To trust in your own art

My friend Raena Shirali was in town this past week, and it was such a joy to spend time together. I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen each other since she graduated with her MFA in 2015, and we haven’t been particularly good about keeping in touch, but when we met up for lunch we talked for an hour and a half, picking up the thread as if we’d just set it down last week. It’s strange to need to catch someone up on the better part of a fairly tumultuous decade of your life, but not to feel awkward about it, and instead to just laugh and joke like the old friends you are.

It was never about us

If you’re reading this post, there’s very good odds that you’re familiar already with Rabbi David Wolpe’s editorial, “The Return of the Pagans,” in The Atlantic this week (also available, mirrored without restriction, via MSN). If you’ve somehow ended up here with that foreknowledge, I invite you to read the piece; it’s about 2000 words, certainly longish but tackleable. I’ll get into some specifics, but Jason Mankey’s response title sums it up well: “The Return of the Pagan Scapegoats.” Pagan values are destroying society, unlike monotheism, which supports society; nothing to see here, let’s have dinner.

And I assure you, the last thing I want to do right now is write yet another blasted reaction/response/rebuttal to the piece: I started typing this at 12:15am, and I’m supposed to drive 4 hours tomorrow morning for a lunch appointment. But sometimes the writing bug bites hard, as it did tonight. If you just want the tired and slightly aggravated sound bite at the center of the writing bug it’s this: my fellow pagans, this is not about you.

A Gaelic (Re)Creation of the Cosmos

It’s been a long time since the last post — so long that I’ve gotten a new phone and new laptop, and had to stop and think for a minute to remember how to even log in here — but I wanted to share a piece of writing I’m proud of. At this past Wellspring Festival, I competed in the competition for the Bardic Chair, for which the core components are the performance of a story, a poem, and a song. I have plenty of songs and poems in my files, but few stories; I couldn’t pull something from the archives. Instead, I sat down and wrote a Gaelic creation myth, drawing on various bits of lore and my ever-deepening relationships with Manannán mac Lir and with the Cailleach Bheur.

Cleaning for Brigando

Last weekend, Three Cranes Grove celebrated our Anagantios druid moon, the Stay-at-Home Moon. For this moon, we do exactly that: instead of convening together for ritual, we each stay at our homes and the priests go on their peregrinations, bringing the fire of Brigando to bless each home. There are a number of rituals and customs that we have around the occasion. Shawneen keeps a Kildare flame at his home, and the priests carry its flame in a candle lantern lit afresh from that flame in the early morning. Shawn also each year selects a new batik cloth to lay out as a brat Brìghde on Imbolc Eve, and cuts it into strips that the priests deliver along with our own flame-lit chime candle, to bring the goddess into our home. As for we grove members? We clean.

Preparing the ground of hope

I’ve spent much of the day musing on hope, and on perseverance — what it means to continue on in the face of adversity, in the face of hurt and pain. As so often happens for me, multiple seemingly-disconnected items came in over the transom throughout the day, each piquing a different part of my brain, each cross-pollinating to make me consider the question from a new angle, or with a new exigency.

Enough for now

I hit a wall last night. We’re just a bit past the ten-month mark in the pandemic, and I have been weathering the storm reasonably well — sure, there have been up-moments and down-moments, but overall I’ve been riding the wave, keeping my chin up, whatever metaphor you like.

Over the past week or so, though, it’s all started to weigh on me much more than usual. A couple days ago, in a meeting that was about my professional future, I told the friend and colleague I was meeting with that at the moment all I wanted to do was crawl into the woods and be a hermit, leave every last thing behind. I’ve been keeping busy since March with work, with making music, with organizing the work of Three Cranes Grove, with trying to be a strong pillar for everyone I come into contact with. It’s what I do. But eventually the steam runs out; the wave crests; the pillar fractures from repeated blows.

Rehearsals with my beloved chorus start again on Sunday, and I dread them.

Some workdays I write three emails and otherwise I scroll Facebook and play games on my phone, and I call it good enough.

My altar goes untended, except when scheduled ritual comes around and duty calls.

The festival of Imbolc — one of my favorites, a warm, glowing jewel in the heart of winter — is in a week, and I don’t really care.

I’ve known more people in the past month who’ve been sick with COVID, who have died of COVID, than in the nine months before.

And yet also, I’m so exhausted from worrying about the virus, so tired of taking precautions and weighing risk, that I neither feel like I have any good instincts anymore, nor care to.

I finally broke down last night and just sobbed, barely able to get a word out. I wish I could say that I immediately felt better, that there was a release and a lightness. I did feel better, but it wasn’t the lightness of healing; it was the lancing of a boil, the quick gush of pain spilling out. The only lightness I felt was emptiness.

But I went to bed, and I slept well for once. I woke in the pre-dawn, hours and hours before I’ve been tardily dragging myself out of bed for the past few weeks, made coffee, read. And at a chapter break, I glanced up and realized the first light was breaking over the land. I stood outside in the freezing chill and words of praise poured out of me — not fine poetry, just a rush of emotion.

Bright star of morning, arise in my heart
Bright star of dawning, fill me with light
Bright sun of earth’s light, warm me, inspire me
Bright star of morning, arise in my heart

This isn’t an easy “it gets better” post; you don’t have to simply open your soul to the beauty of the world and you’ll be healed of pain and doubt. That’s utter tripe. I’m still tired, and sad, and apathetic, and overwhelmed, and I still want to crawl into the woods and leave all of this behind. But the sun came up, and I saw it, and it gave me a feeling that wasn’t despair for a bit, and that was enough for right now.

Circumambulating home

I remember, when I was first exploring druidry, that many authors I respected and learned much from wrote reverently about the importance of learning and knowing the local ecosystems. I agreed in principle, but what a tall order! I’ve always loved nature, but I’d never made a concerted study, and as a young man I’d moved a thousand miles from home, where I still am. It seemed like too much, too high a barrier on top of learning a whole new way of prayer and worship, so I didn’t bother.

The Cailleach, finally

It’s snowing as I sit typing this, here in Columbus. This would normally be a fairly uninteresting opening most years: it’s February in Ohio, after all. But this has been a very warm winter for us. That’s true for much of the country, of course, and for the globe, but I’m feeling it especially poignantly right now, since the winter storms that have blanketed friends in the upper Midwest, the Northeast — even the northern half of our own state — have encountered an unmoving bubble of warmth in Central Ohio, and at best only rained.

The god you already know

CW: suicidal friends

This morning, during my walk to work, I pulled out my phone and idly thumbed at Facebook, and then came to a dead stop in the middle of the sidewalk. A friend had posted in a private group: “Everyone, you need to reach out to this other one of our friends; he’s in crisis, and we don’t know where he is.” Panic. Worry. Fear. I called our friend; I texted when he didn’t pick up the call.

But then, the obvious immediate moves done… what do you do? The authorities are already notified, people who know his habits better than me are looking… what do you do? Where do you turn?

Praying through the internet

My grandmother died last night.

I write a lot about death, to my sometimes surprise, but this isn’t a post about death, or dying, or about the Ancestors. This is a post about prayer, about the technology of prayer, and about the communities that sustain us.