LUGNASADH 2023: INQUIRY HARVESTING
A circle is cast on sand. It is almost complete. The image is that of the Wheel, tenth major trump in the Druidcraft Tarot (1). Arianrhod, as Goddess associated with the Wheel and the Milky Way, is casting the Circle of Life. The adjacent cave has resonances of both womb and tomb. The seashore is a liminal space. The Celtic Otherworld is often linked to the sea and what lies underneath its surface. This image as a whole is associated with harvesting. Arianrhod carries a flail as well as a wand and a symbolic eight-spoked wheel.
It is Lugnasadh/Lammas, the first harvest-related festival of 2023. I am sitting with the notion of ‘winnowing’ in my inquiry. In agriculture, winnowing involves blowing a current of air through grain to remove the chaff remaining after threshing. We find a reference to winnowing towards the end of the medieval Welsh poem The Hostile Confederacy from The Book of Taliesin (2):
“I have been a grain discovered,
Which grew on a hill.
He that reaped me placed me,
Into a smoke hole driving me.
Exerting of the hand,
In afflicting me,
A hen received me,
With ruddy claws, (and) parting comb.
I rested nine nights.
In her womb, a child,
I have been matured,
I have been an offering before the Guledig.
I have been dead, I have been alive.
A branch there was to me of ivy,
I have been a convoy.
Before God, I have been poor.”
It seems that winnowing (or being winnowed) is far from an end point to our journeys. The processes of life go on, very likely in unexpected ways. Any state of peace has to be found within these processes, rather than in efforts to halt or break out of them.
At Lughnasadh 2023 I find myself at ease within Druidry, though I do also continue to refine lessons from other paths that enrich my practice of Druidry. The most significant, and the best embedded, is ‘interbeing’ as a spatial relationship and its temporal equivalent ‘impermanence’. It is like a kernel of grain I have winnowed from Mahayana Buddhism to grow into another life in my Druidry. The Druid soil is fertile for this purpose, as indicated through the image of the Wheel drawn on sand, and the passage from The Hostile Confederacy in The Book of Taliesin. For me, Thich Nhat Hanh simply provides a particularly persuasive languaging of this perspective.
He says (3): “The insight of interbeing is that nothing can exist by itself alone, that each thing exists only in relation to everything else … looking from the perspective of space, we call emptiness ‘interbeing’ [NB ’emptiness’ here = empty of a separate self] ; looking from the perspective of time we call it ‘impermanence’ … to be empty is to be alive, to breathe in and breathe out. Emptiness is impermanence, it is change. …When you have a kernel of corn and entrust it to the soil, you hope it will be a tall corn plant. If there is no impermanence, the kernel of corn will remain the kernel of corn forever and you will never have an ear of corn to eat. Impermanence is crucial in the life of everything”.
There is another level to this year’s inquiry harvest. Recently I have engaged more fully with the challenge of Thich Nhat Hanh’s understanding of the Mahayana emptiness teachings, which stand behind the interbeing/impermanence insight. In the light of this understanding he finds neither an individual nor a cosmic self – and hence no ultimate reality or ground of being. “Our notion of emptiness should be removed. It is empty”. Many teachers I have worked with in the past are on the other side of this debate, finding the Divine in ‘Presence’ (Eckhardt Tolle), Pure Awareness (Rupert Spira), and the ‘Clear Awake Space’ of Douglas Harding’s Headless Way. They find God as ‘No-Thing’. For Thich Nhat Hanh, no-thing is simply nothing.
I have been all over the place on this question, developing a language and practices compatible with both views, as I slipped and slid between them. This is fine in its way, but I have wanted some kind of resolution, if only to avoid the energy drain of uncertainty around something that matters to me and to many spiritual traditions. Tomas Sander, co-writing with Greg Goode (4) has also explored the Mahayana ’emptiness’ texts. He reports that “as a person who had been seeking truth and ultimate reality” he finds a “greater sense of ease” in the approach of these texts. Unlike Thich Nhat Hanh, he does not take away an active disbelief in a cosmic ground of being. Instead, he arrives at a relaxed unknowing, a place of ‘joyful freedom’. He says: “spiritual teachings tend to have notions of absolutes, which by their very nature seem to trump everything else. None of them can claim to have an absolute, transcendent truth on their side”.
Tomas Sander finds that “it was a wonderfully freeing moment to recognize that there is no one way that reality ‘really’ is, and therefore no way to miss out on it”. So he adopts different criteria for evaluating spiritual paths. “They need to prove themselves on the level of ordinary, conventional reality with practical questions like: who does the view serve and who is being marginalized? Is the view helpful, compassionate or humane?’ I have known of and entertained this view for some time, but it has only recently clicked with me as a good way of settling this question. Metaphysical speculation will no longer be part of my inquiry. This does indeed feel like winnowing, like blowing away the chaff. The promised harvest? Druidry as joyful freedom.
(1) Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druidcraft Tarot: Use the Magic of Wicca and Druidry to Guide Your Life London: Connections, 2004 (Illustrated by Will Worthington)
(2) William F. Skene The Four Ancient Books of Wales Forgotten Books, 2007 (First published in Edinburgh 1868
(3) Thich Nhat Hanh The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2017
(4) Greg Goode and Tomas Sander Emptiness and Joyful Freedom Salisbury: Non-Duality Press, 2013 (Section written by Tomas Sander)