When I walked out this morning, my fingers felt cold inside their gloves. Visually I enjoyed the interplay of strong light and strong shade. The sky overhead was blue. Without seeing it directly I felt the presence of the sun. When I did find it and stepped into its path I found it dazzling and warm. I hadn’t expected the warmth. When I checked the temperature I noticed that it was rising, though not by much.
This, for me, was the sign that the sun was back after the long Midwinter moment that marks the turn of the year where I live. It helped that we were free of fog, rain and snow. Whatever comes next, Ì can tell myself that I have lived to greet another rising year together with my wife Elaine. A moment to cherish and celebrate.
Twelve years ago (1) I wrote about the paidirean (pahj-urinn) prayer beads of the Ceile De or Culdee movement (2). In its current iteration this is a modern monastic order based in Scotland with a lay following in other parts of the world. It looks back to the early Celtic church once influential in Ireland, Scotland and north-east England. The post referenced above (1) describes my relationship with the beads at the time.
Now, coming back to this beautiful artifact, I am principally focused on the cross – an equal armed and circled silver cross that hangs from the beads – at heart level when worn as a necklace. This form of cross is an ancient symbol, sacred to many people in many cultures, often understood as a sun wheel, and not specific to Celtic Christianity. It is sometimes called the balanced, or peaceful, cross.
For me, this cross is a more fundamental image than the awen symbol, which I can also wear as a pendant, appropriately sitting at the level of my throat. The silver cross maps a whole imaginal world: four directions or winds – east, south, west, north; four powers – light, life, love, law; four elements- air, fire, water, earth; four guardians – hawk, stag, salmon, bear; four qualities – vision, purpose, wisdom, faith; four times of day – sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight; four seasons – spring and early growth, summer and ripening, autumn and bearing fruit, winter, dying and regeneration. Having a liturgy to this effect, casting a circle and calling for peace as a regular practice, marinate me in a certain way of spiritual life. Wearing this cross confirms and declares it.
In my light energy work, the disc becomes a radiant sphere that holds me. For there is a vertical dimension. Horizontally I hold my hands out palms raised and the energy flows out from heart through outstretched arms and to my hands. Vertically it flows in both directions from my heart to my feet and the earth and also to my brow and above my head. But the source of this radiance is the energy behind the heart and the still emptiness behind the energy. This flow is an open system. Energy also comes back. My energy sphere is porous to the world. I like the illustration on the bag below because it shows an empty circle at the centre. This does not feature on the pendant itself, but to me empathises the divine power at the centre from which I am not separate. It is good to reconnect with an carrier of healing and insight which I appeared to have left behind. I am grateful that it was still here for me when I was ready to reconnect.
It is very close to the turn of the year. The sun is now setting on 2024. The sunset pictures above and below are from 15 December at 4pm, taken from a balcony window. Vivid imagery after long days of sunless grey. It feels weird and alien, almost as if I’m looking out on another planet. 2024 has often felt like that, at times beautiful, at times scary and disorienting, at times a test of endurance.
Looking back at 2024 in a seasonal but non-festive way, I find a hard year with extraordinary moments. Personally, it was dominated by my wife Elaine’s accident in Gran Canaria and her gradual and ongoing recovery. A roller coaster of a year. Currently I feel good about my spiritual inquiry and practice, which I experience as a great blessing. But I do not want to impose any expectations on 2025. Let the new year be what it will.
Stars in a night sky. Candles in a dark room. Cleverly crafted decorations for Yule. These, for me, are ideal images of light in winter. When I came into Druidry, I was moved by the liturgical use of the phrase ‘the illumination of lights’. In a reality of many lights, which can also be a reality of one light and many lamps, the light is not overwhelming.
Darkness makes light bearable when containing a plurality of lights. There is space for freedom here, and likewise space for relationship and connection. This winter, I am not energetically hibernating, as I sometimes do. I find myself going deeply into Innerworld landscapes and connections in a way I have become unused to in recent years. Yet I do not feel alone or self-absorbed. I feel like a little light in a field of lights, each contributing its own individual illumination to the field, whist nested in a nurturing dark. It feels like the right focus for the time of year, and the end of 2024.
In my Druid circle, I associate the northern quarter with faith. The quality and context of faith are not defined. They could simply mean faith in the practice and path. My contemplative inquiry overall has tended towards a stance of ‘sacred agnosticism’ (1), in which faith is not emphasised. This has served me in many ways. I have avoided mixing up the idea of ‘faith’ with affiliation to authoritarian movements, mandated beliefs, or the surrender of self-responsibility and personal discernment. I have been alert to the metaphysical group think and consensus collusion that can show up in any spiritual movement (other kinds of movement too). I have done my best to gather and evaluate information skilfully, when developing principles about how to live ethically and gracefully in an increasingly scary world.
And yet … this is not the whole story, or I would feel spiritually malnourished. In recent months I have experienced a strong felt sense of the divine. When I describe myself as ‘living presence in a field of living presence in a more than human world’ – an animist identification – the identification now seems more than animist, though the animism is still there. I pray more congruently to the Goddess as Ancient Mother and talk, less anthropomorphically, about the ‘bubbling source from which I spring’. The Divine is beyond name, form or description – and some people prefer a specialist, capitalised use of rather abstract terms like Consciousness, Awareness, Void, Ground of Being. But the ones from my own practice are the ones that work for me. They come from the intuitive heart and the imagination. To me they offer a deeper knowing, though I am personally cautious about the use of the word gnosis. For me, it can reduce the sense of mystery, banishing the creative role of faith itself.
I have become a provisional panentheist, experiencing intimations of a divine which is everywhere and no-where, and from which we are not separate. This partly reprises work I did in the earlier days of my inquiry using the framework of non-duality. Now I find panentheism a better term than non-duality for affirming both the divine and the world. The earth spirituality in the Druid tradition is in no way compromised by a panentheist perspective. If anything it is enhanced.
This post is about Hillfield Gardens (1,2) and the taste of psychic rejuvenation. Just being there, actively opening to the elemental energies of place and time, I felt confident, happy and strong.
The early morning of 20 November was misty and dark in a slushy, miserable kind of way; closed in and confining rather than magical and mysterious. Elaine and I catastrophised together in gloomy harmony about skies made unfriendly by perpetual drizzle and pavements made treacherous by hidden ice. The term stir crazy came up for me. We have begun to expect fresh air and activity outside the home. This time we planned to be in separate spaces. They are good in themselves and healthy for us as a partnership. So the tension of anticipated disappointment was in the air, for a long moment in a dull morning.
Then everything changed, with clear blue sky and sun. After an early lunch, I could wheel Elaine to her creative arts event and then fully stretch my legs in a walk to Hillfield Gardens. When I got there I slowed down again and shifted from a doing mode to a being mode. I became porous to the world – at once disappearing into it and expanding to embrace it. The snow on the ground looked beautiful to me and a crinkly fallen leaf both modified the picture and enhanced the look. William Blake once famously wrote: “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite” This brief eternal time (being in two worlds at once) – with the snow on the ground, and the fallen leaf – was like that, or at least something which pointed towards it. I feel tremendous gratitude for the experience. In its afterglow, I found myself feeling confident, happy and strong.
At a reduced level of intensity, I continued my walk. Below, My attention was drawn by a seat, and the snow around it, in a secluded corner of the gardens. Sun shone freely on the buildings, and the bushes, but reached only a small area on the seat.
In the most wooded and unmanicured section of the gardens, I found snow still present on a section of cleared space and pathway. Elsewhere there was no trace of it, even in this relatively shadowed space.
On the buildings below – blue sky, sun and shadow. In the picture below snow is just discernible on a rooftop and in a garden. During the period of my walk (1-1.30 pm) the gardens visibly changed. The snow was retreating and shadows continued to shift.
It wasn’t a long walk – twenty minutes each way for the sake of my legs and thirty in the garden. It was enough. I took away the psychic rejuvenation I named at the beginning of this post. The experience was both mystical and ordinary, a place where the ‘spiritual’ and ‘mundane’ are one – and big part of how I live my Druidry.
(2) NOTE: At the beginning of April 2024 I discovered Hillfield Gardens – a little outside the centre of Gloucester, yet still in easy walking distance (or an easy bus ride) from where I live. Originally the gardens of a large house, Hillfield Gardens are about 1.6 hectares in extent. They are managed by a Friends Group on behalf of Gloucestershire County Council. For me the gardens are a tranquil space, different in feeling-tone from other local parks.
It’s about 3.45 pm on Thursday 14 November. For a few precious days there has been blue sky and a visible sun in my neighbourhood. But the days themselves are short and the sun is already falling in the sky. Its rays are brightly visible and they beautifully catch the leaves – those still on their trees, and those already on the ground. But much of the ground, apart from the carefully tended green lawns, is darker and more shadowy. It feels like a last hurrah of autumn before it gives way to winter.
I enjoy the park and the way that it is laid out. It is highly used and valued, and an important lung for the city. I am glad to have it here in Gloucester. Today is a quiet time, good for contemplation. It is easy to walk to from where I live and a good place to be with the land and the trees. My visits don’t require long periods of time or present much physical challenge. This is good for me at a time when I am unavailable for heroic physical journeys but very open to the magic of what is.
For more than a decade, my spiritual practice has been mobilised around a contemplative inquiry. For me, this has been successful in its own terms, but I’m conscious now of something missing. It’s as if, for earnest, intelligent and ethical reasons, I have whitewashed the walls in the church of me. Now I want my murals back. So, recently I have started a course correction.
This course correction includes a glance back at my own pre-inquiry practices, happily well documented. The image of Modron and Mabon used to walk with me: Modron as the primal mother and Mabon as the primal child (2). They were archetypal figures, not everyday humans. My understanding was that these names were from a pre-Celtic language, retained in Brythonic speech. I am not sure if this is true, but for me it offered the possibility that even the surviving Celtic stories (3) were not the first. I was free to dream. In this dreaming I was powerfully influenced by the image at the top of this post (received as a midwinter holiday gift from my wife, then partner, Elaine, in 2007) and by the Silver on the Tree song that follows.
I see the child in the image as androgyne, and not in their earliest infancy. In the song, Mabon is not gendered. The mother in the picture is clearly the Goddess as Mother. Different stories can be drawn from this. In my own journey I tilt the child back somewhat to the masculine. In this pairing, She is Zoe, the life eternal. He is Bios, the life that comes and goes and comes again. Like Taliesin (4), transmuting out of his identity as Gwion, Mabon becomes in a sense his own father. So my midwinter picture appears to reference the Christmas story, but in important ways diverges from it. The image shows a magical midwinter child, who will indeed have an illuminating and transformational influence, but who is not exactly a redeemer in the Christian sense. This is drawn out in the Silver in the Tree song, which includes specifically Celtic references and extends beyond them.
Both Mother and Child live strongly within me, in the imaginal realm. I like and use the old language, Modron and Mabon, because of its sense of ancient mystery. But what it points to is universal. Part of my work now is to re-open my contact with them, who after another fashion I also am.
(1) Silver in the Tree in their 1991 album Eye of the Aeon
(2) NOTE: I am aware that there are divergent visions of Mabon. One centred the Autumn Equinox has become powerful and influential in recent years. Happily modern Druidry is not a religion of the Book though it is enriched by its books. This new literature follows the oral tradition practice of allowing stories to evolve and change in divergent directions. I see this as a strength.
(3) Caitlin Matthews Mabon and the Guardians of Celtic Britain: Hero Myths in the Mabinogion Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2002 (Revised edition of Mabon and the Mysteries of Britain, 1987)
(4) If you visit Loch Maben in Dumfriesshire, in south west Scotland, you may find the feeling-tone similar to the much larger Lake Bala, strongly associated with Taliesin, in north Wales.
Contemplative Inquiry 