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.

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.

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.

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.

What makes a Druid?

Following on from Those other people who should not be Druids, and the many fascinating and thought-inspiring comments. What makes a Druid?
It isn’t the name, really. We aren’t even sure where ‘Druid’ comes from as a word – there are many theories – and we don’t entirely know what it means, and we don’t know what the Druids called themselves, although we have guesses there too.

It isn’t the robes (those came from a mistake about some statues of Greek philosophers, apparently) or the beards, and it can’t be the gold sickles because no one has ever found one, and they wouldn’t work anyway.
I’m guessing that in ancient history, you were a Druid if you’d been taught by Druids and those who were already established said that you could be. Although given the speed of travel and communication in the ancient world and the general tendency of people to hive off and start new things, I’m also prepared to bet that even then, there was more than one kind of Druidry about, and probably a fair number of people who hadn’t got *proper* Druid qualifications and still used the title, or who were called it by people who assumed they were because they did the job. Even with the best organised system of education and regulation, there are still people who make stuff up and claim to be things they are not and I doubt that’s anything new. There are also people who just intrinsically are something, and for whom the piece of paper that confirms it hardly seems appropriate.

Buzzard commented yesterday that Druidry is heartfelt, and Symbian remarked on the importance of caring about what we do and giving it our best. Only in the safety of our own heads do we know what we’ve done, and whether we did it well or not. You can have a qualification and only the most superficial understanding of how to do the job. With the right coaching, you can fake a pass at most things, when you wouldn’t be able to sustain the work alone. This is not purely a Druid issue. How is anybody an anything? What makes me an author? What makes my bloke an artist? So often in life the titles aren’t really handed out. Anyone can write a book, does that mean everyone can realistically claim to be ‘an author’? As Wendy pointed out yesterday, many titles are so diluted as to be meaningless.

Part of me likes that. I’m not keen on authority, and the weakening of titles weakens arbitrary authority too. Part of me finds it frustrating, because the multiplying of meaningless titles makes it harder to see where the good stuff is, and makes the accolades less meaningful where they are deserved. On the plus side it means we’re all called upon to pay attention, to judge people by their actions and not the bit of paper (thank you Silverbear). We are all thinking creatures, and we can think for ourselves. When it comes to making judgements about what we do, and what other people do, your own mind is actually the only useful thing you’ve got. All the rest is just propaganda.

What makes a Druid? I still haven’t answered that, have I? I know what I think makes me a Druid, but that wouldn’t necessarily define anyone else. Nor should it.

Thank you everyone who shared thoughts and ideas yesterday, I greatly appreciate the comments, even if I don’t reliably respond to all of them.

Becoming a druid

Every now and then I get a message from someone who wants to become a Druid, and feels the need for input. I’ve also noticed that search terms around getting into Druidry bring a lot of people to this blog, so clearly it’s a question plenty of people are asking. Although I think there are two distinct things going on.

One is the practical side. People hear something about Druidry, it interests them and they want to know more. What do we do? How does it work? The question of how to get started is part and parcel of that enquiry. It’s not the easiest thing to answer because where you need to start depends on who you are, where you are and what you want. If there’s a group meeting near you then going along and meeting some actual Druids and doing a bit of ritual may be a good way in. Perhaps you’re academically orientated and need a study course – OBOD at http://www.druidry.org would be my first suggestion, but ADF and Henge of Keltria also inform, and there are plenty of smaller groups and informal teaching materials out there. Budget, desire to join, relationship with authority – these also inform where you might want to go to start off. Are you an urban proto-Druid working with culture or social justice? Are you a rural proto-Druid out planting trees? The answer may not be simply about where you live.

Working out what kind of person you are and what kind of Druidry you want to do is really important when looking for courses, mentors etc. Of course until you have some exposure it’s not always obvious what it was that you needed to be looking for. Druidry is a broad, diverse tradition, so poke around, explore, experiment, ask questions and see what feels right. There’s no point doing things that feel weird, silly or wrong. If there’s no resonance in your heart, the practice is not for you, try some other group, or teacher, or Order or aspect.

No sane person will expect you to be able to dive right in and Be A Druid from the start. You aren’t supposed to magically and intuitively know how to do it all. You will find there are things that you do magically and intuitively know, though, and these are the ones to run with. Give yourself permission to make mistakes, take wrong turnings, change your mind and then get out there and see what happens. Don’t expect perfection from yourself, or from anyone else. Teachers are also human, Orders are made by humans, it’s all a work in progress and some of it is going to be flawed. This is not something to get cross about, just something to deal with as you learn to flex and find your own way.

Alongside the practical information search there is an issue of permission. This has been visible in a lot of the queries I’ve had. People tell me about who they are, what they do, what they know, and sound me out to see if I think they’ve got the makings of being a Druid. I’ve never said ‘no’. As I see it, it’s not about whether a person is qualified to be a Druid, but whether they want to be a Druid. If you want it enough, you will put in the work that will take you forward to the point where you feel entitled to call yourself a Druid, and to a place where other Druids will recognise you as being one. No one can give you that, or do it for you.

We have a culture where qualifications and certificates are the norm, where vetting and examining are a given. If you want to be almost anything in this life, you can expect to be scrutinised, judged, assessed, and you may be found lacking. You may not know enough or have the right bit of paper. Doors will shut for you.

Druidry can be academic and intellectual, and it can be highly skills based. However, there s no one with the power to say that you are, or are not a Druid. This is a spiritual path, and really what happens on it is between you and whatever you engage with. I can’t make you into a Druid. I can’t give you Druidry like a diploma. But I can say this. You are a human being and therefore you have all the necessary qualifications to study Druidry. You are drawn to Druidry and therefore you have the potential to become a Druid. You have every right to explore as you wish.

Now you need to give yourself permission, and take your own steps down your own path.

Teaching Druidry

We all do this, every time we speak or act in ritual, whenever we blog, or exchange ideas. The scope to learn from one another exists in every interaction. It’s also there, continually, in our experience of all facets of life, but for today I want to focus on the human.
When I started learning about Druidry, I looked for teachers. Not because I wanted a guru who could make everything miraculously easy, but because I wanted pointing in the right direction and some confirmation that I wasn’t talking out of my bottom! Experience of others starting out inclines me to think that’s all very normal. I found some people who were helpful and some people who wanted to tell me what to do. As a student, I’ve never been responsive to orders. I resent authority, I always want to pull the other way, this seems intrinsic to my nature. My favourite teachers have suggested, fed back, encouraged, counter-argued. They have given me space to be myself, whilst sharing what they know.
When I started teaching, I was terribly organised about it. Not least because I hadn’t sought it. Someone came to me, and there was no one else I could realistically have sent him to. I accepted the challenge, and put in a lot of hours and effort. At that point my own lack of confidence and certainty, my own newness reduced the risk of me being too much like an authority figure. However, the further I go, the more of a question it becomes. Lots of people blog, I like this space because its open, egalitarian, anyone can comment or do their own thing. Being here does not confer authority. There is something about printed books that does have more of a sense of authority to it. The whole process of being published suggests it, and really, what’s the point of writing if not to assert something? I try to walk the lines between sharing what I know, and not actually telling anyone else what to do with that. Sometimes it feels a bit like juggling cats.
I’ve settled on a new way of teaching, lately. I’m just here for people to ask questions (email is good). No set frequency, no set topics, just that I will do what I can with questions that people send me. I love the informality, it takes the pressure off me in ways that are helpful. It puts the direction into the hands of the student. Sometimes it means I write lists of people, books, websites who know far more about it than I do. Teaching can mean sending people somewhere else, and that’s fine.
You never know what another person is going to do with the thing you taught them. It will change as soon as it leaves your hands. Trying to control it mostly doesn’t work, and can make life miserable. Letting things go, trusting other people to find their own way, not needing to hold authority… I learn a lot from teaching.

Learning Druidry from the trees

I’ve seen two wonderful posts about trees in Druidry this week – Damh the bard here http://damh.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/stillness-and-the-born-survivor/ and on the fundamentalist druid blog here – http://phoenixgrove.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/oak-totems-and-what-druid-really-means/

 

How we learn druidry is a very interesting question. I’ve heard plenty of druids talk about the religion of the ancestors, the Celts and what fragments we have left of Celtic tradition. I find a great deal of inspiration from things Celtic, but it is not the absolute core of my Druidry, and the reason is this: The Celts did not learn their religion by studying fragments of Celtic mythology. It is possible they inherited something from whatever went before, but if you take that back through time, there must, logically, be a starting point. There must be a place and a time where a person was inspired to think a thing.

 

When it comes to book religions, it is fair to say that before the book, the religion did not exist. Take the book away, and the religion would cease to be viable. While many pagan paths depend to some degree on our textural knowledge of old gods and myths, paganism as a whole does not. The idea of paganism, or the sacredness of nature, the spirit in all things, a multitude of divinity and so forth can be found over, and over with no reference to older cultures or beliefs. Paganism is a response to nature. While there is nature, we can viably keep rediscovering paganism.

 

I believe that my Celtic ancestors venerated the natural world, although that is not all I think they believed in. It is also my belief that they were able to find this for themselves, not in half remembered myths, or borrowed ideas, but from immediate and personal experiences of nature and deity. And of course, trees. So I very much agree with my fundamentalist friend about the essentialness of trees in Druidry.

 

Trees, historically have been vital to human life. Each kind of wood has its own unique properties, and humans have been utilising wood as material for as far back as we know about. The Stone Age was also a wood age. Trees are housing, fuel, and the raw material for almost every civilized activity there has ever been. We might turn more to metals and plastics these days, but trees and earth, wood and ceramics are the material basis of human civilization as we know it. Our modern relationship may seem different, but the breath of trees, the soil holding, life giving, rain influencing magic of trees is no less essential than it has ever been.

 

The experience of being in the company of trees defies language. Trees do not normally speak in human terms, but that does not mean they cannot be heard, experienced and felt. In their age, their seasons, growth patterns and slowness they are a wholly different kind of entity to us, and yet the scope to learn from them is vast. Who we are when we are in the trees is not always who we are the rest of the time. Put a child in a wood if you want to see what a free range, inspired human being looks like.

 

The knowledge of trees does not give authority to humans. It does not make the holder of texts or language the controller of spiritual truth. It does not create a text that can be waved under the noses of disbelievers or used to explain us to other faith groups. By its very nature, what we learn from the trees is hard to express human to human. I have felt it, and I have no words to speak it. Even if I had those words, I would not want to write them, because speaking it is inadequate. It needs to be felt, individually, uniquely, each of us finding it in our own way. Druidry is not in books, it is in groves and forests, in the trees of our cities even. It is also in the sky and the soil, but these are harder still to engage with, and not always the easiest place to start.

Druidry is listening, and feeling, it is knowing and doing. And we might also find that in relation with each other, in moments of shared inspiration, and we might guide each other in useful directions, but no one can just hand this over wholesale to someone else. No matter how philosophical a religion may be, it is not an intellectual premise. But it is also entirely available to anyone who decides to go looking for it.

OBOD Druid

By the time I started the OBOD druid grade, I’d already been involved with running a grove and several meditation circles. It would have been more useful to do this the other way round, but that’s life. When I first landed in the druid grade, it felt like a huge relief after the rigours of ovate studies. Then I started looking around for the next challenge, and didn’t really find it. I know the druid course has changed recently, sounding like it goes deeper and further, so my observations are thoroughly out of date!

The affirmation I found in the druid grade echoes my experience of first coming in as a bard. It was a warm, reassuring sort of experience, and this was undoubtedly a good thing. But at the same time, where was the next testing, stretching challenge going to come from? I’d got into the habit of being a student again, and remembered that I liked it. I didn’t want to stop.

No matter how much revision the druid grade has undergone, it will still be a finite thing. This is very important, and is an issue that transcends any individual course or mentor. You get to the end. There is nothing more they can teach you. This does not mean there is nothing more to learn.

I think the most important thing the druid grade gave me was the sense that I could strike out on my own. I’d spent the best part of four years on the three grades, I’d been tested. Wiser and more experienced folk had looked me over and found me acceptable. I’d done everything in the book. At the end, there was recognition in the form of a certificate, and that felt rather good too. It felt like permission. After all the setbacks and put downs and crap that had got me to OBOD’s door, I’d come through and completed the course. I felt proud of the achievement. I knew that I was perfectly capable of striking out on my own and learning for myself. I also knew that I always had been, that I had been misguided by others for whatever reasons, but that my judgement and inclinations were fine from the start.

I think the very best thing any teacher or course can do for the student is get them to the point where said course, or teacher, are no longer needed.

Time to leave the often walked path through the Druid Forest. I eyed up a number of other clearly marked paths, especially the ADF courses, but didn’t go for it. With no plan, map or sense of direction, I ambled off into the undergrowth to see what would happen. Life brought all manner of things to test my sense of self and druidry to breaking point.

When I finished the OBOD grades, I had an awen tattooed onto my arm – a rite of passage I felt I had earned.

Most of the time I have no idea where I am, but there are plenty of fellow travellers who stop to exchange experiences of the journey. I learned, finishing the druid grade, that it’s not a journey to anywhere specific. There are no prizes for getting further than others or going faster. No one is keeping score. It’s very different from school-based learning. And at the end of the course there was no sense of being finished and ready to move on. In that regard it reminds me a bit of Tai Chi. An expert who has mastered the series of moves for Tai Chi goes back to the beginning and learns them again, doing more, understanding more, and knowing that there are infinite cycles of understanding and experiencing.

Ends are always beginnings. The more you know, the more doors open to things you do not know. And then all the questions about what are we knowing this for, what are we seeking to understand, kicks off a new cycle of exploration.