Nimue Brown's Blog, page 439

Accumulation sickness

There’s a certain amount of stuff, both physical and more ephemeral, that is necessary for a reasonable standard of life. I’m repeating an old idea here. We need shelter, food, warmth and affection to function. Sometimes objects give an illusion of security, and we cling to them for that, for imagined status and imagined need. Accumulation sickness is much more than that, though.

Where there is a flow of resources, quite a lot of things can and will move around sustainably and to good effect. From love given and received to quality work honoured with an appropriate payment, flow spreads the goodness. What happens when someone in the flow wants to accumulate excessively? All the love should flow to them, not anyone else. All the money should flow their way, not to flow on, but to stop there and pile up. There are plenty of people in our world who have more wealth than it would be humanly possible to use, stashed away in imaginary piles that reduce the flow of money and therefore energy for everyone else. There are people whose desire for importance diverts social flows in wholly comparable ways.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting what is needed, or even in having a safety net, something to fall back on. A little layer of insulation for the hard times is a natural enough thing to seek. Creatures do it, laying down fat in the good times so as to survive the winter, or the drought. But they never get so fat as to be unable to function. If they did, something else would eat them. Plenty of creatures store and accumulate. Bees with honey, squirrels with nuts, but the relationship between storing and need is pretty transparent. Nature doesn’t stockpile much, and when it does, get carried away, it’s usually an accident, as with the way wood becomes coal, or things collect up in one place by chance.

There are many reasons why wild beings do not do as we do. Most have their tools, weapons and insulation built into their bodies, and we do not. All other creatures are their own modes of transport. We mostly gave that up. Other creatures make homes and nests, but none quite like us. Somewhere along the way, the reasonable fear of death and the reasonable desire to have resources stored to avert that threat, became this other thing. This insatiable appetite to own stuff way beyond our capacity to use it, and to attract wealth and power way beyond any scope of either understanding or enjoying the implications of it.

All the while the mantra of ‘work harder’ is chanted at us by our politicians. Why? What do we need that we don’t actually have? What are we working so hard for? No matter what they tell us about working hard to get rich as an individual and do your bit for the economy, (poor, needy creature that it is) the reality is that resources tend to flow towards those glitches in the system where resources have already accumulated. The damns in the stream, if you will. There’s a thing about damns though. Every now and then, the blocked stream picks an easier path and stops piling more debris against the damn. Perhaps if we all recognised that we don’t need to keep accumulating, we could take the stream off in another direction. Anyone with a good vision of how to do this, please say!

Speaking for others

Cat raised the issue yesterday that she is clear about only being able to speak for herself. That sharing of personal experience is very much intrinsic to what Cat does, but at the same time because she’s a prominent Pagan and Druid, there’s every likelihood other people will hear her words as being typical of, or on behalf of others. As she says, that’s not something you get a lot of control over. Trying to imagine ‘the reader’ with the many faces and opinions, all the places those words might go – well, that’s one way to drive yourself slowly round the bend, but inevitably that too becomes part of the job.

There are ways though, in which speaking for other people can be a meaningful act of service. It depends on a number of factors – depth of personal experience, emotional intelligence, linguistic skill and having a bunch of people who could do with some words. Generally speaking this is not a service the Druid community will call for, thanks to most of us having the skills to talk our own talk. Now and then my being able to wrap language around an experience seems to be useful for other people, but it’s more a dialogue than a service, I feel. I’m learning as much as I’m dishing out, if not more. However, out there in the rest of the world, speaking for others has a lot more relevance.

I spent two terms on something called The Freedom Program – it’s a structured, self help based course for women recovering from domestic abuse. It explains the mechanisms of abuse, enabling victims to understand how they got to where they are and avoid returning to abusive relationships. Abuse is a process, very few people get hit on the first date because most women would have the sense to get the hell away from that. There’s a slow and deliberate erosion of self, self esteem, confidence and sanity that enables the physical abuse, although the psychological impact is probably the more damaging bit. Women come out of that dazed, confused, demoralised, deeply wounded and struggling to explain themselves. Many go back to their abuser, or find another one. Frequently, said women are also faced with disbelief and hostile systems when they are at their most vulnerable and fragile. I say ‘they’ but I was there too.

I’ve always been good with words, and comfortable attaching language to experience and emotion. I’m able to think logically about feelings and to articulate that. So, given the framework of the Freedom Program, I started talking, slowly, painfully about what had happened to me. I learned a thing: Other women found this useful. They were able to say ‘me too!’ or ‘I know what that feels like’, and ‘that was it.’ In telling my own story, I was, week by week, providing additional language with which other women became able to tell their stories too, or at least say ‘I was there’ and not have to delve into revelation whilst still being able to get some catharsis out of sharing. A minority of women on that course had missed out at school, lacked confidence in their own cleverness, but through the sessions became more able to speak, to hear their own voices, recognise their own strength. It was powerful stuff.

Sometimes speaking for yourself is such a raw and painful activity, that it can be a relief to have someone else say it and be able to go ‘me too’ and that be enough. Sometimes the language needed to put experience into words isn’t available to a person, and being given the words to make sense of the experience is very helpful. Talking cures abound in counselling, but if you don’t have the breadth of language and the confidence to match words to feelings, that kind of talking therapy is pretty hard to make any use of.

There are times when speaking for other people is all about self assertion, self importance and disempowering the person whose voice you have squashed. That’s not the whole story. Most people out there don’t have much of a language for talking about emotional experience, much less religious experience. The soul yearning will be no less present, but with no means of expression, it’s much easier to ignore it and turn to some short term remedy that doesn’t help. However much we speak for ourselves, it’s worth having an eye to the potential to be speaking for others, because that speech can be a process of endowing others with language, terms of reference and narrative structures in which they can then go on to talk about their own things.

Having been there, it is the most humbling sort of process, when a lost and stumbling person starts to pick up the words you have spoken, and rearranges them to tell their own story, where before they could not. That can break your heart, in the best possible way.

Voicing the Druidry

The voice any of us write with can seem like a very personal, natural thing, but to some degree it’s a construct. I did a degree in English lit a long time ago, and one of the ongoing effects is that I am very conscious of voices in writing, both my own, and other people’s. I write erotic under another name, and I have a whole other voice for that; arsey, darkly playful, much more evil than my regular self. That voice exists to do a job, and I created it in a very deliberate way.

One of my first Druid teachers was in the habit of saying ‘in Druidry we…’ which drove me nuts. Normally ‘we’ ought to be an inclusive word, but when you hear a lot of ’in druidry we do something entirely different from this thing you want to do’ it can become remarkably exclusive. Even so, I probably default to the language of ‘we’ more than anything else. We can do this. We can try that. I use ‘I’ to talk about things that seem passably unique to me. Okay, this is all a bit navel gazey and meta bloggy, but I think it’s worth a thought.

Language, in its subtle nuances conveys all kinds of information. Who has the power and authority here? Am I telling you what to do, telling you what I do, talking about what I do, suggesting what we could do… it all creates different vibes and will impact on how you, dear reader, experience my words. Now, if there was just one of you and I knew who you were, I could tailor it, but I’m also very conscious that there are quite a few people reading this, scattered about the world, coming in from different language backgrounds, with various levels of experience and different needs and expectations. You, dear reader, are a creature of many faces, voices and identities, and to treat you as one person may be convenient from a writing perspective, but ultimately feels a bit weird and probably doesn’t work.

That whole ‘dear reader’ thing is one of those charming Victorian conventions that modern authors aren’t supposed to dabble in. Ah well.

Some authors use the third person, and that voice is laden with authority. Here we can see that the author is a person of great insight who is handing out the facts in a calm and objective way. Only, all authors are people, and that objective third person voice readily disguises opinion and assumption as unassailable truth. Do not be seduced by the authority of the third person voice! (There, I said that in an authoritative, third persony sort of way, is that irony?)

This is not just an author issue. We voice our Druidry in ritual, and at other public gatherings. How much ‘I’ and how much ‘we’ needs to be in that mix? Well, that depends a bit on what you’re doing. If you are calling to Spirits of Place on behalf of a whole circle, you have to be offering your voice on behalf of everyone. It would be weird to say ‘spirits of place, I honour you’ at that point, it would leave everyone else out! I’ve also heard people in ritual call to Gods or Goddesses on behalf of everyone and felt uneasy because they hadn’t been asked to do so, and these were not my deities.

How we use language can have massive impact. I’m conscious that fellow blogger Cat over at http://www.druidcat.wordpress.com frequently talks about what she is doing, and rounds up by asking, what are you doing? A most direct challenge thrown out to the reader, a separation of ‘I’ and ‘you’ that always has a discernible impact on ‘me’. Am I really doing enough?

No matter where you are working, you are speaking and writing and interacting as a Druid. Your ‘natural’ voice is full of your beliefs and assumptions, and it is worth sitting down and poking it. (There, I went all I-you, conveying my authority and your need to do something different… fascinating, isn’t it?)

The devil is in the detail. I’m quite convinced the Druidry is in there too, more often than not. It’s amazing how much space you can get inside a detail… is it time to go all Doctor Who now?

Nature worshipper

So there I was this morning, stood outside the boat, looking up at the skeletal, wintery trees, to where a speckled woodpecker was clinging on. Behind trees and bird, a vibrant blue sky, and all the colours of everything intensely vivid. It was a moment of long, slow exhale, keenly feeling the beauty and wonder of the natural world, feeling present in the moment and part of the scene I was stood in. This, for me, is what it means to be a nature worshipper.

So what am I worshipping? The sky? Not really. The tree? No, that’s more like a neighbour. The woodpecker? No, he’s more like a casual acquaintance I know well enough to wave to. The colours?

One of the problems with describing yourself as a nature worshipper is that, in some people’s mind this conjures up the image of treating a tree, or a hedge or a field maybe, like it was a God. Which of course makes no sense at all. The tree is a tree. The field is a field. Worshipping them makes no more sense than worshipping my domestic cat, or the bloke in the next boat. The very idea of worship is so loaded with monotheistic connotations that trying to apply it in another context is tricky.

At the same time, I know to the depth of my soul that what I do when I’m standing under the sky, experiencing the bird, the tree, the sunlight… is precisely an act of worship. I’m not worshipping some abstract or unknown mysterious thing imagined behind the tree, bird and sky, either. More the combination. It’s about the coming together of all these different, individual things that are, in order to make something that is bigger than the sum of the parts. It’s the flow, the web, the unity and the way each system is part of a bigger system that I think I’m honouring in these moments. The tree, its roots interacting with fungi in the soil, its bark harbouring insects, the bird that will have non-bird originating bacteria in its gut. It’s the interconnectedness of everything that fills me with wonder. I am part of that, too.

Druidry outside

As a modern Druid, you may well be drawn to doing your rituals and celebrations outside. I’ve read descriptions by fellow Druids of getting soaked and frozen, being out all night, covered in mud and so forth, and I find myself wondering, is this what the ancients would have done, or is it actually both a reaction to, and a consequence of modern life?

Oddly enough what started me down this line of thought was a blog post about the archaeology of homelessness, and a dig in Bristol. Homeless people were invited to get involved, but most didn’t want to do any actual digging because they had nowhere to clean up and dry off, and so couldn’t afford to get wet and filthy in a hole in the first place. Our ancient ancestors had roofs and fires, but they didn’t have hot showers or tumble driers. Get a garment absolutely soaked, especially if it’s a wool garment, and then try to dry it, with just wringing out, and fire heat. It takes a while. Now, if you have lots of other clothes, this may be no big deal, but if you don’t… it’s a crisis.

I know runners who go out in all weathers and get soaked to the skin, and are fine with this. But they have places to dry their clothes, are not running water from a water tank for that hot shower, and I think this makes a lot of odds. I’ve been soaked to the skin a few times this winter. I have towels and changes of clothes, but what’s at a premium is drying space, and so I don’t get wet voluntarily. Not even for ritual. I can’t afford to.

I’ve also found that, since taking up residence on the boat, I’ve not felt the same need I used to, to reconnect with nature at regular intervals through the year. I’m living in such intense relationship, day to day, with the outside, that this has changed me. Light levels, weather conditions, visiting wildlife all impact directly, so there is no ‘reconnect’ issue. I’m here. Nature is all around me. I don’t especially need to sit on a hill all night to remind myself of the realities.

Our ancient ancestors owned a lot less than we do, lived far closer to the land than we do, and did not have anything resembling tumble driers. Did they go out and freeze their ancestral bottoms off, and get themselves soaked, for the sake of the Gods?

Maybe they didn’t.

Which does not invalidate our doing so, if we feel the need. If mud, cold, wet and the immediacy of living reality are not a normal part of life, those acts of reconnection are very important. You could do it by running just as well as by ritual, with the right intent and consciousness.

I’ll finish with a half remembered quote from Good Omens, in which it is observed that the female heroine, Anathema, had a mother who spent six months living in a field in order to get back to nature and understand why humans had spent thousands of years trying to get away from nature in the first place…

Introducing The Pagan Voice

On the 5th of January 2013, http://www.paganliving.tv launched. I’ve been watching the run up to this new project with a great deal of interest and wanted to help spread awareness of something I think represents an important new development for Pagans around the world.

According to their blurb, The Pagan Voice will be a weekly news magazine that brings you a variety of news and information from a Pagan perspective. They were also listed by Llewellyn Worldwide and the Wild Hunt Blog as one of the 7 most important Pagan organizations to support. That’s no small endorsement.

As regular readers will know, I live on a boat and my internet access is pretty rubbish. I can’t reliably watch any kind of video, which means I’m not able to comment as yet on the actual content of the first program. It’s the principle of it that I want to talk about. Internet TV is very much on the rise. Like all other internet features, it puts power and opportunity into the hands of independent creators and ordinary people. The mainstream media is all about huge corporations, most of whom have some kind of political agenda. Pagan representation out there in the mainstream is frequently non-existent and still tends towards the freak show when it does happen. However, TV internet allows all kinds of productions to get a foothold, build an audience, and hopefully in the longer term will give us the stats to get alternative input at the big tables, in the big outlets and in the world. I’m watching this process with The Chronicles of Professor Elemental at the moment as well, and will talk about that in more detail some time soon.

Access to news, including the kind of news we hear and the spin put on it are all deeply political. Having a Pagan voice, and Pagan perspectives out there, in a way that people around the world can access, is really important. It’s often said that the victors write history. Well, history is being written and recorded every day, usually by someone else, and anything that gets more diversity, more compassionate, green and yes, Pagan voices into the mix has to be a good thing and needs support. We need alternative ways of seeing the world and different stories from the ones those in authority and in the media keep spinning for us. There is real power and potential in this.

Now, you can support ventures like this by giving them money, that’s always helpful. All small indy enterprises need cash, and if you have the funds to spare, go for it. However, audience itself is a powerful thing. Put your bum on a seat. Tune in. If you like what you see, share some links on, tell a friend, write a review for your local Pagan magazine. Word of mouth advertising is powerful stuff, so if you love something, talk about it, and if you want to see something happen, get out there and help get other bums on seats.

If you’ve got the kind of news that the Pagan community needs to hear about, this would be a very good place to take it to as well.

The Lord of Misrule

It’s Twelfth Night, the day the decorations traditionally come down, and when the festivities are supposed to end. The twelve days of Christmas, culminating in Twelfth Night as a time of revelry and mayhem, have a long tradition, and with seasonal associations of Saturnalia, it is tempting to see this as a Pagan throwback. Maybe it is.

Mediaeval life was in many ways quite regulated. Most people lived very close to the land and so the shapes of their lives were governed a lot by seasons, light levels and weather. The church of those times held a lot of political and practical power, we were in a feudal system where arms and fealty ruled, there were some very well defined social structures and the more ordinary people had little say over their lives. It’s a broad generalisation of a big swathe of time, but enough to put carnival and misrule into context. For a few days, the poorest man may be King. The Boy Bishop may preach, there can be nonsense in the services, lewdness, mirth and misbehaviour. As far as anyone can tell the effect of this was to make it easier to hold up the rules and status quo the rest of the year. I believe the Romans did something similar. I can’t help but think that if a hierarchical society likes a short period of misrule, that rather suggests that the brief letting off of steam serves to facilitate the existence of power structures the rest of the time.

Mayhem, it turns out, may not be as anarchic as we might like to think. Mayhem might be all about getting us to play nicely most of the time. I find myself thinking of the young binge drinkers, out misbehaving at the weekends, but back on the treadmills come Monday morning. The promise of a bit of carnival keeps us all behaving. In Alice through the Looking Glass, one of the Queens mentions that there will be jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today. Now, you can, as one of my favourite philosophers, Terry Pratchett observes, get people to do rather a lot on the basis of jam tomorrow. You can’t do that forever though. Just now and then the jam has to show up for a little while, to keep the promise of jam real for the rest of the time. Welcome to Twelfth Night.

In terms of modern partying, New Year and Christmas itself have replaced Twelfth Night as the party season, because we’ve largely abandoned the religious aspect. But like the Romans of old, we need our bread and circuses to keep us passive.

We need a balance of order and chaos. Life depends on it. Sanity also. Too much safe stasis leads to stagnation and boredom. Too much chaos is exhausting and disorientating. We need the wild times and the times of peace. As a Druid I feel that need for balance keenly. Give me a staid and suffocating thing and I will try and break it open. Give me an excess of disorder and I will tidy it up a bit. I’m also a touch perverse, so give me a prevailing current and I’ll tend to swim against it anyway, but it doing that I create balances and restore harmonies. A bit of perverseness is an essential part of the mix.

What troubles me enormously, is the idea that officially sanctioned mayhem has probably always existed as a way of upholding the status quo. That’s not real chaos, real rule breaking, real wildness, it’s a stage managed and carefully ring-fenced bit of allowed messing about with a side order of pretending this is the real thing. The Boy bishop and the hooting priest are not manifestations of chaos if every year you get the same routine for a couple of days. The Lord of Misrule is not an expression of liberation if paying for his brief rein sends you back to a soul destroying job making someone else rich.

Chaos should not just be for Christmas, and if you’re doing it to uphold the system, you’re doing it wrong.

Making time for Druidry

In many ways, the aim of Druidry is not to have some floaty, robe wearing alternative existence that takes you away from real life, but to bring Druidry into your day to day existence. The spiritual life has the potential to transform what may otherwise seem banal and mundane, into activity rich with meaning. It also helps us weed out the things that waste our time and crush our spirits. However, bringing Druidry into life does not mean doing the same old things and saying ‘I am doing this as a Druid’. There are shifts of consciousness and practice, some of them subtle, that are necessary to move from a normal way of being to making Druidry your normal way of being. What that means is that initially, and along the way, you need to make time that is specifically for the Druidry.

Now, ‘doing Druidry’ does not mean you have to be in ritual or meditating, although both are good. For me, walking has long been a big part of my ‘Druid time’ because it engages me with landscapes, nature, the weather and my own body in some very intense ways. Going out there and bringing something back is good work and well worth doing. Druidry in part comes from inside you, but if your life is not inherently nourishing, you’re going to have a lot of trouble with that internal sourcing.

Think about what inspires you. What fills you with wonder, gives you a sense of awe, possibility, magic? That’s the thing you most need to be giving time to. It could be gardening, or running. It could be listening to live music or going to art galleries. What it is, really doesn’t matter compared to the importance of finding it, and exposing yourself to it. Druidry is a path of inspiration, so find that which inspires you and give time to it. Be that going out to gaze at the moon, or listening to bird song, or walking barefoot in the mud.

Try and give time to your inspiration every day. Stop and let yourself be a Druid, by letting yourself be nourished by the things that feed your soul. Let the peace and joy these sources of inspiration give you, fill you up, and then try to bring them back to everything else you are doing, and make it more, and deeper, better and richer than it would otherwise have been. Druidry is a constant process of reaching out for inspiration and then using that inspiration to do something meaningful. You have to both give, and receive.

One of the things I’m trying to do is get back into singing. I used to sing a lot, but got out of the habit. I need to find new songs that resonate more with how I’m feeling now and who I’m becoming. I also know that me singing inspires my bloke, so that works in a number of ways, except that I’ve got out of the habit. I need to make time and space for it, and treat it like something that matters. I’ve got back into crafting recently, that too I find nourishing, the act of making with hands is good for feeding my imagination.

Find a thing. Do it. Enjoy it.

Hearing the voice of spirit

…for without peace, the voice of spirit cannot be heard.

Hearing your own voice, your own spirit, is absolutely key to being able to think clearly and to engage with the world. Modern life readily fills the head with noise and clutter. We create environments that barrage us with overloads of information, noise, people, activity and all of it making demands on our awareness. Half of your mind may well be working hard just to tune all the rubbish out while the rest… work and family, dinner, shopping, what was on TV last night, what a neighbour said, something in the news… its easy to spend most of the time with a head full of half processed ideas, half formed thoughts, barely chewed input, and undigested information. Amidst all of this chaos, there isn’t much scope for thinking like a Druid or hearing the voice of spirit – yours, much less anything else’s.

This is primarily a post for people who are trying to get started, trying to work out how to become a Druid. However, the exercise is a good one, and works any time there’s too much white noise between the ears and you need some clarity.

First, make time. At least a couple of hours. If you aren’t willing to give a few hours to your spiritual self, you’ve got problems that go far beyond the ‘how to be a Druid’ issue. Find the time. Make the time. Get some sensible shoes, carry a drink and some snacks, turn the phone off, and walk. Go somewhere you won’t meet people you know and get side tracked into chatting. Countryside and trees are good, but use what you’ve got. If you aren’t physically able to walk, then swimming works too, up and down in the lanes, and if that’s beyond you, just shoot for getting some quiet space.

There are several advantages to walking. Firstly it makes you unavailable to anyone who might want to demand your time and attention. This gives you valuable space. Secondly it engages you outside with the landscape – urban ones work just as well as rural ones really. Thirdly, after long enough, the rhythm of walking has an effect on your mind. If you run well enough to be able to run and think about something else, odds are running will work too.

The likelihood is that for at least the first half hour, your mind will still be full of white noise. This is fine, don’t try and fight it or suppress it. Try to follow those thoughts through, deal with them, tidy them up. It takes as long as it takes. Between the letting yourself think, and the rhythm of walking, a process will happen, by which all that noise and inner muddle slowly resolves out into one, coherent voice. One stream of thought that is deliberate and focused. Your own voice.

Once you find that inner voice, then getting it back becomes ever easier, and the more time you spend with it, the more normal it becomes to be clear headed and thinking in a calm and deliberate way. This in turn paves the way to being able to properly think about your life and its challenges. You stop being someone who reacts, and can become someone who acts. That alone is incredibly powerful. Having your soul voice present to you makes it possible to meditate and undertake deep contemplation work with far greater ease.

When you know what your own voice sounds like, the rubbish that gets flung at your head from the outside becomes that much more distasteful. You will start wanting to preserve your peace and the integrity of your mind. This will affect the technology, entertainment and situations you expose yourself to, and this in turn changes how you are able to think. A process, cyclical in nature, begins, in which you become ever more yourself, ever more clear within yourself and ever more able to resist the things that deprive you of your inner calm and ability to hear the song of your own soul.

It begins with a walk, long enough to enter your own quiet.

Thinking like a Druid

Thank you for the pointer in the comments yesterday, I realise this would be a very good topic to run with. It’s hard to talk about what to do in order to be a Druid, because there’s so much diversity. It’s equally tricky to discuss belief for all the same reasons. When there are atheist, Christian, animist and polytheist Druids out there, pinning down what to believe in order to call yourself a Druid makes no sense at all. Like many writers poking around issues of modern Druidry, I’ve struggled to see what I can do that really makes the essence of Druidry available and coherent to potential seekers. Contemplating this overnight, I realise that talking about how to think might indeed be the key. So, let’s try it and see what happens…

Belief and action are, after all, consequences of thinking. If the thinking that underpins Druidry can be pinned down, the diversity of belief and action might turn out to make sense. One of the most obvious problems here is that I am one Druid, with one way of thinking about things, but, I spend a lot of time listening to and reading the thoughts of other Druids, exploring varieties of practice and hopefully I have enough to draw on.

The most important thing, I think, is that we are thinking. We’re not going through life on autopilot, doing what we’ve always done, jumping through other people’s hoops, doing what we’re told and otherwise killing time with whatever mind numbing options come to hand. To be a Druid is to be a thinking person.

Some people talk about Druidry as being a philosophy. I’m not sure this is quite it. I think at heart all Druids are philosophers. Now, I know that’s a large and loaded word full of connotations about a whole history of philosophical thinking, but that’s not what I mean, so forget Aristotle and Kant and everyone else Monty Python mentioned in that lovely song. Anyone can be a philosopher. In my experience, the best and most capable philosophers are children. They go around asking why things are as they are, and how, and who did that, and why again? What’s it for? Could it be different? What does it mean? Why? Children land with no assumptions and see the world with clearer eyes. They notice that the Emperor has no clothes on and that easily half of everything adults do is bloody stupid, but we teach them that what we have in the only way, and eventually they turn into grownups too, mores the pity. To be a Druid is to rediscover the questing, questioning nature of the child, and to start asking again. Who am I? What do I want? What is true? What matters? What is real? What is life for? How should I live? There are always more questions than answers.

While many religions exist to try and answer those questions, the whole point of Druidry is to find your own answers. It’s the active quest that makes us Druids. We seek knowledge and skills, wisdom, experience, and we keep asking who am I, and what do I want, and where is the meaning? We keep asking what can I do that would be better? Where can I help? What do I need? It’s in the thinking and the posing of questions that we shape our ability to step away from convention, tradition, and all the traps and soul-sucking features of a ‘normal’ life. As soon as you ask ‘is there some better way than this?’ you have stepped onto a path that can lead you to Druidry.

At no point have we figured it all out. There is never a day when you’ve done all the work, and, become a Druid. Imagine that you’ve ‘got there’ and the one thing you can be sure of is that you haven’t. My feeling is that a degree of uncertainty, doubt and questioning is intrinsic to following the Druid path. It’s that precisely which precludes dogma, and stops us getting too comfortable and smug. We’re never going to know, and we always have to keep asking. This is also why its very hard to teach someone how to be a Druid, because the habit of questioning requires you to go into things that cannot readily be answered and to actively seek for your own meanings and understanding. No one can give you that.

What we can do is share the journey, exchange ideas, bounce things off each other. And possibly what I can do is talk more about the thinking skills that I believe underpin what it means to be a Druid. Please do feed back, I’m pushing beyond my own comfort zone a bit here so need to know if this is working. I’ve spent a lot of years saying that the essence of Druidry is inherently unteachable, just to wake up this morning and realise I may have been wrong – which is rather exciting, and what you get when you never stop thinking and asking questions.