Contemplative inquiry

CHANT

The hour when minute by minute
The colours are stolen away
When red goes brown and black
And green goes grey

The simple twilight-falling hour
The twinkle hour the dewdrop minute
When the hare with a scuffle is gone
Through long grass with a forked twig in it,

When thrush drops down
Last loud chirrup and jig
From the alder top bare
Lo then is the time of calling and taking,
Of mating, and the enlarging of mind into mind,
When the eye thinks and the light stays behind.

Chant by Philip Ross Nichols Prophet, Priest and King: the poetry of Philip Ross Nichols, edited and introduced by Jay Ramsay Oak Tree Press, 1989. Ross Nichols – ‘Nuinn’ – founded the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD) in 1964.

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July 21, 2014

‘DRUID CONTEMPLATIVE VOICES’: THE BOOK

‘Druid Contemplative Voices’ is a book project in which I have brought together 15 people with an active, practitioner interest in Druidry and contemplative practice. This post is to introduce the book and share something about working methods, ethics concerning participants and their contributions, and the context of the work.

The book is largely based on a set of questions (answered in live interviews or through written responses). These explore people’s links with Druidry and other traditions and the role of meditation and other contemplative practices in their lives. They also look at the potential advantages of such practices for the wider Druid movement. This part of the project is almost complete. The last two contributions are due by the end of this month.

I am adopting a themed approach for the writing, rather than presenting a succession of individual contributions. While this book has no pretensions to be academic, I have started to analyse the material and identify themes in a way combines a certain intellectual formality with an intuitive tuning in to what is emerging. I have some background, including a PhD about transition into later life, in ‘qualitative’ health and social research. Qualitative, here, means research focused on people’s own sense of their lived experience – and this can include ‘insider’ research (where I am part of part of the group under consideration). Although the context and relationships here are different, I find this discipline helpful. Far from being an abstracting and alienating process, it keeps me alert and in integrity.

I am writing the book and responsible for its content, but everyone else will have a chance to look at the text and comment before it is published. Where they are directly quoted (which will be a lot and at length, in the approach I am using) participants will need to be satisfied that I am presenting their contributions accurately and in context – and that they are still happy to stand behind them in print. If not they can be amended (within a timeframe) or withdrawn. The book will also include two appendices drawn from early threads in the life of the Contemplative Druidry Facebook group. In this case I sought, and gained, positive specific permission from each contributor to these threads before going ahead.

Druid contemplative voices is the latest stage of the ‘contemplative exploration’ launched in the OBOD* magazine Touchstone in April 2012. Connections made through the article led to a ‘contemplative exploration’ day in Stroud, Gloucestershire, England on 7 July 2102. The Contemplative Druidry Facebook group was launched on 1 August 2012, and this blog https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com on 28 August of that year. In each case, one of their aims has been to champion the contemplative meme within Druidry and support the wider contemplative exploration. By the beginning of 2014 an expanded local group in Stroud had a regular meeting cycle of two full days each year (in May and November) with shorter monthly meetings in between. 11 of the contributors to the book have been involved in this group. Druid Contemplative Voices will include an appendix that looks at the group’s structural frameworks and programmes.

*Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids

NB This I am blogging a day early, ahead of Druid Camp.

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July 15, 2014

MERLIN AND CONTEMPLATION

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini (1) draws on the legendary history of Wales, Cumbria and South West Scotland. The overall story, written in the middle of the twelfth century, is about wounding and healing in various forms at the level both of the individual and the collective.

My interest here is in the resolution. Four people, somewhat bruised by life and getting on in years, retire to the Caledonian woods. They vow to live a contemplative life – outside in the summer, and in an elaborate ‘observatory’ in the winter, dedicated to star lore. Their leader is Merlin himself, recovering from a period of (still masterful and charismatic) breakdown, precipitated by a war of neighbours between the old British peoples of Cumbria and Strathclyde. This was at a time when both of them had invaders from other language groups (English and Gaelic) to contend with.

The little community’s second member is Merlin’s sister Ganieda, now widowed, previously Queen of Strathclyde – a kingdom ruled from Dumbarton and extending south to the Solway Firth. The third member is the traumatised vagrant Maeldinus, disoriented and damaged by the juice of poisoned (i.e. magical) apples. Last but not least is the Bard Taliesin, often taken as the model for self-realization in British Celtic tradition. He is world weary after the passing of Arthur from the apparent world into The Isle of Apples – Avalon, a Celtic Otherworld – to be healed and cared for by a wholly benign Morgan and her sisters. In the deeper picture Arthur will never die. But it is still it is the end of an era and a time of lengthening shadows for the culture he defended.

Geoffrey of Monmouth became the first Bishop of St. Asaph in North East Wales, though he never visited the diocese. But for literary purposes, he relies on the imagery and world views of both Roman and Celtic paganism. The forest contemplative group is dedicated to the Roman wisdom and owl goddess Minerva (often used as an equivalent to native British goddesses as in Sulis Minerva at Bath, and inscribed on a cliff overlooking the Dee at Chester, the city called Deva/Dea by the Romans). Indeed Ganieda, taking on the mantle of prophecy, in a sense becomes the Minerva of the little community. Describing his reason for joining forces with Merlin, Taliesin says “I have spent enough time living in vain, and now is the time to restore me to myself”, which seems to me to have a subtle tinge of divine self-recollection, thereby synthesising Pagan British and Neo-Platonist understandings of who he is. A recent verse translation (2) goes as far as say “I will have time to discover my true self”. I prefer the older translation, since Taliesin has already made that discovery, much earlier in life (3). What he needs is a place where he can fully connect again, after a life of service in the world. Either way, it’s an untypical view of contemplative spirituality for the place and time in which it was written.

The Vita Merlini is a poem written in Latin hexameters and presented as a literary game. It is an opportunity to display both classical and indigenous wisdom as understood in the twelfth century Renaissance (2). Yet in The Mystic Life of Merlin (4), R. J. Stewart shows how the work has greater potential depths for anyone open to them. His Merlin Tarot (5) images draw on two of Geoffrey’s books, the second being the better known History of the Kings of Britain (6), and on Stewart’s own seership. They are further explored in The Complete Merlin Tarot, (7), and The Miracle Tree (8) and ask for our contemplation as much as divination, having the power to open imaginal doors. Geoffrey’s books themselves introduced Merlin and Morgan to medieval European literature outside the Celtic language sphere and did much to establish Arthur. The imagery of the Vita Merlini evokes a sense of woodland renewal, of groves as healing places, and a restorative ‘Island of Apples’, presided over by a magical Otherworld sisterhood. It offers something to medieval people in Western Europe that was unavailable through the mainstream spirituality of the day. The world that Geoffrey made has been a potent resource ever since.

References

1: http://www.sacred-texts.com Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1150) Vita Merlini Latin text with English translation by John J. Parry (1925). (Transcribed for Sacred Texts by Graham K. Tallboys.)

2: Walker, Mark (2011) Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘Life of Merlin’: a new verse translation Chalford: Amberley Publishing

3: Hughes, Kristoffer (2012) From the cauldron born: exploring the magic of Welsh legend and lore Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications

4: Stewart, R. J. (1986) The mystic life of Merlin London: Arkana

5: Stewart, R. J. (2003) The Merlin Tarot London: Element (Illustrated by Miranda Gray. Boxed set with pack of cards, handbook and notebook for users. An earlier edition was published by the Aquarian Press in 1992)

6: Geoffrey of Monmouth (1136) History of the Kings of Britain London: Penguin, 1966. (Translated with an introduction by Lewis Thorpe)

7: Stewart, R. J. (1992) The complete Merlin Tarot: images, insight and wisdom from the age of Merlin London: The Aquarian Press (Not to be confused with the Merlin Tarot handbook which accompanies the pack, but is sometimes sold separately)

8: Stewart, R. J. (2003) The miracle tree: demystifying the Qabalah Franklin Lakes, NY: New Page Books

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July 12, 2014

THE EYE OF CONTEMPLATION

In the middle of the ninth century the Irish scholar and contemplative mystic John Scotus Eriugena got into trouble with the leaders of his church. He publicly opposed St. Augustine’s doctrines of original sin (intensifying the consequences of the fall) and predestination (the fall was always in the mind of God, its consequences already decided). He called them “a most cruel and stupid madness”.

John lived in France, working for Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald, King of the West Franks. John’s role was to superintend the palace school and to translate rare Greek texts. Although a layman, he had been educated in an Irish monastic school – the Irish monastic schools at the time being among the very few places in Western Europe where Greek was still taught. He countered the Augustinian orthodoxy with the Neo-Platonist argument that ultimately God, the One, must necessarily contain everyone and everything, or not be the One. His arguments were dismissed, in an interesting choice of calumny, as “pultes Scottorum” (Gaelic porridge – since ‘Scotus’ then referred to a language group rather than a place). Nonetheless he stuck to his position, under the protection of his king, and managed to avoid obeying a summons to Rome to explain himself.

John makes a somewhat pointed statement about the spirit of contemplation versus a certain kind of activism in his Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John. As I read it, Peter founded the church in Rome is identified with the papacy, whereas John Scotus is modelling himself on the gospel writer. “Peter is always presented as the model of faith and action, while John portrays the type of contemplation and knowledge. The one indeed leans on the bosom of the Lord, which is the sacrament of contemplation, while the other often hesitates, which is the symbol of restless action. For the execution of divine commands, before it becomes habitual, may shatter the pure brilliance of virtue and fall short in its judgements, clouded by the fog of sense-bound thinking. The keenness of profoundest contemplation, on the other hand, once it has perceived the countenance of the truth, neither hesitates, nor slips, nor is darkened by any cloud”. In a sense contemplation becomes a quiet resistance: resistance supported by a way of stillness and insight.

(This story is told in Christopher Bamford’s (2000) The voice of the eagle: the heart of Celtic Christianity: John Scotus Eriugena’s homily on the prologue to the Gospel of St. John Great Barrington, MA: Lindisifarne Books (New translation, with reflections and commentary. Foreword by Thomas Moore.) the book was published in 2000 and there is a Kindle edition.

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July 8, 2014

THE ROSE SANCTUARY

It is two years since the Stroud based Druid ‘contemplative’ group first met. On 7 July 2012 six Druids met for a day of meditation and personal sharing in sacred space and began a tradition in which 16 people are now involved. As reported in an earlier post (‘A Brief and Luminous Tea Time’, 15 January 2014) we currently have monthly meetings, mostly for two hours on the second Tuesday of the month. In two months – May and November – we meet for a whole day, so far always on a Saturday. We had 11 people on 10 May this year.

Today was one of our Tuesday meetings, held in a dedicated space called the Rose Sanctuary, a new environment for us. We sat there through a summer storm, seeing flashes of lightning through the windows, hearing the thunder rolling in the distance, and then listening to the rain falling on the roof – first hard, then soft. The scene outside, insofar as it was visible, was lush and glistening, albeit a little dusky for the time of day. Inside, the space was one of elegant simplicity, a natural container for contemplation and reflective sharing.

There were seven of us present, two from the original group and five others who have joined since. The group reconstitutes itself at each meeting, building its culture a little more each time, developing its sense of what a Druid contemplative group looks and feels like. This time we began with an extended check-in and a five minute shared silence for attunement, rather than a long meditation. Then we chanted together, finding our shared resonance and the resonance of the space, sensing the pulse and vibration of the Awen in this place and time. We entered a period of intermixed silence and creative sharing, which this time included song, chanting, and accounts of numinous experiences in both outer and inner worlds. Every meeting finds its own note.

For me, it felt like a good second anniversary.

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June 12, 2014

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTION

I’ve been thinking about action and contemplation – and their relationship. I think they belong together. Both modes are engaged. Neither is passive or indifferent. I am coming to see them as qualities that arise together and remain interdependent, rather like the paired opposites described in the Tao Te Ching:

For being and non-being arise together

Hard and easy complete each other

Long and short shape each other

High and low depend on each other

Note and voice make the music together

In progressive Christian circles, this kind of relationship is demonstrated in organisations such as Richard Rohr’s Centre for Action and Contemplation. Andrew Harvey would be another example. In my ‘contemplative Druidry’ home group, I’ve noticed that a high proportion of the members are politically and socially engaged (mostly in the kind of causes currently packaged as ‘Green’). And I’ve also noticed that these different commitments support each other, rather than getting in each other’s way. On the one side it’s something about self-care, time for refreshment and renewal , and remembering to pause a little, able to maintain a spacious rather than frantic or tunnel-visioned awareness. On the other side it’s about enacting our interconnectedness and service, our commitment to the life of the world. Right now it’s nudging me in the direction of activity.

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June 1, 2014

BOOK REVIEW: DANCING WITH NEMETONA

This is my Amazon book review for Joanna van der Hoeven’s latest book.

Highly recommended. With an ease and lightness of touch, this book reflects on the sacred in relation to physical and subtle space, relationships and boundaries, safety and risk, liminality and letting go. Sacred time too – I liked the author’s definition of ritual as “taking a moment, taking time out, to celebrate or honour a specific moment of time”.

A modern Druid, Joanna van der Hoeven uses her personal journey to illustrate her themes and suggests practices to explore them – within the home, within the forest and within the inner world. These practices, and the book as a whole, are accessible to beginners or non-aligned seekers as well as those already grounded in Druid and Pagan tradition. This is helped by the careful arrangement of the book in six chapters: Lady of Boundaries and Edges; Lady of Hearth and Home; Lady of the Sacred Grove; Lady of sanctuary; Lady of Ritual: Lady of Everything and Nothing.

The last chapter opens the way to reflections on personal identity and the no self/true self paradox of Zen and other non-dual traditions. To enter into “immersion into the entirety of being … to be at one with existence, to truly experience life”, there seems to be a necessary letting go of our customary self-sense and a finding of true self through being in the moment, returning to the core. In this way the book continues the journey of the author’s earlier and well-received Zen Druidry.

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January 15, 2014

A BRIEF AND LUMINOUS TEA TIME

Last March I talked about a Druid contemplative day in Gloucestershire, England, and the way in which “our meeting grew out of the still simplicity of the space and our shared contemplative intent”. We now have a regular group, which meets for two hours in the afternoon on the second Tuesday of every month, except for May and November. In those months we meet for a full Saturday, sometime after the festivals of Beltane and Samhain. These days offer an introduction to new members, and also attract people from outside our local catchment area. Sixteen people are now at least provisionally involved, about half of whom attend our Tuesday sessions.

I feel very blessed to have a group of ‘like intent’ for contemplative practice. It supports and extends my solo practice, without simply replicating it at a collective level. I feel recognised and nurtured by the presence of fellow travellers and the strength of a commonly held intent. I also feel more confident in my note and in the value of sounding it

Our Tuesday pm gatherings – which do include a slot for tea and cake as a very English soul food – have so far had a very simple structure. We have a personal check in, make an unfussy entry into sacred space and sit in meditation together for about 20 minutes. After that (and this is the Druid bit) we tune into our individual and relational presence within awen. Traditionally awen has connotations of divine inspiration, especially in the fields of poetry, music and prophecy. For modern Druids awen can be also seen as the manifestation of the immanent divine, the breath of the Goddess (Shakti, Shekinah), the enlivening presence of spirit or more simply the way in which space can be palpably and numinously enlivened by people of like intent.

In terms of the practice, we discover ourselves, touched or inspired by awen, in an enlivened relational field with each other, as well as in the space and within ourselves. Sometimes we share it in silence and sometimes we are moved to speak, finding an authentic here-and-now language for our felt sense of connection. I can see a possibility of moving on to other expressions of this connection – chanting, toning and movement as the group develops. The practice is open-ended, but tends to go on for 35-40 minutes.

We then exit sacred space, celebrating and also grounding ourselves with tea and cake. These meetings have prompted me into a greater intentionality about my wider inquiry, which includes sharing it through this blog.

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March 17, 2013

CONTEMPLATIVE DAY

A small group in Gloucestershire, England, mostly with Druid backgrounds, held a contemplative day yesterday, on Saturday 16 March. Most of us were local, but we also had members from further afield including (for the first time) London.

Once gathered, we spent some of our time together indoors and part of it alone, walking in neighbouring woods and fields. For this outside time we caught a beautiful sunlit spring interlude in the later morning. We had periods of silence, periods of chanting, periods of talking and periods of eating. (The day included a magical shared lunch).

I loved it when, early on, JJ talked of our connection as based on ‘like intent’ rather than ‘like mindedness’. It felt to me very much as if our meeting grew out of the still simplicity of the space and our shared contemplative intent.

I think that this approach to a contemplative day, together with our previous one which had more focus on weaving our stories, are good ways to go in developing these events. I look forward to more of them.

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January 31, 2013

WILLOW

Some systems of training – R.J. Stewart in ‘The Way of Merlin’ and the OBOD Ovate Course for example – ask us to develop a long term relationship with a specific tree. In my case it was a willow. At that time I had already made a willow wand from wood that had fallen off another tree, and though I don’t use wands or other tools much in circle casting, I do use this wand occasionally. It’s a wood that I find it easy to connect with.

My willow stands on the banks of the Avon at Bristol, in sight of the Clifton suspension bridge and the gorge. I was living within walking distance of it at the time. In terms of ‘head knowledge’ I wasn’t quite sure whether it was technically a weeping willow or a hybrid and decided it didn’t matter. Its branches certainly bowed to the flowing Avon water and to the ground. Through dedicated tree hugging practice I discovered a strong Nwyfre or life force, running up and down the tree. This was about the time of the Spring Equinox in a prematurely warm and burgeoning year. I had the pleasure of watching catkins and early leaves growing and of active bees. So I created an energetic bond with the physical tree, at the edge of a public park, greeting it and fare-welling it at each encounter without developing a detailed botanical knowledge.

I also did inner work with the tree, through visualization. Usually the visualization was an idealized version of the physical reality, prompting a slightly different set of feelings and reflections. There was one major difference. During a gale, the wind broke one of the major branches from the tree. I was very distressed to see that branch partly on the ground and partly hanging on to the rest of the tree by thin strands of bark. Then the branch got chopped off. I was in mourning. Yet my visualization didn’t change. At that level, the tree was still there and whole. And in fact the physical changed and grew new branches, not in quite the same place, to fill the gap of the big one that had gone. I supplied the distress and mourning. The tree simply adapted. Throughout the physical process, I felt little difference in its energy.

In the back of my mind I was also aware of traditional knowledge, both specific to Ogam lore and the more diffuse inheritance of popular tradition. I tended to hold this lightly, feeling imaginatively enriched whilst putting personal lived experience first. I do know that leaning against the tree whilst looking across the water to the bridge and the gorge were (and are) good for refreshment, reverie and lazy, half conscious forms of reflection. Out of this can come a creativity that doesn’t come from the willed marshaling of correspondences. And to be fair, the traditional willow correspondences say as much, when they talk of openness and receptivity to Otherworld and the inspiration of the Goddess. When I first knew the willow, it was at a time of fecundity – I’ve already mentioned the vibrancy of catkins and new leaves, the early appearance of bees. So I’m not surprised that William Anderson’s green man poem says, for the period running from 13 April to 10 May:

In and out of the yellowing wands of the willow

The pollen-bright bees are plundering the catkins;

‘I am honey of love’, says the Green Man

‘I am honey of love’, says he.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that in the Romanian Gypsy Festival of Green George (needless to say on 23 April) a young and leafy willow, already felled, is erected and decorated with streamers and ribbons. The community’s pregnant women gather around the tree, each laying out one piece of clothing. If, overnight a leaf falls from the tree on to the clothing, it is said that the goddess of the tree promises both an easy delivery and a gifted child.”

Such associations are in the background of my relationship to Willow if not the foreground. They touch my imagination, especially the parts that are nurtured by a sense of place and of history. They amplify my direct here-and-now experience, adding emotional texture to sensory immediacy. They extend what’s already there, in the tree, the setting, my presence, and our connection.

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Tag: Contemplative inquiry

July 29, 2014

CHANT

July 21, 2014

‘DRUID CONTEMPLATIVE VOICES’: THE BOOK

July 15, 2014

MERLIN AND CONTEMPLATION

July 12, 2014

THE EYE OF CONTEMPLATION

July 8, 2014

THE ROSE SANCTUARY

June 12, 2014

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTION

June 1, 2014

BOOK REVIEW: DANCING WITH NEMETONA

January 15, 2014

A BRIEF AND LUMINOUS TEA TIME

March 17, 2013

CONTEMPLATIVE DAY

January 31, 2013

WILLOW