Is it really late November already?

“The holidays are upon us,” I keep hearing, meaning Thanksgiving-and-Christmas, the season of spending large amounts of money on friends and family to prove our love for them and eating large amounts of food which we will be called upon to ritually repent in January.

“The holidays” are upon us, if I believe the advertising I see and hear, the jolly red-and-white covers of December issues of magazines that I check in at work, splashed with candy canes and cake recipes, and we are expected to rejoice. As for me, I’m always grumpy and refractory, this time of year. It’s still November and I’m thinking about the dead–my Aunt Margaret, whose birthday was yesterday; my father-in-law, whom I ought to pray to and for more often; my mother, dead 26 years on the 22d, who still in many ways haunts my life.

And I’m thinking about Advent, about apocalypse stories, about the Rapture and the great zombie takeover and what the Mayans did or did not predict. Just for the record, I don’t think they or anyone else predicted the End of the World on 21 December 2012. I definitely don’t think Jesus is coming at any minute to waft away all the True Believers and punish the rest of us with gruesome special effects. As for the zombies, well, we are the zombies, aren’t we? Mindless consumers who will eat everything in sight until there is nothing left, and we eat one another, and die off.

Well.

But it might just be the late-afternoon, early winter light making me feel this way, right at the moment. Remembering the beloved dead is not necessarily a sad thing. It’s remembering the not-so-beloved dead, like my mother and our problematic relationship, that is hard. And for an introvert like myself, the over-cultural exhortations to cook, eat, buy presents, spend money, drink egg nog, ho ho ho, ha ha ha, always make me want to lock myself in a dim room and listen to austere Gregorian chant until it all goes away. That doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to the Thanksgiving meal with family, or to exchanging gifts with those I love. It just means I want to do so in my time, not at the corporate world’s demand.

Long-term readers of this blog (if there are any–one or two) are no doubt used to my vacillating between religious labels: Am I a Druid, an Anglican, a Buddhist, or something else? Is there anything I haven’t tried and found wanting? Maybe I, myself, have been tried and found wanting, by the gods or the egregores of a tradition or at least by my readers. I was raised an Episcopalian, and I will probably always be able to quote the Prayerbook and sing hymns from the Hymnal 1940 with gusto. But the Christian tradition that in large measure formed my spirituality has done a lot in the past ten years or so to kill my love and admiration for it. Granted, it’s been helped along by the atrocities of a number of other Christian traditions–the Roman Catholic hierarchy protecting its pedophile priests, the right-wing Evangelical Protestants in the U.S. doing their best to control female sexuality and reproduction throughout the population–but I cannot hold the Anglican Communion blameless any more.

Nor can I ignore the fact that I just don’t believe any more. I don’t believe or accept many points of Christian doctrine, as a description of reality. I don’t believe in, trust, have any significant relationship with Jesus. Jesus makes most sense to me now as a buddha or bodhisattva, a fully enlightened human being, a teacher of wisdom and compassion who, like Amitabha or Padmasambhava, has his own pure land, the heaven he offers his followers.

I have failed to find a place in Druidry, or to make a druidry for myself. Nobody can say that I haven’t tried, but Druidry has been for me a very beautiful, very attractive garment, in all my favorite colors, that just Does. Not. Fit, no matter how much I squirm or fuss. It is a cloak I cannot wear, a house I cannot live in, no matter how much I like and admire those who can wear the druid cloak and live in the druid grove.

Buddhism continues to provide me with invaluable perspective on managing my mind, on the purpose of spiritual work, on ethical questions, on how the scattered branches of the Western tradition, like the scattered limbs of Osiris, might fit together again into a living whole. Yet it remains a school of practice that is not for me, perhaps because of its cultural contexts, perhaps for more individual reasons. I’m not certain I agree with Dion Fortune‘s dictum that Western people must follow Western paths, but it does seem to me that Westerners who genuinely “convert” to Buddhism, for lack of a better word than “convert”, often come from a background in which there was no significant religious commitment, a secular Jewishness, for example, or a twice-a-year mainstream Protestantism, not from deeply committed practice in a Western tradition.

So where does that leave me? Actually, despite my gloomy start to this entry, I am not left alone in the cold, dark winter night of an atheistic existence. (Getting dark where I am, at the moment, but not terribly cold or wintry.) I still have my training in the New Hermetics, otherwise known as That Thing I Tried And I Finished The Whole Course And It Worked Really Well For Me. I also have, unexpectedly, a new devotion–to Antinous, the Bithynian Boy, the beloved of the Roman Emperor Hadrian who was deified, in accordance with ancient Egyptian tradition, when he drowned in the Nile.

There are a lot of interesting connections between Antinous, Hermetic magic, and stuff in my life, which I think I should save for another post. As I contemplate that, I’ll also be contemplating whether to change the name of this blog, or start a new one, or just muddle on with the name recognition of “Confessions of an Urban Druid” while I blog about magic, Antinous, and my media intake. Cheers.

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The controlling metaphor, or, there and back again

When I was an English major in college (which I’m sure surprises nobody), I had a teacher who started every semester, every course, by going through a list of the literary terminology she expected to use and to hear used and giving definitions for all the terms. Her list ranged from things as basic as “image”, “simile”, and “metaphor” to more abstruse terms such as “chiasmus” and “zeugma”. (I can still remember the textbook example of a zeugma: “He has gone to the country to cultivate matrimony and his garden.”)

One of the more useful things I learned from Mrs. A. in college (I don’t get to sling around the word “zeugma” nearly as often as I’d like) was the idea of the controlling metaphor. The controlling metaphor is an implied comparison that runs through and organizes an entire poem or other work. The controlling metaphor of the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is simply, “High school is hell”. The twist is that the metaphor is literally, factually true. Sunnydale’s high school sits upon a hellmouth, and everything that Buffy and her friends ever say about how their teenage problems are The End of the World is extremely possible.

So one of my random thoughts in the shower recently was controlling metaphors for religions.

Christianity is a faith. Originally, that meant faith in the sense of trust, trust in Jesus and in the God he called Father. Nowadays, faith as trust in a person or deity has been almost entirely replaced by faith as belief in or assent to a set of propositions. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty” could be translated as “Somebody told me about the Big G, and I decided to go along with the idea.” The predominance of Christianity in the world has made “faith” a default metaphor for religion in Christian eyes.

Buddhism, as it is developing in the West, is a practice. Whether they are Zen or Tibetan Buddhists, Nichiren or Pure Land, Western Buddhists want to do more than show up at temple occasionally and put money in the hands of the experts, the way their grandparents did for church or synagogue. They want a religion which gives them something practical to do on a daily basis, something they can rely on in good times and bad.

Islam has submission built into its very name. I don’t know a lot about the African traditional religions, but the concept of house keeps coming up in what I read of them–the religion, the temple, the worshipper, the world being a house for the spirit beings. Many northern or heathen traditions use the word troth; the worshipper is true and loyal to the gods, the gods and goddesses are true and loyal to the worshipper.

What then is Druidry? Druidry is a path. That’s the word I keep coming back to myself. Path as a metaphor for spirituality, religious practice, school of magic is very common, very widespread right now, but when I think of Druidry, I think very specifically, visually, of a path that leads away from the village, the human settlement, the domain of culture, and into the forest, the domain of nature, where deities and spirits and larger truths can be encountered. And then, it leads back, to the village. The druid’s grove is the liminal place between the two, a human space shaped out of the forest, a place where nature and culture meet.

So Druidry is my path, not in the sense that it is my chosen or appointed route from Point A (ordinary me, unenlightened me, whatever) to Point B (super extraordinary me, enlightened me, no more problems me), but in the sense that it is my way through the world, my way from community to solitude and back again, my way from This World to the Other World and back again, and that it is always a path which takes me there and brings me, like Bilbo the hobbit, back again.

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The work of a Hermit

I was a member of the Ancient Order of Druids in America for over five years. I attained the First Degree of three. I sweated and procrastinated and flailed a long time, wondering why I couldn’t get myself organized to study for Second Degree. I am no longer a member of the Order.

I have been a member of Ar nDraoicht Fein for a year three or four different times. I procrastinated and flailed some more, wondering why I never got my feet on the street and went to one of their High Day rituals, seeing as they had a permanent grove location not far off a convenient bus route. I’m not a member of ADF any more.

I’ve wanted for two decades to join the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids, but joining means subscribing to their correspondence course, and I’ve always been put off by the cost.

I have books I treasure by members of AODA, ADF, and OBOD. My druid practice looks like the unlikely offspring of AODA and ADF as reared in the forest like Percival by OBOD. I am grateful for all that I have learned from these disparate organizations and their traditions. But I practice alone.

Maybe that was the idea all along. Maybe I should have known. Ever since I discovered Julian of Norwich in my late teens, I’ve dreamt of the solitary religious life. I have often thought that if I hadn’t met my husband at the right time, I might have become a nun, or that if he died suddenly, I might enter celibate religious life rather than looking for another spouse.

I’m not so sure about that any more, but I am finally sure of this: I am a druid, and I am a solitary. I do best practicing alone, following my own path through the forest. Perhaps others will come behind me and use the path that I have cleared; if not, I know that when I return from my grove to the town, the fruits of my practice will be the gifts I have to give the world.

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Following the thread of spirit

I’ve been reading a lot of Aidan Kelly lately, ever since Jason at The Wild Hunt linked to a post on Aidan’s recently inaugurated blog. I’ve read every post on the blog; in addition, I’ve read Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, his book on the formationof the NROOGD and his short novel Goddess Murder, in which he does what Dan Brown was trying to do in his most famous work, only better.

In HCBW, he records some of a group conversation amongst himself and the other people most closely involved in researching and writing ritual for the group. In this discussion the group talks about “having an intuitive sense of what our pattern is, or we couldn’t have looked at all the bits and pieces of traditional information and figured out which ones would fit into a pattern for us and which ones wouldn’t.”

This rang a bell with me, a bell which chimed again when in a recent blog post Aidan discussed  the intellectual discipline which advancement in the Craft requires and said, “You must read Murray and Graves and Gardner, for starters, as theology, not history.”

This work, the seeking that Aidan describes the NROOGD doing as a group in its fledgling years, the picking up of pieces from a pattern, the fragments of a jigsaw puzzle, the shards of a vase, is the work I am doing right now. It’s the work of creating a system of philosophy and practice, a system which will probably only ever be mine and mine alone, but which will be tested by experience and have enough internal consistency and practicality to be shared with other people. This system need not have a name, except “what Mam Adar does”. It will include magic and devotion and creative work; it will owe something to Wicca, Druidry, Buddhism, Feri, Northern traditions, hermetic magic, and the Prayerbook and Hymnal that taught me what religion and liturgy should look like and sound like.

One way that I am doing this work is by exploring the practices of one of R.J. Stewart’s more recent books, The Spirit Cord. The book teaches methods of working with one of the simplest of all magical tools: the Cord. I braided three strands of hemp thread together, good tough vividly dyed thread bought at my local bead shop, knotted off the ends, dripped a bit of beeswax on the knots, and I was ready. I have not so far done much formal sit-down work, except for the three rounds of three different dedications which Stewart prescribes as preliminary to the work, but as I have carried it on my person and slept with it under my pillow, my dreams have strengthened, my daily practices have stabilized, and I’ve begun to see, feel, and sense (to borrow one of Stewart’s favorite phrases) the pattern which belongs to me and into which my pieces fit.

The joyful part is that things are working, things are fermenting. The frustrating part is that I was clued in to this pattern some twenty years ago, and I got distracted from it, repeatedly, by a lot of different things. Stewart’s books are part of the pattern, and so are the works of John and Caitlin Matthews; the Druid Revival is part of it, but so is pre-Christian Celtic religion; Wicca has some pieces of it alongside Druidry, Buddhism has some pieces alongside Christianity (and Buddhism has been invaluable in giving me a picture of what an intact, complete religious/magical system looks like and how it works).

Is that eclecticism? is it syncretism? I don’t know and I actually don’t care. What I do care about is following the thread of this pattern, like Theseus in the labyrinth, and not getting distracted again, whether by my own fears and doubts, or by other people’s critiques of what I’m doing. The five feet and four inches of my slender hand-braided cord are my vow not to get distracted or derailed again.

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Infidelity, polyamory, or just confusion?

For as long as I’ve been able to read, I’ve loved to read about religion. Whether it was my own religion, Protestant (Episcopal) Christianity, or the more exotic forms of Christianity in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, or other religions entirely, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, it was all interesting. I started with picture-heavy tomes on Religions of the World, went on to children’s retellings of Greek and Norse myths, and branched out into adult books on archaeology, mythology, and comparative religion. For most of my life (I could already read when I entered kindergarten), religion has been for me one of the most fascinating things in the world.

When I discovered The Spiral Dance at thirteen, the same year it was published, what I discovered was not just that some people believed in a Goddess, or The Goddess, or gods and goddesses. I discovered that people like me believed in them, worshipped them, took them seriously, right now today. People who were Americans, who were brought up as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who weren’t ethnic or exotic or distant from in time or space. People like me.

As soon as I finished the book, I was quite certain I was actually a Witch, or at least a Pagan, and that I always would be. My observance took the form of writing a lot of bad poetry about spring and fall and my two favorite deities, Athena and Dionysus. Well, I was only thirteen. Then when I was sixteen, my grandmother died, after no illness and a massive heart attack and on my birthday, and within two years, I was back at my little Episcopal church, because there was a new priest there and absolutely no community, no support, in my solitary poetry-writing paganism.

In the last twenty years, I have identified variously as a Neopagan, an Anglican, a Druid, a Magician, and a Buddhist. I have been a member of two different druid organizations, trained in a Hermetic magical system, flirted with Greco-Egyptian syncretism, and taken refuge and bodhisattva vows. I have kept and abandoned and restarted this blog multiple times. I have read not only on Druidry, magic and occultism, and Tibetan Buddhism, but on Zen, Santeria, Wicca, Feri, Reclaiming, Asatru and the Northern Tradition, and Thelema.

In that same period of time, I have been happily monogamously married to one man, my husband, my best friend, my lover. Being sexually and emotional faithful, being true to the traditional Christian wedding vows we made, has not been difficult or challenging in the slightest. Admiring beautiful people and swooning over beautiful, talented actors has not interfered with my commitment to one person and our life together.

A lot of people find long-term sexual/romantic commitment difficult, even impossible. They cheat on spouses, adopt serial monogamy, or try the path of polyamory. Yet they might not have a problem adopting one spiritual path, one system of practice, and sticking to it. I know people who have been Wiccan or Heathen or Buddhist for decades, as contentedly as I have been married. If someone asked me for relationship advice, as somebody with a successful marriage, I would have no hesitation in giving it. But if someone asked me for spiritual advice, well, I have to admit, finally, that I remain in many ways a beginner, because I have never stayed the course and gone deep with anything.

Right now I’m reading Dedicant: A Witch’s Circle of Fire by Thuri Calafia. In the introduction, she describes her system of study in the Craft as a circle of five stages corresponding to the elements: Seeker (Air), Dedicant (Fire), Initiate (Water), Adept (Earth), and Master (Spirit). The Initiate, Adept, and Master stages correspond to the First, Second, and Third Degrees of coven-based Craft. Here is how Calafia describes the Dedicant:

The Dedicant becomes very passionate and fired up about this religion, and begins by learning to use his will as he learns about himself and the Craft.

And the Initiate:

The Initiate (in traditional Wicca, the first-degree) falls in love in a whole new way with her religion as she comes to understand how deep she must go to truly know and love herself and her gods.

Somehow, I have never crossed the threshold from the enthusiasm of the Dedicant to the commitment of the Initiate. I’ve gotten engaged a lot of times but never made it to the altar.

Why is it that a sexual, relationship commitment has been easy for me to make and maintain, but a spiritual commitment nearly impossible? Why does the grass always look greener to me in somebody else’s circle? I don’t have an answer, but this is a question I am going to be exploring for a while.

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I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer

Lent began on Wednesday the 22d. I said the Daily Office but did not attend any services. (I was amused and appalled that a local Episcopal church, my own denomination, described their service as “Ashing & Holy Communion”. I thought the heirs of Cranmer and Hooker could do better than that.) Will I engage in acts of fasting and self-denial? Probably not, although I may say the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary or the Stations of the Cross privately. Years ago I read in a Roman Catholic publication that the Lenten fast grew out of the conditions of pre-industrial living: Before factory farming and refrigeration, the winter stores of food that made the Yuletide so jolly were nearly exhausted by February, and new foods were not yet available. Beginning in early February (Imbolc/Candlemas), milk, butter, and cheese became available thanks to the birth of lambs; as the days got longer, chickens began to lay again. (Perhaps that’s why eggs are associated with the Spring Equinox–chickens would be laying reliably by then, if not sooner.)

Am I a Christian? I don’t know. I believe that Jesus was an incarnation of divinity and a great teacher, perhaps the most important teacher of the Western traditions. I don’t think he was the sole embodiment of divinity, but rather a model for what all human persons are capable of. I could say I believe in him, but I don’t really have much of a relationship with him. I have much more of a relationship with Julian of Norwich, whose writings I have studied in more depth and with more devotion than I have given any book of the Christian Scriptures.

Am I a Pagan, then? Again, I don’t know. I think many gods exist; I think many spirits or wights, beings neither human nor divine, angel nor devil, exist. I think some of them are benevolently interested in humankind, a few are actively hostile to us, and many are basically indifferent. But I don’t have much of a relationship with any non-Christian deity, either. I have gained strength and benefit from the practice of Tara and Medicine Buddha in Tibetan Buddhist contexts. I definitely have a relationship with birds, all birds, not just my own companions; anywhere I go, birds seem to recognize me, to know that I am a safe human, to come near to me. On the other hand, I have actually tried to cultivate relationships with some Celtic deities who seemed interested in me, and that situation seems to have resulted in FAIL all round.

Am I a Buddhist? No, as much as I admire Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, as much as I have learned from studying and practicing it. Perhaps Dion Fortune and her successors were right in saying Eastern methods are not for Western methods. Perhaps I just had too many years of Western religion and magic behind me, too many patterns formed, before I discovered Buddhism; I might be a thorough-going Buddhist if I’d made contact with it in my early twenties.

Am I a Druid, even? Probably not. I’m feeling like I’ve made repeated efforts, alone and as part of a group, to connect with Druidry, with the traditions of Arthur and Merlin and Taliesin, with faery lore, with bardic lore, with the Druid Revival and with more Reconstructionist systems, all to no avail. I’ve been banging my head against a wall, or possibly knocking at a door that just won’t open, and I’m exhausted by it. I want a holiday from all things Druidic and Celtic and Arthurian, except possibly Celtic music and episodes of the BBC’s Merlin.

What am I? I’m a married woman; a writer; a library paraprofessional; a singer, or former singer, specifically a chorister; and… a magician? a mage? an Adept of the New Hermetics? I trained with Jason Augustus Newcomb in the original New Hermetics course, in 2005-2006, and have completed all levels through Advanced Adept (equivalent to the Golden Dawn’s Adeptus Major). I have the certificates and the Rose Cross lamen to prove it. And for the last year, I’ve been trying to get my act together and undertake Jason’s revised version of the course.

I think about saying, “I’m a Hermeticist… I’m a Hermetic magician…” and the words just don’t want to come out of my mouth. I think about saying, “I’m a magician–” and my brain adds, “–not a priestess!” and follows it up with Bones McCoy growling, “I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer!” (I believe that episode, “Devil in the Dark“, was the first appearance of the Great McCoy Disclaimer, which has since been echoed by every other Starfleet doctor.)

Here are a few things I’m certain of:

• I’m interested in religious and magical traditions and what I can learn from them, even if I never identify with or practice them. This has been true of me since I was a child and read the grown-up books on comparative religion.
• The New Hermetics has worked better for me as a spiritual practice than pretty much anything else I’ve ever tried.
• I am convinced of the rightness of the Mahayana Buddhist approach: To seek the fullest possible personal freedom and self-development in order to help other beings achieve the same thing. I cannot be genuinely free and genuinely happy while others are trapped and miserable; helping others is an essential part of my own fulfillment. Helping others may not look like anything more than doing my library job, keeping this blog, and helping individuals as opportunity arises, but it is still part of the Great Work.

So I’m thinking of changing the name of this blog to reflect… whatever I’ve changed into.

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The Druid and the Witch

I’ve been re-reading one of my favorite books on witchcraft, The Clan of Tubal Cain by Ann Finnin. While it could have used a stronger, more thorough editing (sadly true not merely of many Pagan books but of many books nowadays), it is an interesting and important book, I think, for two reasons. First, it is a candid memoir of the development of a distinctive tradition of witchcraft in the United States, deriving from a British source other than Gerald Gardner; second, it is a useful manual of magical training aimed at producing a skilled individual who can work closely with others using a common body of symbolism and method. I highly recommend it to any reader who is interested in Craft history, magic, or both.

What strikes me most on this reading, however, is something very simple: There is such a thing as a Witch, and I am not one. That is, there is definitely a certain kind of personality, a certain flavor of magic and mysticism, a certain body of symbols and experiences, that are “witchy”. Whether people call themselves witches, Wiccans, Feri, Faery, or what have you, some people are witchy and some aren’t–and I am not.

It would be easy to fall into stereotypes here, but I don’t think one has to. The wanna-bes who traipse around looking like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, even when they’re just headed to the grocery store for a quart of milk, are the extreme of the type, the caricature, and like any caricature, they have only a superficial resemblance to the real thing, an exaggeration of the most obvious features. I would characterize the witchy temperament as the contrast of black and white: The blackness of a dark hooded cloak in the shadows, the white of a full moon at zenith in a clear sky. The witchy temperament is lunar, nocturnal, and a little bit lunatic, a little deranged by the moon, yet at the same time severely, even cruelly practical. The witch crushes herbs and then brews potions or makes soup with the same attention and the same magical awareness. The sweeping of the broom both cleans the room in a mundane and physical sense and readies it for the magical circle about to be cast.

Witchiness is beautiful, fascinating, even admirable. I have no doubt that well-trained, cohesive covens around the world are doing important magical work with this lunar and telluric power, the intertwining power of full moon light and earthy darkness. But I am not a witch. There is probably not a witchy bone in my body. Whatever witchiness truly is, I don’t have it.

I’m a druid.

When I imagine the Witch at work, I see a solitary woman or a group of men and women, gathered on a hilltop beneath that mesmerizing full moon. When I imagine the Druid, I see a man (yes, that’s my first thought) or a woman or a group of people gathered in the open beneath the sun.

Of course, it’s not that simple–Witch = Moon, Druid = Sun. But the images are there. Druid Revival groups have typically held their rituals “in the eye of the sun”, in daylight, visible to the public. ADF’s rites are open to the public on principle. While Druids usually gather in a circle, that circle is an open space, not a magically sealed sphere like the witches’ workspace. Solitary or small groups of Druids may, of course, meditate, do magic, practice music or write poetry in private, but the Druid rite is a public celebration, not a secret one.

The Druidic temperament, as I see it, is at once scholarly and romantic, a poet with a Ph.D., a scientist who sings folk music in coffeehouses. (Which I have done, by the way.) The Druid is more respectable than the Witch by mundane standards, but secretly more daft. The Doctor of Doctor Who is a druidic type; so is Rupert Giles of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which featured quite a few witchy types–Willow, Jenny Calendar, and Willow’s girlfriend Tara. Take any Anglican who’s gone round the bend a bit, and you’ll get a Druid (e.g., your humble blogger). The Druid is a singer, poet, rambler, nature enthusiast, birder, philosopher, absent-minded professor, librarian or archivist, the person who remembers, organizes, has bits of knowledge at hand.

Of course these words are themselves romantic, poetic ramblings, delivered when I should be taking a shower. To every Pagan his or her own path, the inner road to freedom and happiness, for the benefit of all.

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The druid’s grove

In the past couple of weeks I’ve gradually been moving my focus of practice at home from a shrine atop a marble-topped chest of drawers, with a deep windowsill behind it, to a smaller shrine on my desk, with a shallower windowsill behind it. Part of this process has been relocating our home computer so that the big desk can be *mine* again. I can write in my journal, light candles and incense, and gaze out the window at the courtyard in front of our house, with its large Japanese maple tree, even larger magnolia, and small tiered fountain.

So far the shrine consists mainly of my staff, hung with a grapevine wreath that I decorated in orange and brown ribbon; a candelabra for seven votive candles in seven colors, straight out of the Pyramid Catalog; a cauldron full of ash and sand for incense and a tea light; a blue-glazed cup for water; and a pretty good reproduction of the Apollo Belvedere draped with a strand of amber beads in honor of my patron, Grannos, who was often syncretized with Apollo. A piece of art paper in sage green with brown leaves covers the white-painted windowsill. A cheap cloth runner in brown and black embroidered with a few green and orange leaves hangs over the desk. (I bought the runner and some other goodies at a Michael’s craft store.)

What is a sacred place? What is a holy place? What is the difference between sacred and not-sacred, holy and not-holy? I’m not sure I know. Many books on pagan paths, Wiccan, Druid, and other, recommend making an altar or shrine or some kind of sacred place in the home as a first step in practice. That was something I didn’t have to be told; I’ve had a home shrine on and off since I was a teenager and began saying the Episcopal Daily Office. I sat on the bed looking toward a statue of Maria Kannon and read the Psalms and prayers. My husband has a shrine at his own desk; there are deity statues and candles on all three of our bedroom windows, and the mantel over our gas fireplace hosts gilded Buddha statues, traditional icons of Mary and Jesus, and a plaque of the Lares and the family Genius.

What is a holy place outdoors, a sacred place in nature? Again, I’m not sure I know. The weekend before last, my husband and I went walking, or maybe I should say hiking, in a local park. After taking light rail to the park, we circled the lake on a track that eventually wound away to the northwest and came out from under the trees by the side of a busy road. We ate lunch seated on a fallen log covered with filmy fungus and reluctantly decided our best bet was to retrace our steps–about a two-hour walk, having come that far. By the time I was halfway back to the light rail stop, my feet were throbbing in my inadequate shoes. By the time I boarded the train, everything ached from my waist down. We stopped on the way home to buy frozen lasagna, ibuprofen, and epsom salts. But it was worth it to see the lake, the trees, the jolly dogs pulling at their leashes, the diversity of people exploring the trails. Did I have any great spiritual or mystical experience? No. But it was unquestionably part of my druid practice.

I learned religion in a small stone building defined by the smell of incense and the nature of its acoustics. A church doesn’t feel like a church to me unless it smells of beeswax, incense, Murphy’s oil soap, unless it houses the reserved Eucharist, unless the ministers of the altar wear special clothes. It is consecrated, sacred, set apart. Before we passed from the church hall into the sacred space, we crossed ourselves with holy water, a purification, a reminder of baptism. If my ancestors built temples, they were mostly of wood; if they worshipped in sacred groves, those groves are long since cut down.

John Michael Greer once had this bit of wisdom concerning the druid grove: “A grove is a druid’s field of action.” That is, where your druidry happens, that is your grove. Where your druid practice is centered, that is your grove. Where you live, think, feel, and act as a druid, there is your grove. Which means that your neighborhood, your workplace, your city streets or county acres, the whole planet, the galaxy, the universe, are all, at least potentially, part of your grove.

Everything is sacred. Everything is holy. Find a small part of it to pay attention to as your sacred, your holy, your altar, your grove–your reminder that everything deserves that kind of attention.

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Getting down to basics

When people begin to talk about “the elements”, they begin to make tables. Even more than when one talks of the Three Realms, when one talks of the Elements, the urge to make lists and tables, to pile on correspondences, to organize things so that they can be memorized (and so that one can insist that students memorize them). A whole day can be spent in explaining, discussing, or arguing, as you please, whether the Element of Earth belongs to the North or the South, whether Air is the Element proper to the East or to the North, what your teacher said, what my teacher said, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. And that’s without even addressing the magical/pagan use of the word “element” vs. the scientific use.

Here again, the map is not the territory. The word “elements” also means “rudiments, basics, fundamentals”. What do you need when you get down to basics?

There are four things that a human being needs to stay alive: air, water, heat (in the form of clothing and shelter), and food. Without food, we starve; without water, death comes sooner than by starvation; without air, death is quick; without adequate heat and protection from weather, sooner or later, the individual will perish.

Air is our breath. Breath leads to speech, speech leads to song, and usually, though not inevitably, speech and song lead to writing, which leads to reading, and sometimes to printing.

Water is what we drink, what we weep, what we sweat. As urine it carries out waste; as blood, it runs through us as rivers through the land. The uterus cradling an embryo becomes a tiny ocean; when the time of birth comes, we call the vagina “the birth canal”.

Our bodies generate heat, need heat. With our sparse body hair, our naked feet, we need the pelts of other animals, the tough fibers of plants to protect us. We build fires, we dance to warm up, we couple under covers in the chill of winter. We need heat in order to live, light in order to see, fire in order to cook. The more complex our cultures become, the more fire, the more energy they need.

Food comes from animals who eat plants, from animals who eat other animals who eat plants, and from the plants themselves. Plants grow out of the earth, and they need sun, air, and water just as we do. Their out-breathing is our in-breathing; our in-breathing is their out-breathing. Without air, water, and light, we have no plants and therefore no food.

That is all the Elements are, all they have to be. Our basics. The things we cannot do without. The bedrock realities we share with other creatures that live and die on planet Earth. Air, water, fire, earth.

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Up, down, within, around

It is one of my peculiarities that I lose my way very easily indoors, but I never get lost outside. I am easily turned around by corridors and cubicles, but as a life-long pedestrian and rider of public transport, I always know where I am on the street. I know which way is north and south, east and west, where the city center lies, and which side of the street to catch the bus that will take me home.

Wicca has given the Neopagan movement an abiding awareness of the Four Quarters, and that fourfold symbolism is echoed in many traditions around the world. Native American cultures, Tibetan Buddhism, Hermetic traditions, and native Celtic ones, to name just a few, assign meanings to the East, the place of sunrise; the South, the place of sun’s height; the West, where the sun sets; and the North, where the sun never crosses the sky. Whether or not the concepts of the Elements come into it, the Quarters are significant; wherever you are, you have a basic awareness of Before and Behind, Right and Left, and every tradition has a default direction for facing the Sacred.

But if you’re standing up, facing East, say, what’s over your head? What’s under your feet? Life is three-dimensional. The sacred space has four quarters, but it also has three realms: Land, sky, and sea.

What’s over my head? The sky. Well, what’s in the sky? Light, for one thing: The sun (not that we’ve seen much of it lately, after two or three months of record rainfall), the moon, and the stars. Even here in the middle of a respectable-sized city, I can see and identify some of the major stars and constellations. I can observe that the sun and the moon don’t rise and set in the exact same place every day, but move back and forth on the horizon in a regular pattern. I can be wakened by the morning sun on a lazy Saturday or by the full moon shining into my bedroom in the middle of the night.

Clouds are in the sky, too, the visible signifiers of weather. Rain comes down, and snow, and various mixtures of precipitation. Clouds form, move, shift, dissipate, hide or reveal the sun, moon, and stars. Clouds reflect back the lights of the city at night and make me wish I could see more of the stars.

Birds are in the sky, and treetops. Of course a great deal of my awareness of nature is observation of the birds who live in my city or pass through it in fall and spring: rock doves, mourning doves, house sparrows and starlings, robins, gulls, cardinals, oven birds and juncos who winter in my vicinity because I feed them. But birds have the unique potential of belonging to all three realms, land, sea, and sky.

If sky is above, what is below? In Celtic tradition, that answer might be “the land”, but it might also be “the sea”, or the waters. Britain and Ireland bequeathed to Druidry the sense of the world we live in as an island, open to the sky, surrounded by the mysterious potential of the sea. But they also bequeathed the sense that water is a thing which wells up from under the earth, a gift of the Underworld. Dig a well, and you tap the chthonic powers. Find a spring, and you receive their gifts. Folk traditions still honor those powers with gifts, cloths tied on nearby trees, offerings to the waters, just as Bronze Age peoples offered jewellery, weapons, tools, and even chariots.

Sky above us, land below us and about us, waters below us, sea about us. Here in the city the land is paved over, concrete and asphalt, the underworld upflow only mimicked by fountains, but trees still grow in dirt, and in every sidewalk crack, moss, grasses, mushrooms, and other growths seek a foothold and flourish if they are not driven out. I would like to see our cities acknowledge that fecundity, work with it instead of fighting it, plant gardens for flowers and vegetables instead of laying out straight lines of pavement and lawn. We cannot be separated from the realities of the Three Realms, no matter how hard we try. The tallest buildings must sink deep foundations and take account of the stresses of wind in their structures. The need for drinking water and transportation leads cities like New Orleans to be built and rebuilt where wind, rain, and river converge. Traditional Japanese cities used more wood than stone because wooden buildings caused less damage during earthquakes and were more easily rebuilt afterward. Life is three-dimensional, and you don’t need 3-D glasses to know that, only an awareness of before and behind, right and left, up and down, within, around.

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