contemplativeinquiry

Early this morning, I re-dedicated my contemplative inquiry. Yesterday was my 67^th birthday. It seems like a good moment for re-visioning and renewal.  I recently received my Sophia icon from Hrana Janto* and finally understood that my contemplative inquiry is itself my Way of Sophia. I don’t see this as a project – more as an ongoing life practice. My contemplative Druid work and exploration of the Headless Way are aspects of inquiry, and this re-dedication is an integrating move.

The original dedication was at Samhain 2011. It assumed a Druid and specifically OBOD context, and I did see it as a project. I didn’t give it a timescale, but later I thought in terms of 5 years. The re-dedication comes a few months short of that, at a time when – amidst many continuities – there has been a clear shift in focus.

Today I made use of the icon, entered into a reflective space, before deepening into an Innerworld journey. Working with imagery puts me in a realm of what James Hillman (1) understands by ‘soul’ work. For him, soul (or psyche, or anima) is “a perspective, rather than a substance, a view point towards things rather than a thing in itself … by soul, I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy – that mode which recognizes all meanings as primarily symbolic or metaphorical”. For Hillman, soul makes meaning possible and turns events into experiences. It is communicated in love, and characteristically has a religious concern.

In my morning ritual, I open my heart to the wisdom of Sophia and gaze at my icon.  I remember and appreciate the initial inquiry – writing articles for OBOD’s member journal Touchstone; gradually bringing people together, holding the first events, launching the Contemplative Druidry Facebook Group, connecting with people in other Druid bodies (The Druid Network and Order of the Sacred Nemeton in particular); developing a monthly meeting cycle for the home group; writing the Contemplative Druidry book, offering contemplative Druid events to the wider Druid and fellow-travelling public, including both day retreats and a residential. This feels good to recall, because sometimes I think that the project hasn’t spread very far or been widely understood, mostly through my own limitations and relative reclusiveness. Here I can focus on what has been achieved, and allow myself to recognize that there is something to appreciate.

Completing this period of reflection, I close my eyes and slip into Sophia’s Innerworld nemeton, which takes the form of a walled garden. At the centre is a fountain surrounded by four rose beds separated by run-offs. Two of the beds hold white roses, and two hold red. There are seats around the fountain, big enough for two people, on all four sides. The rest of the garden is more of an orchard with many kinds of fruit tree, including some trained up the garden walls. These walls are brick, and have an eighteenth century feel.  The orchard isn’t over-manicured. It might indeed be described as slightly unkempt, though not with any sense of neglect. When I visit this garden, the Sophia of the icon may sit opposite or beside me. But she may also take different forms – a dove, a rose, a tree, the fountain itself. She may be another bird or creature that turns up in the space. She may be sunlight in a drop of water. I may also experience her as all of it, so that goddess and nemeton are one. She is always a friend and guide.

This time she is in her icon form, though the dove is in a tree and the chalice by her side as she sits opposite me, in the late May dawn, east facing west. I go into my headless state and know that the same is true of her. But the context (the Innerworld, in this garden, with Sophia) changes the state, making it more intimate, relational and local. I like it. In my heart, I have more care about the particularities, indeed vagaries, of the writing than the pristine emptiness of the paper that holds them, though both perspectives matter and they do belong together. If form is nothing but emptiness, and emptiness nothing but form, then what we always have is paper being written on, and it is the story writing itself that mostly draws a storying monkey like me.

As this thought, within my living dream of the garden, passes through, Sophia comes to sit beside me. We are simply companionable, watching the fountain, as the clear fresh water bubbles up. It is from an inexhaustible spring. In this archetypal garden setting, Sophia renews an eternal pledge – that wisdom’s commitment is to extend and transmute knowledge, and not to repress it. And in this moment the garden, the fountain and Sophia begin to fade …

I came away from my ritual of re-dedication feeling encouraged and refreshed, and a new cycle begins from here.

*http://Hrana.Janto.com

(1) Hillman, James The essential James Hillman: A blue fire London: Routledge, 1990. (Introduced and edited by Thomas Moore)