It has been the most glorious week of sunshine, unseasonably warm days and nights, and early spring awakenings. . . I left the windows open last night for the first time this year and woke to the sound of birds bickering in the branches outside my window. I’m contemplating planting seeds and turning the dirt to prepare for the season to come. It will start this year with pulling the pots from the cold frame and watering everything to see what will spring up in the next few days of this unusual March heat.
But, I’m not writing today because it is time to garden. . . In light of getting the first full draft of my academic monograph completed yesterday, I decided to take a day or two off and away from the work of that project. But, my habit of writing every day–and I do mean everyday, it’s one of my central practices, like walking, mediation, and yoga–will not be sated if I just sit and watch the sweet little birds flit about the feeder and revel in the sweetness of an unexpectedly warm day. Words must find the page, as usual.
So, I thought I’d put down some things that have come to matter to me.
I’ve been thinking an awful lot about who I am as a “Druid” and how different my views are from the views of others. For years, and now on two coasts, I’ve skirted embracing a membership in the greater “Pagan” community. There’ve been a number of reasons for this. I’m not a polytheist, for one. And, my beliefs about “ritual” are very different than those that circulate in the communities of Witches, Wiccans, High Ritualists, etc that make up the Pagan communities that have welcomed me.
On the one hand, I’ve been hesitant to embrace the community of Pagans as my home, because I have always felt that I don’t quite comfortably fit. . . Anyone who knows me well also knows that I am an academic and a skeptic; I embrace scholarship (indeed, I make my living by being a scholar) and try to root my understanding of the cultures and pathways I admire in a logocentric understanding of the past. (Though I am not a reconstructionist.) I believe in the importance of experience and the inner voice that guides each of us, I believe in the power of poetry and the paratheatrical, but I also believe fiercely that we need to keep ourselves from making shit up and passing it off as historical, authentic, or a secret revealed.
And, I do recognize that my discomfit around fitting in is often largely a choice. Because I have training as a cultural critic and theorist, I think it is crucial that we challenge the labels we apply to ourselves and others (especially when we are hoping to form alternative communities). We need to be contesting and challenging our language norms, critically examining our ideals of ritual practice and our notions of what “magic” might be. We need to be calling out how we intentionally and accidentally re-enact the hierarchies that we otherwise say we hope to dismantle. I largely see our pagan communities recreating the heteronormativity, racial privileges, and capitalist structures of the broader society–this disquiets me. Unrecognized forms of cultural appropriation (from our ancestral societies and indigenous peoples who are still living and breathing) is often at the center of much of what we do. These relations are the products of our engagement with global capital–following the great forgetting, “primitive cultures” are viewed through the conflicting lenses of nobility and savagery. Their rites are often cast as doorways to deep secrets if only we can access them.
And, we all too quickly forget that we have access, for instance, to OBOD’s teaching or the AODA or ADF or RDF website or JMG’s latest book–or, or, or–because of a vast system of inequalities and exploitive processes that span the planet. (I am able to join OBOD b/c I have the means, the privilege available to me through surplus or “spending monies.” I can pay for my membership via online international banking, brokered and protected through the power of nation states; the creation of paper (trees) and plastic (pollution) and electricity (no “power” w/o pollution, right?) is necessary to transfer knowledge between locations; the workplace of the international mail system delivers the teachings to my door so that I may consume the lessons in the free time afforded me as a member of the middle class. This is by no means the quaint mouth-to-ear method so enshrined in Pagan-lore.) So frequently, I just think we are all largely full of shit–we talk a good game about authentic community and healing and being led by “the Gods” to something better or more powerful, when really we’ve just swapped out the window dressing and called it good. Please note, that I indict myself here as much as I might anyone else.
But, even if it is unshakably mine, this is an admittedly fatalistic world view. Is it any wonder that I’m so often lonely and weary? (The fatalism of Marxism and Postcolonial critique feel so necessary, but also often leave me feeling hopeless, powerless, and wrung out.) And, despite the surface differences, I have come to find something so comforting in the fellowship of Pagan communities. These groups still largely feel the most like home.
So, as I’ve stuck with it now for a few years, not running so quickly from the opportunity to belong somewhere, I also have come to realize. . . what for me is the crux of why I DO identify with these groups and the broader pagan community.
If you’ve hung out with me or heard me speak about why I chose this path, you’ve likely heard me say that I am an animist. I believe that all things are imbued with a spiritual energy. What we call Gods or Goddesses or even elementals or spirits are frequencies that we can tune into. We give these energies faces and personalities because it allows us to encounter parts of ourselves that feel most necessary. This is why I don’t identify as a polytheist. I don’t believe the Gods act outside of us and our understandings of them. It’s very pretty to think so, of course, but ultimately I believe that the stage of existence shows itself to us only in ways that we are capable of reading. . .
In my mind, all of our understandings are social constructions. And largely these constructions confirm what we already comfortably believe. So, if you believe, for instance, in light or dark forms of practice, or evil. . . this thinking benefits some ideal you hold of the self or others.
Which brings me to the transrational. While I don’t believe in God forms or the binaries that often organize them and the natural world in our own images, I do believe in the transrational. I do ritual because I believe in the transrational. I talk with others who hold quite different beliefs than I do because I believe in the transrational. It’s this belief that holds it all together for me. Everything is imbued with spirit, but not everything can be known or named or understood. (I also want to note that the transrational is not magic. . . it functions a bit more like the collective unconscious–as a web of radical relationality that reveals to us the limits of human perception and ontology.) We sense time as linear simply because our meat suits are wired that way. We observe the day as light and night as dark because our sensory organs are designed in such a way–indeed, our entire approach to being is rooted in sensibilities that affirm this.
The transrational, however, indicates that there are natural forces that supercede our ability to perceive them. There are experiences that may exist outside of the familiar and most comfortable. And, paradoxically, through attention to the limits and abilities of our senses (the five we name as the source of the empirical-touch, taste, sight, hear, smell–and the many that other moments of consciousness we have named for millennia–intellect, emotion, desire, will, dreams, intuition, imagination) we can encounter break downs in our rational expectations of the world, our selves, and others.
I also believe that I am part of a web of existence–the expanse of the universe, the tiniest atoms, the oceans, the dirt of my garden, the butterfly in the Amazon Rainforest, yes, everything is interconnected. All things and all beings are my teachers, if I will quiet my mind to see if they have a message or lesson for me. And, I have a responsibility to the ecosystems that sustain me and others, even those I may not see or interact with. Because ultimately, the planet is a closed ecosystem. There is no safe place to “stash” our pollutants–it will always seep into someone’s ground water, which will eventually be my ground water. This sense of being in it together makes it especially important that I work for social equality, as well. All humans must have equal voice to stand up to anyone who would poison or exploit US. All beings must be granted basic dignity and basic security so that we can listen to and learn from each other.
In short, it is all sacred. Every breath, every movement, every particle of clay.
And here’s one of my other differences, too. I hear people in the Pagan community speaking of magic as if it is something special. We talk of “making” magic or “casting” circles. We must call up magic, cast spells, and create sacred spaces. But, for me, human beings are already an amazing form of deep magic. I’m thinking of a meme that I have seen circulate on FB, that argues “You are a ghost driving a meat covered skeleton made of stardust riding a rock floating through space.” Human consciousness, indeed ALL life, is a freaking amazing miracle of magic. So, I do not believe that we go to, make, or find magic–I believe that magic is instead a constant presence in our lives.
We are the deep magic.
Stay with me. Our cells are the living embodiment of the sacred circle. We are the integration of the elements–earth, water, air, fire. All are working in perfect harmony to manifest life and. . . amazingly, consciousness, self-awareness, the ability to know the multiverse inside ourselves, and occasionally authentically connect with others.
So, when I speak of finding magic or of making magic, we are really just–for me–talking about recognizing this actuality. We slow down, connect to breath, remember the elements as the foundational building blocks of all life, and remember the openings that are already there for the Nwyfre to flow.
It’s pretty simple, really but no less profound for this recognition. There are no secrets; there are only mysteries.
Random musings on a passing day. It’s lunch time and I’m ready to garden.
Tree of Many Feathers: 