Nature mysticism | Contemplative Inquiry

March 21, 2015

AT TATE LIVERPOOL

I spent time at the Tate Liverpool yesterday. Currently there is an exhibition of work by Leonora Carrington the mystical surrealist and feminist. It was almost too much to take in. For me the work, among other things, aptly illustrated one of her own comments.

“One cannot understand reality. Paradigms are a transitory convention for man. It is to our advantage to believe that we know, but it is obvious that absolute truths that were accepted in the times of Newton and Euclid do not exist.

“Sorcerers and alchemists know about animal, vegetable and mineral bodies. To hack away the crust of what we have forgotten and rediscover things we knew before we were born.

“There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.”

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March 18, 2015

EVENTS UPDATE

The Contemplative Druid residential retreat (17-19 April 2015). at Anybody’s Barn, Birchwood Hall, Storridge, Nr. Malvern, Worcestershire WR13 5EZ. is now fully booked. However anyone interested should still contact us as there is a waiting list and there is the possibility of future residential retreats.

Looking ahead, we will have a presence at Druid Camp (29 July – 2 August 2015) and we will also be holding an open Contemplative Day in Stroud on 3 October 2015, from 10.30 a.m. – 4.30 p.m. at the St. Luke’s Medical Centre, 53 Caincross Road, Stroud Gloucestershire GL5 4EX. This will be facilitated by James Nichol, Nimue Brown and Elaine Knight. We will work with a maximum of twelve other participants, continue to build on the working methods we have developed in our local group over the last three years..

Contact grovelight@hotmail.co.uk for further information or to make a booking.

See http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com for fuller events information, including the Stroud day on 3 October. For Druid Camp information see www.druidcamp.org.uk and www.facebook.com/groups/druidcamp/

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March 3, 2015

LONDON, ANYBODYS BARN, DRUID CAMP

Elaine and I returned from London last week feeling pleased about our half-day introduction to Contemplative Druidry there. We were lucky (and grateful) for the colleagueship of Julie Bond and to be working with a supportive group. As people with different backgrounds and experiences, who generally didn’t know each other well, we worked together in an attentive and accepting atmosphere and were readily able to deepen into stillness. I for one was moved by this alone, as well as feeling confirmed in the belief that contemplative approaches have a role to play in Druidry and Paganism more widely.

Contemplative Druidry as we champion it doesn’t have a set of traditional teachings with which leaders nourish (or poison) their nestlings. We do talk about the book ‘Contemplative Druidry’ and the bones of what we do in our home group in Gloucestershire. But this is just to share the diverse perspectives of people who’ve been developing relevant ideas and practices in recent years. We describe our history and our practices not to impose them, but to seed possibilities, offer frameworks and then co-create new experiences with new people. I think that we managed this, in a promising way, in London.

I’ve recognised (or re-recognised) my personal preference for working in small, defined and intentional groups – however fleeting their life may be. It doesn’t take much to set the note for a small motivated group – culture-setting though the provision of some background, introductory sharing and a little lean ritual to provide definition and a safe container. In this work, I like an alternation between silence and speech. The process of deepening is supported by sharing and reflection. These define the context for our silence and stillness, as we gently move between narrative expression and simple being. Such a movement allows a group to co-create a collective moment in which all individuals can have a stake without surrendering their own existing understandings. And for this I think that a small group (up to about a dozen or so) is best. Much beyond that, and the event has to be run a bit differently – tilting towards a more managerial approach or risking a relative loss of definition, or both.

We have two further ventures in the fairly near future. The first is our April retreat at Anybody’s Barn near Malvern. We have decided to reduce the numbers of available places both for the reasons above and to make the accommodation more spacious for those who attend. We already have enough bookings to go ahead, and at the time of writing have room for just 3 more people. I look forward to seeing how our way of working develops over a two day and two night period, and also to working with two other companions from our Gloucestershire home group (JJ Middleway and Karen Webb) as well as Elaine.

The second is Druid Camp 2015, which itself has a contemplative theme overall this year, including a dedicated working space co-ordinated by Nimue Brown, another member of the Gloucestershire group and also part of Contemplative Druid Events. Within this larger Druid Camp programme, Druid Contemplative Events will have a two hour session. Offering our session inside a bigger event (probably about 300 people) will be an opportunity to look at where ‘Contemplative Druidry’ may be going in the wider world (now that the meme is out there), and how our own approach fits in. Because the larger community will have already been created, we’ll be able to work with a larger than usual group in our session.

I see the Contemplative Druid Events journey as a continuous inquiry – a cycle of development, action and reflection followed by re-development, action, reflection … and so on, hoping thereby to improve Contemplative Druid Events’ ability to provide introductory sessions, workshops and retreats. These are still early days.

See http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com for retreat information and http://anybodysbarn.co.uk/ for retreat accommodation. For Druid Camp information see www.druidcamp.org.uk and www.facebook.com/groups/druidcamp/

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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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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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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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October 12, 2014

CONTEMPLATIVE DRUIDRY: PEOPLE PRACTICE AND POTENTIAL

Since last February I have been working with others on a book about contemplative Druidry. It has now been published and it is available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

‘Contemplative Druidry: People Practice and Potential’ was written to show that contemplative approaches are growing in modern Druidry, and to look at ways in which they might be fostered. Practices discussed include solo and group meditation, contemplation in natural settings and contemplative arts.

In my approach to this project, I decided to take a snapshot of contemplative Druidry in a particular place and time. The place is England, with a particular (though not exclusive) focus on a Druid contemplative group meeting in Gloucestershire. The time is March-July 2014, where 15 Druids responded to a questionnaire either through face-to-face interviews or in writing.

The questionnaire was designed to let respondents talk freely about their understanding of ‘contemplative Druidry’ and its value in their lives. They first discuss relevant aspects of their early lives, such as love of the outdoors, the literatures that fed them, and forms of numinous and psychic experience that they had but could not language or contextualise. They talk about their spiritual questing, often in the arenas of Paganism, Shamanism and Earth spirituality more widely, as well as their specific attraction to Druidry. Then they discuss their contemplative practice and influences on it, in some cases, from other traditions such as Buddhism, neo-Gnosticism and mystical Christianity. Overall there is the sense of an identifiable contemplative thread within Druidry (or Druid thread within contemplative spirituality). There is a sense of a form of spiritual expression to nurture and develop.

The idea of a book offering a variety of voices was further strengthened by Philip Carr-Gomm, who has led the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD) since 1988. His foreword ‘Deep Peace of the Quiet Earth: the Nature Mysticism of Druidry’ is a significant contribution in its own right, speaking of a contemplative turn in Druidry as “an idea whose time has come”.

With the permission of the posters and commenters, the book includes two threads from the Contemplative Druidry Facebook Group – ‘Contemplation and Mysticism’ and ‘Pilgrimage’ as Appendices. These are more international in flavour, and date from August 2012.

The people who joined me in responding to the questionnaire were: David Popely, Elaine Knight, Eve Adams, JJ Middleway, Joanna Vander Hoeven, Julie Bond, Karen Webb, Katy Jordan, Mark Rosher, Nimue Brown, Penny Billington, Robert Kyle, Rosa Davis and Tom Brown. My heartfelt thanks to all of them and everyone else who has supported this book and the work that stands behind it.

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Tag: Nature mysticism