To Eat or Not to Eat – that is the question

Here is my take on eating…

Eating is the most extreme relationship I can think of. If we have a fight, we come together, get violent and hit each other. But then we separate and go our different ways to heal up. If we kill someone, they are buried and we go to jail or try to move on in life if was accidental. If we have a lover, we come together in deep physical intimacy, and may even join momentarily in intercourse. But then we separate again. But with food, it is extreme. We kill it. And then we take it to a step further by totally ingesting it, taking all of it into our being to be processed and made a permanent part of us.

There are other relationships I can think of with the same dynamic, but they are far less tangible. We take in knowledge. We take in inspiration. We take in sensation. These go deep into our being and become part of us as well. But none of these examples are as clear as the eating of food. In reality, physical food isn’t all that different from mental and spiritual food. An apple is the pure creativity expressed from the inspiration of an apple tree. The song of a bard really isn’t all that different from the apple. It is pure energy or “spirit” at the core of it all. And it is all the creative result of the expression of inspiration.

With eating, it is easy for us to see, hear, touch, taste and smell the food. Yet, we constantly do this without any consciousness involved. We mindlessly munch our food as we are involved with other things. I think it is vital that we begin to listen to our food, to acknowledge that we are taking part of another soul into our being. We are making it part of us. I want to take in living healthy food that is humming with nutrition and beauty. I want to be aware of how that food feels inside of me. I want to acknowledge its creativity and honor its sacrifice. I need to remind myself to do this everyday.

The Gods of Snow and Ice

So I am working from home today. The gods of snow and ice are expressing themselves in power and beauty. In my path of Druidry, I don’t challenge or submit to deity. It is too dangerous a prospect. So in honor of the gods, I am at home, respecting, watching and listening to them.

My gods are the gods of Nature. These gods are completely real and present. It isn’t an abstraction. Nature is simply the gods creativity. Through touching Nature, we touch the gods, we touch holiness, we experience the presence of divinity. Anyone, at anytime, can do this and find inspiration, direction, clarity, purpose and meaning in life. To me, touching the divine through our relationship to Nature is the very definition of the path of the pagan.

What are your gods? How do you experience them?

Doing the Simple Things

I am sitting at work feeling distracted, feeling bored, feeling half awake, feeling disconnected. This is a lousy way to go through the day. Even though I would rather be elsewhere, letting myself slide into this mindset isn’t helpful.

The gap between the mundane and the spiritual needs to come together. The spiritual experience has to come to work with me or there will always be conflict. As much as I dream of it, I doubt very much that I will suddenly have enough money to buy land and build a home outright. So what can be done to improve the work experience?

We have to be mindful to do the simple things.

First of all, let’s remember to breathe consciously. One word used to describe the in-breath is inspiration. Stopping the constant conversation going on in our head is so important. A single conscious breath is all it takes to wake up from that place. The simple act of breathing the air around us can help us find “inspiration”.

Food is another way to wake up to the fact we are alive (and no matter where we are, that is a truly remarkable thing). Look at your food. Touch it. Where did it come from? Who grew it? What has its life process been? What stories does it tell you? Then eat it with a sense of reverence and gratitude. It may be simple food but simplicity and sanctity, are not mutually exclusive terms. Taste your food fully. It is the most amazing gift from Mother Earth.

Have you ever half-listened to a co-worker or customer during a phone call? Is this treating the other with respect? Is this way of approach interaction honorable? Let the phone ringing remind us that we are engaging in relationship to another soul. It is through these interactions we come to understand ourselves. It is how we learn. So even the most annoying phone calls are in fact acts of spiritual learning and experience.

Finally, stand up and move around! We sit on the way to work. If we have a desk job, we sit all day. We sit on the ride home. We sit at dinner. And then we sit some more to relax. Moving the body is about the best way to awaken to our soul’s journey. Movement allows us to feel our whole being. So get off the chair and make yourself more alive. As soon as I post this, I am going for a walk!

Not the most insightful post but there it is :>) If our spiritual practices get complicated, they are doomed to be ineffective. Anyone have any other simple suggestions for making our work day a more alive, interesting, and spiritual activity?

The Old Gods – Tales that never end

Last night I finished reading an exquisitely beautiful book, Thomas the Rhymer, by Ellen Kushner. As I read the book (for the third time), it struck me just how much the theme parallels my own life. In my mind, it is in these myths that replay themselves out in the lives of people, generation after generation, that the “Old Gods” live on.

I think of the Old Gods as deities whose powers are tied up in story. And that story repeats itself in the lives of humans, shifting and changing with each retelling as good story does, but retaining its core essence. Because I use the word “story”, it isn’t to say the Old Gods aren’t real. They are very real. They have been and always will be.

The most tangible gods to me are the forces of Nature: the wind, sun, moon, Earth, ocean, winter storms, and the rush of Spring growth. The Old Gods are not so different. They are forces of Nature that run through the human collective. Though we may give them different names, they are energies that play out in the lives of people around the globe. Although our tribes are scattered, similar life themes are found in all of them. For example, the journey of Persephone to the Underworld can be found in similar myths from many cultures. It is through experiencing the ancient energies that influence and give theme to our personal journey, the power of the Old Gods are felt, the story renewed.

There is a definite power in these tales, in the myths of old, the stories of our ancestors and the gods. It is the gift and power of the Bard to retell the tales of old so that each of us, in that moment, hear and feel and identify with it. The story doesn’t just mirror our story. It is our story!

By delving into the old myths, we learn to understand ourselves better, we gain insight in to our ancestors, our heritage, and our own humanity. We attune to and feel more deeply the currents of energy that shape our life. Learning the ways of Nature, we gain wisdom and insight. Most importantly though, we must live powerfully, embracing the tale that has become our own, awakening to the energies at play. In the living of the tale, we touch the gods. The power of the Old Gods flows through our own life story. We experience the power of deity and in that moment, we are filled with awen. We drink once again from the chalice that is at once Cerridwen’s cauldron, the Holy Grail and the Sacred Well. We eat the fruit of the Tree of Life – the Old Gods gracing our journey, together we find the divine inspiration that flows when soul touches soul in truth.

So in honor of the Old Gods that have touched me, shared their wisdom and gifted me with inspiration, I say, “Hail to the Gods of our people, to the Gods of old. Hail to the Queen of Fey, dark mistress of magic. Hail to the forest God, Jack O’ the Green. May we always find you. May your songs be sung. May your stories live on!”

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.”