How do you live a Druid life?
(Nimue)
Asking the question is more important than any specific answers you might come up with. Meanings that we make and choose are far more powerful for us than ones we think we should have based on other people’s assertions.
To live a Druid life is to have your Druidry be a meaningful part of your life, in short. That could well mean that your Druidry informs your principles and beliefs – we tend towards the philosophical, so it makes a lot of sense to deliberately have Druidry influence your thinking. Absorbing ideas and them embodying them can be a good way of living your Druidry.
That will then inform our actions. If we value justice and fairness, want to be sustainable, celebrate creativity and find a sense of sacredness in the living world, that will inform our words and deeds. It’s good to pause sometimes and reflect on the ways in which you are doing that. It’s an affirming process. The better a job you do of embedding your Druidry in your life, the less self announcing it becomes. Taking the time to reflect on it, and celebrate it can be helpful for not losing sight of it.
What makes you feel most Druidic? Is that a comfortable way of identifying for you? Being on the Druid path is a less dramatic claim than ‘being a Druid’ and that second approach doesn’t sit easily with everyone. When do you feel most in tune with Druidry? When do you get the most out of it? There are a lot of options within Druidry, and not all of them are for everyone. It’s good to try things, but at the same time, check in with yourself about what works for you, and what doesn’t. If you aren’t excited, inspired or comforted by a particular practice, it’s good to question it and to consider replacing it.
What makes for good Druidry today might not work tomorrow. Our circumstances change, and we grow, and sometimes grow away from things. Letting go can be good, shedding old skins to make way for change. There’s no one thing you have to do to qualify as a Druid, so there’s room to be relaxed around personal preference and need.
Sometimes it’s good to drift and not have goals or directions in mind. Sometimes it makes sense to go the other way and create structure. I’m in more of a drifty place at the moment – not least because the weather is hot. Summer invites daydreaming and inclines me to sit under trees and not do much. I’m more of a twilight creature at this time of year, and I want to commune with fresh fruit from the hedgerows.
Ask what the Druidry in your life looks like right now, but don’t judge yourself over the answer. It’s fine to be wherever you are. This is not a linear journey where we measure ourselves in distance travelled, boxes ticked or stuff done. It’s about living, being, feeling and thinking in whatever way makes most sense at the time.
