Integrity and Druidry

(Nimue)

If you’re looking for sacrifices to offer up to your godds, or with which to honour your path, then acting with integrity is a good candidate. Acting with integrity is expensive.

All too often it’s the people who push and shove, shout and demand who get ahead. If you are prepared to act fairly, not exploit others or blame them for your errors, that comes at a cost. If you aren’t willing to use your power to undermine others, or compromise on the truth for your own benefit, this will impact on your life.

If you are kind and co-operative that won’t always go in your favour. You’ll be the safer person to let down, or mess about. You’ll be more likely to have to pay for other people’s mistakes. You are likely to be expected to pick up the slack, and suffer the consequences when things go wrong. Less co-operative people often get a better deal.

We don’t reliably treat with most kindness and respect the people who are kindest and most helpful. We appease the people who have power, we go along with what’s going to cause us least trouble. Failure to do this has consequences. Refuse to support injustice, refuse to play nicely when situations aren’t nice at all, and it can cost you.

Apathy is often the easier choice. Life is simpler when you aren’t inclined to care about anything very much. Shrugging and going with the flow takes very little effort. Refusing to cooperate when things are unethical is hard.

What do we have without integrity? Look around you, and the injustice in the world, and the destruction of life itself, and that’s the answer. When greed, disinterest, selfishness and cruelty lead, this is what we have. There are many battles I can’t wade into, but the one thing I can do is act with integrity at every turn. I can do that when it hurts, and when it leaves me exposed, when it comes at a high price, when it massively inconveniences me. I can try.

We live in systems that often make it hard to take honourable action. To be online is to be ethically compromised, there are no innocent platforms. To be offline is to be silenced, and to reject many of the tools that allow those of us who have little influence to try and make a difference. So many things are like this that it can make the idea of acting with integrity seem impossible.

But, there are always opportunities, and those opportunities are always worth taking. If you want to make meaningful sacrifices for your Druidry, then sacrifice ease and comfort. Sacrifice what would cause you least hassle in favour of upholding what is true, and fair and necessary. Even though you probably can’t do that all of the time, doing it at all is a powerful choice, and one the living world urgently needs us to make.

Druidry and authority

(Nimue)

The title of ‘Druid’ is one that suggests authority. Sometimes it feels more comfortable to say ‘I am on the Druid path’ instead, and not deal with that aspect of it. I spend a lot of my time deliberately avoiding presenting myself as an authority figure. I talk about what I’m doing, and how that’s going, in a your-mileage-may-vary sort of way. I write a lot of these posts assuming that readers are in a fairly similar position to me and just like finding out what others are up to.

Sometimes it feels necessary to take a firmer stance and speak with more authority. I only do that when I feel confident that I have the knowledge and experience to back it up. I tend to be more assertive around bard-path issues. Other times there are issues where I feel so strongly that there are right and wrong ways of doing things that I’m prepared to be assertive.

A lot of that comes down to the idea of spirituality based on kindness. So much of how modern life is structured is based on exploitation. This informs our destructive relationship with other beings, ecosystems and the planet. It informs so much on the political side. Being kinder to each other and to the rest of the world is essential for fixing this. So I feel easy about using more direct and demanding language around these topics.

To assume a position of authority is to open yourself up to attacks and criticism. Not that posting in a gentle and understated way will remove all risk of that, but it certainly dials down the agro. Most of the time I’m fine  with that. I don’t feel it’s my job to tell people what to do and I certainly don’t want the drama that comes from ruffling other people’s metaphorical feathers.

Sometimes, not standing in your own power is an abdication of responsibility. Druidry as a path is one that calls to us to act honourably, and that doesn’t always mean taking the easiest path. There are times when it is necessary to speak up, to discomfort the comfortable and to challenge the status quo. Deciding when that really is necessary is one of the things that comes up around deciding what honour means to you.

So what I will say, in an authoritative way is that sometimes you have to be authoritative. Sometimes you have to assert what is true, or fair or needed and stand by that even if it gets difficult. When that will be true and how best to do it are much more personal questions. That’s not something anyone should be dictating to anyone else.

Druidry and Dreaming

(Nimue)

If you’re looking for a small, everyday practice, there’s a lot to be said for daydreaming. It’s a surprisingly powerful thing to give time to.

Everything we do begins with an idea. If we’re acting unconsciously there’s a fair risk that the idea we’re acting on was not our own. Making change begins with inspiration. Daydreaming allows us to find and play with ideas and explore what we’re interested in. Time spent daydreaming allows us to consider our lives, wants, needs and feelings. The better a sense you have of what you want, the easier it is to see how to move in the right direction.

The more time you spend daydreaming, the less likely you are to have your wants defined by adverts and social pressure. Deliberately thinking about things that bring you joy and reflecting on good experiences drives out the commercial noise. If you’re on the Druid path the odds are that you want more time in nature, more peace and inspiration, more wonder and sacredness. Make room to think about it and you invite more of that in.

Daydreaming is a low carbon activity. It doesn’t hurt any other living being. Daydreaming time is time that isn’t spent working or consuming. Stepping off the capitalist treadmill for a while is liberating and restorative. It’s a meaningful act of resistance that will make you less vulnerable to these pressures the rest of the time. It’s also a really good form of self care. Daydreaming is restful and supports good mental health. You can combine it with wandering about, or physically resting depending on what your body most needs.

When you invite ideas in this way, you make room for inspiration to strike. Create space for the awen, and it will come to you. Inspiration is sacred and magical, so making room for it every day is a particularly powerful Druidic practice. As inspiration comes to you, you will find more options, more sense of direction, more clarity, priorities and so forth. If you are feeling stuck, or lost, then daydreaming is how you start to imagine a path into existence.

Close your eyes, take a few slow breaths, and see what comes to you.

The magic of not knowing

(Nimue)

Many religions exist to try and explain the mysteries of life and death. That’s never appealed to me. I think the not-knowing is part of what it means to be human. The longing for meaning and explanations is also part of what it means to be human. We want there to be a point, a purpose, and something to offer comfort in face of all the many challenges and the inevitability of death.

There is wonder in mystery, though. There’s more magic in the uncertainty than in any tale we might want to tell ourselves about it. However much we know, there will always be more to know. The universe is vast beyond anything we could hope to grasp. At the same time, a field is vast beyond anything we could hope to grasp. You could devote your entire life to trying to understand a single field, and there would always be more to learn. That, to me, seems incredibly magical.

I have a hunger for knowledge and a longing to understand whatever I encounter. Yet clearly I cannot understand more than a fraction of what I experience. There are also no absolute truths. All we have is our best understanding right now. If you look back at how people saw things in the past it seems fair to assume our understanding is also partial now, and we do not have everything figured out.

Truths are so often partial, slippery things, depending on context and perspective. My truth is not your truth. My truth today may well be overthrown by my experiences tomorrow. To be human is to be unsure.

The desire for certainty can lead us badly astray. It makes us more open to the snakeoil sellers who offer is their total conviction. It’s part of why conspiracy theories are often persuasive – because there is no element of doubt, while anyone with expertise will be more cautious. The person who says ‘this is the truth, this is how it works’ pushes a lot of emotional buttons. It’s a big part of what makes religion attractive in the first place – that promise of truth and meaning in face of the chaos and uncertainty.

Part of why I feel at home with Druidry is that we don’t deal in absolute truths. We’re each on our own journey, making sense of the world as best we can. Druidry gives us tools we can use to help navigate, but what sense we make of anything is individual. What meaning we settle on is the one we have found for ourselves – helped by guides, teachers or deities perhaps, but still with the individual Druid being responsible for the choices they make.

Can you really learn Druidry?

(Nimue)

Spend any time in online discussion spaces and you will run into people keen to tell you that you can’t learn Druidry.

The most usual reason is because the Druids are all long dead and didn’t write anything down. Therefore anyone claiming to be a modern Druid is fake, a scammer, or deluded. 

There are also the people who feel that the only way to learn Druidry is directly from nature. They never elaborate – do they watch the rain falling? Are they learning Druidry from trees, from yeast, from the tiny worms who live in their skin? They don’t say, because then they’d be teaching Druidry which obviously you can’t do because you can only learn it from nature…

I suspect quite a few of them are simply bad faith actors who like to come along and rubbish things. They can be annoying, frustrating and demoralising to encounter, which is why I wanted to write about it.

Modern Druidry exists. It is inspired by what we know about the past. Many  modern Druids do not claim to be doing anything ancient, while the genuine reconstructionists put in a lot of work trying to be as informed and authentic as they can be. A tradition doesn’t have to be ancient to be valid. If something works for you, then it doesn’t really matter if it was thought up last week, or a thousand years ago. Equally, age doesn’t make things good, there are plenty of old things (human sacrifice for example) that are not made good simply by being old ideas. 

It’s fine to be a modern Druid working with modern ideas and inspiration. There are many ways of doing your Druidry, and many ways of learning. I’ve learned a lot from people, but also from direct experiences of the land, the seasons and other living beings. You can learn in whatever way suits you,

It seems entirely pointless to me to devote time to telling people that what they do isn’t real, or valid. To me it seems to miss the way that the essence of spirituality is one of reaching after the impossible. Faith is intrinsically about what we don’t know, and any quest for meaning in this life is about resisting the apparent lack of meaning. 

To follow the Druid path is to make your own peace with what we do and don’t know about ancient Druids. It’s to choose something here and now, for whatever reasons that speak to you. For most of us that’s a journey we undertake with all the integrity we can muster. We learn from each other, from our own explorations and from whatever inspires us. 

In all aspects of life, there are people who will come along simply to tear you down. They do it because they have nothing better to bring, and because it gives them some small feeling of power. No matter what capacity you encounter them in, you owe them nothing. They are not entitled to demoralise you, or to take anything you value from you. They will claim their destructiveness is helpful realism, but they are wrong about this and I think some of them know that. Useful criticism helps a person grow and do better. If someone knocks you down, it doesn’t prove anything except that they are not kind. It doesn’t make them right, or useful. 

If you find yourself in spaces where people tell you that you cannot be a Druid, leave, and find better spaces.

Druidry and Projection

(Nimue)

We don’t have a huge amount of certainty when it comes to the Druids of ancient times. One of the consequences of this is that people project their own things into the space that leaves. How someone perceives ancient Druids usually says more about them than about anything historical. I have no doubt that it’s part of what makes Druidry attractive, that it seems to offer space for whatever you want.

When we come at something with assumptions – as we all so often do – it can be hard to see how those assumptions are colouring our interpretation of the evidence. To give a simple case in point, archaeology is prone to assuming anything that makes no immediate sense probably relates to religion and ritual. Much of it could just as well be sport. As thought experiments, I like asking what sense the ancient past might make if we assumed bureaucracy as an explanation sometimes.

Rituals aren’t just religious. A lot of social, and political things have ritualistic aspects to them. Rituals can be displays of power, ways of making people conform, ways of building or enforcing identity. Sports often have similar things going on – the symbols, the chanting, the praying, the crowd willing the participants to act in certain ways.

The willingness to read ‘ritual’ into the past and not sports or administration has a lot to do with what we believe about history in the first place. If you think our ancestors were primitive, ignorant and superstitious then the idea that they do inexplicable things for religious reasons makes a lot more sense. It’s not the only way of reading the available evidence.

One of the things the ancient Druids can reveal to us (if we let them) are our own beliefs and biases. In thinking about who we want the ancient Druids to have been, we reveal a lot about who we are. This has everyday applications. The more aware we are of what we might be projecting onto the world, the better a chance we have at seeing through our own assumptions to encounter something other than ourselves. Discovering your own assumptions is a good thing to do in terms of developing self knowledge. Once you know what your filters are, you can decide how you want to handle them.

I choose to try and see the best in people. I’m quite aware of the ways that has tripped me up in the past and likely will do again. I give the benefit of the doubt where I can, and assume people are doing things for the best reasons… and sometimes they really aren’t and it doesn’t play out well for me. I choose this because I find it preferable to projecting my anxieties onto the world. I don’t want to go round looking out for the worst in everyone and expecting to be stabbed in the back. It’s no way to live. 

The projection that I’m currently working on is the belief that people know what they are doing and act deliberately. I have made a lot of mistakes based on that assumption and I need to get to grips with it. Meanwhile I am going to allow myself the idea that the Druids of old were wise, insightful people acting in considered ways, because I very much want that to have been true.

Everyday Compassion

(Nimue)

One of the more powerful things we can choose as part of our everyday Druidry, is compassion. Small acts of care and kindness can get a great deal done.

Compassion can take many forms. It can mean being patient with someone else and avoiding getting angry with other people who are struggling. Listening to others can be really supportive, as can simply taking someone else seriously even when their experiences are different from your own. 

We can consider the many ways in which we might treat ourselves with more compassion. Meeting our own needs and holding ourselves to functional, sustainable standards is an important part of this. In so doing we can also model better ways of being that might well help and encourage anyone who encounters it. Refusing to celebrate toxic work cultures is a good place to start. Making time for rest and gentleness and encouraging others to do the same is a good one. Taking care of yourself often aligns with doing things that are more environmentally friendly. 

When we treat ourselves gently, it’s easier to be kind to others. If you internalise pressures to perform, to work relentlessly, to look a certain way then this will likely make you miserable. Rather than being angry with the internalised capitalism, its all too easy to be angry with other people. The more we compete with each other and resent each other the unhappier we are likely to be. The person who can delight in the joy and success of others has a happier time of it and won’t struggle to treat others well.

When we treat each other gently we are less likely to experience conflict or  the stress and misery that can cause. When we experience ourselves as kind, patient people who make good contributions to whatever we’re part of, we get to feel better about ourselves. Warmth invites warmth.

There are of course people who mistake kindness for weakness and who see gentleness as an excuse for exploitation. Compassionate responses sometimes need a wider view. Calling out a bully is an act of compassion to anyone everyone they hurt, even if it makes the person being called out uncomfortable. Tackling prejudice, misinformation, unkindness and selfishness can make room for better things. This needs balancing against what resources you have, and what you can afford to deal with. It’s important not to confuse being nice with being compassionate. Sometimes compression is complicated and challenging. Being nice in some situations can enable cruelty to continue.

Small acts of care can get a lot done. I want to thank everyone who has sent messages of support to Keith via this blog – I have been passing those along. This support is really helping him and he appreciates it, so thank you for that.

Changing your everyday practice

(Nimue)

When spiritual people talk about an everyday practice it can sound like you’re supposed to pick a thing and do it forever. This isn’t’t the case. It can be easier if you pick to do the same thing at the same time every day because then you know where it fits in. That doesn’t suit everyone.

If having an everyday practice doesn’t work for you, that’s fine. It’s totally acceptable to show up at the frequency that suits you. The most important question to ask is – what do you need from this? Once a week? Eight festivals a year? It’s all good.

An everyday practice doesn’t have to mean doing exactly the same thing every day. I tend to make a little space for meditation and contemplation and that’s usually on waking or when when settling at night, but not always. What I do varies a lot. I’ve talked about some of the specific things I’ve worked on – like having conversations with my gut inhabitants. Some meditations I visit regularly and these tend to be the ones that help my body relax. The rest of the time I explore and experiment and do things for as long as they make sense to me.

You have to try things to see if they work for you. Small everyday practices can include prayer, taking a moment with your altar, watching the sunrise, movement-based meditations, gratitude, journaling, making affirmations and more. Different times may call for different things. You will also need to try different things to figure out how they work for you.

When you’re new to something it is worth giving it a few weeks to see how you do with it. When starting out with anything it’s reasonable to feel awkward about it, especially if you’re new to having a spiritual practice. You might feel foolish or self-conscious, second guess the point of what you’re doing, worry about not being good enough and other potentially self-sabotaging things. So you have to give yourself long enough to get past that and see how you feel then.

It’s good to re-assess what you’re doing, and to do so regularly. If something has become more routine than ritual, it probably isn’t serving you anymore. If you’ve tried something and after a few weeks you aren’t getting into it then maybe try something else for a while. Think about what results you were expecting to get and whether those were realistic – especially if you were trying to do something more ambitious.

Simply checking in with yourself can be a really good fixed daily practice. Taking a moment to ask ‘how do I feel?’ and ‘what do I need?’ can help guide what you do the rest of the time. Do you need to get out and feel the air on your skin today? Do you need movement or rest? Do you need to soothe your mind or stimulate it? Give yourself permission to be a bit complicated and messy, and let your feelings and inspiration guide you.

Spirits of place

(Nimue)

We don’t know what the ancient Druids thought about spirits of place. We do know from the Romans that they gathered in oak groves and had a bit of a thing about mistletoe. This not being especially sensational, it’s likely to be true. We also know that Celtic peoples honoured a lot of Godds and that many of them were associated with specific places and were probably not worshipped widely. 

The idea of working with spirits of place is something we find in modern Druidry, and I’m not claiming there’s anything historical about it. However, based on what we do know about the beliefs of Celtic peoples, it seems fair to assume that modern and ancient Druidry have things in common around this concept.

The line between very local deities and spirits of place isn’t a clear one. Once you’re talking about a river, a well, a hill or a cave with a deity associated I’m not sure it makes any sense to try and categorise them as separate things. Deities who belong to specific places and who cannot meaningfully be honoured anywhere else are arguably spirits of place.

Spirits of place are everywhere. They are what dwells in a place – seen or unseen. Many of them have no interest in humans – consider the microfauna in the leaflitter, tiny insects in the tree bark or bugs living amongst the feathers of birds. We are unlikely to have anything much to say to each other. Some presences have more impact on humans – as with the trees and the birds. Connecting to these kinds of presences is a very different sort of process than trying to engage with a deity.

At the moment, David is sharing his explorations of working with the Morrigan. I’m struck by how different a path it is from working with spirits of place. There cleary are areas of overlap between the divine manifesting at a local level, and other kinds of local presence. Working with spirits of place has not (so far) offered me anything much to help directly with my own challenges. What it gives me is a sense of belonging and involvement that means a great deal to me, but does not direct me in any particular way.

I think it will be interesting to juxtapose these two different approaches as David and I seek sacredness and connection in radically different ways.

What’s it like to be a Druid?

(Guest blog by Mikalobakus)

Actually, rather like being a human being on a daily basis.

But it depends on the type of human being. Druids are a diverse and ragged edged group, self defined and accepting all comers, up to a point. If you are too far from common Druid thought and practice, probably nobody will try to kick you out, but you may find, and others may point out, that not much is gained, for you or anyone else, from you doing Druid things. And if you become disruptive, you will be encouraged to step aside.

The most fundamental idea in Druidry, for me, is the integration of mankind within nature, both collectively and individually. We are part of the universe, and, through our numbers and our technology, have a critical role to play in the web of life on our planet. We have a fundamental obligation not to mess it up as we are doing at the moment. Similarly, as individuals, we have an obligation to nurture and respect the natural world around us, including the other human beings we may affect by our choices or actions.

For most Druids a significant part of this is a belief in some form of collective consciousness, or spirituality. The spiritual universe is integrated with the physical universe, and may or may not be home to spiritual beings – deities, elementals, spirits of place, souls of the living and/or the dead – maybe all of these, and a selection of others! I try to respect all beliefs in this area so long as they reflect the ideas of integration and mutual respect. A lot of us believe in the use of spiritual connections (prayers, rituals, magic, offerings, …) to gain a wider insight into our universe, and/or to influence the outcome of events in the physical by interacting with the spiritual. Others will see it as mainly or wholely affecting the participants, providing synchronisation, inspiration, motivation, and ideas to the individuals involved. Or both – whatever works for you is fine by me.

Another basic idea, at least for me, is the individual within the group. Every one of us has a personal life path which we make for ourselves, within the universe as we see it and as it affects us in a multitude of ways. Our most important responsibility is to ourselves – our physical, spiritual and material welfare, our growth and development, and our contribution to the groups to which we belong. These form a heirarchy, sometimes overlapping – family, spiritual, friends, community, locality, …., planet, universe. All of these have different interactions, and some are more important than others, depending in part on the politics and administration of the place where you live. This has to be approached in a pragmatic but principled way – if something is wrong, but you have no effective way to influence it, record the fact, sign the petition, and get on with something else. But at the same time, the groups have responsibilities towards you – again depending a lot on where they are in the heirarchy. Do not be afraid to give to or to accept help from a group, and do not adopt an accounting mentality. But at the same time, look after yourself. Emergencies apart, you do no good by giving all you have and then calling for help in the morning!

A personal devewlopment path I find useful is through knowledge, understanding, wisdom, and empathy. First find out the facts as far as possible, analyse them together and in the immediate context, review the facts and conclusions, then look at the wider environment to seek underlying causes, unexpected effects, wider implications. Look for balance and harmony wherever possible, and consider the lives and circumstances of those affected now and likely to be affected in the future. This can obviously be an iterative process at any level, and often is. Doing this can often reveal the complexities of a situation, or illustrate a way forward that was not obvious at the start. At least it can avoid robbing Peter to pay Paul, or jumping on a bandwaggon.

We are unique human beings, and we have a unique basket of talents and abilities. These need to be developed to the point where we can run day to day life, but beyond that I am always looking for things that I can do better than those in my groups. That way my personal improvement provides a growing resource for the group, rather than simply satisfaction for myself.