The view from the hermit shack

There is a large chessboard laid out on the floor in the central court of the library where I work. The chess pieces are three or four feet high.  Two men are playing a game, while a couple of others stand watching.  I think this is for National Library Week.

I keep reading on our local weather blog that much of the state is in borderline drought conditions.  It seems to me, however, like we have had constant rain for weeks, or at least, constant cloud cover and occasional drizzle.  My neighborhood is bursting with daffodils and hyacinths, flowering pear, ornamental cherries in bloom, and fresh green grass; it doesn’t look or feel like drought conditions to me, but I’m no expert, I only go by what I see and smell and feel.

The smell of a single pot of hyacinths fills our shrine room and overwhelms all but the richest of incense.

I’ve been hiding in my virtual hermit shack for a while, experimenting with other blogging sites and other names.  But I find myself back here, even if I’m no longer sure what I’m confessing, or that “druid” is a right name for my spiritual practice.  Yesterday was the first anniversary of my Taking Refuge as a Buddhist, with a lama of the Drikung Kagyu tradition.  In that year I’ve learned I can no more be a Good Little Buddhist than I managed to be a Good Little Anglican.  I’ve also learned that I’m still an Anglican, to the extent that I still have an Anglican sensibility and a relationship to the tradition, fragile and imperiled as it is, and that I am and will continue to be a Buddhist.  I’m also a magician, a pagan, and possibly even a witch.  Oh yes, and a druid–a member in good standing, if not a very active one, of a Revival Druid order.

Buddhism, you see, gave me the key to understanding the spiritual path, what it’s for, what it’s all about.  It gave me The View (to use the Buddhist term–I don’t mean the ladies’ talk show!) from which to look at my experiences of religion, magic, and spirituality and see them as a whole.  As Isis reassembled the scattered pieces of Osiris and made him whole, so Buddhism, for me, has reassembled the scattered pieces of Western Dharma, in Christianity, paganism, Gnosticism, and magic, and made them come to life–even if, like Isis, there might be a piece here and there I have to create for myself.

So right now I’m reading about Buddhism, still, mostly from Zen abbot John Daido Loori, rebuilding a New Hermetics practice, and starting to work with teachings from Thorn Coyle, whom I had the privilege of meeting and hearing speak last Friday night (which deserves its own post).  And watching things bloom, hearing mourning doves call, wondering about that dog who seems to be always in the yard and never indoors, and, at the moment, about to have lunch.  You’ll hear more from the hermit shack later.