Aspiring Druid, still learning
When I started exploring druidry, I read all sorts of books with content about who the druids were and what they did, and not wholly identical content about who druids are and what they do. I came to the conclusion that while modern druidry cannot be ancient druidry, in many ways it isn’t even trying. There is reason to think that the ancient druids were the learned, educated class of the Celtic peoples. Modern druidry focuses almost entirely on personal, and sometimes group spirituality. I do know plenty of individual druids who do strike out to learn other things or who are already intellectuals in their own fields though.
By the time I finished my degree I’d figured out that, while I enjoyed the learning, I hate the assessment process. It was getting in the way of the interesting stuff, and it seemed ever les relevant to me. I didn’t want marks out of a hundred, I wanted to push the boundaries of my own understanding. Since then I’ve frequently been a self taught student of all manner of subjects. I love learning. There are however, a number of ways in which a person can learn.
Skill learning, the mastering of an art, craft, instrument, or other form of physical activity. The Celts valued skill and respected their craftspeople, so I feel that this kind of learning entirely supports my more spiritual druid work. I don’t have a Celtic tribe to live in, and I cannot know what that would have been like, but I can take inspiration from what I do know about.
Fact learning can be very important when it feeds into developing a skill. It can also take a person into learning number three (bear with me). However, it’s very easy to go round acquiring facts in the same way that others might accumulate money, or possessions. Bland, irrelevant information cluttering up the mind and glittering like fool’s gold. Do we need the football results or the music charts of the last fifty years committed to memory? Do we need to know the population of Beijing? We probably don’t. The kind of fact learning good for pub quizzes and trivia games doesn’t tend to give us much else.
Then there is learning that leads to understanding. It’s like the difference between knowing all the prime numbers from zero up to a million, and knowing what a prime number is. In theory, you could commit them all to memory without knowing what they mean or why they might be interesting. Understanding is a form of learning that takes us into relationship with the subject matter. It enables us to recognise, to adapt, change, re-imagine. Fact based knowledge can be sterile, understanding is much more likely to breed creativity.
There is a tendency in modern culture to compartmentalise. We keep work, family, leisure time separate. We don’t take our spiritual lives to work, or our families to college. We divide intellect from emotion, mind from body. Most importantly, we tend to hive the spiritual life off, away from the rest of who we are and what we do. What we need to do with spiritual life, is take it other places with us, and actively seek those other places.
To be a druid is not just to sit in a tree somewhere contemplating the wonders of nature. Druids need one foot in the wild, one in the civilized world. One foot in the emotional realms, one foot in the land of intellect. One foot in the spirit planes, the other firmly on solid, material ground. One foot on the goat, the other on the well. I now have an image in my head of an eight legged octopus druid, tentacles all over the place.
Moving swiftly on… working with the intellect in any field is still druid work. It’s not separate. We’re pretty good at recognising skill learning as part of the bardic path. There are other kinds of arts I think Druids need to be studying and exploring. The art of good relationship is central. And beyond that, the occult science that is the blending of intellectual understanding with spiritual insight. I think the technical word for that is ‘wisdom’. That’s something to quest after.
I’ve just read a Catholic book on prayer and am now tackling a Protestant text on the same subject. It’s made me remember just how much I love studying, how fired up I am by working with ideas. Some of my other druid tentacles keep waving though, not letting me shift into an entirely head based view. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is just another thing to collect and horde. I keep asking, where am I going with this? What can I do with it? No grand epiphanies yet, just more signposts along the path.
