August Miscellany

The world will always be here, and it will always be different, more varied, more interesting, more alive, but still always the world in all its complexity and incompleteness.  There is nothing behind it, no absolute or platonic world to transcend to.  All there is of Nature is what is around us.  All there is of Being is relations among real, sensible things.  All we have of natural law is a world that has made itself.  All we may expect of human law is what we can negotiate among ourselves, and what we take as our responsibility.  All we may gain of knowledge must be drawn from what we can see with our own eyes and what others tell us they have seen with their own eyes.  All we may expect of justice is compassion.  All we may look up to as judges are each other.  All that is possible of utopia is what we make with our own hands.  Pray let it be enough.

-- Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos

Late afternoon reflections in a subalpine lake.  August 2011.

The summer has nearly ended.  It is hard to believe that August will soon be over and September beginning already.  I will soon be moving back to university once again, so posting may be a bit sparse over the next few days until I get settled in, but I do plan to continue writing for the 30 Days of Druidry.  I have really been enjoying writing the last few 30 Days posts; they seem to be just what I needed to get writing again.

 

Notable posts in August:

• "To be able to say / how much you love" - wall blogging from a blog-less mad poet, shared by Wanderin' Weeta.
• Dianne Sylvan reflects on the pain and power of delight.
• "Morning Prayers", a poem by Joy Harjo shared at Beyond the Fields We Know.
• At No Unsacred Place, John discusses change and adaptation in Doing Something About the Weather.
• Finding the inspiration within ourselves and becoming our own role models with T. Thorn Coyle.
• What does it mean to practice Druidry today, in our modern world?  Alison Leigh Lilly revisits the question of why Druidry, while Nimue Brown discusses becoming a Druid at Druid Life.
• Snowhawke muses on Awen - life energy in motion.

Notable books:

• In The Life of the Cosmos, Lee Smolin takes a critical look at the philosophical underpinnings of modern science and physics and what they may mean for the quest to construct a "theory of everything."  Although a difficult book to read at times, The Life of the Cosmos deserves recognition for Smolin's willingness to confront with science and physics the questions that are usually relegated to the province of spirituality and religion.  Smolin may be more of an atheist than an agnostic, but his atheism is far more positive than a simple statement of disbelief, and Smolin's universe is recognized to be constantly evolving and beautiful in its incompleteness and complexity.
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke is a short book, consisting of 10 brief letters and commentary, less than 100 pages in all.  In the letters, Rilke muses on what it means to live the life of a poet, and how to cope with solitude and sorrow.  So much of what he wrote seems perfectly tailored to many of the things that I am going through in my life right now that I wish I had picked this book up years ago.
• Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin is the concluding book of Le Guin's Annals of the Western Shore.  (The previous books were Gifts and Voices.)  Like most of Le Guin's later novels, Powers is a quiet, under-stated, deeply personal, and spiritual tale.  It tells the story of Gav, a boy who is a slave in a wealthy city-state, forced to flee and seek his livelihood elsewhere when tragedy strikes.  It is a lyrical tale of coming-of-age, and of coming to terms with grief and betrayal.  I highly recommend all three books of the Annals of the Western Shore.

Finally, I wish to send my blessings to the family of Jack Layton, leader of Canada's federal New Democratic Party, who sadly passed away of cancer earlier this month.  He was a charismatic leader who brought a positive energy to Canadian politics, and inspired and was respected by many Canadians, whatever their political affiliations.  You can read more about his life and work here.

My friends, love is better than anger.  Hope is better than fear.  Optimism is better than despair.  So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic.  And we’ll change the world.

-- Jack Layton, from his final letter to Canadians

Earth and Nature

This Earth, this land, this dirt, this soil...  It is the planet on which we travel in our voyage through space, in our yearly orbit around the Sun, in the Sun's much longer orbit around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, in the galaxy's own inexorable movement.

The Earth is our home.  Perhaps even one day when we have colonized other planets in the galaxy (if our species even lives that long), grandparents will tell their grandchildren, "Once upon a time, we humans all lived on one planet called Earth."

"Earth!" they will say.  "What kind of a silly name is that for a planet?  Might as well call it 'Dirt' or 'Mud'!  And how could all humans ever fit on one tiny planet anyway?"

And Grandma or Grandpa will smile and say, "For a long time, Earth was the only dirt we knew.  We didn't even know that other planets existed, and even when we did know that, we didn't know if we would ever be able to travel to them or live on them.  There weren't as many of us in those days, and it was only as Earth began to fill up and its limited resources to be depleted that people began looking for other planets on which to live."

"But what about Earth?  Is it still there?  Do people still live on it?"

"Yes, Earth is still there, and I think a few people still live on it.  But there isn't much there to live for there anymore.  We humans, all we did on Earth was take and take and we gave hardly anything back.  We filled the planet with our garbage and our shopping malls and killed off thousands of species of plants and animals."

"Why?  Why did people do that?"

Grandma or Grandpa will shake her or his head sadly.  "We didn't know what we had.  And we didn't know that what we had was so precious and so fragile."

The Earth is the most precious thing we have.  The Earth is fragile and it is sacred.  This little speck of dirt orbiting around a run-of-the-mill star in an average spiral galaxy is the only home we have, and it is sacred.

We humans are not separate from this Earth.  We depend on it completely and utterly for our existence: for clean air and clean water, for food and medicines, for materials to build our houses, for fuels to keep our houses warm and cook our food and transport us from place to place.  The Earth in turn contains organisms who make this planet habitable for us: plants produce oxygen which we breathe in and which protects us from damaging radiation, fungi and other micro-organisms decompose dead plants and animals into soil, bacteria and lichens break down rocks and enable plants to grow.

By naming all this "nature", we have separated ourselves from it.  We have fooled ourselves into thinking that nature and human are two separate things, that being human doesn't have anything to do with being part of nature.  By holding ourselves apart from the rest of the world, we have thought ourselves above it.  We have thought ourselves the masters of nature, more enlightened and privileged than the rest of the animals, able to do with it as we please.  But we have never truly been separate from nature, and never will be.  It is only in our heads the separation has occurred.

We are not the masters of nature, only one part of it, intimately interconnected with all the other parts.  We are beginning, finally, to realize this again today, and so we try to get back to nature, get in tune with nature, connect with nature.  But we would have done none of these things if we had not first believed that we were separate from it.

We humans will always need a home on which to live.  Right now, the only home we have is this one tiny planet, this Earth.  Let us not destroy it.  Let us love it and respect it and revere it as the sacred land that it is.  Let us give the grandparents of the future better stories to tell their grandchildren.

(Part of 30 Days of Druidry)

Cosmology

In the beginning, there was chaos*.

In the beginning, things were hotter and denser than they are now, a soup of undifferentiated particles.  Matter cooled.  Photons were released, and there was light.

Matter cooled, expanded, condensed into swirling galaxies.  Clouds of gas collapsed into stars.  Nuclear fusion occurred, and there was light.

Stars burned and died, strewing the galaxy as they did with more complex elements.  The waves of energy triggered the formation of more stars, and clouds of debris left over from their formation orbited around them.  The debris collided, broke apart, joined together into planets, and there was the Earth.

The surface of the Earth was inhospitable, bombarded with meteorites and perhaps even other smaller planets.  Things gradually settled down in the solar system.  On Earth, it rained.  The oceans filled.  In the oceans, complex molecules joined together, learned to replicate themselves, and there was life.

Life was fruitful and multiplied and it filled the Earth, from the oceans to the land, from deep below the crust to high into the atmosphere.  Life evolved and changed, first as simple single-celled organisms and then, finally, as increasingly complex multi-celled species.  Life discovered photosynthesis, and brought oxygen into the atmosphere.  Life continued to evolve, each species adapting itself better and better to its ever-changing environment, constantly competing with others for the right to survive and reproduce.

Eventually, humans appeared, Homo sapiens, clever, tool-using primates who thought themselves better than anyone else.

We are not better.  We are not special.  We are not any more unique than any other living or non-living thing on Earth or elsewhere in the universe.  We are one of many.

When we look up into the sky at night, we see the stars.  Without stars, there would be no life.  Stars create the complex elements of which life is made, and convert matter into energy via Einstein's equation of E = mc², providing the energy that allows matter to self-organize into complex molecules and life, and preventing the otherwise inevitable slide into entropy and disorder.

Our personal star is called the Sun, and over the millennia, we humans have worshipped it as a god, sacrificed to it, and prayed to it to rise again each day.  Even today, we know that without the Sun, there would be no life**.

The atoms in our bodies were created in the heart of a star, billions of years ago.  Not as long as that, the atoms and molecules in our bodies were part of the Earth itself, part of the soil and the water and the air, part of other animals and plants, part of the lunch you ate yesterday.  The air that we breathe was breathed by others before us.  The waters that we drink were drank by others before us.  The bodies of those plants and animals who have died make up our body.

We humans are one of millions of species that have lived on this planet, most of which are now extinct.  We are the product of billions of years of evolution.  We share many of the genes in our DNA with other species, from chimps to fruit flies to plants and fungi and even bacteria.  We are all related here on this planet, all part of one family.

We are not alone.  We are not separated.  We are connected intimately to every other living and non-living thing in the universe, from distant stars and galaxies, photons from which enter our eyes when we gaze skyward at night, to the other plants and animals and bacteria here on Earth, which share our DNA and provide us food and whose processes ensure that the Earth is hospitable for us to live.

We are all connected.  We are all one.  And each of us, alone, is not one, but many.

(Part of 30 Days of Druidry)


* I begin my tale shortly after the Big Bang has occurred.  We do not know what happened before then.  Depending on the theory you prefer, the universe may have not just come out of nothingness, but may have arisen from other universes or be part of a wider, higher-dimensional "multiverse."  In other theories, it simply does not make sense to speak of "before", since both time and space had their beginnings in the Big Bang.

** Some species on Earth do get their energy from geological processes rather than from the Sun, but the vast majority of organisms on Earth depend directly on the Sun for their existence.

Why Druidry?

Once upon a time, long long ago, a group of peoples spread across Europe.  The Greeks called them Celts and it is this name that we know them by today, although it is unlikely that they all called themselves that, or even that they all saw themselves as one people.  Their allegiance was to their separate tribes, which warred among and raided from each other frequently.  The Romans wrote of their disorganized, impulsive behaviour in battle, no match for the highly organized and efficient Roman army.  Nevertheless, the Celts were a proud, passionate, creative, and intelligent people.  We don't really know much about them.  Today, we are left with a few metal items, weaponry and drinking cups inscribed with the flowing lines and interlacing patterns of Celtic knotwork; a few hundred deity names carved on stone monuments, mostly from the Roman period; and the (probably more or less biased) accounts of the Greek and Roman authors.

It is these authors who tell us that the learned class of the Celts was a group of men (and possibly women as well) known as the Druids.  The Druids were doctors, astrologers, lawyers, peace-makers, advisors to kings and leaders, teachers, prophets, poets, and priests.  If we do not know much about the ancient Celts generally, then we know even less about the Druids.  The Celts had an oral, not written, literature, so scarcely any of their writings survive from before the Christian period.  By the time the Irish monks began to write down some of the old myths, the Druids were likely already becoming only a memory.  As the new religion spread and new invading peoples appeared on the scene, the Celts were pushed back to the westernmost fringes of Europe and the Druids faded into the mists of history.  Well, almost.

Many hundreds of years later, at a troubled time when issues within Christianity was causing strife in Europe, modern science and technology were beginning to develop, and most of Europe's natural ecosystems had been altered irreparably by centuries of human contact, a group of antiquarians in England began to be interested in the ancient Druids.  They saw the practices and beliefs of the Druids as an older, purer form of religion.  Their view of the Druids was romantic, idealistic, and mostly rather inaccurate.  They formed Druid orders and held Druid rituals in an attempt to reconnect with and recreate the past.

Years passed.  The idealistic vision of the Druids faded as it was replaced by more critical scholarship.  Still, interest in the Druids did not die.  As the twentieth century developed, more and more people became interested in Druidry as a religion, spirituality, philosophy, and way of life.  Some of these people were descendents of the earlier Druid orders, while others came to Druidry in their quest for a religion and spirituality that fit their lives and their changing world better than more established religions.

We call ourselves Druids today, although most of us realize that the Druids of old would not have recognized us as such.  But they are gone, and we are here.  Druidry is seen now as a religion and spirituality rooted in nature and creativity, inspired by visions of the past (albeit visions tempered, now, with realism), and as a way forward into our troubled future.  Druids today have different beliefs, different practices, different stories of how they found their paths, different reasons for why they continue on them.  In the end, the differences do not matter.  All that matters is the forest, and the path that you follow deeper into it, alone or with others, with confidence or with uncertainty.  Let us keep walking our paths, and help each other along when we can.

(Part of 30 Days of Druidry)

30 Days of Druidry

The 30 Days of Druidry meme was begun by Alison Leigh Lilly as a way to explore the different facets of modern Druidry.  I've altered Ali's original list of topics slightly to make it better suit my personal beliefs, practice, and life situation, as well as to include a couple of other topics that I have been wanting to write about but haven't been able to work into the usual posts.  I'll update the links on this page as I work my way through the topics, and I'll also add it as a stand-alone page that will be linked to below the page header so that you'll be able to refer back to it if you wish.  As I write my way through the list of topics, feel free to share your own opinion in the comments, even and especially if you follow a different spiritual or religious path.

1. Why Druidry?
2. Foundations: Cosmology
3. Foundations: Earth and Nature
4. Foundations: The Three Realms
5. Foundations: The Cycles of Life
6. Foundations: Sacred Spaces, Sacred Places
7. Foundations: Daily Practice
8. Relationships: Deity and Belief
9. Relationships: The Ancestors
10. Relationships: Spirits of the Land
11. Relationships: Ritual
12. Relationships: The Wheel of the Year
13. Inspirations: Awen and Creativity
14. Inspirations: Stillness and Meditation
15. Inspirations: Story and Myth
16. Inspirations: Song and Poetry
17. Inspirations: Values and Ethics
18. Inspirations: Science and Philosophy
19. Inspirations: Magic and Mystery
20. Everyday Life: Druidry and Family/Friends
21. Everyday Life: Druidry and Community
22. Everyday Life: Druidry and Career
23. Everyday Life: Treading Lightly on the Earth
24. Everyday Life: Solitude and Loneliness
25. Everyday Life: Distractions on the Path
26. Everyday Life: A Day in the Life
27. Going Further and Farther: Where Does the Path Lead?
28. Going Further and Farther: The Future of Druidry
29. Advice to the Seeker
30. Why Druidry? Revisited

Where I'm At: Onward and Upward

If the most fundamental questions of our existence are unanswerable, then what is the point of continuing to search for Truth?  If we know we will never reach the summit, then why bother continuing to climb?

Because the alternative - if we could someday reach an ultimate limit to our knowledge - would be far worse, leading to a world without Mystery, without anything new to discover.  Because we must keep seeking, keep pressing onward and upward in our quest to come as close to Truth as we can, even if we never reach it.  It is why we love someone, knowing they will someday die or leave us.  It is why we stand up for what we believe in, recycle, conserve electricity, walk instead of take the bus - these things are simply the right things to do, even if on some days our efforts feel futile.  We must keep climbing, we must keep seeking, because to give up, to admit defeat, is to settle for a life that is stagnant and sterile, and without hope or joy or love.

What do you do when you reach a point in your life when you don't know how to go on, when you no longer know where to go or what to do?  It feels as though you have found a trail in the forest that looked promising and you followed it faithfully for many years.  Over time, however, the path grew fainter and fainter, and you picked your way through the trees and underbrush with greater hesitancy and uncertainty.  Finally, you cannot see the path at all and you come to a halt.  The forest stretches away from you in every direction, and any path you might take seems equally forbidding, equally full of promise or lack of promise.  You cannot even go back, for the path you reached here on has vanished.  You know that you cannot remain here, that the key to your survival is your continual movement along the path, but in despair you do not know where to turn and you have lost sight in any light that may have guided you along the path.  What do you do?  Where do you go?

This seems to be more and more the situation that I am in now, being on the cusp of graduation from university in a field that no longer wholly interests me as a career.  I become more and more certain that I want to be a writer more than I want to be a scientist, but I am becoming more and more uncertain about what I will do after I graduate, how and where I will live, or how I will turn my dreams of becoming a published writer into reality.  All progress in my life seems to have ground to a halt.

At the same time, some changes do seem to be happening in my life now, albeit slowly, although I will not speak of all of these changes here at this time.  Yet even as I sense changes happening, I also sense that in some ways I am subconciously trying to sabotage these very changes, trying to retreat back even as other parts of me are trying to reach out.  I long for and desire change, yet I also fear it.

The realizations I have described in my last two posts here represent some of the progress I have made.  In some ways, I now know where I'm at.  To be able to move forward, we need to know where we are.  Admitting uncertainty in the world and in our personal lives allows us to stop trying to fool ourselves into believing that we have the answers, and perhaps to make some hesitant steps toward our own truths.

We each must find our own truths in this world.  But we are not alone, and perhaps when we are lost in the forest another traveller will pass by and point us in the right direction.  Perhaps by communicating with each other, and not letting labels and dogmas and personal beliefs get in our way, we can put our individual truths together into one greater Truth.

Where I'm At: Uncertainty, Belief, and Spiritual Practice

In my last post, I wrote of my recognition of myself as an agnostic, and of my realization that many of the answers to the most fundamental questions of our existence will likely remain unknown, or at least known only imperfectly.  Our scientific theories become more and more accurate, yet may never be perfect descriptions of our beautiful and messy reality.  Religion and spirituality may provide the answers for some, but even here there is no consensus, as the great variety of religions and belief systems on this planet show.  We each must find our own truth.

I wrote of uncertainty, but the uncertainty I speak of here is not necessarily a personal uncertainty, but a universal uncertainty, an ultimate limit to our knowledge.  This is, however, not to say that I am uncertain in my personal life as well, although I am, both spiritually as well as in the path my life is taking, but that is a separate matter.  Admitting this uncertainty to myself has been a relief to me, allowing me to let go of trying (unsuccessfully) to believe in certain things just because other Pagans believed in them.

However, there are things that I believe in, and firmly.  These things are not specific things such as the existence of deity, but rather values such as love, honour, respect, and honesty.  I believe in the sacredness of this beautiful and fragile planet on which we live, and in the necessity to treat all beings that share it with us, from animals and plants to mountains and rivers, with respect and reverence.  I believe in the validity of science and of the basic scientific method, although I recognize that there are some questions that science will never be able to answer and that, in recent years, science has got itself into some trouble by denying the spiritual side of things.  I believe that science, spirituality, and religion must work together in future years if we are going to have any hope of getting out of our current mess at all.  And I believe that some questions will always remain uncertain and unknown.  We can guess at them, and sometimes we even think we glimpse something of the truth, but much will always remain unanswerable.  And I like it that way.  I like to think that there will always be some areas shrouded in mystery.  It lets us know that there will always be new things to discover, new places to journey.

Whatever our beliefs, it is our spiritual practice that is their outward expression.  It is our spiritual practice that helps us to relate to other beings, both human and non-human.  So many of my posts here at Say the Trees Have Ears have been chronicles of my struggles trying to come to terms with this concept of spiritual practice.  Recently, I have come to realize that, as T. Thorn Coyle has described again and again, daily spiritual practice is simply the practice of showing up for ourselves, day after day.  It is the practice of recognizing ourselves as sacred beings in a sacred world and acting in ways that honour that recognition.  Whatever our spiritual or religious beliefs, most of us would admit to something, some ideal that we hold dear, something above and beyond the everyday routine.  It is what keeps us moving forward, and inspires us to create art, write novels, dance, sing, meditate, do science, spend time with our friends and families, travel, teach, go on long hikes, take photos, learn to speak other languages, or do anything else that we desire to do.

Once again I return to the question I asked in my previous post: am I a Pagan?  I think the answer goes back to a post I wrote here over a year ago, when I touched on the issues around the capitalization of certain words.  Paganism (capital P) is a term that refers to a collection of modern, usually earth- and/or nature-based religions and spiritualities, while paganism (small p) describes an attitude, a spiritual outlook rooted in nature and in this sacred earth, yet not to any specific tradition.  While I am most certainly pagan, I am not so sure whether I am a Pagan, especially since many of my beliefs and practices are really not at all like those of many other modern Pagans.  Once again, do the names really matter in the end?  No label can ever be a perfect description of who we are.  I may say that I am an introverted pagan bibliophile, yet this will only give you a glimmer of who I really am.

What matters is that we keep walking the path, moving onward and upward, even when we find ourselves down in the depths or lost in uncertainty.

(to be continued...)

Like what you read?  Please visit my new blog: At the Edge of the Ordinary.

Where I'm At: Agnosticism, Paganism, and the Limits of Science

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge -- Nicolaus Copernicus

I've been looking through some of the early posts from this blog, and I've realized that the path I was on then is no longer the path I am on now.  This is what accounts, I suppose, for my difficulties in writing here lately.  The reason why I began this blog is not wholly relevant to my situation now, and the things that I was driven to write about in those early days are no longer the things that I am principally interested in today.

So I've decided to write this series of posts, just to establish, for my readers and for myself, where I'm at today.  Think of it them as introductory posts, as though they are the very first posts of a brand new blog.  I hope that by doing this, I can clear away some of that old blogging detritus and, perhaps, start afresh.

I was initially drawn towards Paganism and Druidry as spiritual paths because they expressed the reverence that I felt towards the natural world.  Druidry also had an emphasis on personal creativity, particularly on the arts of poetry, story, and song, and on Celtic mythology and culture.  When I began blogging, I was, in a way, trying these paths on, seeing how they fit my life, beliefs, philosophy, and practice.

Since then, I've come to realize that I am, perhaps above all, ultimately an agnostic.  I believe that the most fundamental questions about human existence and the nature of the universe are unknowable.  Too often, "agnostic" is viewed as simply another flavour of "atheist," probably one who just doesn't have the moral backbone to actually come out and say what they disbelieve in.  An agnostic, to me, is someone who is willing to embrace uncertainty and to say the simple words, I don't know, we don't know, and it is altogether quite likely that none of us will ever know for sure.  Probably most Pagans work with deity in some form; I have tried this, and it simply doesn't work for me.  I simply cannot force myself to believe in what other people have named God or the gods.  However, I cannot and do not deny that the belief of others is false.  The ultimate truth is unknowable.

What does the recognition of myself as an agnostic mean for my identification as a Pagan?  Does it mean that I'm not really a Pagan after all?  Frankly, I don't really care about that.  "Pagan" is a term that I like; it makes for a fairly concise summary of my spirituality, even if it doesn't cover all the details.  Ultimately, the names don't really matter, which is why I've never got caught up in those perennial debates among Pagan bloggers about what Paganism is and who should or should not be considered a Pagan.  We are who we are no matter what labels we use.  I have readers of this blog that are neither Pagans nor Druids.  In fact, some of them are even Christians!  This surprised me a great deal at first, but now I think it's great that all of these people of different backgrounds have found something of value in my rantings here.  I don't think that any of us really know where we're going, although most of us seem to be heading in the same general direction, albeit on many different paths.

I think that my studies of science for the last five years in university have also led me to eventually recognize myself as an agnostic.  Science, as its best, encourages constant questioning and observing and never taking things for granted.  The best scientists, rather than being obsessed with knowing all the answers, readily admit that the things we don't know far outnumber the things we do know, and that the more we learn, the more questions we have.  Albert Einstein wrote, "We still do not know one-thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us."

Scientists keep formulating better and better theories to describe the universe, yet, in the end, the theories are in our head.  The best theory still is not reality, and can only be an approximation of the beautiful, complex, messy reality that is sighing and crying and singing and laughing and breaking into pieces all around us.  Isaac Newton formulated the three laws of motion that are still taught in every high school physics class.  A few hundred years later, physicists realized that these laws were not completely correct, and did not describe all situations.  Albert Einstein provided a better theory: the general theory of relativity.  Today, we know that general relativity is not perfect either, since it breaks down in certain times and places.  Physicists search now for a "theory of everything" that will unite general relativity with quantum mechanics.  Yet I suspect that when such a theory is found, after a few years, decades, or centuries have passed it too will be recognized as incomplete.

Quantum mechanics too has brought us Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that we cannot know both the exact position and exact velocity of a particle at the same time - essentially, that we can never have all the information.  This suggests an ultimate limit to our knowledge, that some things must remain forever unknown - at least in the realms of science.

What, then, of religion and spirituality?  Some will say that religion and spirituality can provide answers where science falls silent.  Many of the same themes can be found throughout the great religions, yet these truths cannot simply be read of in books or talked about but must be felt deep within the core of our beings.  Spirituality is, I feel, a very personal thing, and no one's path is the same as another's, even among two people who follow the same religion.  In my own experiences of walking out alone under the sky, and sitting still in meditation, I have not felt the presence of any god, or heard the voice of any spirit.  The only voices I have heard are those of the other beings with whom I share this world, both human and non-human, plant and animal, mountain and river.  The gods (if gods there be) have not spoken to me.  But this does not deny their existence, especially when so many people throughout history have known them, believed in them, spoken to them.  The absence of evidence, as scientists are so fond of saying, is not evidence of absence.  All of my own experiences have confirmed my belief in the ultimate uncertainty of things.  All that I know is that I do not know.

The most important questions for me are not, "Does God exist?," or, "What happens after we die?" but rather questions of how we can best live our lives here and now.  How can we act, to do the most good and the least harm?  What practices can we follow, day after day, to structure our lives and bring meaning to our everyday existence?  How can we work for life, love, and joy?

(to be continued...)

Like what you read?  Please visit my new blog: At the Edge of the Ordinary.

July Miscellany

I like for narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say they have a lot of the same flaws as I.  Preoccupation with self is good, as is a tendency toward procrastination, self-delusion, darkness, jealousy, groveling, greediness, addictiveness.  They shouldn't be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting.  I like for them to have a nice sick sense of humor and to be concerned with important things, by which I mean that they are interested in political and psychological and spiritual matters.  I want them to know who we are and what life is all about.  I like them to be mentally ill in the same sorts of ways that I am.  -- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Driftwood on the beach, July 2011

In my last post, I described some of the problems I have with Pagan/Druid/spiritual blogs.  One of the things I love about pen and paper bloggers is that many of them frequently link to other blogs and posts that interest them, creating an interconnected blogging community.  I haven't noticed this sort of thing going on much among the Pagan/Druid/spiritual blogs that I read, at least not of the kinds of posts and blogs that I am primarily interested in reading.

So I'm going to start doing it myself.  Every month (maybe more often as well), I will share with you some quotes, photos, thoughts, and, above all, links to posts I have enjoyed reading this month and new blogs I have discovered.  Please let me know in the comments what you think about this, and if it's something that you would like to see more of here in the future.

Speaking of quotes, I love that one by Anne Lamott that I began this post with.  I laughed out loud when I read it, just because it is so true for me.  People that are "mentally ill in the same sorts of ways that I am" are just the sort that I want to have as friends, or that I enjoy reading about in books.

Two of my favourite Druid bloggers, Alison Leigh Lilly and Jeff Lilly, have started a podcast!  It is called Dining with Druids and it includes some great and informal conversations on religion, politics, and other topics.  They have several episodes up already, so go check them out!

Notable posts this month:

• A chilling harbinger of what might happen to the life in our oceans if we continue polluting them, as Wanderin' Weeta shares an extinction event, in microcosm.  She also shares photos of what the tide washed in that make the dangers of throwing out our plastic trash saddeningly clear.
• Another inspiring post from T. Thorn Coyle: Self-Respect: Come to Your Success!  Spiritual practice is simply the practice of showing up for ourselves, day after day.  I cannot tell you how much I needed to read this post at this time.
• War is blasphemy.  Cat at Quaker Pagan Reflections wishes us a Happy Fourth of July.
• How far you would go to grow a vegetable garden in your front yard?  At No Unsacred Place, Alison Leigh Lilly shows us how sustainable living can become an act of civil disobedience.
• Also at No Unsacred Place, Juniper discusses the ethics of gathering materials, whether they be of plant or animal origin, from the wild in Dead Things on the Altar.
• How to find good pagan books: At The Northwest Passage, Brendan Myers gives us tips of how to support our "beyond 101" writers.  I love his list of things to look for in more advanced, serious books.
• How far is there to go?  Rolling, the road rolls relentlessly on at La Vie Graphite.  I am wondering the same about my own life lately.  How far must I go before I finally reach the place I am journeying towards, if it is ever reached at all?
• War is not the answer, and Alison Leigh Lilly is a conscientious objector in the spiritual war.
• Finally, at Beyond the Fields We Know, there are blue skies and many suns blooming.

Summer, when I'm not in class, is the time for spending long hours lost in a book.  Lately, I've been borrowing some excellent non-fiction books from the public library.  Here are some of my favourites:

• The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram is a lyrical analysis of the reasons behind the estrangement of western civilization from the wider, "more-than-human" environment.  Abram examines the development of language and of the alphabet, and draws on the mythology and folklore of cultures from around the world in his quest.  This is the sort of book that I could re-read again and again and always take something new away from it.
• A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel is a fascinating look at my favourite past-time, reading.  I would highly recommend it for all bibliophiles!  Whenever I read one of Manguel's books, I always wish I could get a look at his library.  His clear love for books and reading is evident on every page.
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson is fiction, not non-fiction, and is not recommended for those who like their novels short and to the point.  At nearly 1000 pages, it (perhaps) rambles sometimes, but Stephenson's slightly off-the-wall sense of humour keeps things interesting.  Set in the time of Isaac Newton and the development of modern science and finance, Quicksilver is a fascinating, intricately woven tale.  I look forward to reading the next two books in the series, The Confusion and The System of the World.

That's all for now!  I hope you enjoyed this monthly miscellany, and stay tuned, for I have a new series of posts planned and the first one should be showing up in the next few days.