Novice Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greens and Blues for Beltain

All over facebook, people are posting bits of folk songs and generally hailing the first of May. Beltain is here! Summer is a coming in. And here’s me, feeling awkward. Again. Part of it is not having a group at the moment. These festivals in the calendar are all about group coming togethers, and without the focus of a circle, the first of May is not so very different from the 30th of April, or the second of May. Just another part of the slow transition through the seasons. I can’t find it in me to celebrate any of these days on my own. I bow to my ancestors, to the ones who celebrated, and the ones who protested, because this is also Labour Day. (we’ll have a May Day my oh my…). I bow to the Queens of the May, and the morris dancers who danced up the sun. Memories of previous Beltains, good and less so, also come to mind.

It’s not just the issue of not having a celebration lined up. It’s also about what’s happening around me. The willow trees on the canal are just coming into leaf. Not all of the hedges have greened yet, and hawthorn normally gets going in March. The big beech tree on the school run hasn’t even started to open its buds, most of the visible woodland is still in the twiggy stage, and brown, not green. How can it be Beltain when the trees are not yet fully in leaf?

I’ve seen one clutch of ducklings, and plenty of evidence of nests, some of the usual spring activity is well under way. I’ve heard a cuckoo a few times, that folk icon of May, calling out the coming summer. There are swallows hunting over the canal and along the lanes, bugs now abound and the fish have started jumping in the evenings. It’s coming. But it isn’t here yet. Not all of the cows are back in their fields. There’s a big change in the character of a landscape when the animals go back out. We’ve had lambs, and the sheep are always out earlier than the cows. My nearest neighbours were let out a few days ago, but some of their cousins up the road are still in their sheds. The boggy ground won’t have helped, although we’re drying out finally. Traditionally Beltain is the time of taking the livestock off the low pasture and up into the hills, and the fires purify and protect them. It’s not the time for getting the cows out of the barn. That should have happened already.

I can remember one bad winter in my early twenties where we didn’t have trees in leaf until Beltain. Even that year wasn’t as late as this. I have missed the leaves. There’s no sign of the new reeds coming up yet either. No reed smells and rustlings. I miss the dappling of light through leaves and the greening of the landscape, I miss the way the air is different under a leafy canopy. It’s been a long winter.

If you are celebrating today, or over the weekend, I wish you much joy. May the sun smile down upon you, and the leaves unfurl around you. May there be life and all the delights of summer’s promises. I hope we get a proper summer this year, a good balance of sun and rain so that crops ripen rather than rotting in the fields, unharvestable. Again.

Once upon a time, apparently people related the health of the land to the virtue of their ruler. If we did that now, the UK government would be in a lot of trouble, and we’d have had a very big wicker man last Samhain. There are things a modern person cannot blame the government for, but at the same time, we are seeing climate change, and those in power do not care that Beltain has come without the greening.

The turning of the year

Somewhere in the last few days there was a shift from tail end of winter to definite spring – the sort of spring that could eventually turn into summer, if we’re lucky. The birds are gathering nesting materials, the blackbirds are singing down the sun with enthusiasm, and there’s a greening in the hedgerows. Buds fatten and the hawthorn is in leaf.

In previous years I’ve been wary of that whole ‘tie your psychological processes to the cycle of the seasons’ malarkey. There are many ways in which it doesn’t work. Winter is a hard and busy time for me, the realities of life are demanding, I do not do the peaceful sleep of the dark time of the year. Mostly it depresses me. However, the practical shift into spring, with longer days, more light, more warmth makes a difference. All the jobs become easier, laundry dries outside, the stove doesn’t need keeping in through the day, and I have more energy to use elsewhere.

My ancestors would have been ploughing and sowing – I can see the work in the fields. They would have had new livestock to care for, so being released from the work of winter would simply have made the work of spring easier for them. Not a time of birthing new plans, but a time of reacting to what the season demands, historically speaking.

I don’t do the rush towards midsummer, but I do have a shift at this time of year. More light means more available working time. Sat in the duvet at 6.30 am I wrote some verses. I wake earlier thanks to the light, too. If the weather is fair, such that regular jobs become easier, then there will be more energy to give to other work. If the evenings are good I can also go back to strolling around sunset, which opens me up to different experiences. This is the time of year when I become less devoted to the radio. There will be more people about walking in the evenings too, so it becomes more sociable. Winter nights on the towpath are quiet.

Nature is not something we have to make a considered, intellectual response to. It’s not a case of noticing spring and recognising it’s time to get those winter-dreamed plans under way. We are nature. We are natural. All we have to do is give ourselves enough space to do what we do and find out what it is. We’ll all have our own cycles and rhythms. The hibernating hedgehog is not more or less right than the migrating swan or the labouring duck. We do what we do. If life requires us to live in ways that are at odds with our natures, we suffer. Most of modern life is arranged so that the majority of us do not have scope to live naturally. I can’t imagine this does us any good. However much time and space you have to be your natural self, embrace it, for this is precious. Don’t do any more than you must to reinforce the unnatural systems we’ve locked ourselves into. A little quiet rebellion goes a long way!

Not my Valentine

The wheel of the year brings us round to another festive period that drives me a bit nuts. Once again the great God of commerce is thoroughly worshipped in a festival that does a lot to inspire feelings of guilt, inadequacy and misery. It’s a time when anyone who is unwillingly single gets their unhappiness emphasised for them in every shop window. Today, it is your job to be happily in love with someone and demonstrating this by spending a lot of cash. Gah. He’s not my bloody saint.

Some years, the too-big bouquet of flowers is a reminder of how little romance there is the rest of the year. Sometimes the perfume smells of guilt. Sometimes the romantic meal for two, surrounded by other people desperately trying to do a romantic meal, just flags up that you don’t know what to say to each other anymore. Worse still of course is finding that no one has bothered. No cards from secret admirers, no flowers, no gestures at all. Bad enough when you’re alone, downright humiliating if you’re supposed to be in a relationship.

One day a year for romantic gestures does not a relationship make. When the relationship itself is thin, sad, and troubled, the failure to honour dates, birthdays, anniversaries and this one, just makes things worse. However, in a good relationship, the idea of this being a particularly special occasion seems a bit… mad. If the romantic gestures are there all the time, if you sit down and talk over a meal more nights than not, if you buy each other little gifts just because… what does St Valentine have to offer? Not much. An excuse, we decided, to go to Thorntons together and pick out some chocolates to share. No secrecy and no surprises, and to be honest that joint chocolate quest was one of the sweetest things I’ve shared around this irritating day. Almost made me feel positive about it.

Somewhere round here is the Roman festival of Lupercalia, involving the donning of skins, something to do with goats, and a bit of mayhem. I’m sketchy on the details because I’ve never celebrated it, but it sounds a lot less saccharine and a lot more fun. Also somewhere round here is some near-forgotten Italian festival where you give the object of your desire, a book! That’s for the win, we could do that, I’m not fussy about the date. Any day is an excellent day to bestow a book upon the one you love most. Then of course there’s Beltain, and that’s a whole other bag full of weasels…

Innate Paganism

I wanted to offer this as a counterpoint to yesterday’s Channelling the Folk. I am sure there are the odd ancient Pagan remnants floating about out there – I’m just very wary of over interpretation, another theme I’ve been banging on about lately. However, there is the issue of innate Paganism, that which ‘bubbles up’ (as Theo put it so evocatively at Druidcon).

I’ve long believed in the idea of innate Paganism. It goes like this. The realities of life – the weather, seasons, agricultural cycle, landscape etc impact on us, if we’re paying any kind of attention at all. When we respond to those things, we may well end up doing what people do – it’s not like there are an infinite number of potential responses. Get to the cold, dark time of the year and a desire for warm fires and a bit of colour is pretty natural. Get the main harvest in, whatever it is in your part of the world, and some celebrating is called for. Music, dancing, and drinking tend to feature because these are the happy things we’ve had widest access to for longest.

You don’t need any shared origins or much beyond the whole ‘being human’ thing to get to the cold, dark, damp days and think ‘bloody hell, I could use cheering up’. And so we invent stories and rituals, celebrations, costumes, colourful things and happy music, reasons to feast and special cakes to feast upon, to cheer ourselves up. It is an innately human response to an innately natural experience.

For me that’s the absolute essence of what Paganism means. It responds to the intrinsic parts of life – sex and death, food and farming, the wheel of the year, the cycles of our lives, the mysteries of existence as we experience it, the wonder of sun, moon and stars, the power of water, the secrets of soil. It recognises these essential, life giving things and wants to respond to them. The Pagans of old may well have been seeking control over a hostile world. We still try and do that with science but may have to learn it won’t work either. Where we seek to understand, to honour, and celebrate, what we get is going to look a lot like Paganism.

You do not need insight into the thinking of the ancients for this. You don’t even need to know that there is such a thing as Paganism, or have any kind of conscious creed. You just need to be living on the earth with awareness and, as Mary Oliver puts it ‘Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’.

It doesn’t give us right answers. If you get to midwinter and, like the bear want to embrace the darkness, go into the cave, dream the long dream of winter, then fine. If, like the tree, you are bare and still, waiting for the spring, so be it. If you are struggling to survive, hunting and foraging and trying to keep warm, it’s a grim season. If you need the camp fire and the story teller to get you through the long nights, that’s a perfectly natural reaction too. Even the people who head off to warmer climes are enacting something natural enough, migrating like the swallows.

We are natural. What we do comes from our own natures. The only time we get this ‘wrong’ is when we’re so busy trying to be modern and separate that we ignore what our own natures are telling us, and so disconnect ourselves from the rest of nature too.

Be alive. Be human. Be present in the world. If you respond to that experience with love and gratitude, with respect and honour then what comes will be Pagan, and will probably have more in common with what other Pagans do, than not.

The landscape of light

So here we are at the turning of the year, the mistletoe has been cut in various places, Druids have been out and about at Stonehenge, and soon the days will start that slow process of getting longer again, at least round here.
I realise that the impact of the wheel of the year is bound to vary depending on how far you are from the equator. I struggle to imagine living closer to the arctic circles, with the long night of winter and the long day of summer. I rather suspect that would drive me nuts, but evidently plenty of people manage to live with it. I find it equally hard to imagine the stable nature of light and dark nearer the equator. I‘m too involved with the cycle I was born into.
The balance of light and dark across the year, and the shape of the seasons is closely tied to the land we live on – or at least where that land is in relation to the shape of the planet, its tides and climates. Here in the UK, the Gulf Stream keeps us warmer than neighbours to the east at the same latitudes. Where Tom came from a lot of weather tended to come down from the Arctic over the winter months, making for a very different kind of winter. I’m conscious of the warming effect of the River Severn too, not needing to get that far away to notice a temperature difference.

The shape of the hills affects the patterns of light and dark too. For me, down by the river, the coming of first light and the timing of the sunrise is affected by the Cotswolds. The sun has a great big hill line to get over before I’ll see any sign of it. It sets over the Forest of Dean for me, too, that’s another hefty hill range. For a person living in the shadow of even bigger hills, or mountains the patterns of light and dark will be even more influenced by this, and living on an open plain is a whole other experience.

It makes me realise just how local the experience of the shortest day is bound to be, because it’s going to be a lot shorter for those of us with hills, and all those other variables.

Today I am celebrating being where I am, wet and grey though it is. It’s not like anywhere else. Nowhere is.

A personal wheel of the year

I spent a number of years celebrating the 8 standard wiccan/druid festivals. It gives the cycle of seasons a shape, and for people new to the idea of engaging with the wheel of the year, this is important. The ‘Fire’ festivals have all kinds of history and folklore so are also a way into a lot of traditional material, stories and ideas, making them a great teaching tool. They’re also rather a blunt instrument. The precise date of the equinoxes and solstices vary, and in practice most groups don’t celebrate the event. They celebrate the weekend most convenient to the event, and the idea of the event. As for the other four, they may be tied to natural events, but in any given year those events don’t all correspond to the dates. Arguably they are festivals of ancestral connection more than fertility festivals or part of the cycle of the seasons.

Whatever we do in terms of public and collective ritual, there’s also scope for creating a personal calendar. Our own responses to the seasons can create personal cycles. It’s autumn, and I can see the winter people getting all excited and gearing up joyfully for the dark while the summer people face SAD and feel out of sorts. People whose season is autumn are of course in their element just now. We’re all different. For some, autumn means returning to school or the education cycles. This time of year is very different for a student, teacher or parent, than it is for someone not connected to the education process. For many, this is a time of new beginnings. For others, the tax year commencing in April will be more significant. Many forms of work will have their own seasons too, and we’re all affected by those. Times of quiet, times of industry, not all of them connected at all to the solar year.

Historical events can be a big part of the personal calendar, too. Birthdays, deathdays, anniversaries of rites of passage. Over time, some fade away and don’t need re-celebrating, while others acquire greater significance.  Today is the third anniversary of my landing in America for the first time, and along with the date of Tom’s coming to the UK, and our wedding day, has become part of the calendar. Those kinds of dates can be powerful in affirming relationship, and also give an opportunity to reflect. Where are we now? Where have we been? Where do we want to be, three years hence? Where personal dates are forgotten or ignored, it can be a symptom of an ailing relationship. Where too much money is spent on anniversaries, too much attention paid at the few key points it can flag up how threadbare things are the rest of the time. I’m glad to say this is nothing like that!

Sometimes personal events become meaningful to a whole community. An annually reaffirmed handfasting can become a regular party and get together. The date of an event can become a definitive moment that stays in the local calendar, or the national calendar. Armistice day. Columbus Day. Martin Luther King Day.  Or at a more local level, strange remnants like Hunting the Earl of Rhone or the one about finding a mediaeval lady’s hood – something lingers on even when the meaning gets a bit vague. These rituals and rememberances can become part of a communal identity.

The moral of this story is, don’t be afraid to add new things. The day of the founding of your grove might be an event to reflect on every year. The day of your becoming a fully fledged OBOD druid might be one you want to earmark for druidic reflection in years to come. There are no wrong answers here, it’s just a way of being alert to the resonant things in your life and making a space for them, honouring what they mean. It’s also important to let them go when they cease to have resonance, moving on to new ideas, new celebrations.

Cyclical Living

The way we focus on the wheel of the year in some pagan traditions can make it tempting to try and shoehorn all life into the solar narrative. I’ve griped about this one before. There are however some good and helpful lessons to take from the idea of the wheel of the year. Cyclical living can be considered in much more abstract ways.

We can picture life as a straight line, a journey from point to point. Viewed this way, each experience is a line, a village we will only pas through once, a view we will not see again. In many ways, linear thinking makes it harder to learn, because it reduces the idea that there is anything to learn. If we’re always moving forwards, whatever we get, it won’t be this. With a linear life view, all losses are permanent, all ends are absolute. There is no way back.

A cyclical view allows a very different way of thinking. If life has tides and seasons, things come round again. The corn dies to the scythe, the leaves fall, but come the spring there are new corn stalks pushing up, new buds coming. They may not be the same leaves, but they grow on the same trees. Each turn of the tide is its own, unique moment, but the ebb and flow are continuous, moving seamlessly from one stage to the next. If we view life as ebb and flow, as cycle, as change that holds constancy and constancy that is full of change, then there is every reason to learn from each turn.

I have experienced death in life more than once along the way. Not just the death of loved people, but the death of things within me. Hopes, dreams, ideas, beliefs, sense of self. If I believed at any point that those deaths were absolute, I’d have long since gone crazy. The linear life view would have broken me long ago. But I have a cyclical sense of things. Even when there is winter in my soul, I do not completely forget the existence of spring. When something dies, I do not entirely forget that death is part of the cycle. The moon waxes and wanes. Tiny plants grow on the corpses of fallen giants. Life has a startling ability to continue, and this is as true within as without.

There are stories in the Wiccan tradition about death and rebirth – The Descent of the Goddess – following Persephone into the underworld, and back into the daylight, knowing that the underworld part of the saga awaits. There aren’t any neat Druid/Celtic parallels that I can think of, although there is Taliesin, dying to Cerridwen and being reborn. There is Blodeuwedd who is flowers, and then woman, and then owl. That story has always spoken to me. I think about Rhiannon’s story of loss and trial and eventual release. These are cycles of descent and change, of suffering and transformation. They aren’t as clear as the Persephone narrative.

Going down into the darkness is part of life. Into the darkness of loss and uncertainty, of pain, disease, fear, depression. There are those who talk about the darkness inside the cauldron, the place of potential, waiting to be gestated, imagined into being, born into the world. There are warmer and happier way of understanding ‘darkness’ but for me, each cycle of descent is a narrative of pain and terror. Something dies. There are days of crawling through dark places with no sense of direction, and days when I just lie there and whimper, inside my head. The outside may appear to be functioning, but that’s not always indicative.

The process of emergence is not like watching a butterfly unfurling its wings. It is not the joyfulness of seeing a chick breaking free from the shell or a baby being born. But then, who can say what any of those things are like, from the inside? It’s a slow crawl, it is as bloody as the descent, and as fraught with difficulties. Sometimes the idea of being held in the darkness seems preferable, making a non-space, of not feeling, not doing, not allowing myself to care. That can feel like safety, while the idea of being vulnerable to feeling, to the scrutiny of light, is unbearable. Climbing back out of the hole, feeling like I have no skin on, nothing to protect myself with, does not seem to get any easier with practice. So far, I have always managed, sooner or later, to climb back out of the hole, hanging on to whatever tiny shreds of hope and inspiration I can find. Life is cyclical. There will be other holes, other long descents and arduous returns. Other journeys through dark lands. At least knowing this makes them less of a shock when they turn up.

I am making the trudge back from the underworld, again. I come back knowing that either one day I am going to shatter entirely and throw myself in the river, or I am going to have to find a way to be myself, hold some space that is mine, and have some place to sing the wilderness song in my soul. Sing with blood and teeth and mayhem. There has to be another way of doing things. And the wheel turns…