I am standing in a favourite spot, enjoying the expanse of water in front of me. I am missing the sun. I have been missing it for awhile, as the bright days of early February disappear into memory. I am living among shades of grey.
Standing in this space, I feel both sadness and reassurance. The late winter has turned gloomy and I am somewhat depleted. Not much energy or bounce. At the same time I continue to feel held, powerfully, within this landscape and my life.
Looking now at my apparently monochromatic picture, I see subtle variations within the grey. I am drawn to the ripples and reflections in the water. I am aware of the shapes of buildings and trees against a background leaden sky in which a seagull is flying. There are life and movement here, and their promise that the wheel of the year will continue to turn.
This morning, 2 February, sunlight streamed into our flat. Soon we realised that warmth was coming in along with the light. There was no need for artifical heating.
This may not yet be spring, by most people’s reckoning. But the day has had a spring- like quality. Elaine and I both felt lifted. For me, it was as if a weight had come off my shoulders: a weight to which I had become acclimatised. I had stopped even noticing it until it was so gloriously removed.
We made two trips out during the day. In the later morning we stayed near home. Elaine walked using her rollater and spent welcome time sitting in the sun. The same sun also shone on our adopted birches. Though it’s not shown in the picture below, the catkins are greener now.
In the afternoon, using the wheelchair, we visited Gloucester docks and sat there until not long before 4 pm. The heat was beginning to drain away by the time we left, and shadows were lengthening. Yet the two pictures below show, respectively, the dazzle of sunlight on water, and a canal barge lifting its solar panels to the sun.
A great day for a festival of lights, and a welcome opportunity for exuberance.
We have had a lot of wind and rain in recent days. Saturday was an exception. The sky was clear, vividly blue. The air seemed cleansed and fresh. I stood at the back of St. Mary de Crypt, above, and understood the sensibility that reaches up, aspirationally, to heaven. I could empathise with the yearning that goes with that, looking for something clear and bright and pure. It’s as if such a sky might hold a promise of peace, a peace that was alive and able to nurture beauty.
I am also glad that, by the standards of medieval churches (including others within walking distance) this St. Mary’s is modest and balanced in its upwards aspiration. It aspires, but does not run away from the earth. The picture below shows it as solidly grounded, and not altogether dwarfing the buildings that have been its neighbours for many years. The church is still consecrated and holds services from time to time. But now it functions largely as a busy community centre with a strong continuing role in Gloucester’s life. A solid presence in the heart of the city.
Looking in on the city park, I welcomed the same clear blue sky. But my eye was mostly drawn to the trees that it framed. Although this is still a winter scene, the colour of the willow suggests a strong presence of male catkins and the cycle of growth and change that is under way.
Leaving the park I made my way to the still living garden of the ruined Llanthony Secunda Priory, once the monks’ physic garden. It still feels like a place of healing and the present version is well maintained.
I was both surprised and delighted to see a rose in bloom. Roses have for a long time been a heart symbol for me, but I have generally associated them with summer and especially midsummer. I became aware of winter roses quite late last year and they were shop bought. I loved them but had some misgivings about their production. So I felt blessed to see one growing in the physic garden last Saturday. There’s no traditional link between Imbolc and roses that I know of. But seeing this rose in the ground, sunlight glinting on both petals and thorns, I had an Imbolc kind of feeling, as we approach the first festival of the rising year.
In the picture above, birch catkins are gaining strength. It is a bleak and cold early afternoon. The tree trunks sit in quiet latency. But new life is stirring all the same.
In the wheel of the year, winter is the season both of dying and regeneration. Late winter my be the coldest time of year, but the turn has been made and the days are already lengthening. Imbolc, which once marked the first lambing season of the year for our ancestors, is on its way.
Four years ago (1) I wrote a post in which I described the place of Birch (Beith) in the Irish Ogham alphabet, and its link with new beginnings and the need for careful preparation in any new endeavour. In Northern runic tradition Birch (Beorc, Berkana) is identified with the young Goddess, sexuality and birth, as well as beauty and creativity in general. At the time of writing I was working with a mandala of 16 trees in which Birch was my tree from 1-22 February. It continues to be an important tree in my life.
Now, my emphasis is different. I started by reflecting on a group of birch trees planted just outside our building. I can see them now out of a balcony widow. There are five in this space, somewhat sheltered between two buildings. They are the nearest thing to a grove in this urban setting. They are still young and have only recently reached the second floor level where we live. They seem vulnerable, shallow-rooted. When we have high winds, I expect them to blow down. They bend a long way. But they haven’t broken or fallen yet.
They are our neighbours. Elaine and I walk among them often. They are a good place for her when she re-learns walking after her accident and its complications. She first noticed the catkins and pointed them out to me weeks ago, when they were tiny. The picture above, which I took today, shows how much they have managed to grow in these apparently unpromising winter weeks.
I am in a place and time of cold beauty. Beside the Gloucester-Sharpness canal, the water margin looks like a scene of suspended animation.
It isn’t true. There are fish in the water, underneath the ice. Trees are preparing for spring, protected by their bark. In the picture below evidence of the sun is seen on a tree trunk and on the thawing waters of the canal.
In woodlands beside the canal, I find an iced up inlet where the surrounding ivy lives up to its evergreen name. This small enclosed spot feels strongly alive, the frozen waters an adornment rather than a contrast.
Returning to the Docks, I notice that the seagulls aren’t acting as the confident, aggressively resourceful selves that I expect. The are neither at work, busily scavenging, or at play, gleefully flying or enjoying the water. They seem a bit bewildered by the thin ice that they are standing on.
On this walk I’m connecting rather than communing. I’m outwardly rather than inwardly focused, oriented to narrative and incident. There are different ways of observing and today I want to connect with the world and feel that I am part of it. I am endlessly fascinated with this small territory and the way it changes as the Wheel turns, and seasons come and go.
Twelve years ago (1) I wrote about the paidirean (pahj-urinn) prayer beads of the Ceile De or Culdee movement (2). In its current iteration this is a modern monastic order based in Scotland with a lay following in other parts of the world. It looks back to the early Celtic church once influential in Ireland, Scotland and north-east England. The post referenced above (1) describes my relationship with the beads at the time.
Now, coming back to this beautiful artifact, I am principally focused on the cross – an equal armed and circled silver cross that hangs from the beads – at heart level when worn as a necklace. This form of cross is an ancient symbol, sacred to many people in many cultures, often understood as a sun wheel, and not specific to Celtic Christianity. It is sometimes called the balanced, or peaceful, cross.
For me, this cross is a more fundamental image than the awen symbol, which I can also wear as a pendant, appropriately sitting at the level of my throat. The silver cross maps a whole imaginal world: four directions or winds – east, south, west, north; four powers – light, life, love, law; four elements- air, fire, water, earth; four guardians – hawk, stag, salmon, bear; four qualities – vision, purpose, wisdom, faith; four times of day – sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight; four seasons – spring and early growth, summer and ripening, autumn and bearing fruit, winter, dying and regeneration. Having a liturgy to this effect, casting a circle and calling for peace as a regular practice, marinate me in a certain way of spiritual life. Wearing this cross confirms and declares it.
In my light energy work, the disc becomes a radiant sphere that holds me. For there is a vertical dimension. Horizontally I hold my hands out palms raised and the energy flows out from heart through outstretched arms and to my hands. Vertically it flows in both directions from my heart to my feet and the earth and also to my brow and above my head. But the source of this radiance is the energy behind the heart and the still emptiness behind the energy. This flow is an open system. Energy also comes back. My energy sphere is porous to the world. I like the illustration on the bag below because it shows an empty circle at the centre. This does not feature on the pendant itself, but to me empathises the divine power at the centre from which I am not separate. It is good to reconnect with an carrier of healing and insight which I appeared to have left behind. I am grateful that it was still here for me when I was ready to reconnect.
In my Druid circle, I associate the northern quarter with faith. The quality and context of faith are not defined. They could simply mean faith in the practice and path. My contemplative inquiry overall has tended towards a stance of ‘sacred agnosticism’ (1), in which faith is not emphasised. This has served me in many ways. I have avoided mixing up the idea of ‘faith’ with affiliation to authoritarian movements, mandated beliefs, or the surrender of self-responsibility and personal discernment. I have been alert to the metaphysical group think and consensus collusion that can show up in any spiritual movement (other kinds of movement too). I have done my best to gather and evaluate information skilfully, when developing principles about how to live ethically and gracefully in an increasingly scary world.
And yet … this is not the whole story, or I would feel spiritually malnourished. In recent months I have experienced a strong felt sense of the divine. When I describe myself as ‘living presence in a field of living presence in a more than human world’ – an animist identification – the identification now seems more than animist, though the animism is still there. I pray more congruently to the Goddess as Ancient Mother and talk, less anthropomorphically, about the ‘bubbling source from which I spring’. The Divine is beyond name, form or description – and some people prefer a specialist, capitalised use of rather abstract terms like Consciousness, Awareness, Void, Ground of Being. But the ones from my own practice are the ones that work for me. They come from the intuitive heart and the imagination. To me they offer a deeper knowing, though I am personally cautious about the use of the word gnosis. For me, it can reduce the sense of mystery, banishing the creative role of faith itself.
I have become a provisional panentheist, experiencing intimations of a divine which is everywhere and no-where, and from which we are not separate. This partly reprises work I did in the earlier days of my inquiry using the framework of non-duality. Now I find panentheism a better term than non-duality for affirming both the divine and the world. The earth spirituality in the Druid tradition is in no way compromised by a panentheist perspective. If anything it is enhanced.
This post is about Hillfield Gardens (1,2) and the taste of psychic rejuvenation. Just being there, actively opening to the elemental energies of place and time, I felt confident, happy and strong.
The early morning of 20 November was misty and dark in a slushy, miserable kind of way; closed in and confining rather than magical and mysterious. Elaine and I catastrophised together in gloomy harmony about skies made unfriendly by perpetual drizzle and pavements made treacherous by hidden ice. The term stir crazy came up for me. We have begun to expect fresh air and activity outside the home. This time we planned to be in separate spaces. They are good in themselves and healthy for us as a partnership. So the tension of anticipated disappointment was in the air, for a long moment in a dull morning.
Then everything changed, with clear blue sky and sun. After an early lunch, I could wheel Elaine to her creative arts event and then fully stretch my legs in a walk to Hillfield Gardens. When I got there I slowed down again and shifted from a doing mode to a being mode. I became porous to the world – at once disappearing into it and expanding to embrace it. The snow on the ground looked beautiful to me and a crinkly fallen leaf both modified the picture and enhanced the look. William Blake once famously wrote: “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite” This brief eternal time (being in two worlds at once) – with the snow on the ground, and the fallen leaf – was like that, or at least something which pointed towards it. I feel tremendous gratitude for the experience. In its afterglow, I found myself feeling confident, happy and strong.
At a reduced level of intensity, I continued my walk. Below, My attention was drawn by a seat, and the snow around it, in a secluded corner of the gardens. Sun shone freely on the buildings, and the bushes, but reached only a small area on the seat.
In the most wooded and unmanicured section of the gardens, I found snow still present on a section of cleared space and pathway. Elsewhere there was no trace of it, even in this relatively shadowed space.
On the buildings below – blue sky, sun and shadow. In the picture below snow is just discernible on a rooftop and in a garden. During the period of my walk (1-1.30 pm) the gardens visibly changed. The snow was retreating and shadows continued to shift.
It wasn’t a long walk – twenty minutes each way for the sake of my legs and thirty in the garden. It was enough. I took away the psychic rejuvenation I named at the beginning of this post. The experience was both mystical and ordinary, a place where the ‘spiritual’ and ‘mundane’ are one – and big part of how I live my Druidry.
(2) NOTE: At the beginning of April 2024 I discovered Hillfield Gardens – a little outside the centre of Gloucester, yet still in easy walking distance (or an easy bus ride) from where I live. Originally the gardens of a large house, Hillfield Gardens are about 1.6 hectares in extent. They are managed by a Friends Group on behalf of Gloucestershire County Council. For me the gardens are a tranquil space, different in feeling-tone from other local parks.
