Contemplative Druidry | Contemplative Inquiry

January 3, 2015

FAIRY TALES, ANIMAL HELPERS AND ‘THE PROBLEM OF GOOD’

Recently I came across an article about fairy tales, which included brief reviews of several books and some general observations. The author was Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Communion. Below, and without further comment from me, I include an extract which caught my attention.

“There is a clear strand of social resistance running through much of the old material, a strand repeatedly weakened, in not denied, by nervous rewriting. But this depends on the conviction underlying all this sort of storytelling: that the world is irrationally generous as well as unfairly hurtful. There is no justice but there is a potentially hopeful side to anarchy, and we cannot tell in advance where we will find solidarity. Or, to put it in more theological terms, there is certainly a problem of evil in the way the world goes. Yet there is also a ‘problem of good’ – utterly unexpected and unscripted resources in unlikely places. And at the very least this suggests to the audience for the tale a more speculatively hopeful attitude to the non-human environment as well as to other people. Just be careful how you treat a passing fox, hedgehog or thrush.”

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January 1, 2015

POEM: WOLF VOICE

Happy New Year to all readers of this post! My very best wishes for 2015. I offer a poem by Martin Pallot, a wolf’s life-world in the northern winter.

Martin is my fourth poet from the collection ‘Moon Poets: Six Pagan poets’ published by Moon Books and edited by Trevor Greenfield. Martin has been writing poetry since the early 1980s, mainly inspired by Nature and his pagan beliefs. He admires the early poets and story tellers and the way they engaged the ear, as well as the mind of their audience, and encourages people to say his poetry as well as just reading it. The collection as a whole also includes work by Tiffany Chaney, Lorna Smithers, Robin Herne, Romany Rivers and Beverley Price.

Wolf Voice

Wolf, howling to the moon,

The wind hears your words,

The earth feels your voice,

Sending out your spirit sound,

Calling to the great She wolf

Who shakes the stars from her fur.

Loping in the light of her one great eye,

Silver, shadowing the pack path,

Snow, scented by the passing prey,

Guides you on your killing way.

The trackless whiteness,

Sculpted by spirits of the air,

Into shape of deer and bison.

These insubstantial ghosts,

A pulsating presence in your

Preternatural eye.

When the kill is made,

The pack song rises,

To thank the She Wolf

For her gift of life,

To the den of generations.

And the moon,

Resting on a bed

Of winter branches,

Smiles, to hear

The voice of Wolf.

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December 29, 2014

‘CELEBRATE … MORE THAN’: SHARING A PRACTICE

Earlier in December I shared ‘Awen space’, a Druid contemplative practice from my local group. Today I’m sharing something from my solo morning practice. It’s a set of statements that originally grew out of a traditional ‘who am I?’ inquiry but have now morphed into something else. They are partly a means of scanning and personal review – and partly a celebration or even re-enchantment of identity, supporting a gradual shift in my experienced centre of gravity.

The specific statements may look fixed but in practice they are in process: they shift and evolve over time. My rule of thumb is that they have to describe experiences I live and embody, or have at least touched into. I can borrow other people’s language, but I can’t use anything here on a purely liturgical or aspirational basis. I find this a dynamic and valuable way of working, I think largely because tailored to my emergent experience and understanding. If taken off the shelf, as a formula, these statements might not have had so much power. I suspect that this is a form of practice that has to be customised by the individual practitioner to work well, despite (or even because of) its transpersonal direction.

I celebrate my body and my senses – and I am more than my body and my senses.

I celebrate my life energy – and I am more than my life energy.

I celebrate my feelings, thoughts and images – and I am more than these.

I celebrate my everyday self-sense and the web of story it weaves – and I am more than that everyday self-sense.

I am the song in the heart; I am the healer in the heart; I am the wisdom in the heart.

I am the space inside the breath, and the stillness in that space.

Living presence, in a field of living presence.

Already enough and already at home. Awen.

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December 26, 2014

UNCONQUERED SUN

Yesterday’s post from the Antinous for Everybody blog,

Antinous for Everybody

The obscure, mysterious Mother

bears the radiant, obvious Son.

He is glorious in His self-giving,

triumphant sacrifice, but She

is the necessary ground

of His being and of ours.

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December 24, 2014

POEM: CIRCLE OF THE SOUL

A third poet from the collection ‘Moon Poets: Six Pagan poets’ published by Moon Books and edited by Trevor Greenfield. Tiffany Chaney is a poet and artist residing in North Carolina. Her poetry collection Between Blue and Grey won the 2013 Mother Vine Festival Award for Best in poetry. Tiffany can be found on http://www.tiffanychaney.com/

The collection as a whole also includes work by Lorna Smithers, Robin Herne, Romany Rivers, Martin Pallot and Beverley Price.

Circle of the Soul

Wake,

wake the witness,

silent Sulis

of the pond.

Pretend the nameless

are named.

Pretend the formless

are framed.

Wake,

wake the witness.

Wait,

until it is your turn

of the wheel.

Satiate

the self with

the making of souls,

until having played

pretend you can fall

asleep again.

Wake, and witness,

so we may recall.

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December 22, 2014

GOOD WILL

Dissolving into the dark, in a deeply receptive state, I find myself entertaining the word ‘will’, which soon morphs into ‘good will’.

Midwinter is traditionally a season of good will. I notice that I do feel largely at peace in my personal world, though distressed by many aspects of the bigger picture. Right now I’m experiencing a state of good will and I’d like to offer my good will to anyone who reads this post.

I’m also thinking about ‘will’, including good will, in another way. After the stasis, the turn. The seed of the turn is in the stasis; an awareness and anticipation of movement even in the moment when the sun seems at rest. A part of me is already looking forward, throwing my imagination before me, consciously willing, crafting intent.

This year my Contemplative Druidry book began to map out some potentials for contemplative practice based in Druidry, as seen by the book’s contributors, and the Contemplative Druid Events blog on www.contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com is a vehicle to set out what we are offering. There will be more to come – mostly emphasising half day sessions and one-day ‘contemplative days’. Whilst this activity is growing, I want to work more deeply at mapping possible relationships between the contemplative aspect of spirituality and its ritual and magical aspects (however defined) and its ethical (and by extension political) aspects. My starting point is that they all involve the issue of where we choose to put our attention, and how we enact and sustain our choices intentionally. ‘Will’ is a key term, and what we mean by will is a key inquiry.

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December 16, 2014

POEM: WEPWAWET

Another poem from the collection ‘Moon Poets: Six Pagan poets’ published by Moon Books and edited by Trevor Greenfield. This one is by Robin Herne, “educator, poet, storyteller, artist, dog-owner and Druid”, whose passion for mythologies extends beyond the Celtic world to the ancient Greek and (as in this poem) Egyptian cultures. Robert’s public blog can be found at http://roundtheherne.blogspot.co.uk/

The collection as a whole also includes work by Lorna Smithers, Tiffany Chaney, Romany Rivers, Martin Pallot and Beverley Price.

Wepwawet

Awaken in peace

Beloved of the sun.

Awaken in peace

Follower of the moon.

Desert wanderer

Maker of tracks

In the pathless wastes

Grey light in a red land.

The door is bolted to me

Confined within my mind.

Opener of the ways,

Unlock what I cannot.

Let me ride besides you

In the barque of Re,

Worlds open before us.

Danger abounds, my soul yearns!

Howling in the darkness,

I shiver to your hot breath.

Let me be open, let me be open

And live, let me not sleep.

Robin Herne writes: “the Egyptian deity Wepwawet is known as the Opener of the Ways, and stands at the head of the sun god’s ship unlocking the doors that lead into Dwat, the Underworld, as the sun goes down in the west, and opening the doors back into the land of the living as the sun rises in the East. Establishing Egyptian metre is difficult owing to the uncertainty over precisely how words should be pronounced. However, surviving examples of poetry make use of frequently repeated phrases, much like musical refrains.”

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December 15, 2014

THE MYSTIC SENSE

In his book on Zen Paganism (1), Tom Swiss has a chapter called The Mystic Sense. He includes Mystic, a poem by D.H. Lawrence.

They call all experiences of the

senses mystic, when the

experience is considered.

So an apple becomes mystic

when I taste in it

the summer and the snows, the

wild welter of earth

and the insistence of the sun.

Swiss notes, “one specific, wonderful deep type of beauty comes … from the perception of a relationship between our immediate subjective experience and the broader world”. He adds that depending on our social conditioning and religious training we may come to conceptualise this in terms like ‘cosmic consciousness’, ‘the presence of the divine’, ‘the perception of emptiness’, a feeling of ‘oneness with the universe’, or of ‘sacredness’ or an experience of ‘no-mind’. They are all expressions of the mystical sense, and we have entered a period in which we can let go of any residual belief that this sense is a rare possession, or the exclusive province of a few spiritual specialists and champions.

The way we make meaning and find a language for such experiences may still be heavily conditioned by culture and still be used to justify the truth of dogmas that have in reality “only provided a filter” and “determined what color glasses” we are wearing when we “behold the Clear Light”. But behold it we do, in many different ways, and “with practice we can develop this sense”. Indeed we can “even manage to perceive the mystical experience from multiple perspectives, to swap the glasses for a couple of different colors”. In this context, Swiss reminds us that “this is one of the goals of ceremonial magic, as practised by occultists and Pagans” and not at all confined to still, meditative states.

Swiss, Tom (2013) Why Buddha touched the earth: Zen Paganism for the 21^st. century Stafford, UK: Megalithica books

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December 12, 2014

SWEET AWEN: A POEM

Sweet Awen

sing me a song

of direction

down hills,

over terraces,

past old mills

and factories.

Sing me a song

of poppies and bees

where the bramble

unbridled roams

hedgerows with ease.

Sing me a song

where the first fruits

are born by the light

of a sun who has never

known war.

Sing me a song

where loss no longer

beats like a smith

at her forge

in the summer’s heat.

Sing me the years

that I’ll never meet.

Sweet Awen

sing to me

my impossibilities.

A poet’s take on Awen, in the traditional sense of poetic and vatic inspiration, written by Lorna Smithers who is a poet and Druid based in Lancashire. This poem is from the collection ‘Moon Poets: Six Pagan poets’ published by Moon Books and edited by Trevor Greenfield. The collection also includes work by Robin Herne, Tiffany Chaney, Romany Rivers, Martin Pallot and Beverley Price.

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December 11, 2014

AWEN SPACE

I’ve heard it said that attempting to describe actual spiritual practice is folly. It’s like pinning up butterflies for display – you retain the husk whilst losing the flight. But sometimes the endeavour seems worth the risk. I want to talk about the group practice of ‘awen space’ that forms a part of my Druidry.

My local contemplative Druid group met for two hours last Tuesday, 9 December. We connect for two hours in the afternoon on the second Tuesday of every month, except for May and November – a pattern that has now lasted for just over a year. In those months we meet for a full Saturday, sometime after the festivals of Beltane and Samhain. The days offer the advantage of time for a greater variety of practice, the presence of people from outside our local catchment area, and an introductory space for new members. 19 people are now at least provisionally involved, and we have decided to close the group. The Tuesday sessions offer a greater sense of continuity, a more intimate atmosphere, and even greater focus and simplicity. Attendance currently fluctuates between five and nine. This week eight of us were present.

Our usual structure for a two hour session tends to be

Pre-meeting for greetings and refreshments
Entry into sacred space through a brief ritual opening
Group check in
A period of silent sitting meditation (about 20 minutes)
A move into the awen field (for about 35-40 minutes)
Group check-out
Exit from sacred space
Farewells

Although our use of ritual is lean and parsimonious, it is a very important part of this process. It is the first step in making our attention intentional, and in turning a domestic hearth into a nemeton. Over time, we have tended to favour putting our personal check-ins and check-outs within the nemeton, since we are entering into sacred relationship as well as sacred space, tuning into each other as part of the practice – not just as a preliminary or warm-up. We use a talking stick process for this, to emphasise the intentional and ritualised aspect of what we are doing.

I think of the awen space as being the most distinctive part of the session. We enter the space through a repeated chanting of awen – how much, or whether we ‘cascade’, depends on our sense of the moment – and then enter silence, consciously together rather than meditating side by side as in the simple sitting meditation that precedes this practice. We may maintain this collective and relational silence or we may choose to sing, chant or say things. In this sense it is an interactive practice albeit a subtle one. It is most powerful when we can hold back from entering into actual dialogue and exchange whilst at the same time moving with the current of communication and relationship which we are generating both through our silence and our utterance. There’s a fine point of balance and tension here. When the awen space is over – it’s over, so it’s not strictly timed. There’s a person whose job it is to lead us both into and out of the space and they make the call. Usually it reflects everyone’s sense of the appropriate ending. We chant awen on our way out of this space as well as into it.

In this context we experience awen, Druidry’s subtle magic, as an energetic field in which we are inspired to be more open and receptive to each other – and at times to find authentic here-and-now language for our felt sense of co-presence and connection within an enlivened space. So it’s something within and between us when we are together, not so much a lightning flash from above. Sometimes our experience completely flows; sometimes it’s more halting. The space gives us a mirror, say rather an echo, of what we bring to it on the day. The physical space matters too – on Tuesday it was a space of wood burner glow and tiny lights in a deepening dusk, and a circle of people working gently together. For me, the feeling-tone and the imagery of this space, lodged in the shifting ever-now of memory, are my key reference point for ‘contemplative Druidry’ as a unique spiritual note. And I am made even more grateful to be able to practice in this way with a group of good companions.

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Tag: Contemplative Druidry