Balancing confidence against inexperience

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own (in)experience as a druid. That is, to use the language of educational research, I have a very unbalanced set of competencies. On the one hand, I am relatively new to my path: I began officially-to-myself exploring a pagan spiritual practice in January of 2013, and would not have described myself firmly as a practicing druid until a bit more than a year ago. I have, one might well say and rightly, a lot to learn. And yet, simultaneously, I have a rather large amount of relevant background: I’ve studied comparative religions, with a special interest in neopagan paths, on a hobbyist level for nearly two decades. I’ve been developing my ‘bardic’ skills (as we’d call them) both as an amateur and through formal education for almost my entire life. And thanks to to graduate degrees in the humanities, followed by continual immersion in that same environment as university staff, my ability to absorb and critically engage with large amounts of complex information operates at a fairly high pitch. The gap between my spheres of experience is marked, and I struggle to integrate these mismatched skillsets.

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Something to try: toward the priesthood

Last week I went to see a duo of short plays written by graduate and undergraduate students at the university where I work. The first play, a one-woman show written and performed by a friend, was enjoyable: by turns funny, sobering, and zany. It was also unguardedly honest, even amid its artfulness — I’d expect no less from Sam, a writer of creative nonfiction, but this is worth noting, if only for the way it primed me for the second act. During the intermission, the writer-performers of the second play asked the audience to come forward and write, each on our own brightly-colored construction paper star, something we’d like to try. I wrote “being a priest.”