Those other Druids

They’re at it again you know, those other Druids. Doing it wrong. Worshipping the wrong Gods, in the wrong ways, for the wrong reasons. Some of them aren’t even worshipping Gods at all. They aren’t wearing the right clothes, dammit, and as for the labels they’ve given themselves… pure nonsense. You know who they are. They are the Druids who are not like us and we must forever be righteously indignant about them and make snarky remarks via social media, because we are much more authentic and that’s clearly the way to go.

Most of us modern folk have grown up in a culture that is steeped in the influences of monotheism. We carry that influence with us, often unconsciously. One of the most insidious messages in monotheism is this notion of one true way. All fundamentalist activity is underpinned by a belief in having a monopoly on truth. You will hear the same kinds of assertions from science, commerce, government… the language of one true way is everywhere and we are letting it into Druidry, to our detriment.

Nature is plural. There are many ways of being alive (reptiles, mammals, fish, birds, amphibians, plants, fungi, amoebas….) There are several ways of reproducing (sexually and asexually) many models for having offspring, (from abandonment to one on one nurturing.) Diets vary, lifestyles, ways of existing. Nature is rife with diversity and difference. We Pagans keep trying to claim nature as our sacred book, and then, as people so often do with sacred books, are only quoting the bits we like and ignoring the rest. We owe ourselves more than this.

We have a binary right/wrong logic that we have inherited from our monotheisticaly underpinned culture. There is a right answer, the one true way, and everything else is wrong. Is a dolphin wrong and a shark right? How about emus and penguins, are they wrong? Nature doesn’t give us these binary answers. We get ‘right for this niche’, ‘right for this environment’ ‘right for being a dolphin’. There are many ways. The existence of sharks does not in any way invalidate the existence of dolphins or prove that dolphins are wrong.

In much the same way, the existence of those other Druids who do it some other way is not a challenge to how we are doing it. There is no reason to assume that one way is more or less right than the other. What is right for them may not work for us, because we are different people in a different place. Perhaps they are ferns and we are cacti. We would not thrive in the same environment. We have different needs.

Difference and diversity are good – nature tells us so. Diversity ensures that something will survive. Difference creates more niches in which life can exist. Homogeny leads to extinctions. The reason elms died out nearly in the UK may have had a lot to do with them being far too genetically similar to have any scope for resisting the Dutch elm beetle. It is tempting to suggest that Druids may be a lot like trees. Different soils, rainfall, environment…. Different trees thrive in different places. Alders might like getting their roots in streams and marshes, silver birches do not. What it takes to be a Druid in Australia is not going to be the same as what is involved being a Druid in the American Bible belt, or at Stonehenge, or on an oil rig…

Those other Druids are probably fine. If they are happy, they just aren’t my problem, or yours, and if they try to convert you, it is as easy to walk away from them as it is the Jehovah’s Witness on the doorstep. We’re all good. We are all proper Druids. We are all doing it right. We are better off investing time and energy in our own work than getting grumpy about what those other Druids dared to say now, or what they called us, or what they did wrong with that initiation, or whatever it is. I am a beechtree from the side of a hill. You are a rowan on a mountain top. The guy next to you is a Joshua tree. Some Druids are redwoods and some are tiny new saplings, some are deciduous and others are green all year. Some have fruits and some have seeds, some are more pretty than others. Some even have faces.

Dear 501

There are, to my surprise, now 501 of you subscribed to following this blog. (I know it says more at the bottom, but that’s because wordpress likes to include twitter followers in the maths, and that’s a wee bit like cheating.) So, I’d like to start by saying thank you, for being here, for taking an interest, for the thoughts many of you drop by to share, and for the comfort you give me in knowing I am not shouting into the void.

When I started this blog, I really had no idea if anyone beyond a few immediate friends would be interested. But here you all are, and most of you, I do not know personally. You startle me, in the best possible way.

Since starting this blog, I’ve written 2 non-fiction books on Druidry. There’s a third in process, and there will also be a smaller and broader piece on spirituality in the offing. I’ve had one novel and one graphic novel come out, too. I’ve gone from ancient family cottage, to narrowboat, got my bloke into the country, married him and gone through the paperwork needed to keep him. When I started blogging I no longer felt I belonged anywhere. Now there are many places I call home, chiefly my lovely publisher Moon Books, and the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. I’ve gone from being entirely obscure, to a little bit heard of, such that I’ve seen my quotes in other people’s books and I get queries from librarians and stuff, and people ask me to go places and do things. This also startles me, but I’ll admit I rather enjoy it.

So dear 501, plus anyone else who has wandered in to read… thank you for being here. If there are things you would like me to write about, do say. If there are events you would like me to show up to, do ask. I’m more aware than ever right now of just how much I love to be out and doing, how much it means to me to connect with people, and to come up with stuff that has some utility.

Onwards, towards whatever adventures await…

One Druiding day at a time

Becoming a Druid is not an event. Granted, rites of initiation can feel like dramatic shifts from one stage to the next, but they are just focal moments in a process. I think western culture tends towards a far too tidy and limited perception of existence, a simpling of experience into small moments of cause and effect. Pass and fail. Pass your driving test once and you are a driver. The modern qualifications system tends us towards a perception of doing some work, cramming some facts into the head, churning them out in an exam and then going forth into the world, rubber stamped as being a thing. Many professions call for ongoing study, but it’s clear by then that you have become the title.

We don’t rubber stamp Druids. You can get certificates for having completed a course, but they convey no authority. There’s no exam for archdruidry, no test to pass before you start a grove. Yet at the same time, set forth to run a grove or be an archdruid, and testing experiences will come your way. Only, there will be no one on the side-lines keeping score. No one will give you marks out of ten, a medal, or a promotion. We get used to systems that grade and evaluate us, pass or fail, that judge us based on the A or D grade achieved in a few hours in a stuffy room, armed only with a pen.

One of the things that exhausts volunteers is that absence of feedback. Similar things happen when you parent; another process which you enter unqualified. No one gives you marks out of ten for parenting. There are courses, but absolutely no promotion option. We’re so used to ‘personal progress’ equating to ratings and pay rises, that living without feedback and the score card is often demoralising. Progress becomes a bank balance, a bigger house, more disposable income. Progress is a promotion, a bigger office, more status. We measure it from the outside, in terms of what other people can see.

When people find they want a spiritual life, or to offer service as a volunteer, or to parent, the baggage from mainstream life can be a real handicap. No end of term report cards here. No grades. Nothing to say ‘this is what I am worth’. No scope for rating your skill as a Druid based on how much you earned doing it this week. Most of us who Druid professionally are not making much money. The absence of external markers, the absence of information about progress and the worth of your work, pushes some people away. Getting over that challenge is hard.

Becoming a Druid is something you will be doing every day for as long as it is your intention to be a Druid. Not to be rubber stamped as worthy, not to pass a test, not even to get a really shiny afterlife. The only reason to try and become a Druid, is that you want, heart and soul, to be a Druid. The only thing you can do with that, is spend each day working with what you have, to be a Druid. It never ends. There is no point of success or making the grade. There is no secret order of hidden masters who will turn up on your doorstep one morning with a golden sickle and a nicely framed certificate.

What this means is that we have to trust ourselves. We have to look at things in terms of real, innate worth, not market value, not buying power or social influence, or any of those other normal ways of assessing what we do. Apply normal values to meditation under a tree, and you’ll get a headache, at best. What is of real value? What really matters? Becoming a Druid is becoming someone who asks a lot of questions, who challenges conventional thinking and experiments with new ways of thinking, seeing, feeling, experiencing. Rejecting the world and embracing it all at once.

Cradle to Grave

I met Kerry online through a story sharing project. Cradle To Grave stories approached me because they felt (rightly) that their work in recording and sharing stories would appeal to my bardic inclinations. Furthermore, they had a Druidy story, and would I be interested? I was, and after listening, I asked Kerry, whose story I had heard, if she would be willing to share her thoughts here. She kindly agreed, and an email interview followed…

Nimue: Having listened to your recording for cradle to grave, I had a strong impression that for you, Paganism is an intrinsic thing, and that you are reaching for something innate. Would you like to talk a bit about how that works for you?

Kerry: The answer to your question is both yes and no.

Yes, in that I need something to ring true inside me. I’m pretty honest with myself and have always found it impossible to play along with any belief system that I could rationalise – as I can rationalise many of them – but did not sound a resonant chord inside me as being ultimately truthful. I know myself well enough to trust my own instincts, and I trust myself well enough to examine those instincts and separate the ones that come from an important place from those that come from an unimportant place! I like the concept of faith – but, for me, it has to come from a position of ‘I feel this to be true at a profound level’ rather than ‘I can abandon my instincts and go with this belief because I’d like it to be true’. That’s why that process I describe in my Cradle to Grave story, of reading that druid book and feeling that dawn of deep recognition was so significant to me. It wasn’t even as if I was actively reaching for anything at the time – I was busy with other things and not thinking about this sort of thing at all.

Yes, in that I feel it is important to have, at the heart of one’s connection with the divine, a personal relationship at a level that can never be taken away, because it is an intrinsic part of me. I have friends who went through phases of adhering to a religious faith in a fit of enthusiasm and conviction, only to examine its dogma in the cold light of day and question its veracity – and ultimately abandon that faith. And I think losing that light once you have experienced it is a dreadful thing. Whereas I know, at a deep root level, that my response to nature is not going to be something I ever lose. And that, as my connection to the divine is through the medium of nature, a secure relationship with nature means a secure connection with the divine. I don’t think I will ever be able to sit quietly in a forest and not feel the divine mystery which lies behind the forest.

No, in that I believe in the divine being something that is not just innate. I am not someone who believes that the divine is just an aspect of ourselves that lies within us, waiting for us to discover it in ourselves. I believe it has a real, separate existence as a deity. My experience of it is that there is a spark of it that lies in each of us, a spark which flares up and expands when it comes into contact with its original source. I do not worship or communicate with the spark of that deity that I sense lies within me – it’s the deity that exists beyond me that I worship and pray to. Sometimes I think that this deity might work through me when it requires something to be done – but I am not the deity and the deity is not me. The deity can be in me and work through me, but is also beside and beyond me – and universal and beyond universal. So in that sense, it is a great deal more than innate!

Nimue: Thank you, this is beautifully expressed stuff. Nature is real, after all, it doesn’t require belief. Is there anything that particularly inspires you?

Kerry: Metaphors. Messages that we see written in nature that speak of a great underlying truth. The apparent death that takes place at Samhain, without which new life would not be possible the following spring. Planting bulbs in the soil – and what they represent in terms of our trust that they will have their green awakening at the appointed time. The fulfilment of that promise that comes with the optimistic green shoots and buds the following spring.

I respond far better to metaphors than to dogma! Metaphors have, for me, a humility about them. They are a poetic inkling of what it’s all about, rather than an arrogant assertion. My feeling is that the great mystery which lies behind everything is so far beyond us to describe and contain in language that any attempts to capture it in absolutes can have dangerous results. I have seen too many cases of people taking the dogma of their faith at too literal a level, and mis-applying it as a result. I also feel that dogma runs the risk of being man-made, rather than deity-made – and, if we start setting too much store by man-made interpretations, we end up having a relationship with the dogma rather than the deity. Of course, I enjoy finding the common ground between the dogma of different faiths – so I do believe they have some value. But not at the expense of a direct, personal and essentially mystic interaction with what the deity is trying to communicate to us!

Nimue: Is there anything you have going on that people might want to follow up on?

Kerry: Actually, I don’t. I just tend to invite various friends over for dinner on the festival days and we have a ritual in the garden. They seem to like it, and no-one has ever found anything to quibble with!

Nimue: Fair enough! Thank you Kerry for sharing. If you want to listen to Kerry on Cradle to Grave, she’s here… http://soundcloud.com/cradle2gravestories/kerry I believe Cradle to Grave are looking for more stories all the time.

Peaceful protest

There’s a lot of talk on various Druid groups at the moment about both the warrior path, and the peace path. There are Druids who subscribe to both approaches. The Ancient Celts after all were not averse to a punch up, but the Druids could, it is said, step out between two armies and instruct them to stop.

I don’t think a modern Druid has much scope for stepping in front of the EDL, or other angry people, and making much progress by asking them to stop, but perhaps it would be worth a go anyway. Part of me suspects that’s a one way ticket to getting shouted at, if not thumped, but as I’ve not dealt directly with anyone from the EDL, I’m hardly in a position to comment.

I’m a rural Druid at the moment. About the closest we get to conflict within the community round here is when two tractors are trying to go in opposite directions down the same lane. This is a quiet place. No one is going to riot, or march, or do anything else. That has let me off the hook a bit, and not having a car I’m not well placed to travel to where there are problems.

What would I do if there was unrest on my doorstep? I think it would depend a lot on the nature of the unrest. There are plenty of things I think need protesting about and that I would march over, were there anyone around to influence. The sheep are pretty disinterested on this subject, although my local badgers are developing an unfortunately large degree of political awareness, I suspect.

I would not take arms, or go out expecting to fight. Partly because I am woefully out of practice, partly because a quarterstaff would draw all the wrong sort of attention in the first place, partly because I have no desire to hit anyone. I would like to think that if it came down to it, if people where I lived were marching with hatred and an intention to do violence, I would find in myself the courage to take my body into that space and simply put my flesh in their way. Not aggressively, but accepting the likelihood of violence in order to slow down, protect, discourage.

It’s one of those things. Until we are tested, all the ideas about what we *might* do are hypothetical. Would I have the courage to face being arrested if honour demanded that I put myself in opposition to the police? I think about activists who have gone to court, and sometimes won, standing up for the idea that powerful entities do not have the right to run roughshod over individuals. Would I be brave enough to do that? I think of the three women in Woolwich who tackled the psychos still holding weapons, who had killed Lee Rigby. Do I have what it takes to walk forward in such a situation?

I do not know.

We only find out whether we can truly walk our talk when we are tested to our limits and beyond. What I do know, is how grateful I am for the times when I am not being tested, when I am not overwhelmed by impossible choices or being asked to put my life on the line for honour or justice. Some people do that every day in their normal line of work, and I am deeply grateful to them for shouldering that weight for the sake of the rest of us.

Official book release day!

Although Intelligent Designing for Amateurs has been available in the UK for a couple of weeks now, this is official release day, and amazon.com will now let you get paper copies. http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Designing-Amateurs-Nimue-Brown/dp/1780999526/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369989320&sr=8-1&keywords=intelligent+designing+for+amateurs (and just to confuse everyone, is now saying the release date was the 16th May. Go figure!)

Just to tempt you a bit, here’s one of the bits that owes a lot to revival Druids. It was whilst reading Ronald Hutton’s ‘Blood and Mistletoe’ that it occurred to me that actual history of revival Druidry seems a lot like a Monty Python sketch, with the costumes, titles, claims of ancientness. Which led me to this…

The parlour was overfull of familiar and overdressed women when Justina and her mother were shown in. She looked around despondently, taking in the grotesque excess of decoration on women far too old to carry such girlish extravagance. They clucked and preened like so many hens, the bulk of their skirts filling up the spaces between closely packed items of furniture. Why it was felt desirable to squeeze so many warmly dressed people into such a confined space, Justina had never understood. It was one of the features of her life that had greatly hampered her social development – she simply did not enjoy being pressed against a large number of other people in the confines of heavily furnished rooms.

A gentleman with exceptional moustaches leapt at once to his feet. He appeared to be wearing a white night gown with rather elaborate embroidery at the collar and cuffs. Seeing him only increased the terrible urge she had been feeling to scream, and run away. Before she could plan an escape, Mrs. Easlefeet hurried forwards to make introductions.

“Ah, my dear, my dear, I must present this young lady to you,” she began.

Justina loathed her for that. The person of greater social status was asked first, and she could not, possibly, be of lesser consideration than a man who went about in public in a nightgown?
“This is Justina Fairfax, dear Elizobella’s daughter. Justina, this is none other than the ArchDruid Henry Caractacus Morestrop Jones!”

As Mrs. Easelfeet continued with an incomprehensible list of further titles, ArchDruid Henry indulged in some complex hand maneuvering and offered her his services.

“Founder of the Brotherhood of Restrained Enlightenment, and current leader of the Truly Venerable Order of English Druids,” he added.

Justina took a few careful steps backwards whilst saying, “How charming.” She had only encountered Druids once before, at a meeting of the Society of Archaeology an Antiquities. A lecture about whether the Romans might have constructed on Stonehenge had been disrupted by a man, dressed entirely in clothes made from the skins of very small mammals. He had entered without invitation, stood upon a table, waved a sword about and made a wholly unfathomable speech about classical geometry at ancient sites.

Just as she as paused to flee this current scene of dismay, Mrs Fairfax commenced exalting Justina’s many virtues as an antiquarian scholar. With her reputation the new topic of conversation, escape seemed less appealing.

“I myself have a great interest in the ancient times,” the strangely dressed man announced. He had the kind of voice that would even whisper loudly. “The Truly Venerable Order of English Druids has written records going back to before even the Roman invasion. Our oldest manuscripts are known to be the work of Taliesin himself.”

He paused, and Justina knew she was supposed to be impressed by his claims. Certainly such documents had the power to re-write English history, and that made her very suspicious. It was amazing how many bored gentlemen and obscure vicars turned out to have ancient manuscripts stashed in their attics.

Making a home

We’re in the process of transitioning off the boat. It’s an opportunity to reflect on what is needed, what it is that we want from a home, what’s viable, and how best to walk our talk. We’ve lived without a lot of the ‘normal’ things for several years now. Do we need to go back to conventional living arrangements? It doesn’t feel like good Druidry.

The boat has a solar panel and wind turbine, so most of our electricity is fairly green. I can’t see any way of replicating that in the foreseeable future. However, there are all kinds of dinky bits of technology out there… more efficient, smaller, lower impact. Realising that with this move we have the luxury of time, has opened a few doors.
Other things are going to be odd though. I’ve lived with fires almost all my life, and it looks like there will be no hearth in the next home. For me, a home without a hearth is going to be weird. I can’t say I enjoyed that last time I did it, but that’s part of the trade-off.

In preparation for moving, we’re once again getting rid of stuff, taking the opportunity to offload things that aren’t needed, aren’t used, things we grew out of, or were hanging on to just for nostalgia. That’s a good process. It’s one of the things I find I like about moving home – the chance to reassess every owned object and make some decisions. Last time we did that we gave up furniture and kept books and musical instruments. This time, the absolute priority was finding somewhere we could all live together. ‘All’ in our case includes Mr Cat. Finding a place where he would be happy and welcome informed a lot of our choices.
We’ve enjoyed some aspects of being really rural with the boat, but work would be a lot easier with more ready access to infrastructure. We will no doubt be out and about more, and I suspect I’ll be doing more in-person teaching, as well.

The right space can be really enabling. It underpins a lifestyle, permits certain choices, removes others…. The process of looking at what we need and want in that regard, too, has been really good. Soon we jump, and the next big adventure awaits us.

So, short post today because I’ve been running round in the rain a lot, finding needful things, and sorting stuff out, and ring to work out how best to mix the alternative and the normal to make something good. Much to figure out yet though.

Learning to think (again)

Becoming a Druid is in part a process of learning to think like a Druid. I’m still a work in progress on this one, I expect I always will be. There are so many assumptions drilled into us by the mainstream, other religions we may have been exposed to, our friends, families… unlearning and relearning can take a long time.

We are taught to want consumer goods and we are told that we need them. A Druid, becoming increasingly aware of the environmental destruction wrought by humans, soon has to question this. What do we really need? How much energy should we be consuming? How sustainable are we? Faced by a society that assumes you must have a car, a refrigerator and freezer, a flat screen television, mobile phone, games consul etc… simply saying ‘no’ is difficult. People fail to understand how you might not want those things. Of course you HAVE to want it, because not to want all the stuff is to challenge their reality. People who have not chosen alternative ways of being tend not to like having their comfortable certainties shaken by those who have. It can lead to conflict.

We are taught to blame and criticise. Television is full of it. Bullying is widespread. People seem to think they have a right to be offensive, hurtful, derogatory and so forth under the guise of ‘free speech’. As we learn to be more compassionate, hate language becomes more uncomfortable, as does the desire the challenge it by being hateful back. We start to see the fear that underlies bigotry, the moral cowardice implicit in all bullying behaviour. There’s no tidy answer to dealing with this.

We are taught ‘one true way’ be it science or religion. Druidry offers us a multiplicity of ways. There are many paths through the forest, many routes up the mountain, many names for deity and truth is always going to be bigger than us. Learning Druidry, we learn to give up on the self-important delusions that tell us we know it all, and start down the amazing path of beginning to appreciate the enormity of all that we do not know. Life is full of mystery. There are wonders, as soon as we can open our eyes and admit our ignorance so that we can start to see properly. This is a liberating process that will confuse the hell out of any ‘normal’ people who happen to be going past.

We are taught to be afraid. Fear of difference, of each other, of strangers, authority, anarchy, oil prices, job security… your life is loaded with messages about scarcity and how afraid you should be. Oh, and you can buy this insurance product and that object to help you feel better about these things… Resisting fear, is something I find tricky. I am also aware that fear is deliberately encouraged and fed to serve the needs of politics and big business. Resistance is essential. While we are locked down in fear of each other, we are not cooperating to make things better. We need to cooperate to overcome the genuine challenges and shatter the illusions of the manufactured ones.

We are taught that we are irrelevant, small, and powerless. We are taught to be cogs in other people’s machines, to be nice and inoffensive, passive acceptors of what is handed down to us. To become a Druid is to become your own authority, to embrace you strengths, whatever they are, and to empower others. We each have our own lives to lead. We all matter. None of us have to be cogs. Druidry is a subversive sort of business. It’s as well our processes are quiet and understated, or we might find a lot more resistance to us in the wider world.

Learning to think differently takes time. It’s so easy to fall back into the old habits. Much of your life will do its best to hang on to you and force you to stay where you were: tame, frightened, easily controlled, biddable, nice… Once you start to replace ‘nice’ with ‘compassionate’ and ‘tame’ with ‘responsible’ everything starts to change.

Pagan Titles

As regular readers will know, I’m not that keen on authority or power structures. Titles that are all about seeming important make me edgy. However, not all titles are simply self-given manifestations of self-importance. They also function, at least in theory, as meaningful labels that allow people to better understand what we do. “Celebrant” announces a willingness to take bookings for rites of passage. If you’re calling yourself a wise elder, you’d better have a grey hair or two to back that up with, and so forth.

A label can be a statement of intent. There’s a fab blog post on this very subject here – http://www.roundtheherne.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-name.html

Quite often what happens though is not that we wake up one morning and glue a shiny title to ourselves, but that it comes in from outside. You get labelled as a teacher the moment someone asks that you teach them and you don’t run away. You become a ritual leader the first time you step into a circle to run it, and a grove mother, or father, at the point of there being a grove. Sometimes that’s chosen, sometimes it happens.

There’s an interesting thing about naming. On the landscape history side, the names given by outsiders are considered more useful than those given by locals, in the past. If you live round here (wherever here is) there’s The pub, The church, The fields. If you live somewhere else, and look at it from the outside, there’s that really good pub, the particularly badly built church, the very muddy field. Old names, given by outsiders, often say more about a place than what the inhabitants called it. Let’s not ask what happened to Chipping Sodbury. (Although Chipping means market and bury implies Saxon fortification, so I’ve just foiled my own gag. Never mind, we move on…)

The names people give us may be better indicators of us, than the titles we would choose for ourselves. I find it hugely reassuring that other people are willing to call me ‘Druid’ and ‘author’. Mind you, I’ve also recently been called a filthy urchin, which is not wholly lacking in appropriateness. The titles we give people can be reflections of respect, or derision. One only has to look at politics to see the difference between the titles they give themselves, and the titles others bestow upon them. Can I mention swivel eyed loons now?

The Auroch Grove

I wasn’t particularly contemplating names, when this one popped out at me. It seems to fit. I admit to having a thing about that which is absent – my previous group was Bards of the Lost Forest, a reference to the departed Forest of Arden mentioned in Shakespeare. Aurochs have long appealed to me – giant hairy cows that became extinct in the 1600s when the last one died in Poland. I feel their absence keenly. Aurochs would have made groves, their feeding and trampling clearing areas inside forests. This is important work, it’s the margins of woodland that support the most diversity of life, so the physical groves made by aurochs would have been ecologically important. When you lose a creature, you lose what it does as well. There’s a species of tree that depended on the dodo for germination. Eventually the last of those trees will disappear too.

Thus far I’ve not done much towards starting the Grove. However, with the name in place I’ve set up a google group which hopefully you can find here https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/auroch-grove this is just for ease of communication. The only requirement for joining the Grove is that you join the egroup so that I don’t have to run round doing different things to contact different people and getting confused. Not in anyone’s interests, that. I’m very happy to have people along who have kids, and anyone else who is comfortable with there being children about – I have one too, and he’s very good at this sort of thing. People studying courses are entirely welcome, so are people not studying courses. If you’re an old hand at this and just want a group to belong to, do come along, and equally if you know very little but are interested, that’s fine.

I am not asking for commitment to turn up. I’m going to aim for monthly gatherings, maybe more if I feel like it, or someone else does… come as often or as infrequently as you are able/inclined. If you ask me to come out and don’t show up, then I’ll be grumpy.

I know it’s going to be a creative and experimental sort of group. I know that where possible, we’ll be outside, but I’m lining up places to retreat to in cases of weather. I’m interested in connecting with the land, environmental action, bardic arts, and picnics. Also cake in pretty much any and all circumstances. I also won’t be running rituals around the 8 usual points in the wheel of the year – other groups are doing that already, so I’d rather not tread on toes, and prefer to explore different narrative ideas about the seasons. The rest we can probably make up as we go along.

I don’t know when exactly we’ll be starting in terms of real world meet ups – hopefully this summer, but that kind of information will be on the egroup.