrible irony is, that these children who think they are men, do not actually take themselves seriously. If they did, they’d be doing something real, not playing at gangsters and pretending to be hard. That, perhaps, is their greatest tragedy.

Where is your temple?

(Or, why I prefer to do it outdoors)

I know a lot of Pagans do their rituals inside. There are advantages – privacy, quiet, warmth, not being rained on. Other people dogs and children will not roam through your circle. Toilets are close to hand, and other useful resources. It can be fitted in around the rest of your life without much hassle, and you can wear whatever you like, or nothing at all, without fear of the consequences.

I have done rituals inside. Mostly because I was working with a group and either the weather, or the proposed work meant others wanted a degree more security than the woods could offer. Group work has to include a degree of compromise sometimes.

All the reasons for staying in, are also reasons to go out. Yes, people will see you. This can make you feel exposed, vulnerable and like an idiot, but if we take what we do seriously, then we should be able to stand that. Being able to be a pagan in a semi-public place without shame, is a good thing, and worth experiencing. It also means showing a few lone souls what we do, and that doesn’t hurt either. We may be strange people in the woods, but if others see that we cause no harm, sacrifice no chickens and summon no demons, that helps tackle a few myths about pagans right there. Of course if you do want to dance naked (does anyone actually dance naked?) there might be issues.

Yes, you will be disrupted by the weather. You will get cold, be rained on. The fire will go out. Insects will bite you. Someone will tread in excrement. It will get dark and you will not be able to read the script. But this is nature, as it really is. Not the ‘nature’ we might worship in abstract from a living room, but the dirty, messy, uncomfortable, demanding reality of it. If you can get out there, honour it in person, deal with the dubious stains and the setbacks, it’s so much more real. It’s a much more honest, grounded kind of paganism.

It takes more effort to gather outside, safely, effectively, with the right gear. You can’t just hop into your personal magical space, do a quick thing and get back to regular life. Ritual outside is a big event. It will take energy. This is a good thing. The more you put in, the more you get out, so look at these challenges as an open invitation to put more in, and see where it goes.

You can’t wear what you like. An icy wood at imbolc is not the place for dainty heels, flouncy shirts, or even cloaks. You need solid boots and a good coat. Working outside through most of the year knocks some of the scope for pageantry out of the ritual. So if the aesthetics matter to you, you have to work harder. See previous comments about putting more in. Otherwise, if you are the kind of person who mostly lives indoors, this will be a profound journey. Learning about the reality of nature, the demands it makes of your body, the kit you need for basic comfort – is all good. It’s all real, it all teaches lessons.

It takes determination to do a ritual in the pouring rain, or to trudge out through the snow for one. It takes the right gear and a bit of will to handle a scorchingly hot day, or a bitter wind that you can’t shout over. You will pause and ask why the hell you are doing this to yourself, what it is for and whether there is any point. The gods are clearly not on your side. Perhaps they don’t care if the ritual happens or not. Why not go home and see what’s on the telly?

At that point, some people will give up and either decide they aren’t pagans, or embrace the living room altar with new zeal and fervour. But for the people who survive, who work out why they were out there in all that weather trying to speak some lines… there is a whole new understanding to be found about what paganism means to us. That’s worth getting rained on for.

Conscious, unconscious

How aware are you of your own motives? What drives you? Do you find you’ve done or said things and not known why? What does your unconscious mean to you?

For a long time, years in fact, I’ve worked hard to be as fully conscious as I could be. To know what I was doing and why. To know myself. I considered that essential for self growth. I’ve got to the point of having to acknowledge that so far, I’ve not been doing a great job. There were too many things I refused to accept and acknowledge about what was then around me. In so doing, I distorted my sense of self. But it remains an aspiration to be as self aware as I can manage.

What is the unconscious? Is it the place of denial and letting yourself off the hook? Are we talking about Freud’s id, animalistic and selfish, pushing us to do things for less than honourable reasons? That’s not the sort of unconscious I want.

What about dreams? The rich and magical flows of inspiration and creativity we have aren’t tidy, controlled and known things. Inspiration flourishes in the unconscious. Somewhere, between the questing after self awareness, and the denying of some aspects of my reality, I lost track of that. I should have noticed, because for years I barely dreamed, and when I did it usually involved the same dull handful of anxiety nightmares.

I’ve been trying for a different understanding of my own unconscious, seeing it not in ‘id’ terms as something to tackle, but as a dark river that flows underneath what I do. A place of magic, strangeness and potential. Something to be open to, not something to fight. One of the interesting consequences is, having deliberately and consciously shifted my understanding, my unconscious has also changed. I’m dreaming again. Rich, vibrant, startling, inspiring, unsettling dreams full of colour, emotion, and experience. I wake up in the mornings with my head full of all kinds of strange things, and my heart lifted. When I dream in wild and vivid ways, I feel better. It doesn’t have to be obviously meaningful, so long as it is intense.

There is something in me that exists in ways I am not fully aware of. To be entirely conscious would kill it. I have learned that it does not thrive in environments where I am not honest with myself. Too much misplaced blame and having my intuition messed with did not help. Being open to the unknown within me is a whole new journey. There is so much of who I could be, I realise I do not know at all. Potential, awen, the insanity of poetic vision, the delirium of dreaming. I do not need to know all of that so thoroughly that I control it into not existing. I can have self awareness without sacrificing the magic of unconsciousness. I can dream and still be a realist. I can imagine, and recognise truth.

During the period of my life when I was trying hard to suppress and reject all the things that come from magical unreason and dreaming, I was at my least true. Rationality and reason are not the only things in a human mind that matter, and they need balancing. I lost that balance. In trying to be too sane, I became unsane. (not insane, just ill). I mention this because I fear it’s all too easily done, and if I can discourage others from going too far into wanting self control, then all well and good.

We are, I have come to realise, not supposed to know, or understand everything. The trick is knowing what to unravel, and what to keep mysterious. I’m working on that.

Flair and Style

Part of the bard archetype is flamboyance. A larger than life, glorious exciting presence that captivates everyone, pouring richness into ears. The bard’s every word is poetry. They dance when others merely walk. Then there’s the Druid archetype, mysterious, compelling. Powerful speakers, eloquent expressers of complex thoughts, story making, holding community together with a weave of words and tradition.

I look at me, and I see how far short of these images I fall. There are no images of me on this blog for the simple reason that they wouldn’t help. I am a scruffy sort of creature. Even in ritual, I tend to dress for the weather. Kris Hughes (who I think is brilliant and lovely) said ‘you should be gorgeous before your gods’ but I don’t have it in me to be gorgeous anywhere. Grubby, yes. Dishevelled, any time.

As a performer, musician etc, I tend to be quiet, understated. I’ve no inclination to trumpet myself or ‘big up’ what I’m doing. No bombast, no drama, no flair or style. I just share what I have, with whatever integrity I can muster, and hope it’s enough.

My writing is the same. I favour plain speech, clarity, simple things said with feeling. On the fiction side a few critics have called me cold, dispassionate, uninspiring. I don’t labour emotional points if I can help it, I prefer subtlety, but that isn’t to most people’s tastes. When it comes to non-fiction, I’m usually more focused on trying to get points across clearly than on a desire for verbal elegance.

There are days when these things feel like terrible insufficiencies. A proper bard would dress up more. A real Druid would speak in mystical, magical ways and not sound so ordinary.

But sometimes I think about other traditions. Songs sung by people as they work. Tales told around the fire after a hard day. Telling the story of the bread, the pudding, the jam making, the people who went before. Not stagey bardcraft, but the quieter, dishevelled story telling that goes alongside life lived. Not the performers and Druids who advised and amused Kings, but the small, forgotten folk who brought their creativity to the lives of other small, equally forgotten folk. Is that any less precious?

I could cast those archetypes I tarted the blog with, in other ways. I could speak of self important, pretentious attention seeking. Faux-mystique wrapped up in impenetrable bullshit. All surface and no content. I happen to care about content. I don’t believe for a moment that style and content can’t be combined, but I wouldn’t sacrifice the meaning for the delivery, not ever.

Dressed for the weather, mud splattered, untidy. No robes, no symbols, no polish. Is that something I should be ashamed of? Is there bard fail, druid fail in my lack of gorgeousness? Do the gods care whether my fingernails are clean? And who defines stylish anyway? Whose ‘style’ should I be led by? Are we all to be peacocks? What about the plain pea hens? Do the gods find them gorgeous too? Perhaps it’s less that we should be gorgeous before our gods, and more that we need to be aware of our already being so. Our natural state is beauty. All of nature is beautiful, and we too are natural. Whether we lope, amble, glide or waddle, we all have style. A style. Our style. Do we aspire to fit the archetypes, or do we explore the far reaches of our own possibilities? As I’m never going to be anyone’s notion of bombastic bardic brilliance, I’ve got to choose that second option. My own way, on my own terms. Quietly, clearly, sometimes with bits of twig in my hair.

 

Of all the hard criticism I’ve ever had to take, being told that my writing has neither flair nor style, has been one of the hardest, especially given how deeply I respect the source of those words. But it’s made me think, and acknowledge that I can only be what I am. No amount of pretending to be a sparkling brilliant thing will make me that. If I have no style and flair, so be it. I still have the dirt under my fingernails, and I still have twigs in my hair, and that’s going to have to be enough for me.

The Truth about Ducklings

I’ve always enjoyed seeing ducklings in the spring, cute fuzzy balls of new life to be cooed over. Until this year, I never really thought about them. But, living on a boat, I’ve become a lot more conscious of waterbirds, not as an occasional sight, but as individual characters and neighbours. With today’s blog, I simply want to share what I’ve seen and how that’s making me think.

When the ducklings are newly hatched, they are tiny, and there’s frequently more than ten in the clutch. They keep close together, under mother duck’s watchful eye. Of course with that many, some can get lost. Large fish will eat ducklings. Seagulls and other birds will take them. I watched a herring gull take a young coot, snatching it up, carrying it off and then tearing it apart to eat. Nature is not kind to cute fluffy things who do not yet know how to protect themselves.

By the time ducklings stop looking fuzzy and have the first hint of adult plumage, they are about half the size of an adult bird. And there are unlikely to be more than three surviving from the original clutch. Sometimes the whole lot are wiped out, and the ducks simply start over. Yesterday I watched the coot family nest building as they try again to raise young. I watched the parent coot after the baby was taken, looking for the missing chick, checking everywhere, and eventually giving up and going back to feeding.

It takes human mothers a good deal longer to get over the loss of young. But we don’t bear thirteen children at a go with the awareness that we could lose them all. I have no idea what it feels like, being a duck, having that many young lives to guard and watching them be taken, one by one. I can guess at how that would feel for a human. The waterbirds seem, from where I’m watching, to be very pragmatic. Life goes on, they keep trying. New eggs are laid.

Of course, go back a few generations and most women could expect to lose at least one child either during pregnancy or in the first few years of that child’s life. Even now, one in four pregnancies leads to miscarriage.

Watching the duck families makes me wonder about the evolution of human emotion. It’s an expensive thing to have developed. It slows us down at just the points where evolution might demand we start running again. We would not respond to the death of a child by immediately trying for another one. Love and the pain of loss create a very special kind of weakness and vulnerability in us. Perhaps that encourages us to cling more tightly to the children we have, and perhaps that’s why we evolved it, but it makes me wonder. That emotional attachment isn’t restricted to caring for our offspring, it extends in all kinds of directions where it’s harder to ascribe evolutionary functions.

How much are we like other creatures? How separate should we see ourselves as being? To what extent should we use human emotions as a way of understanding responses in other beings? It’s a minefield, but we don’t exist in isolation, and to know ourselves is to also know where we fit. Whatever that turns out to mean.