A Druid Thurible

The value of the Old Craft today is that in it lie the seeds of the Old Mystery Tradition. Through this the witch may perceive the beginnings of that ultimate in wisdom, knowledge of themselves and their motives. The genuine Mysteries are open to all, because anyone having experience enough can understand that basic message.         Robert Cochrane

For every action we make in our lives, we are so often unaware of the emotional energy that fuels that action. I think Robert Cochrane is absolutely right about the Craft (for me this includes Druidry too) potentially equipping us to move towards a greater self-awareness.

It is hard being honest with ourselves, not merely because we might be in denial about our own self-destructive or self-sabotaging behaviour but because we live within the landscape of our being and not outside it. We are there at ground level, staring out over a limited view, so much of the territory beyond our field of vision. Knowledge of oneself is an ongoing process of discovery – it’s a continual unfolding of who we have been, are, and are to become, and yet, so often the picture we have of ourselves is so ridiculously incomplete. How often is it said that others see more clearly our potential and our flaws? We are in a constant process of drawing up and redrawing maps, our spiritual practices playing a great part in our being able to successfully negotiate the unfamiliar ground of ourselves, providing useful signposts when we feel lost. However, the complexity of the many living experiences – the input, or lack of, which brings any of us to any point in our lives – makes the path to self-understanding and self-knowledge a tricky one. Living sometimes feels frustratingly hard, difficult to judge and impossible to grasp.

This year has given me the (frankly unwanted) opportunity to ponder what negotiating oneself is like if we suddenly find that the signposts are not making sense. I still feel that my path is a Pagan one and I believe in the potential that Cochrane speaks of but struggling with my health throughout most of this year has brought the unexpected arrival of an annoying existential angst that, despite my best efforts, I can’t seem to shift. My health issues continue to throw up challenges and I can’t quite get my head around the fact that, just at the point I could do with the comfort of my spiritual practices, the connection I feel to them appears to be hanging on by the weakest of threads.

Reaching for that self-knowledge seems crucial right now but I discover the more I reach, the further away it becomes and so, I figure – like Alice trying to find her way around the illogical Wonderland she has unwittingly fallen into – logic will not work; the landscape I now find myself in has a different set of rules. Trying to learn them feels a little humiliating, a bit like a maths puzzle whereby I am forced to use skills that do not play to my strengths.

The Mysteries that Cochrane writes about, their gifts to us, cannot be forced or thought into being. They come about by an organic process that is actually a bit of a Mystery in itself, one that often we can only understand in retrospect.

And so, amongst the ongoing confusion, I am left to ponder two quotes by Stephen R. Covey:

Quality of life depends on what happens in the space between stimulus and response.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Laurie has recently bought a very interesting book entitled The Mindful Way Through Depression by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and Jon Kabat –Zinn. I have just started reading and it looks extremely helpful with regard the questions that have been bothering me of late and that I have been writing about here: how do we stay mindful and present when we are in the midst of suffering or when we are ill or depressed?  The book appears to mix techniques from cognitive therapy and Eastern philosophy. Will let you know!

My Tobacco Life

 Shredded.

A fine blend of mistakes and other choice regrets

Rolled into a cigarette. Paper-thin shrouds:

These twenty ritual burnings a day, my funeral pyres

For the clothes of the dead.

I inhale deeply all that should be forgotten.

It lingers in airless lungs like the smell in empty wardrobes,

Long after the rake has ploughed the ashes for that singed

Scrap of dress, that curling corner of photo.

My face is a blue balloon, waiting for the great

Exhale. Life has seized into a rigor of memory,

Caught between the embrace

And the release, the breathing in

And out of relentless living.

There are some things that can not be burnt away,

They hang like smoke and showering ash.

Laurie and I have recently been talking about who our best and worst teachers at school were. The best would have been those who inspired us, helped us to utterly engage with the subject and believe in our own abilities; the worst would be those that definitely didn’t.

My worst: second year senior school math teacher, Mrs Brady. We were all terrified of her; she was fierce and appeared to truly hate children, although now I suspect that she felt a little threatened by them and so over compensated with a steeliness that only just kept her anger at simmering point. If pushed in the smallest of ways, that anger surfaced remarkably quickly. I now realise that she was incredibly young and at the time heavily pregnant, so I feel a greater sympathy and understanding than I ever could then. She wore her own, homemade, rather eccentric looking smock suits, which in themselves were quite hippyish. Mrs Brady’s teaching persona, however, was as far away from peace and love as one could possibly get! Think Mrs Thatcher crossed with an angry bear and you get somewhere close!

Basically, I was too afraid to learn, certainly too scared to ask questions. She once hit a boy across the head for moving a test paper; he cried and we all sat in stunned silence. At a parent’s evening she told my mother that I was below average intelligence. No crueller a thing could have been said to me because being a child of such low confidence, I sadly didn’t have the belief in myself to inwardly challenge her judgement. I guessed she knew best and went around feeling below average for the rest of my schooling life. For this alone, she gets my vote as my worst teacher.

My very best, I had to wait a few more years for. The maelstrom that was my early teenage years resulted in my leaving school with minimal qualifications. I went back to college as a mature student in my late twenties to work through a couple of A levels. I had definitely not planned on taking English Lit (I had been refused entry to the exam at secondary school – I would certainly have failed). It was Laurie who persisted that I enrol- it was a decision that was to change the direction of my life.

My English Literature/Language A level teacher was the truly inspiring George Appleby. He was passionate about the subject and his love of and engagement with it was completely infectious. He had a deep interest in the spiritual and psychological which made our explorations of the set works for the course one of depth and joy. He recognised in me an ability to write. It was George that encouraged me to apply to University, an ambition I could never have aspired to, left to my own devices. It was also George who sat with me when I filled in the forms, patiently and persistently fending off my fears and excuses.

George changed my life. He dropped a stone in a pool whose ripples continue to radiate out, touching me and initiating changes still, situations that could never have been if fate or chance had not brought George into my life. Because of George, others have entered my life who have been equally inspiring. In this way life unfolds; the bonds we share become the most extraordinary, ever-expanding web of connection.

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