Away with the fairies

There’s a hide not far from the canal – private land being developed as a mini nature reserve, with tree planting and a small pond. We regularly see badgers, foxes, rabbits, buzzards and garden birds there, having permission to visit as we please! The badgers are the main attraction, because they generally aren’t easy to spot other places. However, the hide owners tend to put down peanuts to attract them. Last night, there were no nuts. A lone badger of the dozen or so from the set came round to check, and that was the end of the matter. Still, seeing one badger is a joy, and we also had an encounter with a huge, unidentified moth.

We were just getting up to leave when Tom spotted lights amongst the trees. We all saw them – a cluster of small lights that could only be seen from one angle, and that all went off at once. It was nearly dark by then. The nature area does not adjoin any gardens, ruling out fairy lights, solar lights, anything gardenish – there’s a thick hedge and a grass walkway and another hedge between what we could see and the nearest garden.

There were glow bugs in the area, but we haven’t seen any in weeks now. There is a guy who studies moths, we pondered moth traps. Much work went in to looking for a perfectly rational explanation for what all three of us had seen. Increasingly aware that none of us were entirely at ease with the rational explanations, I eventually got round to saying ‘could have been fairies.’

It’s an interesting one for me. I’m a druid and a pagan, I believe in the idea of magic and otherworldliness, but at the same time I pride myself on being a rationally minded creature, willing to consider the evidence as dispassionately as I can. I’ll always look for the banal explanation first, rather than seeing everything in terms of gods, hobgoblins, aliens, Atlanteans etc etc. But there are times when the sense of wonder, the feeling of encountering something numinous is too strong for the rational explanation.

The last time this happened to me I was in Portland with Tom, and we both saw a tiny little whirlwind spinning leaves around. It was so small, so localised, the rest of the air so still that whatever the logical explanation might have been, the sense of seeing something otherworldly was powerful indeed.

Often it’s about the language we use. Thunder and earthquakes have perfectly sensible explanations, we know what they are, and yet at the same time the power of them, and other regular, natural and universally recognised phenomena is breathtaking. Spirit and science do not need to be at odds here. It may be tempting to call things we don’t understand ‘magic’ but there’s no reason not to recognise the known as magical, too. That first rainfall after days of dry heat. A full moon haloed by mist. There’s no reason for the experience of magic to be irrational.

We saw something last night. We don’t know what it was. Any speculation is just that, no version any more evidenced than any other, despite our best efforts. Of course I want to know what I saw, but for me, that knowledge would in no way reduce the feeling of wonder, awe and delight that the moment inspired.

Making Sacred, gods, reality and finding a place to stand

There was Red’s inspirational blog here – http://theanimistscraft.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/to-make-sacred/ and some fine comments on this blog too – Tony talking about sacrifice as making sacred, Jenny talking about that in terms of transformation. I’ve been aware over the last few days of a need to go deeper, asking questions of myself and trying to figure out how my thoughts fit. Cat commented that she sees my blog as a much sacrifice as her own. I don’t.

I can say with all honesty that I think about what I do, and I put a fair amount of effort in trying to do the right things for the right reasons. I have a sense of the sacred, closely tied to my sense of the numinous. It’s all about the poetry, the flow of awen, accidental art, and about the best of what we are and can be. I could spend a lot longer trying to pin that down, but hopefully it will suffice for today. That sense of sacredness has the potential to permeate all things. Spirit, and wonder, can be anywhere.

Now, my world view has plenty of room for gods in it. I’m comfortable with the idea of there being deity. I just don’t experience deity at the moment. There was no sense of the divine in the periods when I was brought to my knees in pain and fear. I have been through plenty of dark nights, but it’s always been people who have brought me through, not gods. I look for my sense of the divine in the world around me, and the people around me. So I do all manner of things in the context of relationship. The idea of offering up something to the gods, is beyond me. I’d have to believe they might care what I do, and I don’t think they do. That leaves plenty of room for other people to have entirely meaningful relationships with deities where that offering up has resonance, but I do not have that in my own life.

I’m deeply wary of dualist thinking – sacred and profane, mundane and magical, all those ways of cutting the experience of life into tidy pieces. How can I make something sacred? How can I make it not sacred? The only space for difference that I see lies not in the object, or the moment, but in my own understanding of it.

Since starting out with Druidry, I moved rapidly towards wanting my sense of spirit, of wonder, my ideals, aspirations and ways of seeing the world, to be part of every aspect of my life. I take it with me into checkout queues, public toilets, courtrooms. In the most banal situations, I’ll find the flower pushing through the cracks, the dash of humanity, the unintended poetry. I’ll find something with heart and resonance, because I refuse not to. But I can’t make anything sacred, I can just choose to experience it as sacred.

I think so much of how we practice, especially round ideas of prayer, service, sacrifice, communion, depend on what kind of relationships we have with the divine. If any. A person who experiences deity is in a very different place from one who does not. I don’t know if it’s possible to tease out ideas and ways of being that embrace both the deist and the atheist, that have room for those who love gods, and those who suspect gods might exist but who don’t have relationships, and those who suspect that all the gods are bastards. (I have days…) Who do we offer to? Who do we pray to? And why? These are such huge questions, and I am nothing like close to having answers for me, much less anything to offer anyone else. I will keep questioning and see what comes.

Druidic Arts: Looking for wonder

A great deal of how we experience the world comes down to choice. The art of seeking wonder begins with the recognition that we do indeed have a lot of choice about how we experience life and interact with it. There are days when life experience, pain, gloom and stress make the quest for wonder seem hopeless, futile, childish. Part of the art involves steadfastly reminding yourself to bother, remembering that it can be done, and that the doing will nourish you.

Sensing truly and being open to the world is an art in its own right, and I’ve talked about it in a previous blog. If we aren’t letting anything impinge on our awareness, then it is a certainty that wonder will not come in to us from the outside. It is possible to generate feelings of wonder and the numinous from within. Through meditation, prayer, contemplation and imaginative exercises, it is entirely possible to feel a sense of wonder without any reference to anything else. There are times when going within in this way makes a lot of sense. However, there is an escapist quality to it, and it is better, frequently, to deal with external problems. To be a druid is not just to be wandering the inner plains, but to be engaging with the world our bodies move through. One of the dangers of seeking wonder within, is that our inspiration can easily become threadbare over time, and the method ceases to give us anything. Another danger is that we become divorced from consensus reality.

Natural beauty can be an easily available source of wonder, and there’s a great deal of it out there. Even in the most squalid of urban environments, plants strive to grow and creatures still manage to exist. Few environments are entirely sterile. Sometimes those determined, struggling urban plants can be the most heartbreaking and poignant things imaginable. The urban tree is as much a place of peace and refuge as one in a forest.

Watching for the good in others, and giving people the chance to step up and do something remarkable can be part of the quest for wonder. It’s easy to become cynical and remote, but for all the crap out there, humans are capable of amazing, generous, inspired, beautiful, wonder-laden actions. The more carefully protective of ourselves we become, the harder it is to access this. It’s only by speaking of pain that we can invite others to treat us with compassion. It’s only by trusting people that we can give them the chance to prove how worthy they were of that trust.

The art of seeking wonder will sometimes lead us to disappointment. In opening eyes a little wider we may also see things we don’t want to find. In taking risks in interactions and in what we expose ourselves to, we may not always find what we seek, but sometimes we will. Being open to wonder specifically calls for being open to risks as well. Wonders can be overwhelming, shocking, fearful, awe inspiring in the awful sense. That which is wonderful can break down our sense of how reality works, challenge our assumptions, even our sense of identity. There are stories about places that will turn you into a poet, or a madman, and I think this is part of the nature of encountering wonder. Small wonders may be gentle with us, but the big ones might well not be.

Nine Druidic Arts

I must start by saying that these are ideas I am working up myself, they are notions in progress, and I am just gathering the basic ideas and casting them forth to see what anyone thinks. There is nothing definitive here, and no authority, just ideas about how we might take Druidry forward to be less about private personal faith and more about living in the world.

What I’ve identified below are 9 areas of endeavour that anyone could choose to practice as arts. By this I mean that they should not be assumed to come naturally. They can be studied, developed, expressed with beauty and consciously put into the world just as any other art form is. I’m going to give an overview today, and then in coming blogs go through each area and how it works. Many of these are ideas that come up in other aspects of Druidry, what I think I’m doing differently is this idea of treating them like art forms, and the implications of that.

Relationship: We readily assume that relationships are ‘natural’ and require no conscious attention. As a result many of us don’t even notice half the relationships in our lives, or the implications of them. Once we look deliberately at relationship, we become more aware, and we can start to deliberately craft relationship so that our love lives, families, working partners all become a deliberate form of art into which we pour soul and inspiration.

Deep Contemplation: In going beneath the surface, asking profound questions and seeking real answers, we step away from a superficial life. Finding good things to contemplate and the mental tools with which explore, our whole understanding of the world can change. Weaving threads of ideas and understanding together, making new concepts out of the raw materials we have. This may manifest in all kinds of ways, but is something that we can encourage others to do, and in sharing it, help to make it more socially acceptable.

Sensing Truly: Not only listening to the humans we encounter, but to all that is around us, to birds and wind, to the voices within things. Seeking out that which is not usually heard. Any open sensory interaction can be developed as an art, we might equally practice seeing what is there, feeling in a real way, becoming more in tune with the interface of our experience and the world. Habits of perception can make us blind to what it really there. Deliberate, artful engagement gives us clarity.

Compassion: It begins with a desire to understand, a willingness to hear and to look beneath the surface. Open to the feelings of others, non-humans included, able to feel for them, and with them. We can also practice compassion upon ourselves, and in that compassion also learn to treat those around us more gently. Compassion does not stay a hand from doing a hard but necessary thing. It requires us to mourn the unavoidable consequences, and to seek for the best way through.

Looking for wonder: Seeking the numinous is the art of finding what is good and beautiful. It is the skill of seeing spirit manifest in the world, or at an earlier stage, it is seeking for the means to play that melody within our lives. Banality is an easy, socially supported perception to hold. Seeking wonder requires conscious engagement and a willingness to be moved. When we are moved, we can then share that.

Nurturing: This is the art of helping other things to flourish. Be that raising children, growing plants, easing pain, facilitating creativity or a great many other things. Nurturing is the art of holding a space that enables others to grow and develop. Praising, encouraging, listening, caring and finding ways to nourish are all aspects of this art.

Slowing and stopping: The modern world is hectic. For a spiritual life, it is necessary to slow down, and sometimes to stop, being here, and now, not moving or acting, just experiencing. A person who studies slowness as an art may explore the scope for enabling slowness in others.

Good speech: Clear, honest, accurate and helpful communication is an art that facilitates a great many other things. We practice this not just by honing our personal skills but by encouraging it in others, and if necessary, demanding it in others. With questions that press for better answers, refusing to accept poor logic, domineering words, or verbal manipulation, we take this art forwards.

Responsibility: We begin by learning to differentiate between things we are responsible for and things we are not. The development of this art involves learning to take responsibility through choice, recognising when there is something to be lifted up and carried forwards. The art of responsibility is the art of not looking the other way.

 

There is no end point with any of these, any more than in other art forms. Committing to these ideas as arts is committing to lifelong work. All of them require, at least once you’re past the basic ‘learner’ stage, dedicated involvement with something outside the self. Being the only druid in the village does not mean you are a druid in isolation. Practicing druidic arts does not require anyone else to notice or understand that you are doing a druid thing in public. The reasoning may remain deeply private, the consequences are in the world.

So, if you want to modify these, add more, add queries, argue the whole premise, or anything else, please add comments. I’d like to thank Buzzard who caught me skimming over this as a thought form in another blog – I like to be challenged, it helps.

Sacred, Profane, Pagan

Normal western thinking likes to divide things up. Mind and body, male and female, and all the other kinds of dualism encourage us to perceive separateness. Part of how we define religions tends to include this separateness. We have special days, places, clothes, words. A religious rite sticks out like a sticky-out thing from the rest of life, with its costumes, formulaic declarations, unique music and so forth. Thus when we are at home we are not doing anything sacred. We have a not-sacred life where there is no place for religiosity, wonder, the numinous or any requirement to act in an overtly religious way. Two seconds of contemplating Christianity makes me feel this is not what the book religion folks were actually aiming for.

Now, let’s consider for a moment the animist perspective in which spirit permeates all things. Not a few special things, or only at the full moon, but everything, all of the time. What room does that leave to designate some things as spiritual and others as not? If nature is my goddess, and my temple, then what, pray, is outside of nature? What, by this definition, counts as not-sacred?

Let’s push that out again. If nature is sacred, and spirit is everywhere, then at what point is it reasonable to decide that I do not need to act in a religious or spiritual way? Which of my actions can be decided to have no spiritual relevance?

Being a pagan full time is a serious dedication, and for anyone moving from that dualist western perspective, it won’t happen overnight. It calls for a process of re-evaluating everything, and a conscious choice to re-enchant and seek meaning. But the aim of any pagan, I think, should be to be a pagan all the time, and in all things. As soon as we designate some time, action or space as not mattering, or not being relevant, we break the idea that everything is part of nature and nature itself is sacred. It does take time to see spirit in all things, and to hold that perception even in the traffic queue, or at work, or wherever else we feel miserable and mundane.

The recognition of spirit will change how we live and feel. It will prompt us to act differently and it will challenge us on a daily basis. There is nowhere to step back to, no place of not having to bother where we can put our feet up, shrug off responsibilities and veg out for a bit. That’s not to say there is no place to put feet up and veg out, that too can be done in a meaningful way, with respect for self, and awareness that we too are manifestations of spirit.

Once you have embraced the idea that everything matters, there is no easily going back. It’s a bit like the pills moment in The Matrix.

Once we divide the world into sacred and not-sacred, we also give ourselves the right to decide what counts and what doesn’t. Where else could that assessment possibly come from? Or do we imagine that the gods (whichever ones we believe in) aren’t interested in some spaces and don’t care what we do whilst in those?

To be a pagan, is still to be a pagan whilst watching TV, if you still feel moved to do that. Faith is not a hobby, or a role play game to indulge in at the weekend. If your faith is meaningful to you, then it is part of you and part of what you do. If you are still finding your way, that might be more aspirational, but that’s fine. Changing how you see everything is a big job, but it’s harder to do if you aren’t aiming for that total immersion and involvement. It is important to know that pagan full time is an entirely realistic goal. This is not something separate from your ‘real life’ if you are moving towards it, it will be intrinsic to your life in every way.

There is always more work to be done. There are always deeper levels of understanding to achieve. There s always more scope to perceive the numinous and be filled and moved by it. This is not a job we ever get to the end of. There is no opportunity to say ‘I am pagan enough now, I do not need to make any more effort.’

Magic for Children

I want to juxtapose two thought forms today and then work up a third.

Thought form number one is that childhood is supposed to be a magical time, and that children should believe in magic. Father Christmas, the tooth fairy, and anything else fantastical that you care to toss their way. Babies being brought by storks featured in my childhood. As children grow up, they realise that this is all a pack of lies, created by adults. I remember feeling really let down when I found out, and I resented having been lied to in the first place. Others I know have admitted to huge feelings of disappointment and betrayal. Finding out that the magic you’ve been told about, was a hoax, sucks. Ok, so you get the years of happy belief, but are they worth it when the time comes for disillusionment?

Thought number two is that no responsible person teaches actual magic to children. They aren’t equipped to deal with it or make good choices, there’s the whole turning into teenagers issue, and the desire to wait for psychological maturity before magic gets thrown into the equation. One of the consequences of this is that younger folk who find out there are adults who do spells and won’t teach them, go online, buy books, or start messing about for themselves. The allegedly responsible solution to children leaves them even more alone and vulnerable if they get the urge to start experimenting. Forgive me if I am uneasy about this.

So where does that leave a pagan parent? I want my child to trust me, so I don’t want to go through a process of lying about the existence of tooth fairies, having to admit that one and then going ‘but you can trust me on this other magical stuff.’ I don’t want my child to think it’s fine for adults to mislead him, even if the motivations are cute. And if he stays pagan, I want him to be able to trust me enough that he’ll talk to me about magic, not go off on his own, thinking it would be fun to try and summon something, or that a Ouija board would be a really great toy to get for a drunken party. I talk to my son a lot about all kinds of issues, the nature of reality included. He’s an information hungry chap.

We’ve had a series of bizarre experiences happen one after the other over the last few months. The kind of series of disasters that leaves you wondering which deity you’ve offended, or if they’re just trying to get your attention for some reason. So I ended up trying to explain to him (he’s 9) how you hold a dual perception of reality, maintaining awareness of what the rational, logical interpretation of events is, whilst simultaneously being able to explore a less ration, more intuitive perspective that allows the possibility that things happen for a reason and random things can turn out to have meaning. It’s a hard combination to hold at the same time, but I think it’s vital. No matter how pagan and magicky you feel, general survival depends on being able to interact with consensus reality.

I think when it comes to children, there is much to be said for working with the magic of awe and wonder. Children are perfectly capable of experiencing the numinous. In many ways, having spiritual experience and perceiving the numinous depends on being open to it in the first place. Greeting the world with both an enquiring mind, and one that is willing to be impressed, moved, delighted, frightened and exited, sometimes all at once. A jaded psyche will never be open to magic, cynicism will not allow us meaningful religious experience.

I’ve just asked James what he considers to be magical He’s thinking hard about it. It turns out that his current understanding of the word ‘magic’ is very Harry Potter led. That has a great deal to do with how we as a family tend to use specific words, I think. James is also someone who believes that spirit is manifest in all things, and it’s only just crossing his mind as I write this, that it could be magic as well, that everything we do might contain a little bit of magic. It’s a good way of viewing the world, and I hope he manages to hold onto it.

Reclaiming Magic

In my teens, I had a strong belief in magic. Not so much the spells and wands variety, but the essential, magical nature of reality, the importance of will, the strange complexities of existence. It’s one of the things I’ve lost along the way, and that wasn’t any kind of good or natural ‘growing up’ experience, or a deliberate embracing of another paradigm. Simply, I had my sense of magic stripped from me.

Over a period of years, I was exposed to a number of people with deeply disturbing and psychotic beliefs. People who claimed to be deities, who claimed to have cursed others and caused illness. People who claimed sole responsibility for keeping other people alive, the fate of others dependent on their whims. I also encountered people who claimed to be highly intuitive, but used their claimed intuition as a way to bully. It’s very easy to use the assertion that you have magical powers to control, intimidate and manipulate others. When modern writers criticise ancient cultures, it is often with the very assertion that people claiming magical powers used them to bully the credulous into serving them. It certainly does happen and is both alarming and destructive to encounter.

Exposed to this kind of behaviour and attitude, I became increasingly unwilling to think about anything in magical terms. Rational causality became ever more important to me. I felt a strong need to defend myself from what I was experiencing by becoming ever more conventionally rational. Magic became the word for experiencing the numinous or feeling a sense of wonder, but the idea of spells or deliberate will working I rejected. And oddly enough, that sense of the numinous, of the magical within life and nature, also began to diminish within me. I became, quite literally, disenchanted.

It is absolutely vital to maintain an understanding of reality that allows you, me, to functionally engage with others in viable and meaningful ways. However, humans are not wholly rational creatures. All things that we do begin in thought, will and imagination. We all have experiences we can’t explain, and the further reaches of science are so full of complexity and strangeness that getting my head round them is endlessly challenging, and much of the time, it might as well be magic. So often historically, ‘magic’ has been the word we’ve used for things we had no other explanations for. Letting that sense of wonder and possibility back in does not mean letting go of sanity or reason.

I am setting out to rediscover my sense of wonder, to rebuild my trust in the world and my ability to perceive it as a place that is not openly hostile to me, and that is rich with beauty and goodness, even amongst the pain and challenges. It is my intention to actively seek my own re-enchantment. The belief of my youth was just what naturally occurred to me. I didn’t put much work into it, so while it had an inherently innocent quality, it was also somewhat unformed, untested. To set out deliberately to rebuild in myself a sense of wonder and magic, is not going to give me back what I’ve had stripped from me. What happens, if this works, is bound to be different. I have no idea what to expect. Gone are the days when my sense of the future was keen and I trusted to my intuition.

I am choosing to step out into the darkness, with only intent to guide me. I want my magic back. I want my sense of magical possibility back, and my trust in both myself and the wider world. I want the rich, unconscious dreaming life I once had, and also I want those things I do not yet know about, that will be part of this journey. I’ll be blogging what happens alongside the other issues I tend to tackle here, and as ever, will be glad of anything anyone feels moved to share along the way.

Art, religion, druidry

Recently in Tewkesbury abbey I saw an exhibition by Christian artist and priest Iain McKillop. It was incredibly vivid, sensual, physical depictions of Jesus, focusing on his last days. As a consequence it was also heartrending and brutal in terms of subject matter. There were a lot of paintings – Gethsemane, last supper, cross bearing, depictions of crucifixion. There were also images inspired by religious crisis. It was incredible art work, and at the same time, almost unbearable to look at.

Coming to it as a non-Christian, as someone outside the story, I was simply shocked by the intensity of pain. The abbey contains plenty of older, more traditional art. Usually, the crucifixion is portrayed in a very clean, peaceful way. Beautiful colours, peaceful faces. Often Jesus looks like he’s taking a little nap, not dying by one of the most tortuous punishments ever devised. Those older paintings must have informed a lot of perceptions of what the death meant. Jesus dying is usually a gentle, soulful affair. To see it offered up, so bloody, extreme and agonised, is a bit of a shock.

As a druid, I’m very open to art, beauty and expressions of soul. I also seek to be aware of reality in all its complex shades, the pain as well as the pleasure. And still I am stumped by what I’ve seen. Trying to imagine the journey of the artist into creating this kind of work. What does it mean to live with such brutal images? To work on them, unrelentingly? And more importantly, what does the depicted pain and suffering mean?

I believe that everything has the scope to bring meaning and religious experience into our lives. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. Pain is no exception. Except that kind of extremis makes it nigh on impossible to think. There comes a point when both physical and emotional pain start to blot you out, so that nothing seems real, nothing is truly experienced beyond it. Is that a religious experience?

It’s easy to turn away from that which horrifies. Especially in art. It’s easiest to close down senses, refuse to engage and go somewhere safer. I stood those paintings for as long as I could bear, and I’ve meditated on them since, and I know I do not understand. All I can offer here is a profound sense of confusion. What does it mean, to offer such suffering as spirituality? For me, pain has taken me away from my spiritual self, not deeper into it. In the aftermath of pain, I have learned compassion and tolerance, and no doubt other things too, but that requires a time after, a peace, a space to regroup and move on. There are things here I feel a need to understand, but I have no idea what to ask, or whom. (Suggestions most welcome).

Tewkesbury abbey also features modern stained glass windows by Thomas Denny. He has windows at Gloucester too. They are beautiful, vivid, detailed and use colour in the most amazing ways. The more you look, the more you see. Light coming through the glass fills the chapel with warmth and every shift of light affects the image. Standing in front of Denny’s work, I see an expression of pantheism, God shining through in all things. It’s not emotionally uncomplicated or free from shadows, but is rich, moving, challenging and inspiring all at once.

I stand before those windows and I see something that fills me with wonder and a sense of the numinous. Just encountering Denny’s art is a religious experience for me. It fills me, nourishes my soul and sends me out into the world wakeful and hopeful. My Druid self loves what he does, and the different sources of our inspiration don’t seem to matter at all. This kind of Christianity, I understand.