Earth spirituality | Contemplative Inquiry

March 6, 2015

FUINN II: THE POETRY OF PRACTICE

I’m a Pagan Druid, happily placed in a tradition that values poetry and seership over dogma and system building. I experience my practice as a sort of poetry. In this poetry of practice, I am held in a compelling myth of origin, an ever-now origin, and I have found a new way of working with it.

My new collection of Fuinn (Ceile De chants in Scottish Gaelic) includes a very simple one which goes A Hu Thi (ah – hoo – hee) repeated over and over again. The Ceile De interpretation, a Celtic Christian one, is that this chant “represents the three stages of the unfolding of creation … A– the Great Mystery draws in its breath … Hu – that breath is breathed out, and creation is born from out of the Mystery … God becomes matter … Thi – the Divine nature, beingness and intention acts within the field of intention … Some Ceile De would say that this final stage represents Christ Consciousness.”

It’s a bit different for me. I’ve been working with this Fonn daily for a couple of weeks now. I don’t chant. I use slow deep breathing with a silent awareness of the sounds. I find that for me, the A sets up a sense of latency, a subtle pulse and vibration on the brink of becoming. I feel it in the quality of my inbreath, as a kinaesthetic song. Hu the outbreath feels more vigorous and intentional; there’s a real sense of movement, expressed as exhalation – the breath moves out from my body, through my nostrils. Thi breathed in feels like the delighted expression of a new reality, one that I share in, distinct yet inseparable as a sentient being. This generally brings up feelings exhileration, gratitude and joy. It leads me on to the use of another Fonn as a contemplative and devotional prayer, which I wrote myself using my collection of Fuinn as a model.

A Brighde, A Brighde, solus an domhain; A Brighde, A Brigdhe, Brighde mo chridhe

A Vree-jah, A Vree-jah, solus an dowan; A Vree-jah, A Vree-jah, Bree-jah mo cree

Brighde, Brighde, light of the world; Brighde, Brighde, Brighde my heart

Brighde is the breath, the practice and the Fuinn. When writing my Fonn I wanted to build a felt sense of Brighde as cosmic birther, initiator into being, with a seat in my heart. Her name evokes power and the prayer invokes relationship – identified as She is with primal generativity and the deep powers of life and land, and also One who inspires skill and accomplishment in those She supports and fosters. Through my experience of relationship and connection, deep levels of feeling and intuition are satisfied, in some way met. I feel empowered, with a sense of having more resources available to me. Why would this be? I don’t really know. What I do know is the value of practice as poetry, and the magic it holds.

The Ceile De can be found on http://www.ceilede.co.uk

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February 19, 2015

BOOK REVIEW: ENCHANTING THE SHADOWLANDS

In formal terms, this is a five star review of Enchanting the Shadowlands, a book of numinous poems and short stories by Lorna Smithers. She describes it as “gathered from my local landscape in response to an imperative from a Brythonic god called Gwyn ap Nudd”. If you have any interest in the lingering subtle resonance of the old Celtic and pre-Celtic world in parts of England like the poet’s native northwest, you will appreciate this volume. If you have any interest in ‘awen’ as an inspirational force or creative current, and what it is to be ‘awenydd’, you will appreciate this volume. If you have any interest in poetry and landscape, or what is now called psycho-geography, you are likely to appreciate this volume. I strongly recommend this book.

More deeply, I am hoping in a small way to share something of the magic of the work as I have experienced it. I find that the best way in is to say that, for me, the resonance of the project, its feeling-tone, can be found in the first two verses of ‘A Journeying Song’, one of the later poems in the collection.

1: Horse and Hound

She will carry me

down invisible horse paths.

He will lead us

to invisible lands.

She will carry me

beyond the stolen skyline.

He will lead us

to where horizons end.

2: The Dreaming Land

The dream is not a dream

it is the life force of the land.

A living memory,

it is the dawn. It is the damned.

The dream is not a sleep.

It is a wakefulness

of past people and their dreams.

It is mistakes and shining laughter.

When I read these lines, I can feel myself riding the mare who will “carry me down invisible horse paths”, led (in my mind’s eye) by a large and shaggy hound. I can easily accept that, surrendering to the instinctive wisdom of these animal powers, I might find myself beyond a “broken skyline” at a place where “horizons end”. I can settle into the felt apprehension of a Dreaming Land where the dream is not a dream, but “the life force of the land, a living memory” and a “wakefulness of past people and their dreams”. The words are a portal to the living reality of the experience itself. In that sense, these two brief verses stand as a microcosm of the whole book.

Peneverdant/Penwortham, the locality described, is a watery place. Its first human inhabitants are called “The Dwellers in the Water Country”, drawn by the obvious attractions of auroch and deer and also by destiny and “the dream of a bard”.

They came with the splash of oars

and the steady splash of feet

drawn by auroch, deer and destiny,

the dream of a bard

who saw the green hill rising

from a wilderness of carr and marsh.

The awenydd poet’s own seership, her own process of inspired and connected reaching back, is caught in her ‘Prayer for Netholme’.

I write this prayer for the White One

Who loaned to me a mare of mist,

Led me across the marsh of time

And granted me the seer’s gift.

For later periods, the poetry is sometimes dialogical with older texts – such as the Domesday Survey of 1086, or James Flockhart’s ‘De Mowbray:A legend of Penwortham’. The latter is referenced in in ‘St. Mary’s Well, Twilight’ – a poem that also includes finely wrought observation of nature and the meaning it makes for the observer/the observer makes for it.

The setting sun is casting his vast aura

With a majesty I never dreamt him capable of

Enflaming clouds in luminescent orange and red,

Purple like mountains behind the trees.

The birds are singing as if it is their last dusk song.

I enlist bold robin, blackbird and little wren …

As if this is the evening of all evenings

And will be their last so better make it their best.

It is hard to write freshly about sunsets, though I do think this is well-managed even in the first four lines, especially through bringing in a delighted shift in the observer’s perception, and then going on to dare purple poetry. But what makes this section of the poem for me is the succeeding lines, which create a foreground for the majestic sunset background through the activity of the birds and their commitment to Being while it lasts.

Throughout the book we are aware of the interweaving of two worlds. This is done particularly well in the stories, which are every bit as inspired as the poetry. I was especially moved by the last, called ‘The Brown-Eared Hound: Rivington, October 31^st. 1917’. It concerns sudden, shocking bereavement and also a direct experience of Gwyn’s wild hunt. I could almost see a novel, or at any rate novella, in this story – bringing together the world of Wilfrid Owen, D.H Lawrence and Virginia Wolf with that of living Brythonic myth. At the same time the piece as written did everything it needed to.

I don’t think it is possible to do this volume justice in a single review. It’s hard, with poetry. So I’m suggesting that readers also have a look at Crychydd’s review in https://barddos.wordpress.com/2015/02/04 and the author’s own discussions about her work and its continuing development at: http://lornasmithers.wordpress.com/

Lorna Smithers Enchanting the Shadowlands Lulu, 2015

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February 5, 2015

NATURE ALIVE

“A cry went through late antiquity: ‘Great Pan is dead!’. Plutarch reported it in his On the failure of the oracles, yet the saying has itself become oracular, meaning many things to many people in many ages. One thing was announced: nature had become deprived of its creative voice. It was no longer an independent voice of generativity. What had had soul, lost it: or lost was the psychic connection with nature.

“With Pan dead, so to was Echo; we could no longer capture consciousness through reflecting within our instincts. They had lost their light and fell easily into asceticism, following sheepishly without instinctual rebellion their new shepherd, Christ, with his new means of management. Nature no longer spoke to us – or we could no longer hear. The person of Pan the mediator, like an ether who invisibly enveloped all natural things with personal meaning, with brightness, had vanished. Stones became only stones – trees, trees; things, places and animals no longer were this god or that, but became ‘symbols’, or were said to ‘belong’ to one god or another.

“When Pan is alive then nature is too and it is filled with gods, so that the owl’s hoot is Athena and the mollusc on the shore is Aphrodite. These bits of nature are not merely attributes or belongings. They are gods in their biological forms. And where better to find the gods than in the things, places and animals that they inhabit, and how better to participate in them through their concrete, natural presentations. Whatever was eaten, smelled, walked upon or watched, all were sensuous presences of archetypal significance.” (1)

The above is an extract from a piece by James Hillman, one time director of studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich. Hillman later went on to develop his own variant form of archetypal psychology. Here he is a strong proponent of panpsychism, a world view very similar to the forms of animism being articulated today. Panpsychism literally means the ensoulment of everything (from the Greek), though the word ‘pan’ also cues in a reference to the Roman god of that name. I find his approach both passionate and liberating as a stance to take towards ‘nature alive’.

(1) Hillman, James (1989) The essential James Hillman: a blue fire London: Routledge (Introduced and edited by Thomas Moore in collaboration with the author)

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February 3, 2015

THE SOUND OF SILENCE: MASS EXTINCTION AD THE MUSIC OF THE WORLD

The Druid's Garden

I recently came across an article from The Guardian in 2012 detailing the work of scientist Bernie Krause, who has spent his life recording sounds of nature. Krause’s major finding is simple: the loss of biodiversity, from the depths of the reefs to the rain forests, can be clearly tracked by listening to audio recordings over a 40-year period. He reports that he now hears deafening silence in so many ecosystems that once teemed with life. The article detailed his book, The Great Animal Orchestra. I bought the book, compelled to read more, the cryptic words of Simon and Garfunkle’s Sound of Silence echoing in my ears. This blog post is a bit different than some of my others, in that it is simply a response, a real and human response, to the growing sound of silence upon our landscape.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of…

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February 2, 2015

IMBOLC LIGHTS

I’m reflecting on the difference between ‘Light’ and ‘lights’. Yesterday evening my partner Elaine and I had an Imbolc ritual. We’ve decided to move through the seasonal festivals in this way, customising a joint practice as we go.

I reflect now on our time in the festive circle as in part a feast of lights. Not ‘Light’, but lights. We can have Light at the throw of a switch, one easy taken-for-granted ‘Let there be Light’ gesture. It’s very powerful and very useful – and effortlessly normal in our culture, at least for the time being.

But it isn’t a feast of lights. A feast of lights requires multiple, small sources. It requires the co-presence of darkness and shadow. It requires variation, degrees of light and darkness. It requires change and play.

We had two basic light sources, during the ritual. The one that attracted my attention most was an array of night lights positioned around the room in various ways. We had nine on the altar (one at the centre, eight at the circumference – with one at each station of the eightfold wheel of the year). And there were others around the room, grouped in threes. Very simple. Very traditional. Very minimal. Very meaningful. Very beautiful. These lights tended to be bright and a high yellow, glinting in some moments, softer and more diffuse at others. Each had its own aura. All tended to flicker in even the smallest current of air. And each had its sphere of influence, fading porously into the surrounding dusk, with no clearly defined or specific boundary – the transitions being so gradual, so gentle. Thus light and darkness were differentiated without being polarised and they cheerfully shared their debatable lands. The play of ambiguity was part of the feast.

The second source was the fire, a wood burner, well-established by the time we began the ritual and happily placed in a north-easterly hearth. Also very traditional. Very simple. Very minimal. Very meaningful. Very beautiful. And for the most part, in this mature phase, a deep red, in a way a dull red, though the word isn’t right. A potent light, a subliminal light, almost a kinaesthetic light. Not a very light sort of light at all. Its presence radiated through the room, bringing our centre of gravity, even in terms of luminosity, closer to the earth.

And that is a feast of lights. It was almost a shock, in the tidying up aftermath of the ritual, to return to the Light.

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January 26, 2015

BOOK REVIEW: FOLLOWING THE DEER TRODS

The full title of this book is Following the Deer Trods: a practical guide to working with Elen of the Ways. It is written as part of Moon Book’s Shaman Pathways series, and is positioned as a stand-alone introduction to its topic, which includes working methods for the aspiring practitioner. As such this book certainly meets its criteria.

I personally think it works best in tandem with Elen Sentier’s other book on the topic, also a Shaman Pathways book, Elen of the Ways; following the deer trods – the ancient Shamanism of Britain, which I reviewed in July 2014. This earlier book establishes the overall context much better and for me they belong together.

Following the Deer Trods begins with a summary of the ideas offered in Elen of the Ways. This works well, even magically, in the opening pages – but I was saddened by a seeming loss of perspective when we get to the Romans and beyond. The author shows no recognition of Christianity as a diverse, complex and internally contested path, not least in the Celtic lands; or of the effects which holding political power can have on religious traditions, regardless of the actual faith. There’s also no clear flagging of the extent to which the positive, Pagan side of the story is necessarily reliant on intuitive reconstruction, relevant records being sparse and problematic, oral traditions highly mutable over time, and material remains providing only limited insight into hearts and minds. There is so much we don’t know, and will never know, about our ancestors, their traditions and what it was like to be them. When talking about them, we do best to avoid the language of certainty.

For me the book picks up from that point, providing the promised guide to working in a series of well-organised practice chapters. The main areas covered (in my language) are meditation, energy work, service, shamanic journeying, relationships with familiar spirits (power animals), and working with trickster figures. The author also discusses the ‘journey horse’ or method of trance induction – and the relative merits for this purpose of drumming, the sound of waves, rain, or a flowing stream; the steady roaring of wind; the recorded purring of cats. That bit of the discussion is a true gem, reflecting a lot of playful trial and experience.

These chapters also lay out a basic cosmology for the work – a cosmology of three worlds (middle, lower, and upper) on the vertical axis and four elements radiating out from the middle world on the horizontal, with the nigh universal notion of the world tree/tree of life very much in mind. Elen describes the image of the six armed cross as a means of bringing them together. She talks about her understanding of the inner world of the journey as a place of ‘interface’, the portal which she, as awenydd, and the Otherworld co-create as a meeting place between them.

The instructions for practice are highly specific and directive and therefore best-suited to people who are new to this kind of work, who don’t have access to hands-on teaching or established learning communities, and who need nonetheless to be strongly held as they begin their exploration. Other readers will look to the offerings provided as a source of new or variant ideas, or information about a specific way of working.

My heart didn’t sing, when I read this book, as it had when I read its predecessor. But it makes its contribution and, with the one significant reservation about the presentation of history, I’m happy to recommend it.

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January 12, 2015

UPDATE ON CONTEMPLATIVE DRUID EVENTS

After the publication of Contemplative Druidry last October, I set up Contemplative Druid Events together with my partner Elaine Knight, supported by other members of our local group – particularly Nimue Brown, Julie Bond, JJ Middleway and Karen Webb. Our main purpose is to organise, publicise and run a limited number of contemplative Druid events for the wider Druid community and others of like intent. We will also respond to inquiries from people wishing to join a Druid contemplative group or start one of their own.

We have arranged three events for 2015:

A half day introduction to contemplative Druidry in London on Sunday 22 February
A weekend retreat near Malvern from Friday 17- Sunday19 April
A contemplative Druid day in Stroud on Saturday 3 October

For more information, or to arrange a booking please go to our dedicated blog at http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com/

These events are all in southern England. I am open to going further afield, and other colleagues might be. In this regard I am happy to hear proposals from people who are willing to gather together their own group and to negotiate times, programme and costs.

Overall our vision for the contemplative thread in Druidry is that it will develop organically, with initiatives coming from different sources and taking different forms. We don’t seek to own or manage this development under the banner of Contemplative Druid Events, though we do see a value in offering programmes of our own on a modest scale.

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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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November 24, 2014

A CONTEMPLATIVE DRUID EVENT

Thanks to the interest generated by Contemplative Druidry, members of the Gloucestershire contemplative group have set up an entity called Contemplative Druid Events. So far we have a blog at http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com/ and a forthcoming retreat.

The retreat is being held on the weekend of 17-19 April 2015 at Anybody’s Barn, Birchwood Hall, Storridge, Nr. Malvern, Worcestershire WR13 5EZ. Details of the retreat can be found on the blog.

I am excited by this prospect. It provides the opportunity to work with a larger group of people and to learn from them. Contemplative Druidry doesn’t come with a long specific tradition or an inherited set of practices and teachings. As modern Druids, we are engaged in an exploratory and co-creative enterprise. Events will extend the experience and understanding of participants and facilitators alike.

At the same time we do have a vision of what we are offering, and a sense of how the retreat will work. We will use the Friday evening to enter sacred space and move into introductions and a culture setting process. I consider the way in which we enter into relationship with the space and each other to be a highly significant part of the event and not just a warm up or preamble. It does much to determine the quality of living presence in the space, as important as any practice or activity. As for practices and activities – there will be sitting meditations and an introduction to what our existing local group calls “Awen Space”. Other offerings may include chanting, sacred movement, outside walking meditation and ‘lectio divina’ from the book of nature. We will likely make use of a fire pit on the Saturday evening.

The retreat also gives us the chance simply to be, alone and with fellow travellers, in a beautiful nurturing space. (After the opening process, every activity is an invitation to the participants, rather than a demand on them.) We will work with a maximum of sixteen people, including ourselves – there are five of us with facilitator roles from the Gloucestershire group. This is not the full capacity of the centre we are using, for we wanted a spacious environment on the physical as well as other levels.

I have a strong belief in this way of working and look forward to sharing it with new people.

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November 17, 2014

NATURE LANGUAGE

Philip Carr-Gomm wrote an essay, Deep Peace of the Quiet Earth: the Nature Mysticism of Druidry, as his foreword to Contemplative Druidry (1). Emma Restall Orr talked about her own nature mysticism in a recent radio interview, published on Joanna Vander Hoeven’s Down the Forest Path blog (2). Last year Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist scholar and teacher who leads the ‘Community of Interbeing’ (and is now perhaps near the end of his journey) wrote a deceptively simple-seeming work called Love Letter to the Earth (3), with chapter headings like: We are the Earth, Practices for Falling in Love with the Earth and Ten Love Letters to the Earth.

These prompts have led me to reflect more deeply on how I use Nature language and what, specifically, I mean by it. Thich Nhat Hanh’s starting point (3) is a helpful one: “at this very moment the Earth is above you, below you, all around you, and even inside you. The Earth is everywhere. … The Earth is not just the environment we live in. We are the Earth and we are always carrying her within us. Realizing this, we can see that the Earth is truly alive … we can begin to transform our relationship to the Earth.” The overall point, familiar enough yet made here with fresh elegance and clarity, is one with which Druids and Buddhists alike can find a ready resonance. But its main effect on me this time round was to get me wondering about the language of Nature.

What do I understand by Nature? For me, the key word is Nature rather than Earth. The Earth is a subset of Nature, larger than you and me who are indeed contained within it, but still a subset. In my understanding, Nature is simply what there is. And ‘what there is’ seems to us, in this culture at this time, to have exploded out of a remarkably fertile emptiness, into the 3D and time-bound reality that our perceptions somewhat mesh with, and of course a great deal more outside our normal range and beyond our range entirely. We humans are wholly natural with all our known and realised potentials – and others too that are but dimly intuited and largely untapped.

We cannot individually encompass the whole of Nature. We must choose, at whatever levels of relative awareness, where to put our efforts and attention. Thich Nhat Hanh is pretty clear about his: he has a strong intent, which involves a mutually sustaining balance of contemplation and action. My key ‘contemplative’ choice, not feeling very accomplished, is to enter more fully into the Heart identity I spoke in my Heart Language post. This seems like a good thing for me, and likely to improve my relationships and connections, particularly with my local world – the Earth and its inhabitants. I could call it extending the human side of human nature, a natural thing for a human to do.

(1) Nichol, James (2014) Contemplative Druidry: People, Practice and Potential Amazon CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing

(2) http://downtheforestpath.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/interview-with-emma-restall-orr/

(3) Thich Nhat Hanh (2013) Love Letter to the Earth Berkeley, California: Parallax Press

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Tag: Earth spirituality