Nimue Brown's Blog, page 454

Constructing an enemy

Normally, if I find someone irritating and unpleasant, I avoid them. I don’t bother spending time arguing with people who irritate the hell out of me. The people I bother to disagree with, are people I like and respect. If I disagree with them, I will be seeking a better understanding of their perspective, or trying to help them see my perspective because I think they’ve gone wrong. I am not going to invest the time that requires, without care.

However, most of us use concepts of opposition to help develop a sense of self. We know who we are, in part by being able to point at what we are not. To do this in any meaningful way, it is necessary to know the ‘other’ or we may just be indulging our prejudices. Sometimes what we hate most in others, is a reflection of the things we do not like about ourselves, so looking deeply is important or we can easily miss something.

There are arguments that you can judge a person by the quality of their enemies. You don’t get enemies by sitting round on the sofa all day munching snacks and watching TV. Pissing people off requires far more active engagement with the world, so having an enemy indicates having done something interesting. However, it’s a mistake to think that developing enmities is somehow proof of being an interesting person. Being an arsehole is not technically difficult.

How much time we invest in our enemies says something about us. How much we feed our own sense of being wronged, our anger and resentment. It can grown on the inside, developing vast proportions while out there in the real world, no one else notices or cares. Who does the anger harm? Well, the angry one, for a start. The one who clings to self righteous indignation rather than letting go and moving on, has not moved on. That’s a high price to pay, for the sake of your enemy.

There is no one in my life who I think of as an enemy. There are occasionally people who irritate me, but I don’t encourage them to stick around and I do not seek them out, nor put myself places where I might have to listen to their drivel. If you are going towards the people who make you angry, I think it’s well worth asking what you get out of doing that. Odds are, there are things inside you that need a look, and the person on the outside is far less the issue.

There are some institutions that would do well to consider me as an enemy. I’m much happier declaring war on structures and bodies that are underpinned by wrong, rather than individual humans. (Anyone see my piece in Green World?) Fighting for fairness, for justice, for a better sort of world often requires taking pot shots. But not usually at specific people, which is in many ways preferable.

Then there are rivalries, and these are worth their weight in gold. People I admire, respect, whose opinions fascinate me, but who I do not fully agree with. People I can clash with, sometimes in public-ish spaces, and watch the glorious sparks coming off. Passionate, intense exchanges with people who are fired up by ideas. These are not enemies. These are not people I would ever want to knock down or see humiliated. They are people I would protect or defend in any other arena. They turn up in all kind of places. Sometimes I find myself converted. Sometimes not. Either is fine. And in truth, I do not really want to convert them to my way of thinking. If I did, I’d have to go and find new people to disagree with.

Rivals are wonderful, exciting and stimulating people to have around. Don’t seek enemies. Seek rivals. They will make you go further, do more, shine brighter. And you can still have a cup of tea with them.

Angels on a pinhead, and other philosophical games

It’s good to ask questions, to ponder, imagine, daydream, reinvent. Most human achievement comes out of thinking, while acts born of stupidity and ignorance are frequently not a good thing. But does this make all questions equally valid or useful? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Asking questions will not make you into a wise old philosopher of the future, unless the questions you throw yourself into have some capacity to foster wisdom within you. Any question about some facet of your life, will have some use. Why do I do this? Could I do differently? Better? Less? More? What makes me happy? Is this working for me? You can poke around such issues at length to good effect. And subjects like politics where you have scope to contribute to a process makes sense as well. Many other potential examples spring to mind but the commonality is that seeking answers engages us with life in a meaningful way. Even when we can’t hope to find answers – what happens after death, is there a god? In the process of asking we consider the implications and explore how we want to live.

There are some questions that do not give us this. Imagine, for example, spending hours of dedicated thought creating what you imagine to be the perfect educational system. Now imagine that you do not work in education, are childless, and are not a politician. You have no intention of sharing your vision with anyone. It was an intellectual exercise. It may indeed have given your mind a workout. However, untested as it is, never offered up for criticism, never explored in practice, it sits inside your mind as ‘proof’ of an intellectual superiority that could be sadly lacking. It’s noticeable that ivory tower academics at least tend to talk to each other, and argue with each other. The issue of the angels on the pinhead was one people debated. At the very least that gives it an interesting social component.

Then there are the questions that cannot be answered well because they are loaded. “Why is my product better than anyone else’s?” “Why are you losers worshipping hedges and fields?” A question based on misunderstanding is not one that can lead directly to good answers. Asking good questions is a skill in its own right. Are you shutting down the options, or enabling genuine feedback? Is the question reinforcing an assumption? If we ask why children who drink cola do better at school we haven’t actually established that children who drink cola do better at school. It’s a crude example. In our own heads, we may be asking “Why am I such a failure?” “Why am I always wrong?” “Why does nobody love me?” without questioning the premise of the question.

There are questions that serve to divide and irritate and which cannot give us much that is productive. The vast majority of exchanges I have ever seen between atheists and theists would fall straight into this category. When the point of asking questions is not to share knowledge but to establish superiority, you’re never going to find good answers. The only good answer in that scenario is to escape from it.

Abstract thought can be interesting, and can lead to concrete consequences. However, I think it’s important to question how much time we pour into intangibles, hypothticals and imaginaries as opposed to real life. Who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman? What on earth difference does that make? Yet people will debate such questions for hours. If we had no big questions needed brain time, then the intellectual exercise would be justification enough. While we have disease, hunger, crime and extinctions, Superman and Batman need to shuffle their overly muscled arses down to the back end of the queue.

What we think about matters. The inner worlds we create inform who we are and help shape our life choices. If you pour hours into working out how best to lead your imaginary army across the Roman Empire, again, that is part of who you are. If you poured just a little bit of that time into contemplating how to get on better with the people around you, how to reduce your consumption levels, or help a local charity, you’d be an entirely different sort of person. Making the hypotheticals important while the real is allowed to suffer, is not, I think, a very good life choice.

Some lines of questioning will bring you insight, soul and a richer life. Some will enable you to twiddle your brain cells. The latter may make you feel clever (you did conquer Rome, after all!) and important (your design for a new education system would surely have solved everything!) but they don’t make you real. Ask how much good you can get out of today, and let the angels on the pinheads take care of themselves.

Druidry with no safety net

I am aware that many people recommend having a ‘safe space’ – be that the magical grove in your head or somewhere else you can retreat to for solace, sustenance and security. I have tried it, and I can’t do it. I’ll start by saying that’s probably about me and my relationship with the universe. Safety is not something I inherently feel. I don’t seek it in my own work, because even when I’ve tried, it’s not been a workable option for me.

What I’ve sought instead, is to be able to hold my own boundaries, my own sense of self, and enough inner calm not to crack up. This is not just about dealing with inner landscapes, monsters of the astral planes or imaginary struggles. This is Druidry practiced in self defence when I find myself in difficult situations. Sometimes I do better than others, but the more time I invest in being able to hold myself still, and hold myself together, the better I’ve got at doing just that.

I will admit that in Druidry and Meditation, I was fairly critical of the sacred grove in the head visualisations. On the contemplative druidry facebook group yesterday (yes, you can ask to join) several people mentioned that their inner groves are just as real to them as outer places. I don’t dispute that – I spend much of my working life imagining places such that they become real to me. We can all make vivid and meaningful inner realities, and it is good to explore this.

However, a safe place inside the head is not like an actual grove. You will probably not find dog shit in your inner grove, or litter, or the consequences of vandalism. Real trees are brought down by storms, disease, people who own the land. Having this happen to your special place really, really hurts.

It’s very easy for the things we imagine, to be and do exactly what we want. They will be friendly, gentle, benevolent. They will affirm. They will make us feel good and happy –and these are things we all need. But at the same time, we also need challenges. The grove in your head probably won’t require you to fight tooth and nail to save it from development. And then have to deal with failing. You probably won’t find a dead and dehydrated animal in it. No one else will plant exotic flowers there in memory of a departed granddad. It belongs to you. The world we share, does not, and the world we share offers challenges.

If you can imagine a safe place, and you have a need for one, then go for it. We all have different ways of working, and different needs. But, if the sacred grove inside your head is a fantasy substitute for real life, you are doing yourself a disservice. If you never get actual mud on your actual clothes, if you never sit under real trees and listen to how they really sound… not only are you missing out, but your ability to imagine realistically will be sorely impaired. Do you know what a wood sounds like at night? Or what it’s like in heavy rain? Have you loved a tree enough to be heartbroken when someone else cut it down? Do you know what really lives in trees?

To be a Druid is to be in this world, at least some of the time. Be wary of things that take you away from real life, or that give you easy, feel good stuff of no substance. Be wary of your own romanticising tendencies, and the limitations of your knowledge. Be wary of self indulgence.

In terms of both being safe and feeling well, there is much to be said for sitting under an actual tree, breathing in the tree scent, experiencing the impact of the tree on your body. Real trees are good for you. They are remarkable life forms with an incredible degree of scope to affect your body for the good. Imagining them does not have the same effect.

On the other hand, imaginary trees will not drop branches on your head leaving you shocked and concussed. Only once, mind, but it was memorable. Trees, when you get down to it, are not wholly safe and benevolent all the time, either. Nothing is. Which is why I feel more comfortable not imagining a safety net in the first place.

The power of expectation

One of the memes that crops up in many New Age lines of thinking is that we get what we look for, and like attracts like. Certainly, you are going to have a hard time seeing something you don’t believe is there. Yesterday I was exploring the way in which negative people are often acting in ways intending to reinforce their own world view. I want to follow on from that today. Not thinking so much about the implications of believing, or not believing in fairies and angels here. More about what we believe of ourselves and the world.

It’s so easy to manufacture the experiences that confirm expectations, without necessarily being conscious off the process. Back in my teens there was a boyfriend who had been through some awful stuff and didn’t really think anyone cared about him, as a logical consequence of this. If anyone got too close, he’d become increasingly demanding, difficult and challenging until he forced them (and in my turn, me) to give up and walk away. Thus he kept confirming his belief about his relationship with the whole of reality. Eventually, I gather he got his head straight enough to give someone a chance. There’s nothing like believing you are unlovable to make it hard for those around you to manifest care.

How many such beliefs are we all lugging around? I’m conscious that I may be viewing the world as more hostile than it inherently is. I don’t see the New Age reality of benevolence and love, I see something that is at best, neutral. As a consequence the odds of me recognising an experience of benevolent angels, for example, are pretty slim. I probably wouldn’t notice them until they bit me on the bottom, by which point they wouldn’t seem quite so benevolent anyway… What else have I got? I don’t know, but I’m looking.  I don’t want to be at the mercy of my own unconscious misapprehensions if I can help it.

How much conflict in life comes from the clashing together of stories and beliefs on this personal level? The person who assumes they won’t be believed, and who consequently stays silent. The person who believes they are inherently unacceptable and so has to keep acting out until they find what you can’t tolerate. The person who cannot believe anything good, kind, altruistic or generous really exists so will keep imagining terrible, hidden motives to explain the compassion their reality has no space for. How many people are lugging round a unique reality and bludgeoning other people with it as a consequence?

None of us has a perfect view of self or wider reality. We all have blind spots and illusions, and I suspect that’s just one of those things about being human. We also have differences of opinion such that my functional reality may seem like crazy fantasy to other people. It’s just as dangerous to assume you are right as it is to default to the assumption that you are wrong in this.

We find out where the issues may be when two incompatible realities are banged together. How to tell which is real? Am I the ungrateful, demanding, unreasonable one, or is what I want normal, and is the other person a lazy slacker who does not know what decent behaviour looks like? We won’t ever figure that out by looking just at the two people involved. Wider context tells us a lot about how we fit in elsewhere. I’m wary of taking ‘normal’ as a measure for anything because it’s so flawed. In a room full of killers, the mass murderer is pretty normal, after all. But if only one person finds us wildly unreasonable and nobody else does, that’s certainly indicative.

The more diverse a pool of people we can draw on for this, the better. How does my work self compare to my social self, my parent self, my pagan-gathering self? Am I getting the same kinds of responses across the board? How do I feel about the people I clash with? Do I respect them and want to respond to the clash, or do I think they are idiots? Where do I want to fit? These can be useful measures, although if we are the killer in a room full of killers, metaphorically speaking, conforming to peer standards may be letting us stay in a crappy place and resisting opportunities to grow.

Someone too entrenched in their own sense of self importance will never be able to make a good assessment in this regard. Someone who cares more about seeming right than being right, will never be able to explore to see if their relationship with reality is faulty. If you can ask, and seriously consider whether you’re going the wrong way, there’s every reason to think you can also consider the issue well. Doubt and self questioning are vital tools. Self belief is also necessary to sanity. There’s a balance to strike, but if you aren’t looking for it, you won’t find it.

In conflict we bemuse

I was deeply affected by a recent post on Cat Treadwell’s blog http://druidcat.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/thedarkpaths/ , where she talks about experiencing conflict scenarios with people who are aggressive towards her. Recognising the isolation, fear and other painful things that may underpin such behaviour, she pondered what to do in such scenarios. The more dedicated a person is to service, the harder it is to turn away from people whose negativity harms them and anyone who comes close enough to be infected by it.

I know that at present, I’m not equal to that kind of service. I don’t have the resources of energy or the depth of equilibrium called for. I’m not prepared to compromise my health and viability to tackle problem people. Mostly I deal with people who bother me by keeping away. And sometimes I recognise that calls for a calculated form of selfishness on my part. Compassion can be exhausting, and I am a finite being. But, so many wrongs in the world derive from the fears, mistaken beliefs and unsustainable habits of people. Turning a blind eye is a means of condoning. Whatever we may feel about not wanting to control people, there’s the issues planetary crisis and not tolerating cruelty to consider. Sometimes, it’s necessary to act.

How do we discern between rightful action, and action motivated by vanity, pride or a desire to control? How much wanting to redirect is merely self importance? Every time any of us get the urge to call another person out over their behaviour, this is something to consider. Never, ever get complacent about it. Holier than thou as a mindset is seldom very holy at all. It’s so easy to see the surface and not see what lies beneath. Another thing that touched me in Cat’s recent blog, was her desire to understand and to heal, not to browbeat.

Taking the time to understand can often foster compassion. If we see the fear that underpins the shouting, the raging insecurity that has someone behaving in a controlling way, we have more scope for handing it gently. It’s easy to accidently reaffirm the mindset – anger, resentment, resistance, can all turn out to be what the awkward one knew would happen. If we reinforce the world view, we help entrench the problem.

There’s a lot to be said for doing, and saying the unexpected. Take a second to consider what kind of response the words or behaviour seemed intended to elicit. Then do some other thing. There are people who will push you away because they believe no one can love them. There are people who will shout at you so that when you shout back, they have a justification for hitting you. There are people who will make you lose your cool so that they can mock you, or will try to make you lash out so they can prove how unreasonable you really are. Often, once you start looking, the intended reaction becomes transparent. Do some other thing. Smile. Laugh. Wish them well. Compliment them. Get them on the back foot by refusing to conform to their world view. Seed an idea.

Lots of people have tightly held stories about the way the world works, and will cling to them regardless of evidence to the contrary. Some people have an amazing capacity to reinvent experiences in order to make them fit. A person clinging to a perspective may react negatively to someone whose very existence challenges belief. Pagans frequently fail to conform to other people’s stereotypes. This alone can lead to resentment. Sometimes just being who and how you are will constitute an affront to people whose tidy little perspectives cannot fit you in. Some people will try and take you down, take you apart, just to make you fit. People who have given up on their dreams tend to detest dreamers. People who believe the world is an ugly place resent those who can see beauty. People who are jealous and fearful resent those who are generous and free. Those who think that power, money and social status matter feel threatened by anyone who can be happy with very little. And on it goes. If we let them diminish us, we let them win.

I think sometimes, the most compassionate thing we can do for some of the people who come into our lives, is to fail to live up to their expectations, and thereby fail to make them comfortable. The shaking of complacency, the challenging of beliefs, the refusal to play, are all very powerful ways of encouraging other people to rethink things. And it’s an approach that keeps us on our toes too, keeps us honest, and stops us falling into other people’s traps or trying to make them do anything at all.

Guest Blog: Origins of the Celtic Folk Religion

By Nukiuk

The greatest rivers have many source just as the Celtic Folk Religions which are some of the richest and most complex sets of beliefs in the world do not have a single source. The Celtic belief system comes from many lands and many peoples who exchanged ideas, philosophies and most importantly fairies and deities. Such exchanges in religious knowledge was common, thus Arito the Celtic Bear Goddess is likely of Ugric origin and Celtic Shamanism was likely greatly influenced by the Ugrics and Altaic peoples.

Such influences and origins provide those who are studying folk religions with advantages in better understanding a given people because while many aspects of the Celtic Folk Religions have been lost to Christian Raiders and the steady decay of time, some of the missing pieces to the puzzle that is the Celtic Folk Beliefs can still be found among those who once shared a religion with or influenced the Celtic peoples. Further the study of these related folk religions can aid those who are trying to build relationships with Celtic Fairies will gain insights into additional ways to do so.

The Indo-Europeans

The Celtic language is an Indo-European language which tells us that at least some of the Celtic faith has the same roots as the Roman, Germanic, Greek, Hindu, and Slavic faiths. Indeed many Romans were disturbed by the similarities between the Celtic and Roman philosophies as they could not understand how a people they considered to be ‘barbarians’ and developed not only such a complex and rich system but a system which was so similar to their own.

Forming on the Eurasian Steppes the Indo-European language came to dominate most of Europe and Southern Asia all the way to India. Initially the Indo-European peoples worshipped formless spirits and fairy like beings which they believed inhibited both natural and important manmade objects. Such beings were not worshipped in temples, but rather in the forests, mountains and along the waterways where they lived.

While today the Hindus of India and the Kalasha people are the only Indo-Europeans who are still primarily pagan, many records still exist of the beliefs of the Greeks and Romans, while folk religions and myths were recorded of the rest which gives us many more pieces to the puzzle.

The First Peoples of Isles

The Indo-Europeans were not the first people to inhabit the Celtic lands, many folklorists of the past have presumed that fairies were nothing more than a pre-existing people. While such notions are supported by the Irish belief that the Tuatha de Danann or the Cornish belief that Pixies had been driven underground by the coming of humans and powerful Druids the nature of things beings brings into question their previous relationship with humanity. What’s more as much as 85% of the DNA of the Welsh and Irish populations comes from pre-Indo-European sources, even in the modern era. In other words the Indo-Europeans might have supplied the Celtic language, but the majority of the Celtic people came from the first peoples of Europe. Thus the majority of the Celtic peoples’ DNA comes from the peoples who built Stonehenge. Although these people left no records I have argued that Europe’s Folk Religions which primarily focuses on the worship of water deities, Earth spirits, The Fates, along with the spirits of stones and hills gives us the best idea of what this early religion was.

The Etruscans

The Proto-Celts formed next to the Raetic people who are related to the Etruscans. These peoples paid greater attention to Banshee figures than were the other Indo-Europeans and so this could be the source for the Celts closeness to these fairies. Further the Etruscan peoples paid closer attention to portents than other European peoples with the exception of the Celts so it seems likely that the Celts were influenced greatly by the Raetic peoples’ faith.

The Ugric Peoples

The Ugric people include the Finnish and Estonians as well as the people who are often called ‘the last Pagans of Europe,’ the Mari of European Russia. The Ugric peoples believed in fairy-like beings which lived in the forests and could help or harm people. Their deities and peoples were often led by Merlin-like figures. As previously mentioned the Celts relationship with Arito the Bear Goddess was likely influenced by the Ugric peoples, as was Merlin, Shamanism and the general idea of magic.

The Altaic Peoples

The Celts get their word for horse from the horsemen of the Eurasian Steppes who became the Turkish, as well as the Japanese, Mongolian and Korean peoples. This shows us not only that the early Celts had contact with the Altaic people but that the Altaic peoples likely had big influence on the Celts conception of horses (some of the most sacred animals in Celtic Lore) and possibly on the Celts’ conception of war. The Altaic peoples were the peoples who developed the idea of the ‘Worlds Tree,’ they are also known for believing that the mountains and hilltops are an otherworld for spirits and fairy like creatures.

To better understand the Altaic Folk Religions one can still study the Japanese Religion which has its roots in the Altaic belief system as does Korean Shamanism, Tengriism, and many forms of Siberian Shamanism.

As previously mentioned these relationships to the Celtic beliefs can make it easier to fill the gaps left in our knowledge of this ancient religion. Further, just as the people who were related to the Celts were inspired by many sources so can the great scholars of today.

Nukiuk is a Folklorist who has been using fairy tales to learn more about Eurasia’s folk religions. You can learn more about his work at http://zeluna.net/.

You can learn more about the Indo-Europeans and the origin of Europe’s fairies at http://fairies.zeluna.net/p/origins-of-europes-fairies_14.html.

References at http://fairies.zeluna.net/p/resources.html

Modern Ancestor Worship

I’ve spent a lot of today in a museum, and it occurred to me that in many ways, museums are modern, secular temples to the ancestors. Whatever the focus of a museum is, they tend to have in common artefacts from times past, and narratives about them. If you hold a vision of reality that embraces all that has been before as ancestry, then there’s even room with natural history museums. Natural history tends to have a lot of human history wrapped around it too – who found what, how we made species extinct, and so forth.

The objects on display in a museum create a very immediate connection to the past. Sometimes, one you are allowed to put your hands on. Where it’s permitted, I generally touch. I like the process of making physical contact with the past. Museums tend also to carry a lot of speculation about meaning, and there may also be religious items. I’ve seen a fair few charms today, and stones from shrines. I find it very hard encountering those behind glass, set up with little labels and all in together, not on the land they were made for, or in the place where they were sacred. But that’s the nature of museums.

I’m torn between relishing the beauty of grave goods and feeling uneasy about them. So much of what we know comes from things buried alongside the dead. But those things were buried for a reason, and most of us would be deeply uneasy if those ancestral possessions were only a few generations old. I’d hate to walk into a museum and see the items my Gran was buried with, for a start. There’s a tension here between intellect and emotion, between wanting a sense of connection, and not feeling that this is the right way to do it. I don’t really have any solutions.

Then there are the bones. Most human history museums will have some human bones somewhere, in my experience. A local ancestor of place, laid out for public scrutiny. This is not the blog post in which to tackle the many issues and ethics. It’s too big a topic. Today in a Cirencester museum I saw, for the first time in my life, a warning that an exhibit contained real human remains. I wondered what made them decide to put the sign up. The young man was laid out as he had been found, with his grave goods in position around him. He’s close to where he came from, geographically speaking. He’s still got his things, but we can see them. That feels like a step in the right direction, a balancing act.

I always pause to pay my respects to the dead, and I always find myself thinking how brief human life is, how precious and fleeting it all is. The animal dead catch me much the same way, but not the fossils. I have no idea why. They have transformed, I suppose, as much rock as remnant of life.

Sitting with the spirits of place

One of the few reliable themes in my otherwise chaotic ritual tendencies, is honouring the spirits of place. With the weather mayhem this year, seasonal celebrations have felt a bit odd. I was out more than a week ago seeing hay and grain being harvested. If we’d been celebrating formally, that would have been more the time to do Lammas, I think. And while some fields were ripe, plenty others weren’t. Some of the cygnets are nearly adult, others look to be fairly recent hatchlings. I heard nightingales in early July when they should have given up weeks before. I can’t engage at all with the seasons, but the locality makes sense.

Today, the locality was a cathedral. Usually there are rows of seats in the main body of the cathedral, but today they were absent, leaving a huge, empty space. We were early, there were few people about, someone running a vacuum cleaner. While everyone around us was either working or being a tourist, we went and sat in the middle of the floor, and contemplated.

A cathedral is full of history. I thought about the ancestors who had worshipped there, all those centuries of Christenings, marriages and funerals. The dead buried on site. Many hands went to quarry, shape and place the stone. The stone itself has its own history too, and the earth beneath the stone. I thought about the music that had happened here, the worship, contemplated spirits of hope and dreams of better worlds. It is easy, as a pagan, to be tremendously negative about Christianity, focusing on all the worst bits. But, these are our ancestors, we are part of their story, and there is plenty there that we can think well of and celebrate.

As I listened to the building, I became aware of how sounds were interacting with each other. All the muted sounds of conversation around the space, coupled with the sounds of motion the low thrum of closing doors, combined. At times they suggested additional notes, far below the sounds being made. Sometimes there was a hint of music to it, a song being made out of the building and the quiet human presences within it. And then, a wonder. A high, soaring voice that rose right to the roof, perfectly resonant in the space, wild and unearthly. I was transfixed. A small pixie child in a pushchair, head raised, vocalising into the space and clearly aware of something happening. Echoes and resonances. It was beautiful.

There were a few of us having spiritual experiences in the cathedral this morning. Three contemplative druids and one wide eyed toddler. I can’t comment on anyone else, but they all seemed busy, or touristy. We must have seemed a tad odd to them.

Making Peace

The internet is full of things that will make you angry. Right now, someone is desecrating that which you hold most sacred. Someone is spouting rubbish so unbearable that you will think it dangerous. We can choose to seek out opportunities to be offended and upset, or we can choose to avoid them. In our personal lives, we can choose to dwell on wrongs committed against us, or we can tune them out. We can forgive, or not. At first glance the acts of ignoring would seem like the ones most likely to engender a sense of inner peace. I don’t think this is so. There’s a process to undertake here, and there are balances to strike.

Ignoring wrongs very simply condones them and facilitates their continuing. Turning a blind eye may assist our equilibrium in the short term, but if we are truly being abused in some way – be that by those around us, government bodies, institutionalised prejudice and the like, ignoring won’t fix it or make it go away. Usually the reverse happens. To get to a point of peace it is often necessary to tackle any external sources of difficulty. Sometimes the only option we have is to move away from the source of the problem, but this isn’t always peace-inducing. Leaving a festering pool of wrongness and pollution behind may well create in you a legacy of wondering what was harmed next, or whether it spread. The peace of knowing the problem is truly resolved, is like no other. The future is lining up a few opportunities for me to tackle aspects of my past. I mean to make the best use of them that I can. I want peace, and I want specifically the kind of peace that comes from having sorted things out and done the right things.

When confronting a wrong, it’s important to consider just how wrong it is, and whether it is, really speaking, your problem. If there is litter chocking the stream near your house, then there is something you can do. If atheists fill you with irrational rage, then maybe seeking out the places where atheists go on line in order to keep telling them what the afterlife is going to do to them, isn’t the best idea. There is a difference between tangible harm – being harassed, attacked, showered with chemical poisons from a factory, and taking offence at something someone else does. It’s that old if you don’t like thinking about what gay guys do, just don’t think about it, solution.

It gets tricky at this point because of course certain schools of thinking will understand certain kinds of behaviour as being dangerous and wrong. Someone less liberal than you may consider you dangerous. Part of the problem here is that fundamentalists of all hues (religious, atheist, scientific, political…) often have the belief that they are entitled or required to try and change you for your own good. If we could just let go of that notion of entitlement and requirement, we could solve a lot of problems. By all means, put your version out there, but if others reject it, you are not responsible for that. It is not your job to force it down the throats of the unwilling.

So where do we go with the people for whom climate change is a belief they don’t agree with, not an established fact? And if we say that the voice of sanity must prevail here, how do we handle it when the drug companies demand, claiming the voice of sanity, that all those quack medicines be taken off the market? (for which read herbal remedies and anything they aren’t getting paid for.) In my experience the majority of swords turn out to be double edged.

Sometimes, the answer is not to look outside and blame others for what causes us to feel angry, threatened or mistreated. Sometimes the answer was inside all along. Why should a straight person feel angry and threatened by gay marriage, for example? Work on the inside would be a better approach there for seeking peace. But the other side of the sword lops bits off us instead. If you are being bullied and you start to imagine that the problem is inside you (not an unusual reaction, I gather) then what you do is internalise the bullying, swallow the blame, and there is no hope for peace in that scenario, not without radical change.

True peace requires integrity and self awareness. It requires recognition as to whether the change needs to happen inside us, or outside. To find it, we have to be more interested in getting things right than merely appearing to be right. We have to be willing to change, to let go, to see with new eyes. We need compassionate thinking, both for ourselves and for others. That, I think, is the key. True peace is compassionate. If you are fighting for peace, if you are angry, what you get will not bring peace. Only compassion can do that, and in trying to find a right way through, compassion is your most reliable guide.

Contemplating prayer

I’m studying prayer at the moment. I’ve been considering prayer practice in different religions as an academic subject, and using what I learn from there to reflect on prayer within the Druid tradition. I am contemplating a book. Now, the old reconstructionists from the early days drew on the Christian prayer tradition, which most of us no longer do. There is a Celtic Christian that some more Christianly orientated Druids draw on. There are a few Iolo Morganwg prayers that seem to come up regularly, but unlike most faiths we do not (as far as I know) have a big body of formal prayer. If you belong to, or know about any Druid order or group that has a formal prayer tradition, please, please let me know.

If you are drawing on a body of written /shared prayer material, also, please drop me a line. If you don’t want to talk publically, but are willing to talk, leave me a message to contact you – from which I can extract your email addy and do it privately.

If you are working with the prayer approach of another tradition – one of those druidry-and scenarios, I would be really interested to hear about that, too.

Question-wise I shall leave it there for today because that could be enough to keep us all very busy. I have a lot more questions though, so expect to hear more shout outs over the coming weeks. I’d like to be able to include some sense of what the current druid approach to prayer looks like alongside the issues raised by the concept of prayer.

If I’m going to quote you, I will be in touch to find out who you want to be for the purposes of being quoted. If people want to remain anonymous, I can handle that. We can go the ‘some druids tell me’ route.

In the meantime, I’m slowly frying my brain with research. I figure this time I’ll do the research first then try and write something. Unlike Druidry and the Ancestors, where I got half way through and realised I needed to go back to the beginning and study a few things.

Also, if you’re not a druid and want to pile in, go for it, the more perspectives the merrier!