04.17.09
Can you feel it?
I alluded to this in my post yesterday*: change is everywhere. One can feel it. Of course this is the beginning of spring, so I’d expect nothing less. But there is a definite, palpable sense of change in the zeitgeist of our culture.
Obama rode this wave to the white house. The forest around me is an obvious manifestation of this change, the snow is (more or less) gone, the mud is drying, buds are appearing, seeds are being planted, life is re-emerging.
This change is frightening on some levels. There is an unprecedented focus on tragedy, apocalypse, and collapse in the mass media, and therefore in popular consciousness. In our own minds, worry and doubt can build up.
I was walking in the woods behind my house and thinking about it. If I listen just right, the trees (and other critters) will speak to me.
“How old are you, what around 40, right?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” I answered.
“40 Years ago I was already many times taller than you are now. I’ve been here a long time, you haven’t been here long, this is but your third spring here. Out here in the woods, things stay pretty much the same. It’s noisier now, but the sun still shines. The rains still fall. It gets cold and we sleep. After a nice nap, we awake and it’s warm again.”
It occurs to me that, as druids, our task is to remain in sacred relationship with everything in our reality, no matter what this reality is.
Sometimes my head spends all-too-much time thinking about the day-to-day problems of my life. Making sure my work gets done, worrying about the economy, about violence in the world, suspicions about the government and its obsession with power-over and force, about impending environmental destruction, and countless other negative distractions.
These distractions, in themselves, are not the issue. But rather, how can we be in authentic relationship with these things? In many cases, authentic relationship with them means to ignore them entirely! For instance, we are supposed to be afraid of terrorism, but the truth is that more people die from lightning strikes each year than terrorism. Other problems (such as climate change) are very real, and we are already related to them by our participation in the capitalist, industrial culture that has created climate change.
The solution, apart from regularly talking to the trees to clear one’s head, is to stay rooted in the spiritual immediacy around us. Many of our problems exist largely in our minds. I say this not to dismiss these problems; on the contrary, our minds are so incredibly powerful. I say this so that we can reprogram our thinking so that we don’t live in fear of future uncertainties, but so that we can instead focus on being in relationship with what confronts us on a more immediate level.
(*yesterday as of when I started writing this post. Getting back to the blogging thing is a challenge, it took me 48 hours to finish this post a bit at a time. I will keep at it though!)