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.

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.

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.

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…

Steampunk Meditation

A few days ago, my Druid friend Shaun asked me if I could design a meditation based on Steampunk. My default reaction was ‘yes’, and then I sat down and thought about it. A meditation needs to do something. It needs to take you deeper in, or expand your mind in some way. There are meditations that are just about relaxing yourself, but that didn’t seem right for an application of Steampunk ideas. Steampunk is too dynamic for that.

Steampunk is also essentially a social and aesthetic movement. How to make that into a meaningful meditation without just playing with surfaces? I considered working round the four elements, but that seemed a bit of a cop-out, not least because I’ve put together a few element based meditations already (See Druidry and Meditation on the Books page http://www.druidlife.wordress.com/books). Really speaking, I’d just be wrapping relevant technology around existing ideas, and that felt like a cheat. I don’t just want to play with surfaces. The other thing is, steam technology burned a lot of coal, it wasn’t very green, which isn’t very Druidy, so the more I thought about it, the less this seemed like a good idea.

So where did that leave me? I confess that there was a brief crisis around just how much Steampunk Druidry you could actually do, and whether it was possible to have anything with more depth. I floated out the Secret Order of Steampunk Druids as much for fun as anything else. Can Steampunk Druidry be anything more than a bit of dressing up and having a giggle?

Here’s what I’ve come up with. It plays to one of the core Steampunk images, it deals in social connection, relationship and visualisation. I think it ticks all the necessary boxes.

Take some time to settle and slow your breath as you normally would when meditating. Then, picture yourself as a cog. Shiny or dull, large or small, well used or pristine… what kind of a cog are you? Every tooth around your cog is a point at which you connect with the world. Every time you turn, other things, other people turn their cogs in response. What causes you to turn? What are you turning? Picture yourself as a cog, be it a small one or a large one, and see how you fit in with all the other cogs, and try to visualise the sort of machine you belong to. Is it the sort of machine that goes round fixing broken things, or is yours a wrecking machine? Are you part of a really clever machine that makes amazing discoveries? Is your machine going somewhere, or just round in circles? Do you like how it looks? Is this a machine you are glad to be part of, or do you need to break out and roll off somewhere else? See where it takes you…

The illusions, fantasies and occasional uses of social networking

It’s a funny set of places, the social networking sites. People posting updates on the most mundane developments in their lives, photos of their food, commentary on TV programs. You can ‘support causes’ and sign petitions for just about everything, creating the illusion of something meaningful done. You can have hundreds of facebook friends but not really know anyone, creating an illusion of social contact. Then there’s the option of hiding behind a fake name and trolling the hell out of your victims. Oh, and there are games. We spend a lot of time on social network sites, time we will never get back and so much of what it gives is illusory.

I have, I case you were wondering, twitter, google+, linkedin and facebook accounts. I’m also on goodreads. Feel free to attempt to connect with me on any of those, although in practice facebook is the only place I reliably show up and interact with people. I have real friends there, people I actually know, or will know, or want to know, and that helps. I find that compared to the general assessments of social networking (as above) I have a pretty good experience of it. This is because my network doesn’t deliver many food photos and random trivia. I get pointers to really good articles I would not otherwise have found, and I get to find out about what some really interesting people are thinking and doing. In that way, I get a lot out of it.

Of course one of the things people use this stuff for is selling their work, big companies included. How much promo can one person take? Speaking as an author, occasional publisher and avid reader, nothing depresses me more than some author I’ve never heard of, banging on endlessly about their book. The egroups used to be full of similar stuff. I know there’s a theory that we can all go 50 Shades with our products, but maundering on about them isn’t the answer. Nobody cares. This can come as a bit of a shock, but one of the lessons the social networks have the power to deliver is that most of the time, most people do not give a shit about that thing you thought really mattered. When they do, it can be a humbling, overwhelming and powerful sort of moment, but that tends to pass. In the great noise of the internet, we might start to see our small place in the grand scheme of things, or we might equally end up with an inflated ego.

In practice the social networks are a lot like the rest of real life in that what you get out depends on what you put in and who you associate with. It can be really good. That a lot of it is tedious, pointless and time wasting, is simply down to the people who use it.

As a Druid who does not have many other Druids in close geographical proximity (when you walk or cycle, ten miles away isn’t close) I appreciate the contact of being online. It’s enabled me to stay at least a little bit in touch with friends and to learn more about the Steampunk community. For this, I am very grateful. I know I’d feel more isolated without it. Not all of us can get to where the likeminded people are. But if there are real people to interact with, better not to be on facebook, I think. My Druidry calls on me to go outside, but it’s easy to hold an illusion that time playing with online Druid communities is somehow proper Druid time. Mostly it isn’t. Or it’s a pale shadow of the real thing. It worries me how readily many people seem to have replaced real world contact with social networking though. Locked away in our little rooms with our little boxes, typing words to people we’ve never met… The scope for fantasy and illusion is vast. The unfortunate outcomes of this show up on a regular basis but the hurt caused is all too real.

I know that the internet has changed how I think. I’m watching myself for good ideas to blog about, and good thoughts to share over the ether. Twenty years ago, this didn’t feature in my mind. I lived and thought differently. I’m aware that social network sites can be addictive, particularly in times of boredom or loneliness. They tend to perpetuate the problems rather than solving them. I don’t think we’ve begun to understand the social implications of what we’re doing. Or the psychological implications, for that matter. It’s a mass retreat from the real world. And yes, the real world is not a great place just now, but we aren’t going to fix that by signing a petition on facebook.
Jo over at http://www.octopusdance.wordpress.com has committed to spending one day a week free from modern communications devices. Obviously I know about this because she facebooked it… but the idea is well worth a thought. Spending less time doing it can, if nothing else, improve the quality of what you bring to it.

I may not be blogging for a couple of days, I have a lot of real world stuff to do. Gods of trains and weather permitting, I shall be in Northampton Waterstones for a book signing on Saturday and then doing family stuff on Sunday.

Druid in conflict

I’ve seen too many occasions of Druids, or people in the wider Pagan community getting into conflict and results being messy, damaging and often aggravated by the wider community. Last year I feel we got it more right than not around Druid Camp issues, so, drawing on a range of experiences, I want to talk about how we handle conflict, because mostly we get this wrong.
Something happens. Usually the two or more people involved know what it was, but they may understand it in very different ways. Thanks to the internet, some aspect of the conflict goes public. One party will likely claim to be a victim of the other. The second party almost always then says that it is the other way round and they are the victim. Now, thus far what we have is pretty normal human behaviour in conflict. I’ve been there. Hurt, angry, in pain, suffering, maybe wanting to lash out, or get some justice, or even the score. It would be nice if even in our darkest and most wounded moments we all could behave like super enlightened people, but realistically, we won’t. Some slack cutting and patience with hurt people helps a lot. We all go there, sooner or later.

However, everyone not directly involved has a lot more scope for calm, clarity and reason. What do we do? We pile in, take sides, make accusations, and most often we demand evidence. We don’t seem to ask what on earth kind of evidence could be presented to us on a social networking website such that we would believe it. Often our own history and baggage comes into play, or our feelings about one or both people. Loyalty to friends is a good thing, but increasing the conflict in a situation is not, so if you are the friend of a person who is hurting, sabre rattling is not going to help them, and picking fights with those who are on ‘the other side’ will only serve to spread the pain, widen the divide, and reduce the hope of resolution.

From the outside, we cannot know what happened. It may be crossed wires and it may be that it could be fixed, with some intelligent intervention and a bit of good will. It could be honest misunderstanding, or confusion, or misinterpretation or a whole bunch of things of that ilk that do not mean either party is evil. Most often the problem is that two flawed human being accidently banged their shortcomings together. Sometimes it is clearer that there could be a genuine victim and a genuine aggressor, but when all you have is one word against another, that’s difficult to tell, especially which way round it is. There may be times when you think you know what you’re seeing. This is why we have the police and law courts and juries – a flawed system that cannot, it should be noticed, handle many of the conflict-of-story cases. But it’s what we’ve got, and trial by public speculation is not a reasonable alternative.

If there is a criminal issue, then you have to treat it like one and encourage the party claiming to be injured to make an approach to the police. If it’s not a criminal level of problem, then what you have is an issue to deal with. Anger and escalation can take you from a dispute into a criminal situation – threats, libel and so forth. No one benefits when those lines are crossed.

No matter who was right and who was wrong, you have two people with problems. Both will need help and support. It may be that one of them has done something appalling, but that doesn’t mean they need demonising. It means they need support from their community to seek help, learn, change, grow or make amends. Druidry is supposed to be about restorative justice. We need to look after the more deluded and messed up members of our communities, too.

So, when you hit a conflict situation, try and avoid using language that will inflame it. Don’t bother demanding evidence, that’s pointless and just makes people feel worse. They can’t give you evidence on facebook. Live with it. If the accusations have a criminal element, it should be a police matter, and it is appropriate and productive to say this. Then, if people are mouthing off, they may be startled into getting some perspective and if they aren’t, they will feel supported in taking necessary action. Where possible, encourage people to step back, and get calm before they do anything stupid. Angry hurting people make mistakes that they would not make as calm people. Try to establish calm.

If you are in a place to listen respectfully to both sides such that you can figure out what is happening and put it straight, there may be useful work to do. I mentioned issues around Druid Camp before, and that was handled well by the wider community, on the whole. Problems were aired and dealt with, all parties had good support, lessons were learned.

It is not an expression of modern Druidry to want to be judge, jury and executioner. It is not Druidry to enter a space of conflict and make it worse. We have to walk our talk with this stuff, we have to take care of our communities and deal with conflicts in responsible ways.

What makes me a Druid?

I’ve been thinking for a while that it might be interesting to lay out what it is that makes me feel entitled to use a hefty word like ‘Druid’ in public places. When I started out as a student, I definitely did not feel able to claim druidhood, it took years of learning, regular ritual attendance and interacting with people who definitely were Druids to get me to that point. The key transition points for me were, completing the three levels of the OBOD course, and being involved in running a group. I’d now add to that the occasional celebrant work, teaching, book writing and blogging. If it quacks like a Druid and waddles like a Druid, it may of course be an outsized duck in a robe…

Well, I don’t have any robes, I have no beard, no staff, no wands, no sword, not even a cloak at present… very little surface detail that screams ‘Druid’ apart from a Victorian style army jacket with the words ‘Secret Order of Steampunk druids’ embroidered on the back but I rather imagine most people would read that and assume I was joking. I’ve never believed that the aesthetic makes the Druid, because anyone can latch onto a look. It’s what we know, what we do, how we think that really defines who we are.

The bard path has always been central to what I do, even back when I didn’t know that was the word for it. I’m not doing public performance in the way I was a few years ago, nor am I holding spaces to support other people to the same degree, but that remains part of my consciousness, and the creativity is a daily feature.

Service is important to me. Currently that manifests as informal teaching, and volunteer work at my son’s school. There have been occasions of tree planting, again not as much as there used to be. Arguably reviewing other people’s books counts as service too, I think.
Honourable behaviour, upholding justice, seeking for balance, green living – there are many concerns that derive from the idea of honourable relationship and shape how I live from day to day. From the outside those aren’t discernibly ‘Druid’ but from the inside I know that’s what powers my whole approach to living and being.

Where there’s been an increase in my Druid work in recent years, it’s been in prayer, meditation and communion. I’ve been a bit of a hermit and living very close to nature. I have close encounters with the natural world many times through the course of a day, and many opportunities to contemplate and experience. At the moment this is the heart of my practice. I’ve been pushing at the edges of what I understand and can do, with both meditation and prayer, and have the first murmurings of a rethink about my whole understanding of what magic is and means. I’m increasingly feeling that experimental Druidry and research through doing will be the mainstays of what I’m about as I move forward.

The names in which I do things, the whispered prayers and specific encounters I increasingly feel are personal. I’d much rather define my Druidry in terms of what I do, than get into issues of belief. No one else really needs to know what I truly believe in my heart of hearts. I rather think that, no matter how devoted I might, or might not be, for everyone else that’s pretty irrelevant. It’s what I do that counts, assuming that has any particular use in it for anyone else. I think being an experimental Druid has possibility on that score. Whether or not anyone else sees me as a Druid has become increasingly irrelevant. When I started, I really cared about that and wanted recognition, I think that’s normal, but over the years I’ve come to realise that the only person who can really judge me is myself, or whatever I choose to stand before. It matters that I do the job of the Druid, not whether anyone notices and ascribes it to Druidry.