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…