It’s finally arrived! You open a sturdy, medium-sized box and read the small paper insert that rests on top of the packing material. Paper? It might even be papyrus, or vellum …
Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you for purchasing this Seeker’s Spirituality Starter-Kit. We’ve designed your Kit to the specifications you provided us (see your Interview Response Summary, Appendix A and your Karmic Parameters Chart, Appendix B) to help launch you on a marvelous journey that can, if you choose, become a life-long adventure.
While we have made every effort to insure that your kit more than meets your expectations and delivers years of service, please contact our Satisfaction Support Team with any concerns or questions you have about performance.
+ For personalized directions based on your unique spiritual set-points, see Part One.
+ For instructions on how to customize your Seeker’s Spirituality Starter-Kit to fine-tune its performance, see Part Two.
+ For advice on encounters with non-physical entities, see Part Three.
+ For what to do in the event that absolutely nothing happens after you’ve tried everything, you’re convinced spirituality is a hot load of crap, and you not only want your money back, but you’ll see us in court, see Part Four.
+ For techniques to magick yourself home after an accidental mis-teleportation, see Part Five.
Antelope Canyon, Arizona: Pexels.com
Part One: Your Unique Spiritual Set-points
Among the many transformations spiritual practice can achieve is a shift in our limiting spiritual set-points. These set-points may include being a complete waste of space, an entity currently constrained by self-imposed, indefensible attitudes, false assumptions, enervating predilections, stupid choices, mindless habits, untested postulates, internalized stress, ingrained prejudices, blatant ignorance, and a generalized media-saturated drugged stupor.
Our apologies: the spiritual sub-contractor who drafted the above paragraph has been identified and sacked. His agenda does not align with our corporate best practices. Please consult the revised version that follows:
Contrary to debilitating propaganda we may have internalized from childhood, parenting, school, religion, mass culture, the arts and the influence of any particularly dubious friends, each of us is a unique spiritual being. Fortunately, this demonstrable spiritual fact outweighs all the accumulated negativity of the previously mentioned influences. This point is so vital that it bears repeating: each of us is a unique spiritual being, and each of us is greater than any forces arrayed against us.
Based on the information you provided us, we suggest implementation of these three principles as you try out your Seeker’s Spirituality Starter Kit:
(a) As one of the Wise was careful to teach, the sacred was made for people, not the other way around. Exploring just what that means to each of us is a first and worthy step for many people.
Here is a long human history of seeking for what is sacred, best, magical, joyous and transformative. And here are some practices, powers, places, perspectives, people and purposes that might help. Respect yourself as you respect these things: but if any of them do not nourish what is deepest and best in you, after you have made a reasonable trial of their potential, do not put any more of your energy into them.
(b) While “try everything once” isn’t always the best advice, most of us probably have, in one life or another. Such experiences go far toward explaining the instinctive reactions many of us have, and some of us lack, to certain kinds of opportunities that provide steady headlines for local and sometimes national news.
As another of the Wise has taught us, “How do I make good decisions? From experience. How do I gain experience? From making bad decisions”.
c) “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free”. As a statement of spiritual destiny, and also as a means of measuring progress, this wisdom-saying bears out extensive experimentation. After all, the Druids counseled others on walking and spiraling the Circles of Abred [1] [2] [3]. Asking, testing, re-asking, and pushing deeper into “What is the truth of this moment?” can feed the most freedom-hungry soul. (Hint: it may partly be star-light and the music of the spheres.)
You glance at the other section titles, but you want to get started. Those other sections can wait. Still, it’s probably smart to quickly review what’s there …
Part Two: Customizing your Seeker’s Spirituality Starter-Kit
Hmm. Worth looking at, for sure, but I’ll probably know more after I get started.
Part Three: Advice on Encounters with Non-physical Entities
That’s not gonna happen. They don’t exist. No worries there.
Part Four: When Absolutely Nothing Happens: A Few Words to the Oblivious and the Litigious-Minded
Something’s always happening.
Part Five: Techniques to Magick Yourself Back Home after an Accidental Mis-teleportation. Also known as “The Silver Apples of the Moon, the Golden Apples of the Sun”
Worth reading, I guess. Might learn something, though it sounds like a kind of Harry-Potter footnote …
Appendix A: Interview Response Summary
Appendix B: Karmic Parameters Chart
Later. These big-box stores — always too much. Shouldn’t have bought the economy-pack …
Over the last several cold damp nights and cool partly cloudy days here in New England, many of us who heat with wood have lit the first fires of autumn. (Some days building and feeding a fire is the best theology I can muster.)
More than one Vermont Druid I know makes it an autumn ritual, invoking Brighid and celebrating the turning of the year in this private, immediately practical and also beautifully symbolic way. Way more fun than turning up a thermostat. You celebrate starting from where you are and what you’re doing. Where else, after all, can I begin?
Stay alert, I tell myself. This can be one of the times Druidry demonstrates its wonder and power and joy. We don’t always need the big ritual circles and dords* sounding their ancient welcomes, though these, too, can be apt and lovely. Sometimes, though, the best Druidry for the moment is pocket-sized.
Pocket Druidry. At last year’s East Coast Gathering, Kris Hughes led a workshop demonstrating another form of it. In the early days of Revival Druidry, the Welsh poet and Druid Iolo Morganwg conceived a literal pocket Druidry, constructing a ritual circle for a gathering of friends on the Summer Solstice of 1792, out of stones drawn from his pocket.
World in your hand, circle in your pocket. Our lives, especially in the last century or so, seem to repeat a pattern: demonstrate our immense power to shape and re-create the world, then withdraw, standing back in dismay and doubt when it doesn’t turn out as we hoped. We’re still practicing, still in the elementary grades, with all the meanings that suggests. Learning to use the elements at hand, still in the early stages.
With the love of triads and threes that marks so much of Celtic art and story, it’s no surprise that the Celtic conception of our spiritual journeys should mirror this same triplicity. From the starting point of Annwn, the Celtic Otherworld, we move forth and back through three states of manifestation and consciousness, in a kind of dance that sees us revisiting old lessons until we’ve fully mastered the material, spiralling through different forms and perspectives.
Most of us hang out for a considerable time in this present world of Abred, this place of testing and proving. From here we proceed to Gwynfyd, a world of liberty and freedom beyond the pale shadows of these forces in our present world. Back and forth between Abred and Gwynfyd, with dips into Annwn here and there. And last comes Ceugant, an unbounded, infinite realm. By definition, no end point, but a new beginning. The horizon recedes.
Morganwg’s compilation Barddas (section 227) explains this cosmology through a kind of Druidic catechism of question and answer. I’ve modernized some of the archaic language in the following excerpt:
Q. What were you before you became human in the circle of Abred?
A. I was in Annwn, the least possible thing capable of life, and the nearest possible to absolute death, and I came in every form, and through every form capable of a body and life, to the state of human in the circle of Abred, where my condition was severe and grievous during the age of ages, ever since I was parted in Annwn from the dead.
Q. Through how many forms have you come?
A. Through every form capable of life, in water, in earth, and in air.
As the Beatles sing it, “It’s a long and winding road …”
One of my teachers notes that human beings recently refused a chance to rise to the next level of awareness by accepting responsibility for themselves and their actions. Some days it feels like we’re throwing tantrums because we didn’t get what we thought we wanted. Rather than awareness, we default to outrage.
In the circle we’re presently in, we refuse to accept cause and effect, continuing to live on a merely emotional, reactive level, without fuller consciousness, at least very often. We’ll readily respond to the energy tides sweeping around us, and contribute to them willingly, but deny that any of them has longer-term effects we need to weigh before leaping in, or that we always have a choice. But that’s how I feel, we say. Yes. So now own it, and go from there, counsel our guides and sages. Maybe not by diving immediately into the very next feeling that presents itself just because it knocks at the door of consciousness.
Ask why? Ask who benefits? Ask how do I live from a place of honor?
Don’t think, say our advertisers and politicians and insta-gurus galore. Don’t think. React!
Seedtime and harvest, whispers the wisdom of the earth.
The glory and wonder and marvel of it all, in the face of the sufferings we keep bringing on ourselves and each other, are the possibilities of joy unbounded that we glimpse too rarely — that view through the window, over the next hill, in a day- or night-dream, which nevertheless keep us going in spite of everything.
This — the Barddas counsels us — this is simply the way we get there. (If you find another and better way, please do let me know!) Through experiencing fully every possibility and option and choice, and living their consequences.
Less comforting that I was looking for, but a provocative insight, nonetheless. It goes remarkably far in explaining the predicaments (plural) we’re in. They’re the lesson at hand. The necessary lesson. Whatever comes, though, matters less than what we do with it. Especially with the sense of deja-vu that we’ve faced this all before. Wait, I say. Sometimes it feels like I’m still in somebody else’s lesson. Why do I have to sit in class waiting for them to get it?
For some, yes, the lesson’s familiar, a kind of review. Others need to go through the whole thing, maybe for the first time. They may never have encountered it before. But the final piece I know I’m still working on, the piece that keeps me here (I can’t speak for you), is that I have the choice to learn and show compassion. To serve. It’s not about me after all.
That’s all? I ask, grumbling or swearing, depending. Obviously I do need to be here, I say ruefully, a moment later, if only because I’ll need compassion from others soon enough, when a hard lesson comes my way. As it will, guaranteed.
Along with each lesson, that peculiar joy: This isn’t all there is. Keep going. Keep loving, in spite of all evidence to contrary. It’s human evidence, says the sage in the heart. You made it, you live it, you learn it, you move on.
And the goal? I ask. Ah, now. The big question. Your answer today is more important than anybody else’s. Because it will shape what you do next …
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IMAGE: Brighid in her form as triple goddess of healing, smithcraft and fire.
*A Youtube video of a large dord being played — sounding remarkably like a didgeridoo.
I want to do some thinking out loud here. Nothing new, since I do it frequently. But it’s an experiment with a more specific kind of thinking I share less often here, because for many people, negative experiences with Christianity raise painful associations and memories that make even a mention of Jesus or the long, rich, varied and potentially very useful Christian tradition anathema to them. So if you’re still deeply allergic and over-sensitized to some of the more toxic forms of religion, well, here’s your red flag. But if you choose to go forward, simply treat the following as another kind of practice, like tai chi or dancing when no one’s watching, or waving at the moon.
Try it out for what it’s worth, without preconceptions. If you need a prod, here’s one: “I can’t dance” doesn’t cut it. Everybody moves, and everybody can move rhythmically. That’s all that’s needed. The rest is mere practice and polish.
As a Druid I feel almost a compulsion to follow wherever the light leads. I’ve rarely been disappointed, which is why I keep doing it.
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One legacy of my Christian upbringing is a fascination with “wisdom from the borders.” Unlike my more fundamentalist cousins, my mother was drawn to Christian Science with its focus on healing, and my World War II vet father was a member of the “God made the world, I farm a small piece of it, I’m grateful for its seasons and gifts, and that’s already enough for me” school of deism. From that initial gift of my parents’ openness to possibility, I learned and grew the most, before I took other paths, through insights from the periphery, or even outside the official “party line,” of Evangelical Christianity, or “EC.”
EC is, after all, just one sub-branch of one faith, but it’s a sub-branch that sometimes gets a bad name for its often unreflective adherence to dogma, especially in the face of good counter-evidence. Because of that, it also gets a lot of press from agnostic and atheist strands in contemporary thought and journalism. One of the regrettable but understandable consequences of the debate is that many people write off a whole religion because one or two particular flavors of it that they happen to know or have experienced just make them gag. It’s a “baby with the bathwater” thang.
One of the EC dogmas that bothered me the most, from about the age of 8 or 9 onward, and that has set many other people’s teeth on edge as well, is what’s more recently been called “damnationism” — the apparent and deeply problematic need to condemn whole swaths of humanity to eternal torment because they don’t happen to believe the right things required by one stream of orthodoxy, all so we can hang with the sheep and not with the goats for the rest of time. Finally, some writers are even starting to call that out for what it is: a blasphemous perversion of an original truth.**
Hell, MI, 48169 — an actual place, population approx. 260, located 15 miles NW of Ann Arbor.
One of my favorite writers within the universalist stream of Christianity, which doesn’t clutch a self-righteous need to condemn everyone else but Christians to hell, is Thomas Talbott. Universalism can be conveniently summed up in just two words: love wins.
Talbott’s insights do come cloaked in evangelical language, because that’s his particular upbringing. But he looks far beyond the surface, like I hope you will, and like most people learn to do when they realize either a pretty or ugly face is often the least interesting and important part of a person.
Here’s an excerpt I want to work with, from Talbott’s fine book* The Inescapable Love of God:
In fact, our bad choices almost never get us what we really want; this is part of what makes them bad, and also one reason why God is able to bring redemptive good out of them. When we make a mess of our lives and our misery becomes more and more unbearable, the hell we thereby create for ourselves will in the end resolve the very ambiguity and shatter the very illusions that made the bad choices possible in the first place. That is how God works with us as created rational agents. He permits us to choose freely in the ambiguous contexts in which we first emerge as self-aware beings, and he then requires us to learn from experience the hard lessons we sometimes need to learn. So in that way, the consequences of our free choices, both the good ones and the bad ones, are a source of revelation; they reveal sooner or later — in the next life, if not in this one — both the horror of separation from God and the bliss of union with him. And that is why the end is foreordained: all paths finally lead to the same destination, the end is reconciliation, though some are longer, windier, and a lot more painful than others.
When I read sound insights from the Wise working in other traditions that may ring notes that jar a little, I like to try out alternate versions, to see how they work when clothed in other terminology. How much of the wisdom survives the change? How much of the difficulty is merely semantics? Here are Talbott’s words again, re-garbed in non-theist language:
In fact, our bad choices almost never get us what we really want; this is part of what makes them bad for us, and also one reason why our subsequent experiences are able to bring good out of them. When we make a mess of our lives and our misery becomes more and more unbearable, the hell we thereby create for ourselves can eventually resolve the very ambiguity and shatter the very illusions that made the bad choices possible in the first place. That is how the patterns of the universe often respond to us as rational agents. They permit us to choose freely in the ambiguous contexts in which we first emerge as self-aware beings, and then let us learn from experience the hard lessons we sometimes need to learn in order to gain wisdom. So in that way, the consequences of our free choices, both the good ones and the bad ones, are a potential source of growth and discovery; they reveal both the suffering of separation from our own highest good and the bliss of heeding its shaping pattern.
That’s interesting to me. How much did I change? Well, “God” gets replaced with patterns that inhere in lived experience, and “redemption” becomes growth and increased insight. The universe becomes aware of itself in us and in other beings. Is that “true”? Well, let’s be Druidic about it and test it, for years if necessary, rather than bothering with any belief or disbelief about it before we even have a foundation of experience to reflect on. Whether the patterns of the universe tend towards love is an experiential question, and really not a matter that mere belief can adequately resolve either way. And for how many other questions like it is this also true?
These insights issue from what used to be called the “perennial tradition,” or the philosophia perennis, a well of wisdom common to the depths of all valid traditions, part of the heritage of humanity rather than the exclusive possession of any one culture or tradition. It’s also part of folk wisdom in the West that emerges in sayings like “what goes around comes around” and “what you do comes back to you.” The added insight here points to the value of “bad” experiences, just as useful — or misleading! — as the good ones. For ease and comfort can mislead us about the pain and suffering in the world, just as our own pain and suffering can blind us to the beauty and wonder and possibility around us. From all I’ve seen, life, fortunately, is bigger than either.
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One of the streams from the early days of the Druid revival and the writings of Iolo Morgannwg*** runs with a Welsh version of such wisdom, offering a vision of a cosmos in which all things move toward growth and increasing consciousness, over countless eons, through every imaginable form, and in every imaginable experience. In this conception, the universe is a flow of energies, and its current sweeps us/we ride it from Annwn (ah-noon) and Abred (ah-bred) to Gwynfyd (gwin-vid) and ultimately on to Ceugant (kye-gahnt), a kind of infinity. Eventually we all experience everything.
Unlike the Christian sense of redemption or heaven, you’ll note, these are simply points along the flow. Another way to see it: the mouth of the river as it enters the sea is not superior to its source in the springs on a distant hillside. All is flow. Things may slow down or speed up as they move along the river, adjusting to the current, to the shore, and to each other.
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I had the privilege this last Saturday to take part in an open discussion on the topic “Have You Had a Spiritual Experience?” Those who attended were mostly older than me. Graying or white hair framed almost every face as I looked around the circle of the dozen or so of us who attended. But when the question arose about how many of us kept to some kind of spiritual practice, every hand went up. I found this wonderfully inspiring.
The point that everyone wanted to tackle: what’s next? How do we work with spiritual truths, with the patterns of life we’ve all encountered, and continue to grow in wisdom and love?
Those questions also continue to drive me on my own path and underlie my explorations on this blog. Thank you to all who read this blog for joining me for a few minutes each week and for considering these things, too.
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*Talbott, Thomas. The Inescapable Love of God. 2nd ed. Cascade Books, 2014.
**Favager, David. Hell to Pay?: The Blasphemous Absurdity of Damnationism. Amazon Digital/Kindle, 2015.
***Iolo Morgannwg — from the foreword to the Sacred Text Archive to Morgannwg’s collection Barddas:
However, this is one of those visionary texts which is worth reading for its own merits, irrespective of whether it is ‘genuine’ or not. Taken at face value, the Barddas remains a fascinating text. It has resonances with the Upanishads, Kabbalah, and Freemasonry. The Bardic alphabet presented in the ‘Symbol’ section is completely invented, based on Runic and Ogham, and has utility as a magical alphabet. However it is about as genuine as the alphabets of J.R.R. Tolkien. The ‘Theology’ section appears to be based on Iolo’s peculiar Christian views (he described himself as a Unitarian Quaker). ‘Theology’ also contains a great number of Triads, some of which may be from authentic ancient Bardic lore. The ‘Wisdom’ section has a great deal of mythopoetic information, some of which is authentic, some not. The Barddas is great reading if you are at all interested in the ancient Druids, as long as you keep in mind the background of its creation.
Sunrise, are you waiting for that sliver of moon to invite you? This time of year I’m up before you, and waiting in the perfect frozen peace of January pre-dawn.
Slowly our snow-covered fields flower from purple to gray to white, and then bloom golden with light. A cardinal with pinfeathers puffed against the cold ignites the snow when he lands beneath the bird-feeder, all impossible red. Ah, day at last, over the eastern hill you come, and here we are, in the eye of the sun, loving the light though we may forget to say so. I will say so now, while I remember. All praise for light inside and out!
Yes, I can be a Druid in the life of a day. But bring on night and darkness and my Druidry can suffer a sea-change. You know you’re a Druid when death moves you not at all, says a tendril of awareness. When you may not even notice you’ve changed realms. Well, but I’m not there yet, I reply. I have no trouble with death. I drop into darkness each time I fall asleep. It’s dying that troubles me. And others’ deaths that are hard to take, though with the gift of Sight we may know them after and visit them still. It’s the body comfort I miss, voice and touch and the daily-ness of a life lived next door to my own. I know you’re around, Ancestors without your skins on, but I miss you here.
I light this flame to gift the darkness, not contend with it. Each has its place, here in Abred*. “Know all things, be all things, experience all things”: some say this is our destiny, as we move through the circles of existence. Maybe. Not sure yet. Don’t need to be. This circle right now, right here, keeps me plenty occupied.
Nine awens for the day
for the day’s choices
and gifts easy and difficult.
Nine awens for the gods
unknown and known who grace us
with the Breath of Asu,
sound and light both.
Nine awens for you, little soul,
beast, bird or human, watching
at the gates of Abred*
for the flower of destiny
to unfold its next petal
*Abred. The great Revival Druid and brilliant forger, Iolo Morganwg, wrote in his compendium of wisdom and fabrication the Barddas that all beings move slowly from Annwn, the unformed, to Abred, the first world, our present circle, “probation,” and from there to Gwynvyd, the “white world” of the next advance and “perfect freedom,” and on from there to Ceugant, “infinity.” And the way there is long and full of experiences until, ripe with knowing all things each circle has to teach us, we take a step to the next.
Do I “believe” it? That’s not the important question to me, or to many Druids. How well does it explain things? What can I learn from it? Those are the important questions. Whether it’s “true” or not is quite beside the point. I’m not interested in creedal religion; that’s one reason I’m a Druid, after all. I don’t have a statement of faith; I have a practice that includes various beliefs that evolve as I do. I don’t want to sit in the restaurant and wait to be served from another’s choice, to use Philip Carr-Gomm’s image (go to 4th paragraph). I want to work in the kitchen, help it come together for myself. This is Abred, the world of probation, after all — of proving and testing and trying out. So I’m game — I try it out, try it on for size.
Over the last several cold damp nights and cool partly cloudy days here in New England, many of us who heat with wood have lit the first fires of autumn. (Some days building and feeding a fire is the best theology I can muster.)
A Druid Way 
