Opening the Grove

Hi, everybody. I’m apparently a Druid now. 

Those of you who follow me on Twitter—which I imagine is the majority of you—will probably have noticed this, because I’ve been talking about it pretty openly. I feel compelled to talk about it here as well, because I’m having a lot of thoughts and feelings about it and this seems like as good a place as any to try to articulate them. How much to articulate is something I’m not sure about yet; when I was first embarking on this path several weeks back, a friend gave me a Rune reading that cautioned me to be careful who I spoke to about what I was going through. When I talked to my mom about this the other day, she cautioned me the same way. 

This is public. But I think I can follow that advice by being careful about what I say publicly, not least because I’m still working so much of this out. 

I’m wanting to do this on Patreon also because I’ve been neglecting Patreon a lot this summer—again—in significant part on account of what a bad place my head has been in. But that’s changed, and it’s changed somewhat dramatically. I’m exploring what I’m all at once now capable of. 

What I will say at this point is that I’ve rediscovered an enchanted world, and I think I was in desperate need of that in ways I was and was not aware of. I had it once, and somewhere along the way—mostly without quite knowing it—I lost it. 

The other thing I’ll say is that for years I’ve been wrestling with faith, with the weird and fractured and therefore fundamentally Lutheran Christianity with which I’ve identified for most of my life, and the way I’ve felt it slipping away from me, and how distressing that’s been. Faith isn’t something I wanted to lose; it never felt like something I was dragging around. And strangely, so strangely, I’ve found myself believing that I’ve been led to Paganism as a way back to the enchanted childhood Christianity I lost. 

The things we know in childhood aren’t all foolish. Many of them are things we ought to retain. They’re wisdom that adulthood makes us forget. 

I think the story of how I ended up here deserves to be a longer piece in and of itself. It’s a story I’m a little hesitant to tell, because there’s some stuff in it that I worry makes me sound slightly albeit benignly unhinged. But I also believe worrying about sounding unhinged is something I probably shouldn’t bother with, and also the horse probably took leave of that particular barn some time ago. 

The one final piece of that I will say, though, is that finding Druidry has been not so much arriving on a new path as rediscovering an old and very familiar one. In many ways I’ve always been here. 

I’ve worked up a daily plan of meditation and ritual. Part of that plan involves reading and meditating on a poem (these days usually by Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, or Walt Whitman, who I very much consider Bards in the Druid tradition). I haven’t yet meditated on the one I want to close with here, but it’s one I discovered about a decade ago when I was making a book of photos from the honeymoon road trip I and my husband took from San Francisco to Seattle. I included a few lines of it in the section that covered Redwood State Park, for reasons that will become obvious. 

Again, in many ways I’ve always been here.

William Cullen Bryant, “A Forest Hymn”

The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned
To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave,
And spread the roof above them, —ere he framed
The lofty vault, to gather and roll back
The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,
Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks
And supplication. For his simple heart
Might not resist the sacred influences,
Which, from the stilly twilight of the place,
And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven
Mingled their mossy boughs, and from the sound
Of the invisible breath that swayed at once
All their green tops, stole over him, and bowed
His spirit with the thought of boundless power
And inaccessible majesty. Ah, why
Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect
God's ancient sanctuaries, and adore
Only among the crowd, and under roofs,
That our frail hands have raised? Let me, at least,
Here, in the shadow of this aged wood,
Offer one hymn—thrice happy, if it find
Acceptance in His ear. 

...

My heart is awed within me when I think
Of the great miracle that still goes on,
In silence, round me—the perpetual work
Of thy creation, finished, yet renewed
Forever. Written on thy works I read
The lesson of thy own eternity. 

(photo from said honeymoon, by Rob Wanenchak)