Seasonal Blessings to all readers, and my best wishes for 2024! I took these photos between 2.20 and 2.50 pm on 21 December, the last day before the Solstice, and a little more than an hour before sunset in Southern England.
The location is Alney Island, Gloucester, which I had not been to for some time. I encountered a sun that was low in the sky, clearly sinking, but still having an obvious influence on the landscape. Above, you can see a powerful luminescence behind the starkness of the trees. Immediately below, you can see light effects on the river and the trees themselves.
In the picture below, the midwinter sunshine is clearer and stronger. I love the way in which the willows show their vitality and abundance even when they have lost their leaves. The path is relatively dry, yet surrounded by green grass. There is a play of light and shade. There is blue as well as cloud in the sky.
On the ground, in the afternoon, and now in the evening as I write, I am thinking of light and dark, and of waxing and waning, as natural phenomena. I am not thinking in moral or metaphysical terms. These are different considerations, with a tendency moreover towards abstraction and absolutism. In my experience, nature tends to be nuanced. Different things are going on at the same time. Certainly where I live, there is always some balance of light and dark. The balance shifts, but both are always in play.
We treat tomorrow’s sunrise as the beginning of a turn. Here, in 2023, the afternoon before the change seems like a friendly one for an annual nadir of the light. This is also a bit how I am thinking about myself. Towards the end of November, when I last wrote a post of this type, I was celebrating a recovery from illness, and the opportunity of a good day. A good day was about what it was. Many people have pointed out in the last year or so that Covid-19 seems to have a long tail. I have been physically restricted beyond what I think of as normal.
I’m aware of a 75th birthday coming up next year, at which time our government will no longer consider my death as premature. Yet I am in good heart and feeling resilient. Without being presumptuous, I’m leaning in to longevity. I’m checking my capabilities and energy levels, anticipating some adjustments, and noticing the many rays of light which present themselves in my world.
Recently I’ve been unwell and housebound, hardly even watching the world go by. But there came a day when I could go out again, a day that was blessed with sun. It seemed bright and new. I was almost blinded by its luminous presence on a white tree-patterned wall. I had entered late fall, a season with both autumnal and winter features.
The sun shone on trees in Gloucester City Park which retained some of their foliage, but in an end-of-season way that signals austere changes to come. Leaves showed a fragile, lingering beauty, prior to their necessary descent.
The Brunswick Gardens, sitting under a clear blue sky, were home to trees where the leaves had already fallen, leaving the branches as patterns of quiescent arboreal bones. The leaves were on the lawn. Other, managed, flora continued to flourish.
In visual and tactile ways, after an indoor confinement, the neighbourhood was full of reward for me. But I felt cold, and it was indeed the coldest it’s been for many many months. I could not stay out for long. But I had encountered a moment in the year, of interbeing, of living presence – where the wheel is visibly and palpably turning. I was glad to be there, however briefly, available for a nurturing and healing experience.
6.15 pm, 6 October 2023. The experience has gone. The images remain. At a surface level, I can use them to trigger memories of my early evening walk. Chiefly, I remember being surprised at how early the twilight was. I hadn’t caught up with the year and was almost shocked. I have caught up now, nearly a week later, as the darkening process speeds up and we approach Samhain. In today’s world, my country will experience a dramatic boost on 29 October as our clocks ‘fall back’. The 6.15 of one day will become the 5.15 of the next.
Looking at the images more deeply, really looking, and giving them time, I can let them nourish me. I connect with their liminal beauty. Both images present me with land, water, sky, and hints of the fiery sun. But they do so in different ways.
In the image above, I am mostly drawn to the energy of water. The variation in shade emphasises movement and different ripple effects. Land, trees, and artifacts are all in silhouette, but the water has light and shade. It is the water that feels most alive. There is variation in the clouds too, with their patterned layers and subtle access to sunlight just above the trees. But they are not as mobile as the water. The sunlight itself seems very subdued. It’s still there, though very much in the background.This is not yet a night sky.
In the image below the water is strong too, but my eyes are drawn above to the clouds, which here are more dramatic. The residual power of waning sunlight is very clearly present. For me, there’s a sense of the tree tops yearning upwards as they reach for the gifts of the sun whilst it still retains a presence. Although I am contemplating images and not immersed in the landscape I have a strong sense of living presence in a field of living presence. In this state I feel a conceivably irrational confidence in life and the world.. A fragile kind of faith, that my heart cannot resist.
Contemplative states come in different varieties. In today’s culture, we tend to privilege an alert language of mindfulness, presence and awakening. Through these tools, we learn take more responsibility for our own experience – not so much for what happens (though our effective agency may improve), as in how we respond. At a deeper level, we learn to embrace the gift of experiencing, even when specific experiences are unwanted or painful. We lean in to the at times heart-breaking miracle of human life.
There are other, also potent, ways to contemplate. In the following extract from his magical realist novel Atlantis (1) John Cowper Powys presents an archaic, more than human world, with a very different take on consciousness and our place in the cosmos. We are on the island of Ithaca, in the later life of its King Odysseus, following his belated return from the siege of Troy and resumption of control at home. We begin in a moment of great collective foreboding – something terrible is happening or about to happen. This is coincident with the old king planning a final voyage. In this place and time, a young boy encounters Atropos, oldest and most powerful of the three Fates. He intuitively grasps that sentient beings help to weave their own destiny simply by falling into states “wherein we simply escape for a moment from the trouble of being a conscious creature at all”.
“The longer Nisos Naubolides looked into the eyes of Fate and the longer Fate looked into the eyes of Nisos Naubilides the more clearly did the later realize that the imperishable frame of Atropos, the ‘one who could not be turned’, was made of a substance drawn from a level of existence outside both time and space, though cunningly adapted to play its part in each of them.
“The boy proved how ‘clever’ he was by imbibing, like an inexhaustible draught of timeless experience, much more at that moment than the mere physical nature of the oldest of the Fates; for there came over him in a trance that was more than a trance the surprising knowledge – and this … was really with him to the day of his death – that Atropos helps us in the creation of our individual fate by an infinitely long series of what some would call nothing but blind, stupid, dull dreamy, moon-struck ‘brown studies’, many of which take place inside the walls of houses, and others when we are moving about on our ordinary errands outside.
“In these interruptions of our ordinary consciousness we fall into a brainless, idea-less moment of dull abstraction in which we cease to think of anything in particular but just stare blindly and dully at some particular physical object, no matter what, that happens to be there at the moment. This object, in itself of no particular interest, and never selected for its real purpose is merely an object to stare at, lean upon, rest against and use as a trance=background, or brown-study foreground, or, if you like, a shoal beneath a stranded consciousness, or a reef of brainless abstraction, wherein we simply escape for a moment from the trouble of being a conscious creature at all.
“Nisos showed how born he was to be an interpreter if not a prophet by his complete acceptance – as from the trunk of his spruce-fir he faced the Mistress of Fate as she leaned against the trunk of her spruce-fir – of the revelation that our individual destiny is made up of an accumulation of brainless, uninspired brown-study moments of abstraction wherein we cease to be organic living creatures and almost become … things of wood and stone and clay and dust and earth, almost become what we were before we were intelligent of instinctive creatures: almost – but not quite!
“For, as our young friend looked Atropos in the face, there was permitted to him what is permitted to few among us mortals during our lifetime, namely the realization of what actually happens to us when we fall, as we all do, into these day-dreams. At that moment as Nisos Naubolides now knew well, all over the surface of the earth there were living creatures, many of them men, women and children, many of them horses, cattle, lions, wolves, foxes, wild asses and tame pigs, sheep and goats, rats and mice, who were standing or crouching, lying or sitting in one of these brooding trances when dazed or dreaming, we are asleep and yet not asleep.”
NOTE: John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) grew up mainly in the English West Country, went to Cambridge University and then became a teacher and lecturer, mostly in the USA where he lived for about 30 years. On returning to the UK, after a short spell in Dorset, he settled in Wales in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his life. His best known works are Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Maiden Castle, Weymouth Sands, Owen Glendower, Porius and his Autobiography. His literary editors describe him as having a “weird, mystical, brilliant and obsessive imagination.”
I am grateful to the Druid community for its varied ways of working with the 8-fold wheel of the year – especially when the festivals are placed in the context of the gradually turning wheel. Within that patterning of both nature and experience, I find the equinoctial periods and my response to them the least predictable of times.
The picture above shows a pre-equinoctial evening in Weymouth harbour, Dorset, England, round about 6 pm. I found this moment gentle and relaxing. The soft sunlight on the houses, boats and water seemed like a welcome home. I was born only 30 miles from Weymouth and it is part of my childhood landscape, my motherland. I took the picture on 18 September, the first day of my first visit for decades. I felt as if I was in a final afterglow of summer, content on familiar ground.
My wife Elaine and I spent only four days in Weymouth. Even over this brief period, we both had a strong sense of the advancing dark, in the mornings and the evenings alike, a shifting alternation of night and day that increasingly favoured night. One of our days was also dominated by high winds and driving rain, followed by a night in which we felt damp and chilled to the bone, unused as we now are to old buildings.
That night I had a rare experience of broken sleep and uncanny dreams. Eventually I woke up fully to a startling level of condensation on old window panes, obscuring an otherwise stunning view. For me this equinoctial period has, at least psychically, emphasised a shift towards the dark rather than a moment of poise and balance. Not a full dark, perhaps, but drained of colour, direction unknown.
The turning of the wheel never stops. On 23 September, the morning of the equinox, I felt the pleasure that can come from enjoying home after a break. I also noticed that the world beyond our many balcony doors was very clearly proclaiming a victory for the darker half of the year. This will be the setting for my journey for some time to come.
Whereas in the world I feel currently secure, I am conscious of uncertainties within. I do not quite see my critical-creative direction. In my 75th year, I wonder about ‘creative ageing’ (an old catch-phrase for me) and ‘critical wisdom’ (a new one). Hot air? Or genuine signposts? The Weymouth visit has stirred me up, but to what specific purpose I don’t yet know.
Forgiving Humanity (1) is an extended essay rather than a book. I found it easy to read and hard to work with. Author Peter Russell is highly skilled at distilling data and making his case. His conclusion is that the near term extinction of the human species is inevitable, and not unnatural or to be faulted. “We are coming to the end of our species’ journey, spinning faster and faster into the center of an evolutionary spiral.”
Russell points to what he sees as our our natural-born drive for exponential growth and development. A dance of genetic and behavioural change led us to an enhanced brain, bi-pedal walking, manual dexterity, and a shift in the position of the larynx to enable complex speech. Cultural evolution then led to organised hunting with the throwing spear and, later, the bow. Later still, at an increasing rate of change, came agriculture, metallurgy, the industrial revolution (from steam to atomic power in not much more than a century) and, most recently, the accelerating information revolution now leading to the rise of AI. Quantum computing is on the horizon.
The problem according to Russell is that exponential growth is inherently predestined to run out of control. This is “the curse of exponential change.” Exponential growth is not like the linear growth that we can more comfortably imagine. In the domain of economics, for example, 3% annual growth rate in the world’s GDP, compounded over 100 years, would lead to a consumption of energy and resources at 20 times today’s rate. Russell started thinking about this problem as a young and gifted mathematician at the end of the 1960s. On his analysis, we would be fatally fouling our own nest even without the specific problem of the climate crisis. Climate change simply exacerbates and dramatises our predicament, hastening the process of breakdown.
Russell is aware of systemic injustices in our socio-economic system, but this book does not explore political mitigations. He expects major breakdown in this century. A remnant population in reduced circumstances will carry on for a while longer. But this human triggered extinction event, which has already claimed many other species, will still be rapid in planetary terms. In the immediate future, Russell sees a likelihood of continuing technological breakthroughs for some decades, in the midst of extensive cultural breakdown and a diminishing global population. I am not certain that he is right, but I fear that he may be. And I find him hard to read, trying to imagine what it would be like for different people in different places, and stepping into their boots down here in the trenches where embodied human life is lived until it’s gone.
Whilst the earlier sections of Forgiving Humanity are presented as if from the perspective of a distant cosmic scientist, there is a later turn to human experience and how to live in the new conditions. Peter Russell becomes one of us and shares his long-held view of consciousness and its possibilities, especially the affirmation that: “beneath our day-to-day experience lies a deeper sense of being, unperturbed by the goings on in the world, and our hopes and fears about them … meditative and self-enquiry processes … lead to greater calm and self-awareness, and … the more in touch we are with our inner being, the more considerate, compassionate, and caring we become – qualities that could prove invaluable in meeting the challenges ahead.” I also like his idea of remaining in service to the earth whenever we can, continuing to do our best for it even when knowing that our species is waning and likely to wink out. The notion of persevering with restorative efforts allows for limited local successes, seems like a healing process in itself and preserves a sense of positive agency in hard times. I am sure that people will continue to work in these ways whenever given half a chance.
For Russell, psycho-spiritual practices and communities are a key resiliency factor for navigating through heart-breaking conditions. We need to “find the acceptance that allows us to move into the unknown with courage and an open heart”. Russell says that facing our collective extinction is like facing our personal deaths, only more so because we are looking at the end of our kind. He borrows from a well-known map of how to work through five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining and depression – to a final acceptance. I have to note some reservations about schemes based on normative ideas about how we work through distress. People are very different – though many, it is true, are reassured by maps of this kind. I would also not want these suggestions to be misunderstood as an injunction to put on a mask of serenity when something else is going on in our body/mind. For me, the deeper acceptance is to recognise and accept our confusion and turbulence, if confusion and turbulence are what is happening. The spaciousness of deep acceptance then keeps company with them, avoiding both the false mask of serenity on the one hand, and immersed identification with our distress on the other. Nothing is denied.
I am not sure about the suggestion of ‘forgiving humanity’. If I take ‘humanity’ as simply the name of a species, I don’t feel that it’s my place either to forgive or withhold forgiveness from a species of which I am a member. If I take ‘Humanity’ as an idealised abstraction, or construct, then there’s no-one there to forgive outside my own imagination. For me, working as best as I can at deep acceptance and loving kindness, accepting with self-compassion that I will likely be wayward and inconsistent in my endeavours, is the better way to go. It keeps me in the world of lived interactions with other sentient beings and feels like a more engaged and grounded aspiration.
Despite some reservations, I value this work highly and recommend it to anyone concerned with the issues raised in it. We need voices like this, who move beyond deep adaptation to face into the possibility of no adaptation. Forgiving Humanity offers a distinctive lens on the crisis we are in, and it does so in a concise, readable and sadly persuasive way.
(1) Peter Russell Forgiving Humanity: How the Most Innovative Became the Most Dangerous Las Vegas, NV: Elf Rock Productions, 2023
NB Peter Russell studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge but later changed to experimental psychology. After learning transcendental meditation (TM) with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, he took up the first academic post ever offered in Britain on the psychology of meditation. He also has a postgraduate degree in computer science. In the 1970s he pioneered senior corporate management courses on meditation, creativity, stress management and sustainable development. Later he coined the term ‘global brain’ with the 1980’s best seller of that name in which he predicted the Internet and the impact it would have on humanity. I have reviewed a more recent book Letting Go of Nothing at:
“Higher up, … in the middle of a small clearing, there stood a gigantic ginkgo tree. In the scheme of tiny streets, this was practically the one single unoccupied space, and of course this plot of land was only precisely as big as was necessary for the ancient tree to exist, for it to get both air and sunlight, for it to have enough strength to spread out roots beneath the earth.
Every other plant on the upward inclining streets of the quarter of Fukuine belonged to either something or someone: it was the property, ornament, and decoration, the carefully guarded and cared-for treasure of one or another family building, reaching out from tiny pristine courtyards with blooming or budding branches, the perennially green foliage emerging suddenly next to the eaves of the tiny, hidden gates, or the regularly repeating fence slats …
Only … the ginkgo tree that belonged to nothing and to no one stood by itself in the clearing as if there were’t even anything that it could be tethered to, as if it couldn’t even belong to anything, a kind of unbridled, wild, dangerous being rising high above every building and roof and tree, already with its full fresh crown in the unaccustomedly gentle early spring and with its multitude of peculiar, fan-shaped leaves, or rather leaves that much more resembled a heart cracked down the middle, sighing with the gentle wind.
This was the ginkgo, bearing within itself the numbed depths of innumerable geochronological ages, its thick trunk only able to bear a Shinto rope with its paper streamers, and below, the wild proliferation of a holly bush grown out from one of its sides; the ginkgo, accordingly, was the only one that rose from this peaceful world, and was well visible from below as well, like a kind of tower, because everything else ended up concealing the other things, one house hiding another, one street hidden by another.
Only it – this colossal, and, among all the other plants, frighteningly alien and unknowable ginkgo tree – ascended, and unmistakably, as if it had not arrived her directly from a hundred million years ago, the dark Cretaceous era from which it had originated, so that someone would have to notice it, someone looking up from below, from the direction of the train station, who, having arrived, and searching for the correct direction, would take a look around.”
Extract from: Laszlo Krasznahorkai A Mountain to the North, a Laketo the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East London: Tuskar Rock Press, 2023. Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet.
NB I have done some minor pruning (…) to keep the focus on the ginkgo. For the sake legibility in this blog format, I have also divided the extract into paragraphs which do not appear in the original text.
The haws are red and shiny on their hawthorn bushes. Blackberry remains tentative, its pale green fruit visible but still unripe. I see green leaves now leaning towards yellow. I am walking in a scrap of local woodland, bounded by a canal* on my left and housing some distance to my right. It is around 7.30 pm on 13 August, and I am opening up to the colours of late summer as they show themselves this year.
Looking up, I see a healthy crop of crab apples at different stages of ripening on their tree. The ripest apples are red, though their red is softer than that of the haws. The leaves of the apple tree are shinier than those in the background. I am aware of a light grey sky.
Nature in various forms finds a niche everywhere. This time has its own flowers, and again I see yellow. I am not the greatest botanist. and I cannot name with certainty these plucky if slightly battered blooms, saying hello from behind a fence. But I imagine them as poor relations of even the lesser celandine, and therefore almost certainly official weeds**. I hope and pray they remain safe here in these woods.
Below, looking at tangled leaves, I find a truly autumnal scene, in the yellowing and browning of leaves. It feels a bit early for this neighbourhood. The wheel of the year is still following its seasonal course, so far, but is becoming more erratic and unpredictable than in the past. I wonder about the future of the jet stream – and indeed the Gulf stream too. But in the moment, my heart opens and I love this pattern of plant life moving through its cycle and gradually, subtly, changing in appearance.
I photograph two teazel stalks, below, because I enjoy their shapes, because they are a further illustration of the browning theme, and also because of the visibility of the canal behind them. They don’t live in the canal, like bullrushes, but they like to be close. The image also includes an almost ghostly barge on the water below.
After leaving the woods, I am confronted (below) with the sky. I am facing west, across the Llanthony Priory gardens. I see dark stormy clouds, whose edgy brooding energy is somewhat modified by a blue opening in the distance. This dark grey, and the rain and storm it sometimes brings, have certainly been a feature of summer this year. There’s a strong contrast with last year at this time, when there was a heat wave, which for us still means C 30-35/F 86-95 with anything more being exceptional. In July 2022 part of the country briefly reached over C40/F 104 for the first time since records began. This year the grass is still green. Last year it burned up and the ground was parched and cracked.
Following the wheel of the year carefully, as it turns, is a valuable discipline for modern Druids, among others concerned with deep ecology (sacred ecology?) and the climate crisis. We don’t confine ourselves to celebrating our seasonal festivals, though we enjoy them too. For we now know experientially that the world is changing. The traditional rhythms of nature are not an eternal verity to rely on.
In some ways I find small personal observations emotionally more impactful than my limited knowledge of climate science and deep time geology. These are very helpful for context and framing, but personal experience is more immediate than these. It is also more deeply immediate, though less dramatic and disturbing, than reports of disaster elsewhere. Following the wheel of the year, we are doing more than making observations. We are celebrating and bearing witness to the life that surrounds us, offering our attention and energy to its continued flourishing. Blessings on the land.
*The Gloucester-Sharpness canal, England. Beyond the Gloucester docks, but not yet out of the city.
** A reader comments: “I think your mystery plant is ragwort, a much maligned ‘weed’ the destruction of which is encouraged by the UK government as it can be harmful to grazing animals yet is actually one of the best forage plants for pollinators”.
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)
This post looks at Animism as the guiding principal of my Druidry. The term itself comes from nineteenth century anthropology, and is somewhat problematic. Scholars from European and North American backgrounds , formed by a mix of Christian and secular ideas, were studying, and labelling, the traditional practices of other people. The people themselves were mostly in the process of becoming colonial subjects and living in cultures under stress. So ‘Animism’ started out as a top-down classification, which gave Animists a lowly position in the hierarchy of cultural and spiritual life. A stigma persists to this day.
Despite this dubious history, the word ‘Animism’ is now being turned around by people from the global north itself, spiritually hungry in our now palpably faltering 21st century world. Some years ago, research by Graham Harvey distinguished two positive uses of the term Animism among modern western Pagans. “Some Pagans identified Animism as a part of their religious practice or experience which involved encounters with tree-spirits, river-spirits or ancestor-spirits. This Animism was metaphysical. … Other Pagans seemed to use ‘Animism’ as a short-hand reference to their efforts to re-imagine and re-direct human participation in the larger-than-human, multi-species community. This Animism was relational, embodied, eco-activist and often ‘naturalist’ rather than metaphysical” (1).
My Animism draws primarily on the second of the two accounts above. But it is deepened by a Buddhist influence, especially that of the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh: “There is no absolute dividing line between living matter and inert matter. If we took the so-called inanimate elements out of you and me, we would not be able to live. We are made of non-human elements. This is what is taught in the Diamond Sutra, an ancient Buddhist text that could be considered the world’s first treatise on deep ecology. We cannot draw a hard distinction between human beings and other living beings, or between living beings and inert matter. There is vitality in everything. The entire cosmos is radiant with vitality. If we see the Earth as a block of matter lying outside of us, then we have not yet truly seen the Earth. The Earth is also alive” (2).
Thich Nhat Hanh follows an old tradition. In thirteenth century Japan, Zen Master Eihei Dogen had taught that enlightenment is just ‘intimacy with all things’. Elsewhere in his own text, Thich Nhat Hanh says: “Just as a wave doesn’t need to go looking for water, we don’t need to go looking for the ultimate. The wave is the water. You already are what you want to become. You are made of the sun, moon and stars. You have everything inside you”. Thich Nhat Hanh explains that a flower is made only of non-flower elements. We can say that the flower is empty of separate self-existence. But that doesn’t mean that the flower is not there. “When you perceive reality in this way, you will not discriminate against the garbage in favour of the rose” (2).
This Buddhist wisdom doesn’t seem to me to come directly out of the four noble truths or eightfold path. The Buddhists of south-east and east Asia were at ease with the traditional Animism of their cultures, and the views expressed above appear to me to be at least partly a cultural gift from the Animists. Japan, for example, was intensely influenced by Buddhism without any thought of displacing Shinto, and the traditions readily interwove.
It was otherwise in the west. Already, In the first century CE, the Roman philosopher Plutarch wrote of the death of Great Pan, after the time of Jesus but before the rise of Christianity. James Hillman comments: “With Pan dead, so was Echo; we could no longer capture consciousness through reflecting within our instincts. … The person of Pan the mediator, like an ether who invisibly enveloped all natural beings with personal meaning, with brightness, had vanished. Stones became only stones – trees, trees; things, places, animals no longer 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 – the owl’s hoot is Athena and the mollusc on the shore is Aphrodite … Whatever was eaten, smelled, walked upon or watched, all were sensuous presences of archetypal significance”.” (3).
James Hillman, after service as Director of Studies as the Jung Institute in Zurich, went on to develop his own form of archetypal psychology. He was a strong proponent of Panpsychism, a world view very similar to forms of Animism being articulated today. Panpsychism literally means the ensoulment of everything (from the Greek), though the sound ‘Pan’ also associates us with the god. At the same time this view broadly fits with the understanding of Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, described above.
‘Animism’ is for me a word, not a thing, or a another religious banner to raise. It points to a wide range of experiences, understandings, and articulations. Pinned down to a single, dictionary definition, it would lose its power and energy. Yet Animism has become the word that best describes my way of being a modern Druid, both as view and as practice. I find it grounding and regenerative to have decisively adopted this word.
(1) Graham Harvey (ed.) The Handbook of Contemporary Animism London & New York: Routledge, 2014 (First published by Acumen in 2013)
(2) Thich Nhat Hanh The Art of Living London: Rider, 2017 (Rider is part of Penguin Random House)
(3) James Hillman The Essential James Hillman: A Blue fire London: Routledge, 1989 (Introduces and edited by Thomas Moore in collaboration with the author)
Contemplative Inquiry 