Where Druidry begins
I’d like to point you at a small film on youtube it’s the first ‘Calm’ film in this list, which for reasons I cannot fathom, I can’t get a url for.
It’s a beautiful video. If you can’t watch, the audio is still well worth your time, and apologies to anyone whose internet does not allow. The urge towards peace and stillness is a big part of what brings many of us to Druidry. Awareness of the enormity of nature can help us not be overwhelmed by the frantic elements of our own lives.
What this film misses, is the way in which our collective anxiety and panic is not essential. It need not be like this. We’re forced to run ever faster, haunted by economic pressures in a system that demands we do more for less, and pay more for less, as though this could continue forever. But why? Because fear makes us willing to seek comfort in consumption. Panicked running means we have no time to stop and think. That in turn means we don’t question, and we don’t resist. Like the eternal child, I keep asking, but why? Why is this happening?
Because greed is a sickness. Greed to own more than can possibly be used. It’s sane and reasonable to want sufficiency. It’s fine to want a bit more, a bit of a safety net, a rainy day fund, but a small percentage of humans accumulate as an obsession. It gives them the power to influence the rest of us, and they do so in ways designed to keep us building their piles of gold. It is madness. It is unsustainable, illogical, destructive madness and we are all paying for the money-sick in our culture.
It is very hard to step away from this, to unpick the many sticky threads trapping you in this system. Odds are, you won’t. But the call to calm, to quiet, to wide open places and perspective helps. Druidry is the call to reason, sanity, hope and healing. With calm, we can see through the lies of growth and progress every time we get caught up in them again.
I firmly believe that we still have time to change things, that we are not inevitably doomed as a species by the madness we have created. The more of us are able to find some calm space, wake from the nightmare and get modern life into a healthy perspective, the better a chance we have.
