Paganism Beyond the Occult

I was writing a fellow pagan in a Tennessee prison this morning. She described to me how pagan were treated there compared to Christians – much worse of course and with great skepticism. The roots of that being arrogance and bigotry but also of our own doing. There was a Nazi Ásatrú group in the prison that spoiled it for all other pagans. This is very common. I hear from prisoners all over North America. And the results of the actions of a few paint a very destructive view of the rest of us.

So how do we change this perception of pagans here in the States? We are perceived quite differently in Europe. I think we as pagans need to come out of the proverbial broom closet and let the world see who we are. We need to collectively demand equality. I am a pagan because Paganism’s ethics and practices go so much deeper than the revealed religions. It makes me a better person. This is something to celebrate, not hide away. The occult approach to paganism needs to go away. It doesn’t serve us well. Our history in America is dominated by occult magical traditions that came here in the 60’s and 70’s. These traditions keep teachings secrets. People have to pass through levels to get the next teaching. I see this as a dynamic antithetical to equality. I find the whole dynamic very troublesome. People love to have power over others.

Nature just doesn’t support this hierarchical dynamic.  There is no top of the food chain. That is a very crude and mechanised way of looking at Nature. In Nature, there is only interdependence. Which his higher, the lion or the Ebola virus? The hierarchy falls apart when you look past the surface and try to comprehend (and even more deeply, participate in) the relationships that Nature is built upon.

Those of us that follow “Nature-based” religions, need to let go of occult and hierarchical dynamics in our religious traditions. It isn’t helpful. I think there are so many pagans in the US now, we could be a political force if people were willing to stand up for their civil liberties and fight for the Earth. Many pagans feel this isn’t an issue. But I can tell you I talk to people every week in prison that are having their religious freedoms stomped on. Many can’t gather as a group, or pray over food, or celebrate ritual and holidays in any way that is visible to anyone else, and they can’t even receive pagan elders as clergy. So many of our brothers and sisters are suffering. Also, when I look at all the environmental degradation all around me, I feel like I have no choice but to stand up and say I am pagan and paganism offers a better way of being in the world, one that doesn’t destroy the Earth. I hope our community starts doing this more. The need is great.

I am not suggesting we proselytize. I only wish we would remove the cloak of the occult and focus on the ethics and our way of living in a sacred manner. This begins to eliminate fear and ignorance and build common ground. So the question for me boils down to this:

Why are we hiding our spirituality, the living expression of our human soul in relationship to the universe?

Free Speech

I walked by an abandoned building next to the mall last night. Written on it with smooth bold black letters were the words, “Ban Gay Marriage”. They were written with a wide brush as they were smooth, unlike regular graffiti. Even though I fully support everyone’s right to free speech, I wished I had a can of paint to write over it. Painting over it would have been an expression of my rights. I wanted to cover up the “Gay” part so that it read, “Ban Marriage” :>) It would have confused people and maybe they would have thought twice.

Well anyway, the shuttle bus drove passed it this evening and the whole thing had been painted over with off-white paint and a large peace sign painted next to it. That was a better expression of free-speech than I had in mind. It made me smile.

Fringe people

Here I am in Burlington Massachusetts for software training for the company I work for. I traveled by train from Maine, leaving my yurt in the woods for a hotel next to a huge mall. I must say, I feel a bit out-of-place. I asked the front desk person on the way out of the hotel directions to walk to a restaurant. She admonished me by saying, “It isn’t a very good walk”. I responded, “Well I don’t have a car and I must get some food”. She shook her head and gave me a look like, “good luck with that walking stuff weirdo.”

Well anyway, I managed a dinner and walking back I walked under a tree that people probable never walk under and we had a talk. I asked to enter into its intimate space and was very welcomed. I don’t think any human had ever acknowledged it as a living soul. I sensed it was unsettled from all the cars rushing by. I told it I thought it beautiful and to grow tall and express all its beauty right in this place as I have no way of bringing her home to Maine. Then I thought, “I really am different”. Anyone seeing me talking to a tree, in a place where no one walks and everyone is in a car, would think I was completely crazy. And they would be right in the context of “normal” people doing their lives in Burlington Mass. Bobcat once told me we were the fringe people. Even though I am wearing my corporate uniform, traveling on trains, staying on hotels, using computers, and even though I never thought of myself as “fringe”, she would be right.

Hail the gods of Samhain

In my mind, Samhain has arrived. We had our first hard frost this past weekend. This year’s cycle of growth has ended. Now we dance in the long slow slide to Yule when the sun begins to return and a new cycle of growth begins. Now however, is the moment to say farewell to the year that has ended, to celebrate it, and to release ourselves from past.

So here we are with the year ended but with a new cycle of growth yet to begin. In Druidry, this time between Samhain and Yule is viewed as a time of chaos. It is a time where we can just be, where we can just dream in the dark. Without the image of a new year shaping up, where we are in the midst of planning and getting ready for winter clean-up, spring planting and the inevitable new projects that come each spring and summer, we are free to just dream, not worrying or constrained by thoughts of whether or not our dreams are possible. We free fall into life’s potentialities.

Referring to the myth of Cerridwen and Taliesin, I call this “swimming in the cauldron of inspiration”. We are free from the work of this year’s planting and harvest, yet we are still a long way from next year’s planting. As the nights grow longer, we naturally begin to spend more time inside, more time in the dark. We begin to move inward, contemplating our life, our desires and goals; we take stock in ourselves and reaffirm our place in our families as we begin to withdraw from our outer communities and the greater world. It is natural to do so at this time. Druidry is nothing if not, natural.

So soon I will celebrate Samhain with my grove. Seeing all the children trick-or-treating on Halloween, I will celebrate it again with my tribe (my local community). Outside of those moments of celebration though, I am diving into head-long into the cauldron; journeying inward; dreaming of the life I want to live; dreaming of the man I want to be; dreaming of the world I want to live in; dreaming of life’s possibilities as I lay in the womb of the goddess awaiting rebirth; floating in the essence of divine inspiration we call, Awen.

Where are you at? What is going on in your soul right now? If possible, please share it.

Blessings of first frost,
Snowhawke

Getting back on the path

Sometimes we all just run out of steam. We lose the energy and focus we need to walk our spiritual path with the dedication required to do so with honour. It has been a very challenging summer for me personally and I haven’t posted in more than a month. I have been struggling on my path. Autumn is here though and there is enough darkness for me to find sufficient balance to open my soul up to the world again.

So I am sitting here listening to the delicious rain outside and letting my mind and soul follow it over the autumn leaves and into the rich dark Earth, mixing with the mud and the cycle of decay that is life giving. I am feeling the Samhain tide and beginning to move inward to do my own work of saying goodbye to the year of growth that has now ended with first frost.

Being pagan gives us endless opportunity to find the connection with need. So even when we get overwhelmed in life, in time the tides shift and life changes. Nature is filled with endless cycles of change and at some point, we find a new current that brings us out of the eddy and back into the flow of the river. For us it is vital to cultivate an attitude of being willing to swim out of the eddy and into the stream. Yes, we need breaks, we have things that come up and we feel the need to find a safe harbor. This is part of what it is to be human. But as pagans we know our journey isn’t one of simplicity in a safe harbor. We need to flow with the currents of life or we stagnate.

So my dear fellow pagans, if you find yourself stuck, know that tides of Nature are always changing. The challenge is simply to be ready to ride the tide out and find a new current when the time comes. Getting back on the path is as simple as beginning to walk it again. There is no barrier. Nature is always open to us. We just need to find the courage to open up and let our soul be touched by her. Each breath is an opportunity to do so. Breathe this autumn air. It is delicious…

The journey as sacred…

A thoughtful commenter asked the following in response to my previous post:

“Can we become that which is truly authentic, with grace? In other words, what if it is WE who are in the act of *becoming*? How can that evolutionary journey be understood as something sacred?”

This is a perfectly poignant question that speaks to the crux living a spiritual life. I love the phrasing “become that which is truly authentic, with grace?” Grace in the dynamism of life is a real challenge, but that is certainly the goal. We are human and the process of becoming authentic is one of figuring out who we are on a soul level. Since we always live in the field of time, this always involves dualities. Duality implicitly implies relationship. And relationships (especially human to human) are almost always sticky :>)

That said, from my experience Druidry gives us the tools to address relationship and live in the real world with a sense of grace. It teaches us how to walk the path with honor, to walk in beauty, picking ourselves up when we stumble. Life inevitably throws us off kilter. We are all stumblers, but with consciousness we needn’t stagger.

“In other words, what if it is WE who are in the act of *becoming*? How can that evolutionary journey be understood as something sacred?”

Perfectly poignant again; we are indeed in the act of becoming. One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Bob Dylan, “He not busy being born is busy dying”. All the universe (the height of arrogance has to be a human thinking they really know and understand the universe! – so just reaching here) is in a continual act of creativity, an endless swirl of dynamic merciless creation. And creativity being temporal, all things come into being and then decay, the elements then moving into new creativity. Our own soul’s journey is no different.

So how can the journey be understood as sacred? It takes consciousness. It takes perspective. It takes choice and effort. It takes stopping and dedicating the time to reach for that understanding. Most of all it takes conscious relationship – what I refer to as sacred relationship, relationship experienced on a soul level. This is where the flow of awen, divine inspiration, happens. So how do we cultivate that?

It is often easier to see the sacred in others, in Nature, than to see it in ourselves. We start with opening up our senses so that we see the sacred in Nature, in the beautiful easy places, the sunsets, the light shimmering on the lake, grace of the heron over the marsh, beauty of blueberries in rich full ripeness, the beauty of a newborn kitten. Then we work to see it in the “dark” places; in death and decay, in the merciless cycle of life feeding on life, in the our own human frailties. We explore our own boundaries in relationship to these things, starting with those where it takes little effort to approach and touch. Then we move onto to the more difficult, the dark places in life, for the potential for finding inspiration is inherent in all relationships.

In order to find that flow of divine inspiration, we first have to learn to feel our own soul and to know its boundaries. Then we learn to open it fully to another soul, letting the boundaries and edges fall away. In Druidry we call this opening our nemeton, our own intimate space. This takes awareness and it takes courage. With work, we can all do this though. It isn’t unnatural. From this place, we bring that awareness into relationship with another soul, and we experience these interactions as holy acts. Relationship soul to soul erases the separation between the mundane and the holy. We feel the flow of awen, and that flow can not be understand as anything other than sacred. This takes a lot of work and it is a life-long process.

The “act of *becoming*”, the “evolutionary journey… understood as something sacred” is at the very core of Druidry. So finding the sacred requires that we find the consciousness and courage to open our soul to others amidst the ever-changing, ever-shifting dynamic of relationship, in a world where nothing is ever fixed or static. As my teacher Bobcat put it so eloquently,

“Engagement, through the ever-changing dynamic of constant change …
What can we trust, but a moment’s intention?
What do we know? We experience how change touches us.”

What becomes sacred?

A simple thought that isn’t so simple. What we see and experience as sacred is what allows us to glimpse the eternal through cracks in consciousness caught in the field of time.

Honouring the gods of war

People are often very surprised that my wife and I are huge fans of mixed martial arts fighting. They don’t see how we can connect the spiritual path with something so apparently violent. For me combat can be a sacred act and I greatly admire the skill and the determination these fighters have, the years of dedication to their training. I see these fights as a beautiful dance of violence that is mutually agreed upon and engaged in. I have met and trained with some of these professional fighters and I can tell you these are not people who like to hurt other people or have anger issues or anything like that. They just find deep inspiration in the act of competition. So the question is, how can competition be a sacred act?

My experience of deity is that deity is plural. They are the forces of Nature (the wind, sun, earth, hurricanes, tornadoes, winter cold, forest fire, and on and on). These are forces of Nature we ignore and disrespect at our own peril. I honour these gods for not to honour them is life threatening. They have the power to kill. They are conscious and they have their own agenda and life process.

There are also gods of human Nature (love, anger, trade, jealousy, lust, creativity, reason, music, fear, etc.). These are forces of Nature that are ubiquitous within the human experience. One of the more powerful ones is the god of war.

One aspect of Druidry is not submitting to the gods. We don’t “worship” the gods. We honour and respect and commune with them. We acknowledge their power and the affect they have in our psyche, in our lives. Submitting to deity is a dangerous proposition. Submit to the will of the ocean and you will drown or be smashed on the rocks. Submit to the will of winter and you will freeze to death. Submit to the power of the gods of human nature and the results are the same. The gods don’t care about us having a “”normal” live. We can learn however to feel their power and let that energy move through us without losing “control”. We stand as whole souls and craft relationships with the gods based on mutual respect. We are humbled for sure. We are in awe. But we aren’t slaves to their will. We meet them in relationship and from that sacred place, inspiration flows. And that brings me back round to mixed martial arts fighting.

In MMA (mixed martial arts) fighting, two people are able to participate in violence without submitting to the gods of war. They can pit their skills against another within a framework that allows that energy of the gods of war to flow through them without fully submitting to it. There are rules. A tap out means stop and the fight is over. The ref says stop, the fight is over. Theirs is a dance of energies that has been apart of the human experience from the very beginning. It is a sacred dance for it is honouring the gods of war and from that place, inspiration flows. I know this from experience and from my conversations with MMA fighters.

For some people it is very important to work closely with the gods of war. We do this in sports and it is a healthy way to touch those gods without submitting to them. Attend a football match in England, Europe, or South America and it isn’t difficult to feel the gods of war flowing through the people there. They use that energy to compete and find inspiration in the competition. But they don’t submit.

All creativity comes apart

Last night my grove of ten years bid farewell to one of our grovemates as she sets out on a new adventure in a new State. For a full decade we have held our grove together, celebrating the seasons with ritual, supporting each other as family, helping each other build our lives and encouraging our creativity and dreams. For tens years we have been able to keep this together without conflict, always coming together with joy and appreciation for our circle. This is remarkable in pagan groups.

But last night, things shifted, the circle lost a link. While we all are very excited about our grovemates adventure ahead, we feel the absence. And we are left with a choice: embrace the change and reach for inspiration, or let what is left of our grove drift apart? Neither of these is the right or wrong path.

What happens isn’t important. It is the process that matters. Druidry is the journey to find certainty in change. It is a path of living fully in the moment, finding the flow of inspiration in all things and happenings. Nature moves in cycles and tides, everything that is built up comes down, everything put together comes apart, everything separated connects and then disconnects only to find a new way or place to connect again. Nature does this relentlessly and without mercy. All creativity is temporal.

As humans, we all have a tendency to try to hold on to something permanent. This is an illusion we all cling to as we try to orient ourselves in time and space. Anything we think of as permanent, isn’t. So how do we orient ourselves so we can manage a life worth living? We can only do that through relationship. And relationship is a process, an ever changing, ever shifting dynamic that allows us to have a direction of focus. It is easier to spin holding another, looking each other in the eyes in a beautiful dance, than it is to just spin on our own. One makes us dizzy and sick, the other excites us and fills us with energy.

So how do we let go without becoming lost? By making every moment part of the dance and by dancing with all the souls in our life, in our environments. We may dance better with some souls but we can not cling to it and refuse to dance with others. If we take that path, when the dance together slides to a stop, we just spin alone. Never having tried letting go, we don’t know how to embrace another and swirl into the next phase of the dance as the cadence changes.

So what becomes of the grove is to be determined? The music continues…

New appreciation of faith

I recently visited a pagan group at a local prison. It was an extraordinary conversation that was truly inspiring. These men are working really hard to raise their level of consciousness. I haven’t met people outside of prison who are more passionate about the environment. They talked a lot about the amount of waste in the prison – food, paper, and other resources. They are acutely aware of just what is happening to the planet with the burning of fossil fuels and what the end of cheap oil will mean for our way of life. And they are doing their best to address this in the prison through leading by example and offering suggestions to the management of the facility.

One topic we discussed was “sphere of influence”. All are working hard to make the prison a better environment for people to live while paying their dues to the State, and to begin to build better lives for themselves when they get out. To me, this was great example of how we have to focus our energies on the relationships that are closest to us.

We also discussed life being in the moment, that we all could die at any second, and what is the value of our pagan practices in the face of that reality. All life is change – continuous creativity, sliding into decay, and then once more the elements gather into new creativity. Paganism offers us a sense of certainty in the face of the reality that there is no certainty in life. The path helps us find acceptance for the fact that nothing in life is fixed. And it helps us develop the ability to raft these ever shifting currents.

I encouraged the group to focus on developing honorable conscious relationship, right where they are at. And to that end, their pagan practices off much. These teachings tell us, not just to wake up, but also provide us tools to do so, the tools to be fully present in life. And they teach us that being present is at the core of truly honorable, respectful, conscious relationship. For when part of us isn’t present, our ability to navigate relationship is compromised.

These men realize this fully. They are diving deeply into their pagan tradition and trying to live the path as fully as possible. They are faced with incarceration and owning up to their crimes and how that has affected the victims as well as the greater community. Yet at the same time, they are walking the talk with a level of dedication that I rarely see in pagans. From these men, I have learned the value of faith.