Relationship in Druidry
The idea that Druidry is all about relationship comes up a lot. Often what’s expressed is the idea that we should seek honourable relationship with all things. Though admirable, this is tricky because the vast array of non-human presences out there are not able to express their opinions, needs and preferences to us. We are obliged to guess much of the other side of any relationship. In practice although we could ask, we also tend to guess and infer the other side of our human relationships, too. Sometimes we don’t get much choice, because the relationship is indirect, brought about by consumption or pollution.
The one thing we can most easily scrutinise is what we bring to our side of that Druidic relationship. What are we looking for? What do we want? What shapes our side of the interaction and what informs out inferences and interpretations? As a case in point, many people have held for a long time that other creatures do not feel pain as humans do. Research is starting to tell us otherwise, but for a long time, the consensus inferred that animals felt little. What we brought to this inference was the collective inclination not to have to worry about how our treatment of animals might impact on them. As lab creatures, farmed creatures, in zoo and circus, in small cages at home, hunted for sport and set on each other for entertainment, our history of relationship with animals has some distinct biases in it.
It’s very easy to imagine that, as enlightened, spiritual people, we don’t do that sort of thing. Except that we do. We bring assumptions to our relationships all the time. Often we are more driven by a desire for status and respect within our own communities than it might be comfortable to accept. But then as people pointed out on a recent post here, we’re basically still monkeys, and there’s no shortage of baboon culture in human interactions. How do we relate to the consciousness of plants? How much landfill waste do we generate, alongside our quest for honourable relationship with the earth? How much of our own behaviour are we carefully justifying and excusing because it suits us to do so, not because we’re upholding honour?
Landfill is an issue much on my mind at present. I send about a carrier bag’s worth of stuff to landfill every week, and every now and then there is more, when a large, non-recyclable, worn out thing needs to leave. I try and squeeze full use out of everything. Reduce, re-use, pass on, recycle… but some items just don’t fit there and eventually I end up with a landfill contribution. Much of my waste is from the kitchen – I’m in a flat, I’ve had no way of composting and food waste isn’t collected here. I’m getting a wormery to deal with that, which leaves the non-recyclable plastics from the foods that I can’t figure out how to get by other means. Each plastic wrapper represents oil taken from the earth, and earth that I will pollute by disposing of it. Each plastic wrapper is a failure on my part to be in honourable relationship with the land.
It would be easy at this point to play up the things I do well, the areas of strength, to claim an offset, a state of ‘good enough’ or to suggest that it is an issue for wider society, not me as an individual. Where is my honourable relationship if I pass the buck on this one? Why do I feel entitled to inflict my waste on future generations? It’s not good enough.
It is easy to bandy round terms like ‘honourable relationship’ in order to feel good about what we do, and bloody hard if not painful to live and breathe that moment to moment and enact it in all things.
None of my relationships are truly honourable. All of them are flawed, partial works in progress and in all of them, there is so much scope to do better.
