Answering Ali, sort of

Ali asks:

What are your experiences in groups (Pagan and otherwise)? What were some of their rewards, things that kept you coming back or really helped to shape your spiritual path? What were some things you wished were different, that you found distracting or frustrating or detrimental? What, in your experience and understanding, is the role a group should play in the spiritual life, and how does it relate to the idea of spiritual community, and to solitary practice?

I always need to be a member of a spiritual group. Without one, I feel like something is missing in my life. I think part of that is simply the loneliness of this path – most people I encounter in everyday life know nothing about my spirituality and would be deeply uncomfortable if they did. That’s OK, because I feel pretty much the same way right back. It’s not something that ought to be talked about around the coffee machine at work. But it is something that needs to be talked about, and not just with my closest friends and family. And I love group ritual – I love the dynamics and currents and eddies and flows of energy passing in and amongst and around people in ritual. I love being part of that flow. A really well-done group ritual is one of my favorite things in the world. I love it for reasons that are aesthetic as well as spiritual. The best way to get to really beautiful ritual in the Pagan context is to be part of an ongoing, long-running group that has become attuned to one another and knows and loves each other.

If that was all there was to it that would be good enough for me, as I think both of these factors – social and aesthetic – are important enough to keep me getting on the bus and going to these things. It’s the same thing that makes people join bird watching clubs  – there’s this thing we like to do, and we like to do it together. But of course there is also an overt spiritual dimension here that is lacking in bird watching. One does not go bird watching in order to get into deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of reality and the relationship of the Self to the All (though if you do go bird watching for those reasons, let me know, because that sounds fantastic.) And so a Pagan group also needs to help, in whatever way, to get to those deeper questions.

There are a couple of ways to go about this. Right now I’m thinking of it as “the Druid way” and “the Wiccan way” because I am thinking about two different groups lately, my Druid grove and the Wiccan coven I just found. (These may or may not be representative of how Druidry or Wicca in general operates – I have certainly seen other groups with those labels that don’t work the way I describe. But it’s my experience for now.)

My Druids have a sort of core set of rituals that get changed around, refreshed and refurbished each time with a rotating cast – there is, for instance, a Herald in the ritual, but there is no one person who is Herald, just whoever feels like doing Herald that time. Even though we work from a script there is a certain improvisational, seat-of-the-pants feel to it, as we never know exactly who will show up and what they will bring with them. There is no official leadership; while there are a few people who can be generally counted on to make things happen in a leaderly sort of way, none of them would be comfortable taking the title of Boss Druid, nor is that needed or wanted. We meet outdoors, regardless of weather, and the weather is always a supporting cast member in the ritual. The Imbolc when it was ten degrees out was very different from the Imbolc when it was forty degrees; the Lughnasadh when it hailed and poured… well, actually, we always get storms at Lughnasadh. But that becomes part of it, part of the ongoing and developing relationship we have with each other and with the space where we meet. We take what comes and we meet it, and each other, with joy. I love this. I love those people and that park and that weather and those rituals. We do not confront the Big Questions in any kind of a head-on way; our group discussions tend to lean towards the silly rather than the profound (though we can be profoundly silly at times); there is no teacher besides the forest and the weather and the interactions we have with each other. We come from different backgrounds and we come for different reasons, and I think any attempts to channel that into a structure meant to address the big questions would be a miserable failure. We’re not that sort of group. We each get it, in our own way, and we all get something valuable from the experience, but the wisdom comes in its own way as we open up to it, not because we go off hunting for it. We stand there and put ourselves where it can fall on our heads like rain.

My impression of the coven of which I am not a member is necessarily less expansive as I’ve only been to one ritual. It’s quite different, though. There is a hierarchy of leadership, there is an order and a tradition behind it, there is structure and sense to it. There is instructional time. The High Priestess is not just playing a role for the purposes of ritual; she is a priestess who has studied for years to be what she is. We meet indoors in a controlled environment. There are reading lists. There is homework, at least for the members. There is a process to go through before one is considered a member and work to accomplish to advance through degrees. By the end of the evening we got around to being silly, but at first the conversation was “what’s this Mabon thing all about?” And we talked about it and had ideas together and had a directed and focused discussion. It was nice. I find this very appealing. It’s like school! I love school!

I’m not saying that I think my Druid grove ought to do or be these things – that’s not what it is nor what it needs to be for any of us who show up and make it anew each time. But there seems to be room in my life for both things and a need for both things.

The biggest distractions in group work, I’ve found, have to do with dealing with dishonesty. By dishonesty I don’t mean lying about yourself or your accomplishments, although that can be part of it – I mean dealing with the person (or myself) who can’t or won’t engage honestly with the group because they are so caught up in what they think the group ought to be or what they perceive themselves to be doing there. There is a whole lot of this in Paganism. People come in with all this baggage around “witch” or “druid” or “Pagan” and look around for a place to put it. It turns into role-playing rather than honest spiritual exploration. It’s hard because there’s nothing wrong with being tuned in to a particular aesthetic, and sometimes that can help people get where they need to go – dressing up in certain ways, taking on a certain persona. But it can also be a way to hide from the self, to be dishonest both with yourself and others. There’s a mystique to this path that leads a lot of people astray – if you get caught up in the labels and the mystique and hey-cool-I’m-a-witch! part of the experience then there is a lot to miss, and frankly it can be a complete pain in the ass to deal with someone who is only there to shore up their funky self-image when everyone else just wants to get down to business.

I think the last part of the question, about the relationship of group work to your own solitary work, is one that can only be answered on an individual basis. I think that solitary work without a group can become unbalanced and ungrounded, and group work without a personal practice can become shallow playacting. This is something I have observed in myself and in other people I’ve worked with, but I don’t know if there’s anything universal about it. I think it’s probably a lot easier to create a worthwhile personal practice without a group than it is to  work with a  group in a worthwhile way without a personal daily practice. For myself, I need both and they have to feed each other.

 

still here

I will post again eventually -  just posting something so everyone knows I’m still alive and relatively well.

Instead of a post, I’m putting up a video of a song made entirely out of Awesome and Win:

 

my new crush

Last Saturday, I went to a Mabon celebration hosted by a local Wiccan coven. I went without any particular expectations and with nothing more mind than a way to get out of the house, meet some new people, and do something besides mope. I’d heard good things about this group and their tradition, so I gave it a shot.

Walking up to the venue, I felt the normal nervousness of being somewhere new – is this the right place? Am I on time? Will anyone be nice to me? Then I saw some people unpacking cars and gathering by the door and felt an instant rush of relief – oh, these are my people! Part of it is, I’m sure, the familiarity of types – big women in full skirts, men with gray ponytails, cute geeky boys, pale gothy girls – the usuals one always sees at these things – my people!  I immediately stopped feeling nervous or like an outsider. Everyone looked familiar, everyone looked like we were already friends (one person I actually had met before – we went to school together – but were never social with each other before and had to talk a bit before we figured out the connection.) More than one person apologized for not remembering my name and was surprised when I told them that we hadn’t actually met before.

They did good ritual. It was well-designed, well-run, and well-performed. That was nice and I appreciated it, but more important for me personally was the feeling I had of fitting in with the group. I enjoyed their company. I don’t usually enjoy company of any kind unless I already know the people – I force myself to meet new people because it’s the only way of getting past my initial discomfort with strangers, but I don’t actually like it. This didn’t feel like meeting new people at all. It felt like catching up. So I have a crush on a coven.

I’m wary about it, because I’m aware that it is only a crush and is based on just a few hours spent with them, but I’m looking forward to seeing them again. Membership is a long, drawn-out process, which is all to the good, but I’m actually contemplating joining them. I didn’t have that in mind this time but next time I’ll go in with that perspective and see how it feels.

I have no intention of giving up my Druidry or my Druid group – where this feels like a new crush, my druid grove is my safe steady boyfriend (who sadly I had to stand up for Alban Elued this year) and fortunately neither one conflicts with the other in any way. Not even in terms of scheduling – Witches on Saturdays, Druids on Sundays! Works just fine.

I’m glad to have something new to work on right now. I’m re-committing to my Ogham studies, which I let slide this past year, and coming up with a plan for the rest of my AODA degree work. I feel like I’ve been doing that work all along anyway, but I would like to bring some of the threads I’ve been following together in a way that fits with that. I have some time and space to get things done and I refuse to waste it on being depressed. Back to the book-blogging soon.

 

Book blogging: Kissing the Limitless, Chapter 2

My Free Will Astrology horoscope for the week:

These days, your gods can kick the butts of everyone else’s gods. Likewise, your lawyers and agents and sidekicks can most likely outwit, outdo, and out-wrestle everyone else’s. But it’s crucial to note that if you try to work alone, you will not be able to kick other people’s butts, let alone the butts of their gods, lawyers, agents, and sidekicks. The skills of your allies will be indispensable. The way I see it, your test in the coming days will be to overcome any tendency you might have to indulge in pathological levels of self-sufficiency as you cultivate a greater capacity to ask for and receive help.

Yup. I feel like energy is shifting, tides are turning, and I am very much looking forward to the New Moon tomorrow. May it bring needed changes and may my allies do what must be done.

To the book blogging – Chapter 2 of Kissing the Limitless is all about the life force, vital energy, what Thorn calls “life power.” Tapping into life power involves being able to still the center, what I’m accustomed to calling “grounding and centering.” Not wittering our power away in fruitless worrying or unproductive thought patterns; engaging in practices that build vitality rather than sapping it. All good, helpful things. Again there was really nothing new to me in this chapter but Thorn’s perspective on it made for a helpful reminder.  One insight that came to me out of reading this chapter is that most of our lives are made up of doing certain basic things: staying nourished and keeping a comfortable and safe home. Cooking and cleaning, really, and gathering resources so that we have things to cook and clean. That’s probably 90% of life. And we can look at 90% of life and think of it as something to get out of the way, or we can look at it as the substance of existence – when it comes to cultivating vitality, we have to draw it from everything we do. My job is, frankly, really dull and not very fulfilling to me, and I feel this is the biggest suck on my energy. I can’t do anything about that right now because I have other responsibilities to look after. I’m not sure how to fix that. But when I come home from work and have to face the dust bunnies and figure out what to eat for dinner, that’s not something that anyone ever gets to “fix.” There are no paths that I could take in life that will let me escape cooking and cleaning. So, in order to stay healthy and vital, cooking and cleaning have to be spiritual practices. (This is all my own meandering thoughts in response to the chapter, not something Thorn gets into here, just to be clear.) I get this and it’s something I strive for, but for some reason it never quite sank in until now that these activities are actually pretty fundamental and they HAVE to feed us back. Cleaning the house and making dinner are magical ceremonies, powerful rituals that transform us every single day. It’s all life, it all feeds life power.

 

Book blogging: Kissing the Limitless, Chapter 1

T. Thorn Coyle’s “Kissing the Limitless” comes highly recommended and I approach it with a mixture of big expectations and fear of disappointment. Big expectations because I really like Thorn’s other work that I’ve read, and fear because I really want a book right now that will smack me around a little and give some real help, and I don’t think it’s all that fair to put all that on one little book. Chapter One, “Discovering Possibility” was not at all disappointing because it gave me exactly that smack I needed.

There wasn’t anything in this first chapter that was new or revelatory or anything. It’s all stuff I already know, but it’s also exactly what I needed to hear. Chapter One is a challenge. The goal set out is understanding of the self, what Thorn calls “self-possession.” Thorn wants us to find and fully possess ourselves. This is helpful to me right now as until recently I thought of myself as completely self-possessed. My latest crisis has knocked that out from under me as I find myself flailing around unanchored, unsure of what I actually want, where I am headed, and who I really am. I knew it would be hard, but I had no idea that it was possible for me to be this bowled-over by anything anymore. If I had read this book even a few months ago, I probably wouldn’t have been nearly as pulled in by the first chapter because I would have thought that the work she was describing is not work I need to do. But suddenly I’m knocked off my pins, and here’s Thorn, reminding me that full possession of my soul is ongoing work.

I found the most useful part of this chapter, for me right now, is the last section on “Cultivating Practice.” I’ve really fallen away from my practice in the past few weeks. Again, there’s nothing that is new to me in what she says in this part, but I still needed to read it. One of the things that has occurred to me is that I have an unusual opportunity right now. My old life is gone, at least for a while, and I am so anchorless right now because I have lost my habits and the structure of my days. But this is an opportunity to create a new structure. I can wallow in shock and sorrow and numb myself with alcohol and ice cream and Torchwood DVD’s, or I can take some control and exercise some discipline and create new and better habits for myself. As always, my life is what I make it, and with discipline I really can do the Great Work. And right now I have some big opportunities to shake things up and make some needed changes.

 

So much custard from such a little cat!

This August, my life hit a patch of turbulence, started spewing black smoke, heeled over on its side for a bit, and then nosedived into a crash. It wasn’t an unexpected event – I’ve been watching it come for a while now and knew that it would hit right about then, but there’s a big difference between anticipating a catastrophe and living through it. My spiritual practices disappeared abruptly around then, for reasons I think quite similar to what Evn describes here – that post was actually very timely for me and helped a lot with perspective (and hm, maybe I ought to thank him for that in his comments). My Stupendous Magical Powers were busy holding me together in one piece and making sure that my cats got fed and I met my deadlines at work, with nothing left over for anything else. 

But there’s a point where “giving yourself time out to deal with something” turns into “melancholic self-indulgence” and I realized last night, as I settled in to an evening on the couch with a bowl of Ben and Jerry’s, a whiskey sour, a couple of cats, and a video game, that I was inching over that line. I was apathetically amused with myself for combining so many bad habits in one place and had this vision of myself transforming slowly into an enormously fat drunken cat lady with an MMO addiction. I started to become alarmed when I realized that this image didn’t actually bother me all that much. Anyone who has been through depression knows what I’m talking about, and I’ve been through enough depressive episodes to know the symptoms. I thought of my stash of Welbutrin in the cupboard and my sympathetic doctor who will recharge my prescription with a phone call, but while it’s never been anything but helpful to me, I don’t like the idea of being dependent on a pharmaceutical for my well-being. What I did instead was pencil “Exercise” into my morning to-do list. This morning, despite really not wanting to do so, I made myself go through a simple and gentle core workout on the floor.As I unrolled my mat on the living room floor, one of the cats produced a large hairball right next to my spot. So I stopped to clean that up, and even though I cleaned it up thoroughly I still felt kind of icky about lying down next to the place where the cat had just puked. I got out a stick of incense to freshen things up. The nearest incense burner is on the Hekate altar, and it’s just not possible for me to light incense on an altar without saying a prayer. So suddenly, without intending to at all, I was making an offering and saying a devotional prayer in the morning. (Thanks, kitty! Who would’ve thought a hairball could actually be good for something.…)

 Between the prayer and the exercise, I feel like I have a chance of maybe becoming myself again in a while as long as I remember to keep it up and don’t get sucked in by the apathy monster. That’s part of the reason I’m blogging about this – if it’s out here in public I’m less likely to fall off that particular wagon.

 I’m also putting the intention out there that I am going to start writing here regularly again. I don’t think posts of the “stuff I happen to be thinking about at the moment” kind will be all that helpful to me or anyone else right now, so I’ve decided to do some book-blogging. I want to read one of those wonderful densely-packed books on spiritual practice and go over what I’m reading and post something after each chapter. That gives me some motivation, gets me thinking about things beyond my immediate mundane problems, and gives me some structure so I don’t have to think of stuff to write about.

 The question is which book? I was thinking either “Faery Teachings,” by Orion Foxwood, which I’ve read a bazillion times but is so packed full of stuff that I get new things from it every time I read it, or “Kissing the Limitless,” by T. Thorn Coyle, which I have not read at all yet but intend to. The advantage of the first is that I already know what I’ll be getting and I know for sure that it will be good for me in lots of ways. The advantage of the second is that it’s new to me and comes highly recommended. Comment, please, and pick one – I will take the first suggestion I get and go with it.

 

Ancestor dream

I had a dream about a week ago that has been sticking with me.  I didn’t think about it very much when I woke up from it, especially since it utterly lacked plot resolution,  but it keeps coming back to mind.  I’m writing it out here to see if I can get more of a handle on whatever it’s trying to tell me.

The dream:

I was attending some sort of party/campout/cookout/gathering sort of affair – it was hosted by a vaguely Native tribal group of some sort but many of the attendees, myself included, were outsiders to the group. It was a casual sort of thing, with lots of socializing around the fire, eating, music, and storytelling. We were all camped out on tribal land. I got to flirting with an older member of the tribe – a man in his 70’s or so. It was all very lighthearted and fun and we hit it off so exceedingly well that we headed back to his tent. In my mind, there was nothing complicated about this – we were attracted to each other and we were off to do something about that, with no ideas and no real interest in thinking about what would happen when the party was over.

When we got to his tent, a group of men from the tribe – four or five of them, I guess – were blocking the way. They looked very disapproving and I knew they had seen us wander off from the fire and figured out what was up. They seemed like pillar-of-the-community types – successful men in their 40’s or so. They started speaking very harshly to my old man in their language. He looked deeply embarrassed – not because of shame about what we had been about to do, but embarrassed for me that I was being treated badly by these people. I couldn’t understand them but I knew that they were talking about me. I thought that they had learned something shameful about me and were warning the old man away. I asked him to tell me what they were saying, but he just looked embarrassed and looked away. So I turned to the man who had last spoken and demanded that he tell me what he had said. I was angry that they were talking about me like that and I yelled at them and demanded that they speak to me.

They explained that the old man was an important tribal elder, their greatest ceremonial leader. They didn’t want me with him because they didn’t want any child of his to be raised outside the tribe. It was very very important to them that his genetic lineage stayed within the tribe.

I explained angrily that it was really unlikely, considering my age, his age, and my reproductive history. I gave my age as 42 – I won’t be 42 for a few years yet but that number stuck out as important. (Maybe something interesting will happen that year…) I also pointed out that we were both adults and it was none of their business. I went on to tell them that if it happened, against all odds, I would be willing to raise the child as a member of the tribe.

They were adamant. It would be dire and terrible if the elder’s blood was mixed with mine and something important would be lost. The elder’s child had to be part of the tribe, but no one from a mixed lineage could be part of the tribe – therefore, there could be no such child. The old man agreed with them, but also agreed with me that he and I had no chance of making a baby together and thus it was none of their business what he and I did. I was angry enough that I kept arguing with them, even though the romantic impulse had pretty much passed.

The elder suggested I tell them about my own lineage. Suddenly we were all standing in front of a big table with a map of Europe and eastern North America on it. I started pointing at places. “I come from here” – the Loire valley - “and here” – somewhere along the border of Norway and Sweden – “and here” – somewhere in western England around Bristol – “and here” – New Brunswick (Canada, not New Jersey).  This part of the dream seemed really important. I experienced it like a camera zooming in on each spot on the map and hovering over the spot. There were no labels on the map; it was entirely topographic and done in pen-and-ink.

That was it. The last bit with map felt like I was the one being shown something.

So now I am smacking myself in the head after writing that, because it seems terribly obvious all of a sudden. The old man, the tribal elder, represents a particular teaching lineage. Something old, well-respected, and not mine. The flirtation and attraction to it was entirely superficial but I was ready to throw myself in to an involvement with it. The guardians of the lineage didn’t like this as they realized that there was the possibility of something permanent coming from my involvement, something that while not really bad in itself would be inappropriate and would cause trouble. I think that means that when encountering something like that and merely flirting with it in a superficial way, there is the danger of getting a long-term sort of result that isn’t actually good for anyone involved – an inappropriate hybridization. The map was telling me to look elsewhere – to my own lineage, not to someone else’s. I know a little about my French and Canadian ancestors but not so much about the British or Scandinavian end of things. All my ancestors were early immigrants, before 1750 or so, down every line I’ve researched, so I tend to think of myself as “New England mutt” and not of any particular heritage besides that.

I think the message that is trying to come out here is that I need to start looking at ancestor work. This is kind of funny because I’ve been doing lots of work with Orion Foxwood’s material lately and he’s all about the ancestors, but I keep skipping over those bits in the books because it doesn’t seem immediately interesting or relevant to my practice. He says that it’s of key importance to work with the ancestors and that Faery work and ancestor work can’t be done without each other. I don’t really understand that so I haven’t been paying much attention to it except to shelve it in the back of my head for later thinking. I don’t think I’m going to get the choice to wait much longer on that.

I find the idea of making an altar to my ancestors to be a little bit scary. I don’t know them all that well, they had different religious ideas than me (I think) and I have no reason to think they’d be enthused by this work. But of course this isn’t about getting the ancestors to like me – it’s to honor them.

 

kind of ranty on the topic of core shamanism

By not imitating any specific cultural tradition, but rather by training in underlying cross-cultural principles, core shamanism is especially suited for utilization by Westerners who desire a relatively culture-free system that they can adopt and integrate into their contemporary lives. – Michael Harner

I read Michael Harner’s “Way of the Shaman” a long time ago. Long enough ago that there are people I know of who read this blog who weren’t born yet when I first read it. I liked it at the time. I thought it was neat. I instantly identified with the idea that taking journeys into “non-ordinary reality,” to use Harner’s term, was a cross-cultural universal human practice. It was nice to get a label for something I pretty much did anyway. The details of his practice – drumming and power animals and soul retrieval and all that – didn’t do so much for me and didn’t have a whole lot to do with anything I was up to, but I liked the idea of a cultureless practice. It seemed like a handy way to have the experiences without having to engage with the various inaccessible ethnic groups associated with them. As I said, this was a long time ago and I was very young. Young enough that I could uncritically accept the idea of a cultureless anything. After reading the book and playing around with the techniques, I let it drop and moved on to more interesting things.

Lately I’ve been looking around at American shamanic practitioners in order to try to learn more about experiences I’ve been having, and of course any such research leads to all kinds of CS encounters. I am seeing now the utter absurdity of it.

Here’s the absurd: the idea that it is “culture-free.” Harner has distilled practices from various parts of the world and, the claim is, stripped them down to their vital essence, decontextualized them from their cultural roots, and made something universal that anyone from any background can work with. More than that, CS practitioners are encouraged to use this as a framework to drape whatever embellishments they like back on to the practice – adding some knotwork to make “Celtic shamanism” or pentacles for “Shamanic witchcraft” and such. And so there are all these folks out there doing this practice with a cosmetic embellishment of whatever they’ve chosen to paint it with – but because it comes from Harner, who claims that his cultureless practices are also ancient and universal, you get people saying that they are actually recreating the shamanic practices of their ancestors by slapping some symbols on it.

This is such a very modern American thing to do that all I can do is laugh. It is so very not “culture-free” – it is so typical to our culture that it’s almost a parody. “Core shamanism” is a practice tailor-made for American consumerist society. Faux-antique, customizable to individual tastes, safety-tested, and commodified.

This probably sounds kind of brutal and maybe that’s not fair. I don’t mean to judge the individual practitioners – I am a big fan of “whatever works” and this seems to work, for some value of that word, for a lot of people. If CS is your thing, this isn’t meant to run down your practice. I am also sure that this is not an original criticism – it’s too obvious for that.

An even bigger issue for me, though, is that CS is pitched as being “safe.” It’s fun! It’s safe! It’s easy! You’ll learn about yourself and it won’t hurt a bit! Anyone can do it! I do not think I want a safe spiritual practice. I don’t think it should be comfortable or safe or easy. I also think it has to be contextualized – there is no culture-free spirit world. I think such a concept is attractive as it implies a sort of Edenic union of consciousness – a primal state where we were all one people. It’s one of the hidden tasks of anthropology to uncover that proto-human existence, but I don’t think it exists. Maybe once it did, but it’s long gone. The urge to simplify, to cut away what is seen as extraneous or accreted to reach some simple essence is essentially destructive – the accretions are part of the whole.

Working with the Underworld, the faeries, the plant spirits, the gods, the guides – this is my practice and it’s complicated. It’s a web of relationships and relationships, as any adult knows, are really hard. They aren’t always safe or easy or fun. I don’t understand large parts of it, and that’s OK. There is certainly a cultural and ancestral context there, I don’t always understand what it is, and that’s OK too.  It’s OK that it’s difficult and complex and that sometimes it hurts. It’s OK that I don’t get to build it myself and others were here before me. And it’s OK that they left something of themselves behind.

 

The post about the tattoo part 4: still figuring it out

I spent last weekend with Maebius and his family at Four Quarters Farm’s “Drum and Splash” gathering. Like last year, it was lots of fun, though attending with the Maebiuses and without Mr. Nettle made it a different kind of fun. I had some experiences this year that were more intense than anything that happened there last year. Last year, I just wanted to have a good time what with the drums and the splashing and the dancing and all. This year, I needed something more, and am glad to say that I got it, mostly by spending as much time as I could in the sweat lodge. I needed that even more than I knew I did and I’m still figuring out the transformations that happened there.

I thought that what I was getting in my tattoo was a symbol of something. I wasn’t sure what it was a symbol of, or why it was important that I get that particular symbol – if I had to give a superficial explanation, which I have to a few people, it’s that it’s symbolic of my devotion and commitment to the figure that gets called the “Horned God” – Cernunnos or Herne or what have you – though none of those names have attached to the being that I experience, reading about others’ experiences with those figures leaves me feeling like we’re talking about someone who is at least in the same family. So to make it easy, I say to other pagans, yeah, it represents Herne, because no one ever seems to know who Gwyn is but they seem to get the right idea from me calling him Herne. Yup, that’s my tattoo of Herne and yeah, it’s cool and all that.

Except that’s not really true except on a really superficial level. It certainly does represent my commitment to that being – having a god tell you to get permanently marked because he says so, and then doing it is a commitment, for sure – but that’s not really the what or the why of it. I might also mention my work with Deer, and people who are familiar with that sort of thing seem to know what I’m talking about, but that’s not really it, either.

It’s not a symbol at all. It’s a tool. I’m still learning how to use it – I’m slowly being taught how to use it, actually – but, to my complete surprise, it’s a tool for use in healing work.

The term “healing work” makes my hackles rise a little bit because it sounds so horribly New Age. I associate “healing” in that sense with people who are trying to figure out how to make money off of other people’s pain. I associate it with cynical charlatans and faith-healers and those who would exploit the pain of others. I don’t have any particularly good thoughts around the entire concept of “spiritual healing” – it seems as bad to me as “original sin” – the concept that we are all broken and need to be fixed. With that comes the assumption that we will never actually be healed and must always rely on someone else to absolve – er, heal – us. I don’t accept that view. We all go through trauma as part of our human existence, and that becomes part of us and shapes us into who we are, makes us into fully complex adult humans  – to much of what I read and hear about spiritual healing wants to deny that, to make all of life into some kind of wonderful peak experience. Since that isn’t possible, it’s a particularly pernicious New Age paradigm that makes everyone into perpetual seekers, always looking for the cure for reality.

I don’t deny that there are people who need help dealing with various traumas of the physical, emotional or spiritual kind – of course there are. I have never seen myself as someone who wanted to offer that kind of help. My herbalism studies are frankly much more motivated by my love for the plants than my love for the people that they can help. I like it that I know what plants to turn to when I need some support and I’m glad to share that information with anyone who asks, but I surely don’t think of that as “healing.” It’s the plants that are doing the healing; my only role as an herbalist is to let people know who their friends are in the plant world.

It’s not that I don’t care about people (in the general as well as the specific sense) and wish to help them; I just don’t see that as my role. It feels uncomfortably manipulative. I appreciate the sincere and qualified professionals who help those are suffering, but I’m also wary of them and it takes a while for me to come to trust a new doctor or therapist or acupuncturist or whoever – as soon as I feel like I’m being sold something, I stop going back.

So why am I suddenly being called to this? I’m not even sure what “this” is. I dipped my toe into it earlier this year and I’m being pulled to wade in deeper. Ever since I got tattooed, every time I sit down to do my spiritual practices, Deer shows up and insists that I do healing work first. This usual involves something as simple as visualizing someone that I know is in need of help and sending him or her some love. Sometimes it gets much more involved than that, but it’s always Deer leading the way and sometimes I have no idea who it is we’re working on. Afterwards, I feel very refreshed and clear-headed and slightly euphoric and can go on to do my normal practices. If I don’t follow the lead and do the work, I tend to get headachey and grouchy.

I don’t know if this is having any effect on the subjects of my attention. I haven’t told anyone who has been worked on that I have done anything and I haven’t heard back any reports of miraculous bunion healing or anything like that. I don’t even know that I am really “doing” anything at all. I don’t even know if that’s the point of this.  Right now, since I’m not sure what I’m doing or where this is going, I feel kind of weird about drawing other people into my practice – as I said, that feels a little manipulative – but I guess it’s not that different from praying for someone who is having a hard time. It’s mostly just about love anyway, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with loving someone in an abstract and nonpersonal way without their permission.

So I think my tattoo is a tool and imparts something to my being that wasn’t there before – it’s more than a symbol and more than a decorative embellishment but almost like an extra sense – not sure that is the right word, but I’m not sure there is a right word for what I’m trying to say.

One insight I brought home from Drum and Splash is that I NEED a (human) teacher for this work. I have relied up to this point on information gleaned from books and the leadings of my guides and guides and the faeries, but I know I need some human help in figuring out where to go from here. I am at a loss as to where to turn for that help, though. I’m hoping that my path will lead me to bump into the right person at the right time but I know it doesn’t always work that way. I don’t know what else to do, though.

 

Another good question from Meme

Meme asked me,

“I’m curious Nettle. When I hear the word “fairy” I think of wee folk, the Summer and Winter courts, The Sidhe, Queen Titania, and Puck. I have a feeling that when you say fairy you mean what I would call “anima”, a spirit of a local or object.Is that correct? Do you ever meet people who in their workings are trying to interface with the other type?”

RJ Stewart says faeries are “living beings which are one step, one change of awareness, beyond humanity They are also those which out of the wide range of spiritual beings described in tradition, magic, religion or folklore, are most close to humanity.” (The Living World of Faery, 1995) He thinks that the cute winged faeries are merely products of Victorian sentimentality that has been laid over the older tradition and are not “real faeries.” (I am not sure I agree with that.) The various beings you name are all part of Faerie but not all of it. Robert Kirk said that fairies were “of a middle nature betwixt man and Angel…of intelligence Studious Spirits and light changeable bodies….best seen in twilight.” (Secret Commonwealth, 1692) Orion Foxwood calls them a “co-existing order of pre-human intelligent beings [existing] very close to human awareness but not dependent on it for their existence.” (The Faery Teachings, 2003)

A. E. Evans-Wentz, an anthropologist, wrote:

And there seems never to have been an uncivilized tribe, a race, or nation of civilized men who have not had some form of belief in an unseen world, peopled by unseen beings. In religions, mythologies, and the Fairy-Faith, too, we behold the attempts which have been made by different peoples in different ages to explain in terms of human experience this unseen world, its inhabitants, its laws, and man’s relation to it. The Ancients called its inhabitants gods, genii, daemons, and shades; Christianity knows them as angels, saints, demons, and souls of the dead; to tin-civilized tribes they are gods, demons, and spirits of ancestors; and the Celts think of them as gods, and as fairies of many kinds.” (The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, 1902)

I’m quoting all sorts of other people because I want to be clear that what I’m saying is not based solely on my visionary experiences but also on a long tradition of such experiences. Faeries are those inhabitants of the unseen world that exist in a liminal place between the material world and the otherworld – they have a foot in both, which is why they can sometimes be seen by waking eyes. Sometimes they are connected to a place – my friend Otter “belongs” to this stretch of the banks of Mill Creek – never mind that Mill Creek was paved over and made to run through the sewers, I still live on the banks of Mill Creek even though I can’t see it and it runs far under the street. And so Otter is here too, because this is where he lives. I have seen all sorts of “genii loci” connected to the mountains and forests of my home. I do not think that they are the animated spirits of a place so much as beings who are strongly at home in that place, if you know what I mean. RJ Stewart (I think? I can’t find the reference right now) makes an interesting observation that when he does workshops in the US, the faery contacts made by people there look different from the ones made by people in the UK – the UK contacts tend to be more humanoid and often are dressed in fanciful clothing and armor, while in the US, they tend to be shaggier and generally wilder in appearance. I can say from my own experience that I’ve never seen a faery with clothes on – generally they are hairy or clad in bark or hides, (or made of bark or hides or hair – it’s hard to tell and seems impolite to ask) and I’ve never done faery work anywhere except the northeastern US, so I don’t know what they look like elsewhere. It’s one of the reasons I REALLY want to go on a pilgrimage to sacred sites in the UK. I think that these beings are everywhere and cultural traditions all over the world describe them, but they look different in different places (I’m thinking of Totoro all of a sudden… if I met Totoro, I’d call him a faery because he looks and acts like one, but I’m sure the Japanese have their own word for beings like that. In fact, the thing I love the most about Miyazaki is that his stories are always faery-stories) I am sure that the beings described in some Native American stories are the same beings.

I also think that faeries love to upset expectations and any attempts to define them or pin them down with words will result in me having my assumptions overthrown at some point. This is ok but if I suddenly come back and say, “no, wait, I was wrong, faeries are really this other thing!” that would be… well, not unexpected. And if anyone else has another perspective to contribute to this, I’d love to see it in the comments.

So – to answer your question – yes, faeries are Puck and Sidhe and Titania and all that, sometimes, and sometimes they’re local spirits connected to a place, and sometimes they’re connected to specific people or families, and sometimes they are something completely different – the only consistent characteristic is that they are the ones who are of the Otherworld but sit very close to our awareness – midway between man and the angels, as Kirk would have it.