8pm, 25 July. Alchemy on the canal. The evening sun, low and potent in the sky, strikes the flowing water. At points the union of the two creates a molten liquid light, clearly defined in the still image above.
By contrast, the short video below reveals light and water together in movement. Flow, and patterns in the flow, draw my attention. They show me an energised harmony, becoming more than the sum of their parts.
I notice also that when I play the video without sound, I find it contemplative and reflective. When I play it with sound, the birds immerse me in living nature. I value both experiences.
I usually feel a transition into late summer about now, a little before Lammas/Lughnasadh. The days here are still long, though now clearly not as long as they have been. It’s a warm time, often the warmest of the year. Blackberries have appeared on their bushes, a foretaste of autumnal fruit bearing.
I am reminded, too, of the Fferyllt, the Druid alchemist in OBOD tradition. She is a woman of power and a devotee of Brigid. In the Druidcraft Tarot (1) she is represented by Trump XIV, standing for fluency between worlds, creativity, harmony, peace, alchemy and magic. My canal side encounter with fire on water nudged my imagination towards this figure, who somehow completed it.
(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.
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)
Muin (Ogham name for Blackberry) is one of four plants that have a place in both The Green Man Tree Oracle (1) and The Druid Plant Oracle (2). In the latter, from which the illustration is taken, it is called Bramble.
Muin is an important plant ally for me. At times I have identified closely with ‘Mr. Bramble’ (3). He is stubbornly resilient, with deep and extensive underground root systems. Above ground, he can create an almost impenetrable barrier of briars. He digs in. He is a survivor. He tests qualities and intentions. He protects the deep earth and undervalued dimensions of being. Yet he also grows abundant tasty fruit, that can be made into wine or gin.
Where I live, Muin’s time traditionally runs from Lammas/Lugnasadh to Michaelmas/Mabon – essentially the calendar months August and September. This year, as this time approaches, I am thinking of Muin as a teacher. The Green Man Tree Oracle offers words of ‘green man wisdom’ for all its trees. Muin’s words are: “gather in what is dearest to you“. I find “gather in” friendly and relational, very good to hear in a world where ‘harvesting’ is often cold, impersonal and mechanistic. Muin’s more warmly relational note is reinforced by the words “dearest to you”. We are invited to consider “riches of the soul and the things that give us inspiration” as our recommended harvest.
There are obvious questions here: what is ‘mine’ to ‘gather in’? what to I choose? what do I let go? But this is not, fundamentally, a questioning and list-making task. It is more about being open to Muin’s magic. This, I believe, is rooted in an unusual combination of qualities: tenacity, challenge, depth, an invitation to pleasure and, indeed, a certain kind of intoxication. Over the coming weeks, I will draw on Muin’s inspiration as I gather this harvest of the soul*.
(1) Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druid Plant Oracle: Working with the Flora of Druid Tradition London: Connections, 2007 (Illustrated by Will Worthington)
(2) John Matthews & Will Worthington The Green Man Tree Oracle: Ancient Wisdom from the Greenwood London: Connections, 2003
A familiar sight at this time of year: a family of swans, adolescent cygnets with their parents. A superficial glance at the picture gives me a satisfying sense of near completion, of an annual cycle showing its results. It is a still image, literally a snapshot. Nothing in it can change.
Yet when I took the photo, the swans were highly mobile, constantly shifting their relative positions while sometimes gliding elegantly along the canal and sometimes pausing to investigate its banks. I also foresaw their likely passage through a more extended time. Soon enough, the cygnets will be grown up and on their own. A new beginning enabled by an ending.
I live in southern England, where daylight hours have begun noticeably to shorten. Lughnasadh (Lammas) marks the beginning of August. This festival initiates a quarter that moves through the autumn equinox and ends at Samhain. These three months embrace decline, decay and eventually death, whilst also celebrating grain and fruit harvests and (in past times) the culling of livestock to see us through the winter. The themes belong together.
I treasure this attunement to cycles of time. Part of my contemplative life rests in the timeless. Another part, more worldly, enriches my experience of time. By contrast mainstream western culture characterises time as a limited resource to be measured and priced; to be ‘spent’ productively and not ‘wasted’. The phrase ‘time is money’ comes to mind. This time hurtles onwards like a runaway train into a future always packaged as better, even redemptive, but now looking increasingly dystopian.
But any time we can know is a matter of human perception, and therefore malleable. There are, and have been, many ways for humans to live in time. For me, living the cyclical time of the eightfold wheel of the year, widely practised in Druid and Pagan culture, continues to be a re-enchanting experience.
In the northern hemisphere we will soon be entering a quarter of harvests and waning light, starting with Lughnasadh/Lammas. In the south there will be the energy of rising light and growth. In the manner of the yin/yang symbol. a taste of that energy is present here too. As I approach Lughnasadh/Lammas this year, I am living largely day-at-a-time, and sense only the faintest outlines of what might be coming into my life. I intuit change, but not its nature, scale. or specific form.
So I look to harvesting possibilities that are within my power. I wrote recently that Druidry and the Eckhart Tolle Community are currently my key points spiritual reference. This invites a new synthesis and integration of spiritual practice and understanding. Druidry remains primary. It is the container. But there are two areas in which the Tolle work has strongly influenced me.
The first is through reframing my understanding of meditation. Instead of being a specialist activity, it has become the gateway to living from what Tolle calls ‘stillness’, ‘presence’ and the ‘Deep I’. These simple terms are pointers to a way of experiencing the world that cannot be accurately languaged but is easy to recognise if we are open to it. Meditation, here, is a state of openness and availability. It does not require extended time or any specific form.
I still value formal daily practice. It is a way of keeping fit in this domain. But while, in the past, I have seen meditation as a specific activity, I now see that anything can be a meditation if it is a gateway to stillness, presence, or the Deep I. Tolle tells a story about his early days as a teacher, when he would sometimes make presentations to the Theosophical Society in London. The first time he showed up with a set of notes virtually amounting to a script. His eyes were frequently on it and although he was received respectfully, many of his listeners’ eyes were glazing over. The next time he abandoned this approach, faced his listeners and simply waited, open and trusting, for the words to come. They did. He connected. Energy levels in the room were high, and the presentation was successful.
I’ve been taught versions of this lesson a number of times in my life, but I clearly needed to hear it again with a new and different language. For my second Tolle influence concerns ‘awen’. As a Druid I might want to use ‘awen’ in the context of Tolle’s story. But it doesn’t feel right. I love the awen chant and the awen symbol. I love the alchemy of the Hanes Taliesin and the way it points to possibilities of human transformation. But it belongs in a world that is not my own, that of Brythonic bardistry and seership. I feel more connected to my own experience when I use Eckhart Tolle’s language. It holds more possibilities for me. I do not count myself as among the awenyddion.But I can speak from stillness. I can speak from the Deep I.
It is some time since the solstice. Where I live, the time between sunrise and sunset has shortened by about 20 minutes. Though the change is still slow, it is noticeable now. But I do not yet feel a pull towards Lughnasadh/Lammas. I took these pictures on 11 July, and this is its own time, a time of abundance and ripening. They give me the sense of a summer that has kept its promise and is managing to mature despite a year of patchy weather.
At this stage, the willows below, early to leaf, remain majestic in their abundance – whilst hinting at a tiredness that will manifest in late summer, when energy starts to withdraw, and turn inwards.
But this isn’t the case with the treescape as a whole. In the woods I continue to find the fresh green of a vigorous life energy. It is the time when I get the strongest sense of a canopy, even in a relatively small and modestly wooded space. It hints at the glories of old forest, even though it isn’t one.
Whilst there is a sense of flora moving into new stages of their cycle, the process is gradual. There is time and leisure for slow change. There is no sense of having to be perfectly one thing and then, immediately, perfectly another.
Above all. I notice subtle differences in shape and colour within a setting of predominantly green growth. My gaze is drawn by intricacies of variation, contrast and patterning within this always astonishing display of life, and its natural will to be and become.
In mid-July, life rests in its moment, with harvesting some way off.
In my wheel of the year tree mandala (1), gorse covers the period from 9-31 July. It is the last tree of the summer quarter, handing over to apple at Lughnasadh/Lammas on 1 August. The illustration is from The Green Man Tree Oracle (2).
I know from my childhood that gorse can make a tame, gently sloping hill seem wild and edgy. Navigating through gorse requires an eye to self-care. Flowering gorse is not confined to summer, but for me it is anchored to summer in memory. Seen from afar, gorse was a vivid harbinger of the summer holidays with days of warmth (rising to heat) and freedom to roam. It carried a hint of adventure and disinhibition. Sometimes the promise was fulfilled. Sometimes there was a hot heavy dullness broken by only storms, and a degree of frustration. July days were unpredictable.
Gorse (ogham name Onn) was sacred to the Irish god Lugh, and thus to light, to all manner of skills, and to the fire in the head of ecstatic creativity. Lugh has a trickster aspect, and can be seen in certain lights as more a god of lightning than of the sun. He has a cousinship with the Brythonic Lleu Llaw Gyffes, the warrior magician of the fourth branch of the Mabinogi. He has also been linked to the Norse Loki, for tricksterism is an aspect of the smouldering fertile mind.
Gorse makes good fuel and so has an obvious role in fire festivals. In Brittany, 1 August was marked by the Festival of the Golden Gorse and gorse has has strong associations with the faery folk. It is a plant of power. We cannot make assumptions about how we stand with it. A wary respect might be wise.
NOTE: This post brings to an end a year in which I have featured the sixteen trees in this mandala. I began on 16 July 2020 with an out-of-sequence Rowan (3), because I had had a vivid encounter with a rowan tree in the woods. (Its time in the mandala is 9-31 October.). Then I moved on to apple(4) and blackberry (5). From the Autumn Equinox (1) the enterprise became more systematic. As a blogger, I won’t be repeating the cycle in the same way in the coming year. Once for the record feels enough.
(1) This mandala is based on my personal experience of trees in the neighbourhood as well as traditional lore. Moving around the summer quarter from Beltane, 1 May, the positions and dates of the four trees are: Hawthorn, south-east, 1-23 May; Beech & Bluebell, south-south-east, 24 May – 15 June; Oak, south, 16 June – 8 July; Gorse, south-south-west, 9 – 31 July. The autumn quarter then starts with Apple at Lughnasadh/Lammas. For a complete list of the sixteen trees, see https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2020/autumn-equinox-2020-hazel-salmon-awen/
(2) John Matthews & Will Worthington The Green Man Tree Oracle London: Connections, 2003
This picture was taken early one morning, at a moment slightly defended from the heat of early August. I was walking through woods to shelter from the sun.
Those days, intense in their moment, have already receded into the past. After a period of somewhat lower temperatures, and of flashes and rumblings in the sky followed by modest rainfall, we found ourselves in a flash flood on Sunday evening. For a relatively brief period, the A46 (a main road, locally) turned into a fast-flowing river not far from our house. Guttering held, but needs attention.
It was as if, following a period of contest, water had succeeded fire as the prevailing element. Now, the situation is less clear cut. But we are in a cooler and wetter place than we were at the beginning of the month. Daylight hours are reducing. We are leaning in to autumn.
During this time I have been busy with my own harvesting. The meditations presented in my last three posts (1) complete a basic repertoire of formal solo practice in my renewed Druidry. I have been fruitfully indoors during both heat wave (beyond my comfort zone) and the return of rain. I have been inwardly focused.
In my own Innerworld wheel of the year, apple presides over the first three weeks or so of the post Lughnasadh/Lammas quarter. Apple, in many traditions, is a Goddess tree, associated with both wisdom and healing (2). It is linked to a visionary ability to see beyond the surface: perceptions grow wiser and the heart sees further than it might otherwise do.
In Irish myth, Lugh was sent to collect apples from a Tree of Light found in the Otherworld. In Britain, after the Battle of Camlann, Arthur was taken by three Celtic goddesses to be healed on the Isle of Avalon (=Island of Apples).
In a more everyday way, my meditations serve the same goals. The timing of my work on them wasn’t exactly planned. But it doesn’t surprise me that my commitment to living the wheel of the year has led to this result.
I notice swans at this time of year. They are mute swans, the largest birds in Britain, and they live here throughout the year. In my locality, there is an abundance of fresh water and they tend to do well. Now they are in their family groups, with the cygnets becoming adolescent.
Watching swans, even this soon after Lammas, cues me in to an elegaic mood, a slight bitter sweetness in the heart. Their family life is in its later stages. The generations will go their own ways before long. The parents will stay together since the swans mate for life, but they will be moving into a new cycle of life and parenting. There’s an anticipatory poignancy about this, where the current moment knowingly invites images of a probable future. I sense impending separation, not precisely fixed in time.
I am influenced by literature and legend, as I slip in to the autumnal quarter. Yeats sets The Wild Swans at Coole (1) at a moment when “the trees are in their autumn beauty”. He counts 59 swans “upon the brimming water among the stones” and the poem gives voice to the soreness of heart that goes with a feeling of unwanted change, and the foreknowledge of their departure from the lake. There are resonances here of the legendary Dream of Oengus, where King Oengus and his secret Cymric lover Caer Ibormeith (Yewberry) can meet only for a brief time at Samhain, and then only every other year, in the form of swans (2).
But the main reference for me is Tennyson’s Tithonus, a Tojan hero who asks for eternal life, and is granted it, by his divine lover Eos the Goddess of Dawn. He neglects to ask for eternal youth, with very sad results.
“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thy arms,
…
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes.” (3)
Aldous Huxley published his novel After Many a Summer in 1939 (4). This was a year or two after he moved to California to become a Hollywood screen writer, and also to engage in earnest with Eastern spirituality. In a youth worshipping culture, a self-referential multi-millionaire hires an ambitious doctor/research scientist to extend his life span. What could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile, in the wider world, Barcelona falls and the Spanish Republic is extinguished. At one level, the novel is a simple satire. At another it is a vehicle for Huxley’s view, on the eve of World War II, that political and military solutions to the world’s problems will, by themselves, always fall short. A spiritual dimension is needed to make a difference. Without such a dimension, ‘peace’ will be sought by unskillful means and ‘eternity’ will be confused with extended time. Both are found authentically in another – counter-cultural yet nonetheless accessible – approach to life. Huxley explores these ideas in more depth, with more of a sense of how to develop and maintain a healthy society, in his last novel Island (5) published in 1962.
Politically and culturally, I feel perplexed and disoriented. Individually, I have many ways of responding to my experiences of love and loss, growth and decay, life and death. Anxious anticipations of unwanted experiences and events are certainly a feature. My contemplative inquiry is in part about learning to be lovingly open and engaged with experience, whilst at the same time wisely anchored in the peace and stillness of living presence. An acceptance of falling short is baked into this stance.
(1) W. B. Yeats The Wild Swans at Coole In:A. Nroman Jeffares Poems of W. B. Yeats London: MacMillan, 1964 (Selected, with an introduction and notes)
(2) Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druid Animal Oracle: Working with the Sacred Animals of the Druid Tradition New York, NY: Fireside, 1994
(3) Alfred, Lord Tennyson Tithonus (extract) In: Tennyson Poems and Plays London: Oxford University Press, 1968
(4) Aldous Huxley After Many a Summer Vintage Claasics e-book edition. (Original publication 1939)
Lughnasadh (or Lammas) marks an important moment in my year. I move from a season of ripening to a season of bearing fruit. At the point of transition, both of these processes are happening. My distinction between ‘ripening’ and ‘bearing fruit’ is a soft one, allowing for continuities. But I know a harvest when I see one, and I celebrate it when it comes.
The Celtic fire festivals have a stronger hold on me than the solstices and equinoxes, with the exception of midwinter. I don’t know why this is. The quarter beginning in Samhain is one of dying and regeneration. I am happy to start and end my year in the middle of it: I have moved from the dying of the year to its point of regeneration. But it is the quarters that tell the most compelling story: from the time of dying and regeneration, to one of early growth – and then on to those of ripening and of bearing fruit.
August, though very much a summer month, comes with a withdrawal of light and intensity, very noticeable to me, where I live, in the last ten days of the month. September and October continue this whilst including fine and balmy days. Throughout much of my life, this is the quarter that has especially moved me. All periods have their magic. Compared to its predecessor, the quarter beginning with Lughnasadh has, at least for me, a quality of reduced intensity and greater subtlety.
2020 specifically continues to be odd and unsettling. I have not had my usual summer. I was essentially housebound for four months. I have not left my town since February. My upside, as a contemplative, has been an unseasonable permission to turn inwards. I have refreshed my solo Druid practice and I feel re-grounded in Druid culture.
I have recently crafted three forms of sitting meditation for use within my daily practice: I describe them as Light Body, Living Presence and Wisdom’s House. I will write more fully at a later date. This development marks a return to an older contemplative approach – I have moved away from formal sitting meditations in recent years. Each meditation is based on, or descended from, a practice previously used over a long period. This work has tenacious roots yet happily feels new and fresh. I look forward to its fruits.
Contemplative Inquiry 