Steam Druid

For all of you who suffer from folk innuendo syndrome, I should start by saying no, this is not a Beltain related topic. It’s about steam engines and Druids.

Only when I went to the Cambridge (Gloucestershire) vintage car and steam show last weekend did I remember what I was doing there the previous year. It’s a small show – a field of old cars, a steam car (the only car I have ever loved!) a steamroller and a few baby traction engines puffing about. There was also a lot of rain. Last year I was working on Intelligent Designing for Amateurs. It’s a fiction thing and it’s coming soon… and as the title suggests, it is a bit about people playing God.

But I digress. I’d read Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe the previous winter, and that was a big influence on writing Druidry and the Ancestors. I needed to make some kind of meaningful response. A legacy remained. The sheer insanity of revival Druids, the mad energy, shameless disregard for facts, fraudulent invention… that had got under my skin. At the time I couldn’t see any way of bringing that to my ‘proper’ Druidry so I did what I usually do with impossible things, and put it in a story. How to do revival Druids? I didn’t want to work with the actual historical figures, so I needed to invent some equally crazy people to play with.

One of the consequences of this, was Henry Caractacus Morestrop Jones (Archdruid) complete with moustache, a robe that looks suspiciously like a nightdress, and a heightened sense of self importance. I wanted some slightly more sympathetic Druids as well though.

Then, at last year’s vintage car show with traction engine event, I watched the steam roller pootle back and forth, slowly. Inspiration popped into my head. Not the kind of spiritual, fire in the head awen inspiration we normally like to associate with Druids, but very silly inspiration. Druids on a traction engine. The scope for low speed chases struck me at once. I like a good slow chase for comedy value. Jack Barrow does them well, too.

In the process of writing a book, its’ not difficult to lose track of the source material, especially with fiction where I’m not making the same conscious effort to remember what I got from where. As a result I sometimes get the curious pleasure of re-encountering a thing and realising that it set me on an imaginative journey.
Druids on a traction engine.

I gather Dr Who has sinister cybermice in it, so I may have been a bit prescient with that one. Yes, it’s been a strange year, creatively speaking and the upshot is a strange book.

Studying Druidry

There are a number of Druid Orders out there offering teaching material. The highest profile are OBOD, ADF and Henge of Keltria, but most Orders make some study material available to students. With the internet, it’s relatively easy to do. Do you need a study course to become a Druid? Maybe.

The advantage of joining a course is that someone else has figured out what to study and often a good order in which to do the work. Being self-taught can mean an awful lot of groping around in the dark trying to figure out what’s relevant, and whether the thing you are doing even counts as Druidry. With courses come mentors, tutors, advisors, people who can tell you how you are doing. For some people that affirmation is really helpful, for others, being in any way subject to authority doesn’t work.

Studying a course means there’s an identifiable set of other Druids who will recognise what you do and with whom you can easily work. You know roughly what they’re going to do. A formal OBOD ritual anywhere in the world will be recognisable to anyone who knows OBOD material, assuming they can handle the language. On the downside, it can tie you into more fixed ways of thinking, a belief that there’s a ‘right way’ to do ritual, when of course there are many ways.

Being entirely self-taught can be lonely, confusing and demoralising. It’s not just a matter of reading the right books, either, but of getting out there, engaging with the land, learning the seasons, finding your own ways of responding to that. For some, the solitary path is the only one that can ever make sense. It’s also worth bearing in mind that every last detail taught in any Druid course anywhere comes from people. Teaching materials are developed by experience, practice, and experimenting. On one hand they can save you a lot of time and spare you from both dead ends and wheel reinventions. On the other, their validity depends on having been used, and that does not mean other ways will turn out to be less valid. Other innovations from other people may better suit some times and places. That includes our innovations.

However you choose to learn, there is one critical thing that remains a constant across all possibilities: It’s down to the individual. What you do with the material you are given, or find, how you approach your learning and what of yourself you put in is critical. There is no course in existence that will turn you into a Druid. Only you can do that. A course may be helpful, but the work is all yours.

OBOD adventures, further

I announced some weeks ago now that I had decided to apply to see if I could be an OBOD tutor, and that I’d post along the way to talk about how that goes. So, I’m in process now. I’m not going into the details of the process, that doesn’t feel wholly appropriate nor do I think it’s likely to be of much interest. But there is a process, and I’m finding it a gentle and helpful one. This is not especially surprising as it goes with my experience of OBOD to date. Helpful, informative, gently testing to find out what I am and where I fit.

I like how supported this all feels. I like the strong sense I have that I’m entering a community in which I can both enable others and be supported in doing so. My wider experience of volunteering has had a very different sort of vibe to it – one of the most difficult things for volunteers is not having the back up to be sure of what you’re doing, that you’re on the right track and so forth. I’ve been places where volunteering was intimidating and felt exposed. I’ve plenty of experience of things I barely understood being dropped on me, and having to learn on the job to the detriment of those who got me during the teething period. I should add this isn’t exclusively a Paganism issue either. Often the problem is that volunteers are in such short supply that people don’t have time to properly train and support those coming in, there’s too much fire fighting going on already. It’s a long way short of ideal.

It’s lovely to find that with OBOD, I’m stepping out onto a path, already very clear about the existence of safety nets and knowing that I will not be expected to fly on my own until I’ve got the experience to realistically do so. And even then I’ll still be part of a wider, supportive community. I feel very, very positive about this. The time frames are not stressful looking. I don’t have to be up and running in a matter of weeks. I’ll be doing some practice work over the next month, and then some reading, and then we go from there. I’m looking forward to the challenges. I’m also looking forward to revisiting the study material from years ago, knowing that I’ll be working closely with that, for some time to come. Opportunities to go deeper, and to see thing through other people’s eyes abound.

My biggest fear around undertaking this, was that I simply wouldn’t be acceptable. It’s a deeply held, longstanding fear that pertains to pretty much everything in my life, nothing OBOD specific here. I worry about not being good enough, and testing that is always intimidating. I’m coming to learn that yes, there are places I do not fit, and yes, there are people who are not going to be ok with what I do and how I do it, but no, I am not innately an exile, I am not that which does not belong anywhere. It’s just a matter of finding the right places and people, and apparently I’m getting better at that.

Who am I?

Picking myself apart, I look for things that were put on me from the outside. There are a lot of them. I look for things I’ve been taught to believe that don’t hold up to rational scrutiny. There are a fair few of those, too. I carry so many assumptions, absorbed with little thought. This is a process I started in earnest when I was writing Druidry and the Ancestors. Looking at the way in which ideas and behaviours can be passed down through families, unconsciously. Hurt and wounding transfers from one generation to the next. In my family one of the big issues was that we don’t do physical contact readily or easily. I’ve had issues with boundaries that stem from there.

Often when I’m working on a book, I’m experimenting with my own life and thinking, to see what I can find out first hand. That doesn’t stop just because the book is published. I found myself thinking about my paternal grandmother last night. I know so little about her. I may have inherited some physical problems from her, and I do not know what else. What came to me from those ancestors? What of their lives and stories is meshed into my being? I do not know. I also keep asking what it is I bring to the mix that is truly myself, my own spirit, not a repetition of ancestry, not a manifestation of DNA, or training, but purely and totally me.

I have been aware from the outset of this work that the answer could be ‘nothing at all’.

There’s an energy that is mine. It’s a wild, high octane, intense, manic sort of energy and if I’m not careful with it, it can leave me burned out. It’s not reliably safe to be around, either. A forest fire, hurricane energy that isn’t as careful as it could be with people who get too close, and that worries me. I also have a perception that spiritual means calm. Spiritual people are all mellow and at peace with the world. I’ve put in a lot of time trying to be mellow and at peace with the world, and I can do it a bit, but it gets ever clearer to me that it is not in my nature to live there. The hurricane self needs to be more active.

There has never really been space for me to be wild. I’ve always had to be domesticated. I was taught not to show off, or make a fuss, or draw attention to myself and I learned to be a passably inoffensive presence. Now I struggle with energy levels and depression. The more time I spend quietly looking at this one, the more certain I become that I need to give my wild self more room, more outlet. I need to accept that I am not a creature of still, silent contemplation all the time. There are hungers in me. I do crave attention, that sends me out onto stages and into ritual circles, it has me writing books and blogs. Why should that be shameful? Why should I feel any need to pretend that I do this for ‘good’ reasons and that ‘good’ precludes attention seeking? Celtic tales are full of attention seekers. The bards, heroes, the beautiful women, the magic users – they aren’t self effacing. They take pride in what they do and draw attention to it.

Is it really a virtue to stay silent in face of pain? To not ask for help. Being open about my shortcomings, and learning to ask for help gives other people chance to step up and be heroic. It’s not failure to need input from other people.

I’m aware of food hunger in my body, and sexual desire. Having spent a while now exploring what it means to want, I notice how much I want rest and sleep, physical affection, intellectual stimulation, laughter, beauty, experiences. I’m a demanding creature by nature and I want a lot out of life. I am not satisfied by banality, by that which is unimaginative and lacklustre, and I’ve spent a lot of years pretending to accept what bored me witless, just to avoid hurting other people’s feelings. What I learned along the way was that wanting made me a bad person. My wanting was an affront to others, who either couldn’t make sense of it, didn’t like it, feared it… and I let myself feel responsible for that, hiding those bits that I was learning were monstrous and unacceptable.

I am not passive by nature. I’m experimenting with not being ashamed of the hungers, drives, desires and impulses that come from my body. I’m looking for spaces in which I can express them and distancing myself from places where being biddable seems like a requirement. I’m learning to accept that I cannot conform to the image of Druid as chilled out speaker of calm wisdom. That manic, fierce, burning energy that has so much potential for trouble, is mine. Is me. It may well be the most ‘me’ thing I’ve got. It’s survived a lifetime of attempts to cage and tame it. It has survived my feelings of shame in it, my rejection of it, my self-hatred. There is an old skin on the outside of me, and I can feel it loosening, ready to slough off.

Novice Again

I’m very much a lifelong learning person. Learning new things, new ideas and new skills is a source of joy to me and I can’t imagine ever wanting to stop. Unshockingly, given the whole Druid thing, I find it a cyclical process. I discover something, I study, explore, practice, I get better at it. I start to feel that I can do the thing passably well. Then I see something else that makes me realise how little I know, and I find myself feeling that I am starting at the beginning again. Occasionally this is frustrating and depression, but most often it’s an exciting experience.

I’ve gone back and relearned how to breathe, repeatedly. Learning to breathe underpins all kinds of voice work, meditation, physical activities. Each time I learn, I go somewhere new, I make a kind of progress around my spirals. I go through it with music too, pausing to break down my techniques as I try to tighten up on some aspect of how I play. Working with voice and bouzouki, I had to go back and learn how to breathe again. Circles within circles. I never did get the hang of breathing, singing and drumming all at the same time, though.

When I started out learning Druidry, I studied correspondences, ideas about circles and elements and pretty much anything anyone pointed me at. I worked very hard to learn. Then somewhere along the way I grasped that Druidry is not wholly an intellectual thing you can get out of books, and that I needed to change my doing. I was outside a lot, but I had to do a relearn to bring Druid ideas to my time amongst trees, and then further relearning as I started to question and challenge the book learning. Particularly, having studied the wheel of the year, I then totally questioned the whole thing and wanted to move away from year narratives. Now I’m feeling a desire to look at that again, to go back to the fundamental cycling of moons and seasons, and think about my own year shapes.

I’m currently reading Dorothy Abrams’ Identity and the Quartered Circle. This is a book about fundamentals, and its making me go over my own practice and beliefs again, thinking about what I do, and how, and why. It’s a witchcraft book, and I’ve never seen myself as that kind of magical practitioner, but there are things that could stand a rethink. It may be time to go back to the beginning again and re-walk the spiral paths of Druidry.

I also find myself a novice in being a person. I don’t know who I am. That’s actually exciting, because it allows so much room for change and growth. I’m recognising things that have been put on me from outside, and shaking them off, but I don’t know who I am without them. Who would I be if I did not start from the assumption that I’m undeserving and useless? How would I behave? What would I be able to do that is currently unavailable? How would I feel? A fledgling in old skin, trying to work out if these are wings, or flippers or what, and flapping, and wondering if I belong in air, or water, of where… metaphorically speaking.

With anything, at any time, it is possible to rededicate, go back to the beginning and try to relearn. Obviously the things we have already learned go with us, either helping us to learn more deeply, or in the form of things we must first unlearn. We can always make the conscious decision to be a novice again, to reject what we thought we knew, or to reinvent it. There’s a letting go of self importance around choosing to be a novice. Sometimes I find it hard to admit that I do not know, or that what I have learned is wrong. Attitudes to myself and my body, I am having to relearn. Attitudes to how to interact peaceably, what to tolerate, what to resist – a work in progress. Admitting you don’t know is a tremendously liberating experience. It opens the door to learning.
Every morning is an opportunity to go out there and become something new. Again.

The happy Druid

I’ve met a lot of people along the way so far, from people who were penniless and living in single rooms in Bed and Breakfasts, to people who have big country houses and go skiing every year. People who have been invalided out of the workforce, the self-made and the downright lucky. I’ve known plenty of wealthy people who were a long way from being happy, whilst misery and poverty go together very easily. Without a doubt, the happiest people I know are either retired, or self employed, doing something they care about and feel has value, and have strong friendship networks.

Often self employed people like me work longer hours than regular employees and do so for less money, but, you get to say no when you need to. You can fit your work around your life, and I see a lot of that amongst the self employed, especially around child raising. People who work for themselves always have more scope to be creative, and get more direct financial reward for the things they get right. There are more risks, but these days most regular employment is so insecure that the risks seem a lot smaller than they used to. At least when it’s your company you can really fight to keep it going and don’t have to depend on whether anyone else is determined to make sure your job continues to exist. What I hear from regularly employed friends suggest that increasing numbers of workplaces are becoming unreasonable, disrespectful pressure fests. The self employed may not have as much cash, but we don’t endure any workplace bullying unless we do it to ourselves.

There are basic essentials that we all need. Recent discussions on facebook around food budgets demonstrate that a person who knows their stuff and has enough wriggle room for some bulk buying, can live well on fairly little. Less desire to be fashionably dressed keeps the clothes budget down. Feet as transport save money, and the cost of gym membership. There’s an art to being less affluent, and one of the key requirements is knowing that cash does not equate to happiness. Yes, life without the basics is miserable, but that’s not always a money issue. Rest and sleep are basics, plenty of highly paid, high flying jobs will deprive you of those. Human relationships are also a basic human need, and if you’ve got to work all your waking hours, or deeply antisocial hours, money costs you in terms of relationship.

The first secret to finding happiness rests on knowing what actually makes you happy. That’s going to vary for all of us, but whatever you think you’ve got, it’s worth poking it. The joy of shopping, for example, can often be about getting a temporary sense of power out of spending money, but if you run up debts, that disempowers you, it can become like an addiction. Getting drunk can feel like happiness, but there’s thinking out there that our young people do this just to blot out the reality of the rest of their lives. So just how happy a state is that? Merry is great, slightly pissed can be wonderful, but so off your face that you don’t know which way is up? Its popular, hugely expensive in terms of police costs and antisocial knock-ons.

I am able to get by on very little because I know what I need. I have books, online articles and radio 4 to supply me with intellectual stimulus on a daily basis. I have good company in the form of my bloke, my child, fellow boaters, excellent friends and a wide selection of casual acquaintances in the wider world. I need time outside and most especially, panoramic landscape views. Enough food, exercise and rest are possible to achieve, although I don’t always get that balance right. Lying in bed, snuggled with my man, cat purring in my ear, child giggling at the other end of the boat as he reads Pratchett in bed… of these things are contentment made. Happiness is not a big, dramatic sort of emotion. If I need thrills and adventures, moving the boat on a windy day, cycling a hill, undertaking an epic walk – I can challenge myself. I don’t get bored. I have the freedom to think and feel as I please, to choose a lot of what happens, or negotiate it in ways that work all round. I am free from bullying, and unkindness doesn’t feature much in my life. I feel very lucky in all of this.

I’m happy when small things go well, and when what I do works for other people, when publishers say yes, and the child says ‘today was an awesome adventure’ or things to that effect. I’m happy when I feel that I’m acting ethically, and walking my talk in some way or another, and when what I do manifestly benefits someone else. Money can be nice, especially when it represents people who bought my books. But money does not buy me the call of the cuckoo, a child’s laughter, or the man who looks at me with adoration in his eyes.

Celtic religion

In his excellent book, Stalking the Goddess, Mark Carter makes some interesting points about Celtic religion. (You’re going to be hearing a lot about Mark). The Celts didn’t have a name for their religion so far as we know. Why would they? It was their religion, the religion, it didn’t need naming. To call it Druidry, he points out, is like calling Christianity Priestism. Celt itself is a word that comes from the outside too. There’s the Greek word Keltoi, which I think the Romans took up to describe some of their ‘barbarian’ neighbours, designating others as Germanic. The divisions are arbitrary.

Often names come from the outside. We don’t need them. We are the people, this is our earth, this is our religion, you only need names when there’s something to distinguish yourself from. As Alan Pilbeam points out when writing about countryside history, inside the village, it’s just the village. The name other people give it will tell you a lot more about what the place is like. I live in the area that was once Slime Bridge. Nice.

Druidry is not the word for ancient Celtic religion. Is it the word to
describe a modern religion? I’m going to say no. Druidry is not A Religion. For many people, what they practice as a Druid is effectively a religion, but that’s not the same as A Religion. We have polytheists, monotheists, duotheists, animists, pantheists and non-theists amongst the modern Druid ranks. No amount of mental wriggling will enable you to call that A Religion. It’s lots of religions.

It’s also worth noting that our culture is totally different. Modern Druids are not one people in one society with one land and one religion. We are scattered across diverse communities and walk amongst people of widely different beliefs. We live in very different places, too. It no longer makes sense to say ‘we are the people and this is our religion’ because the context that worked in no longer exists. There is a great deal about Celtic religion we can never replicate because we do not have social context in which it functioned. A religion is not a tag on to a society. It both informs, and is informed by everything else. Without Celtic life and Celtic social structures, we are doing something else. That’s fine, but we need to recognise it.

I think it helps to consider Druidry as a doing term. Druidry is that which Druids do. This in turn allows us to focus on the commonality and not get bogged down in what it means that some of us believe in individual, personified deities and some of us don’t. Druidry is service. It is study. It is using your creativity for the good of your land and tribe (whoever they are). It is teaching and enabling other people, planting trees, honouring the natural world. Druidry is turning up when you are needed and doing the things you are called on to do. That might be celebrant work, or helping other people find the words they need, or writing stroppy letters to the press, or any number of other things. It’s not belief that makes a Druid, but the doing. It’s also wider reaching than the Druid or Pagan communities. It’s being a voice for the environment at a local planning session. It is protest for human rights and social justice.

Often where your Druidry is most needed is not in the company of other Druids, but out in the rest of the world. The company of Druids is more a place to share ideas, and draw inspiration. We do not need to do Druidry for other Druids very often. Rites of passage maybe, support in hard times, but mostly if a person is doing Druidry, they don’t need another Druid to do it for them. The (im)moral support can be nice though.

Proto Druids

It’s been my privilege on a number of occasions now to see people discovering that they want to walk the Druid path. Frequently there’s an attendant process of working out that lots of the apparently disparate strands of their lives are in fact all things that will become part of their Druidry. I went through this one myself, and it was rather a surprising process. The Bardic grade of OBOD consisted a lot of going ‘bloody hell that as well eh?’ which was a good sort of experience.
So, I thought I’d put together a list of things that tend to already be in the lives of proto-Druids, for people who were wondering if the might be. If you spot one I’ve missed, add it in the comments please! If you’ve got an interest in, or are actively undertaking a number of these, you may be a proto Druid!

Environmental issues and green living, alternative living choices, compassionate living.
Philosophy
Trees
Herbs
Folk music, myths, story telling
Divination
Harps
Celts – ancient or modern.
Archaeology
Astronomy
An enthusiasm for being out of doors.
A call to service, volunteering work.
A need to do creative things – craft, arts, performance, or being the sort of person for whom cooking or making a garden for example, is an art form.
A passion for language, possibly manifesting in poetry, or other forms of writing, or the enjoyment thereof.
Social justice
Feeling a bit out of kilter with modern society
Peace work
Animal welfare
Healing – bodies, minds, humans, nonhumans, places, communities
Teaching
Meditation, or contemplating things a lot
If you feel a pull towards making, holding and facilitating real communities
Ancient sites
Liminal places (in fact if you already know what liminal means, give yourself extra proto-druid points)
A hunger for the numinous and for inspiration.

Druid Adventures

I mentioned a couple of days ago, that I was plotting something, and after some reflection, I’m going to blog the process, whatever it is, even if it doesn’t work out the way I hope it will. If things go to plan, there’s going to be study, and scope for some really productive service. I love studying, so am hoping for things to get my teeth into, and the direction I have in mind could bring some really good challenges.
Of course the flip side is that trying can mean failing. Which is why I’m going to talk about the whole thing.

I’m in the process of applying to become a tutor for OBOD.

I completed the three grades some years ago, and I enjoyed the process. It was challenging, sometimes pretty hard (the Ovate Grade I found emotionally very difficult.) Progression through the grades is not a given. Many people just don’t finish the Bard grade anyway. If you complete it then you can move on to studying the Ovate material. At the end of the Ovate grade, you can fail. It is possible for someone to say no to you carrying on.

I had several tutors on the way through. My Bardic tutor was totally awesome and really helped me. I’d been set back by some bad teaching, and needed help rebuilding my confidence. I’m not a passive receiver of other people’s truths, I need to test and challenge, and what my tutor for that grade gave me was a safe space in which I could do just that, and be accepted. I struggled more with my Ovate Tutor, he had things going on in his life, we weren’t on the same wavelength, and I discovered he was moving out of tutoring, so that was a very different experience, but I got through. In the Druid grade I didn’t have much contact at all. I’d found my feet.

Talking to other OBOD students, I’ve come to realise how critical the good tutor-student relationship is to the whole process. The tutor you get is one of your main experiences of the Order and that relationship can make or break your studies. Although, even the best tutor can’t fix a student who isn’t really interested enough to try, and the most determined and able students will do ok even if their tutors aren’t so good.

I think I have something to offer here, and I think I could make a meaningful contribution. I’d like to try. It means making the jump, risking the failure, or them not having any use for me after all.
It won’t be my first time volunteering for an organisation. I spent a few years doing things for The Pagan Federation, and for The Druid Network. I was so unhappy at the end of my first round of TDN time, that I didn’t think I’d volunteer again. I hated finding other people judging me over the rest of my life (it’s not like I was doing anything illegal). I don’t want to bring any organisation into disrepute, but its bloody hard hearing that people consider you a risk. Will OBOD consider me a risk? (I have this nasty habit of saying things in public, after all). Can I function inside an organisation? I went back to TDN to do book reviews, because I like reviewing books and because that’s useful to both readers and authors. Going back was really hard. I let because I was insulted, and going back felt a bit like letting the people responsible off the hook. I realised it wasn’t about them, it was about the readers and authors I could benefit by being a reviewer. Service matters to me. There are some very good people at TDN, who I am very glad to count as friends, but it only takes one or two hostile people to make a space deeply uncomfortable. As a consequence, TDN is never going to feel like home for me. Perhaps OBOD could be.

I’ve had my years in the wilderness, my hermitude, and I know, coming to the end of that, how much I do want to be part of a community. I want to feel that I belong, and that there is a place I can give service. I want to be somewhere that values what I do, that accepts I’m a bit chaotic and not keen on keeping silent about things that matter to me. It’s an interesting one, because OBOD seems pretty structured. I can cope with structure, I can work with it, and I think they could find a use for me. We shall see.

The other reason for going this way, goes like this. The back of book blurb for Druidry and Meditation mentions that I’m OBOD trained. As a consequence of this, Philip Carr Gomm got in touch with me, I’ve had some lovely reviews from OBOD, and been invited to contribute to the site. I admire Philip as an author, and he’s a lovely chap. At the time in my life when I felt I belonged nowhere, and that the wider Druid community had no place for me, he sought me out, and that meant a huge amount to me. If I could give something back… that would be good too.

Bubbling Up

This week’s instalment of Theo Wildcroft’s Sacred Body series contains my favourite bit – the idea of Bubbling Up http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/sacred-body-part-2-bubbling/. I’ve been studying Druidry for some time now, I’ve read Blood and Mistletoe, I’m conscious of the flaws in writing about Druids from the time and the likely weaknesses of mediaeval texts as source material. For some, that pretty much makes impossible the idea of authentic modern Druidry. However, the one idea I keep coming back to, is that the ancient Celts got their Druidry from somewhere. Not in the sense of revelation, monotheistic style (I assume). My belief is that ancient Celts got their Druidry from the land, the rivers and trees, the mountains, the cranes, aurochs, badgers, buzzards, mice and so forth. Most of that is still here.

Like Theo, I am conscious of how many artificial structures surround our daily lives. Sat here in my metal boat, with this box of plastic wizardry on my knees, typing words that will be read by people I’ve never met… we’ve created a rather fantastical and unreal sort of world. And yet… every few seconds I inhale. Air, one of the elements, with me moment to moment. Real. My boat depends on a stove for heating, I cook on gas. There’s fire in my life, every day, another element, another realness. Water, hopefully on the outside of the boat. The earth is right next to the canal, I tread on it regularly. The sky is above me every day. My food came from plants that lived, grew in soil, experienced light. If I raise my head I can see the willows, thinking about leafing, tentatively getting busy out there. Even in my constructed, human environment, nature is present. I also notice that the moss growing on my boat’s fenders do not see human construct, just a place to call home. Birds shit on the roof just as they would on the ground. I may see a human construct, but to the rest of nature, it shows every sign of just being more environment. Maybe a bit sterile and drab, but the spiders do their best to correct this.

It’s terribly easy to go ‘ooh, nature is my sacred text’ and then not really do anything with that. What can you do? It’s out there, we’re in here… and as long as we see the divide, holding ourselves as separate, we are separate.

For the ancient Celts, survival meant understanding the natural world. This soil. That tree. Those weather conditions. All of it immediate, some of it longer term – when to plant, when to harvest, what to kill and what to leave. I don’t claim to know what the ancient Druids got up to, but understanding nature must have been in the mix. That doesn’t have to mean placing ourselves on the outside with a clipboard. You can stand on the shore and watch the sea, or you can get in it and learn how to rise and fall with the waves. Or you can drown.

Druidry, for me, is increasingly about participating. Not standing back as an intellectual observer, but being in the scene, in the moment, acting and reacting, and paying attention. This land, that tree, another seagull crapping on my boat…