The Hedge Druid

Archive for the ‘Other reports’ Category

In one sentence…

“The universe sings the song but you provide the song title”

Ok, I can see from the draft posts that Gwas is beginning his 2011 round up and since (see The World is Changing) the new spiral has already begun for me I thought I’d get my update in first!

In complete honesty 2011 has only one word that can describe it, amazing!

Where to begin? Of course this year has been dominated by my Knights Quest. So that is a good a place as  to start as any…

Knights Quest

It all came to the fore at Imbolc festival when, quite innocently, Gwas and I were venturing out to several sites. Our first stop was at a site we, incorrectly, identified as St Helen’s well. At this site I had a vision of that infamous entity Caileach. She directed me on a quest to fulfill the achievement of nine blue keys. Once this was achieved I would be knighted. I know, I still have to laugh when I think of it. But that adventure led me across the Atlantic on an improbable.

Although I tried to follow this questing path with courage and aplomb. It was late this Autumn that I was informed that the quest remained incomplete and that a tighter spiral would have to be journeyed. I am rather disappointed at that but understand now why it has to be thus. See? Sometimes you just need to be told twice!

Some of the more salient points (as determined by me) were:

• Journeying 3,500 miles to the States
• Personal physical healing
• Creating a Knights Code to live by (which I have so far)

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It took me a full decade to fully appreciate Roy Harper. Even then I was some forty or more years late. I first saw Roy when I was asked by some friends to go see him play in London. It was his 60th birthday performance, and for me it was an opportunity to go to London, and maybe listen to some nice music too. At that point I had only heard of Roy Harper from the reference to him by Led Zeppelin in one of their song names. After the gig I was quite impressed with how much I had enjoyed it, but then I forgot all about him again. Occasionally since that date I had been to see his son Nick Harper, who is an incredibly talented guitarist too, and his small and intimate gigs have been astonishing, if often unappreciated by the audiences in front of whom he places himself.

A moody Roy Harper at 70

Fast-forward ten years and the opportunity came around again. Something in the back of my mind insisted that I should go again. Something much deeper than the shallow opportunism of the last gig. Something in my druid mind nudged me, and said that I should go. I didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation again. Only when the first few songs began to seep into my mind as the lyrics resonated around the vast space of The Royal Festival Hall did I suddenly realise why I was there this time – Roy Harper is a bard and druid and I was witnessing this great man passing on his mantle to his son like some kind of delightfully touching and inspiring pagan ritual!

For his 70th birthday concert Roy was able to demonstrate that both his vocals and his guitar playing are still in excellent form, although he apologised for not being up to the standards that he had set himself. Believe me – he has talent to spare, and the occaional twang from the string is no distraction amongst the mellifluous tones he generates seemingly at will.

Most impressive for me was his frequent rambles between songs during which he sometimes dispensed his wisdom on topics such as how humans can and should interact, the way that love expresses itself, how we are most human when we treat the Earth with respect, and how excited he still is at the magic of the forces that weave through us and the planet. His humility was genuinely touching for such a talented man, and audience and performer were often brought to tears during the two long halves of the performance.

For a brief account of the evening see this write-up in The Guardian. One of his memorable quotes was included this gem:

“It seems that the ArchDruid has spoken. ‘Tax the bankers!’

Actually, I think somebody else said it a couple of thousand years ago!“.

A reference to the Jesus and the Moneylenders episode, no doubt. From his “Same Old Rock” song accompanied by Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin). The appearance of Jimmy caused a huge ripple of excitement to go through the audience, and there were several audible excited gasps and then a low roar as the legendary Zeppelin guitarist came to sit alongside Roy for the long and complex song.

In the 1970s Roy played at the Stonehenge Free Festival along with Hawkwind. Very druidic musical credentials, if you ask me. Wish I’d done that (although I may not have survived to tell the tale).

Here’s Roy playing surely his most druidic track “The Green Man” from his 70th birthday performance at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The track begins at 4:30 if you don’t want to hear all the introductions, but I would recommend that you give it all a listen for the full picture.

 What a wonderfully gentle, wise and witty man he is. I urge you to introduce him into your life. He’s the only songwriter whose music makes me cry.

Gwas.

I have just got back from The Big Smoke (or London to you and me). I am always in two minds about this place. Now that I am accustomed to the natural surroundings of my Cheshire home with its easy access to the countryside (I step out my front or back doors and it’s there) then I find it difficult to immerse myself in the manic frenzy that is London City. However, it is also exciting for a while, and London has all the virtues of being a cultural hotspot, so I always get to see an interesting  museum, gallery, exhibition or performance. On this occasion I was on the South Bank to see Roy Harper at the Royal Festival Hall, ten years after his last gig there. This time he is seventy. A post will be coming soon about this, but in this post I want to talk about an interesting encounter with some alien objects!

M and I took some hours off before the performance to visit the Natural History Museum. As a child I had been around this museum and was stunned and awed by the incredible exhibits – rack and rack f fossils, dinosaur skeletons, trays of rocks, all animal life stuffed and pinned in shelves and display cabinets in room after room until the eye couldn’t take any more. Now, as an adult, I wanted to go back to look at the collection of meteors that the museum held. I was interested to see how I would react now that I had developed my sensitivity to energy.

London's Natural History Museum

Most major London museums are now free, which is a saving grace. However, there have been some changes made to the museum since I was last there. It’s gone all “kiddy”. Gone are the long racks of beautifully laid out exhibits (boooooring!) and now we have “interactive” exhibits (exciiiiting). Far less of the “show” and much more of the “tell”. I hated it. I hated every second of it. I couldn’t wait to find a safe haven from all the knobs, dials and wheels, the illuminated plastic displays, the childish “learn by picture” storyboarding and the sanctimonious tone of the whole series of sordid scenes supplanting the serious collections. Oh yes, it seems to say, you WILL become an eco-friendly, planet-saving, animal-hugging, rainforest-conscious, water-wary citizen of the world. You WILL! You MUST! Or you are evil and you kill fluffy animals.

I ran for the Rocks and Minerals department. Surely they couldn’t have ruined the rocks? Luckily, they hadn’t. The rocks were still in glass display cases, lined up in rows as far as the eye could see. Wonderful! Museums ”old skool”. Not a flashing bulb or laser experience in sight. No questions to answer. No moral to absorb. Now to find the meteors that I had heard were here.

The Rocks and Gems Gallery of the Natural History Museum

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This year I spent a weekend at a festival that I haven’t been to before. Usually M and I go to the Beautiful Days Festival in Devon in late August, but this year for some reason the Green Man Festival in the Brecon Beacons seemed like an interesting alternative. This annoyed our regular festival-going friends immensely because they were smitten with Beautiful Days, but sometimes you have to strike out on your own to see whether the grass is greener on the other side. We had come to be very familiar with the Beautiful Days scene and its acts, and in a way a change is a better form of rest, to mangle a popular phrase.

The Main Stage at Green Man

We got the site and were amazed at the scale of the layout – only a small car park (you are encouraged to car share or go by public transport) but the camping area was huge and there were lots of performance areas, we discovered. If you’re going next year I’d highly recommend hiring a trolley. We didn’t and regretted it even though we were only carrying enough for two, not a whole family.

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One of our readers Tina, commented on this post about signs and coincidences, I thought it deserved a post because of how related to out work guides and totems are. Here is Tina’s comment:

“Fox is one of my guides, and that began with some amazing experiences of meeting real ones too. I once had to stop for one that crouched in the middle of road and did not get off as I approached in my car. I put my high beam on, and in the brighter light, I could see, in the darkness behind him or her, another fox was crossing with their babies trotting behind. The front fox was risking being run over (obviously I never would but some people here in Oz would have) in order to protect its family.

To me they represent otherworldliness, but tempered with practicality, and they don’t lose their sense of fun either (I was lucky enough to see one playing/dancing in a paddock once) and they are able to adapt to so many conditions. They are true survivors and fantastic guides.”

The first point to make is that what I am about to say is description of my current beliefs, it is what I am holding to be true for me at this moment in time. It doesn’t invalidate what you believe nor does your belief impinge on its validity.

1) My first rule regarding signs, omens, portents or any other word one cares to use is this, that they are deeply personal. A sign is for you. Indeed if you don’t think of an event as a sign, then by definition it isn’t. This is  an important distinction to make as it brings to the fore that another person can’t persuade you that an event is (or isn’t a sign).

2) The second point leads from the first really, an event doesn’t have to be uniquely pointed at you to represent itself as a sign. For example, for me, the Sun coming out of heavy clouds to shine on me whilst I am engaged in work is a sign. Now obviously the sun came out for many other people to, but because I gave it meaning, it becomes a sign.

3) Mutiple people can claim an event as a sign, taking the sun as an example again, Gwas and I often claim this as sign. Each for our own reasons. Thus it is difficult to see how one can lay claim to a sign.

4) A psychological argument is that because we expect a sign, we get one, after all dog barking or a cat mewing can be taken for a sign. Indeed one could find signs everywhere if one is loose enough with their interpretation. I agree. There is no place to go with this counter position.

Examples of signs

Some signs that Gwas and I have experienced and that we regularly encounter is the Sun (less so, the Moon and even less so the Stars) as portents of work that has been well received. Almost unbelievably often, even in the depths of winter and cloud filled skies, work that we have done at sacred sites has resulted in a bathing of sunlight. Specifically this work has to be within the realms of healing the site in some way.

Other signs come from our totems, for instance I adopted the Crow as my totem some years ago (or so it feels, in actuality it may only be two!) and since that time it has been a harbinger of direction. A kind-of: don’t go left, go right or “well done”. We will look at interpretations in a moment.

I distinguish guides/spirits and other sources of information (for instance for me, Ancient Yew Trees) from signs and portents becuase I feel the former are much less cryptic that the latter. Signs to me are Koans to ache the brain. Whereas communingAn interaction with an invisible and natural sentient force that is independently identifiable, even if it cannot be named or classified. The interaction takes place at the level of a subtle amalgamation of the mind of the perceiver such that a dialogue or transference of feelings may occur between the two sentient parties. The interaction that is ‘communing’ is purposefully initiated by the perceiver for the express purpose of learning or simply to transfer feelings in a sympathetic manner. with beings is much more formative, at least the message is a lot longer than just a bird flying in a particular direction!

Good and bad

I don’t believe that signs are good or bad, they are signs. An omen that tells you that there is something bad ahead gives you the chance to avoid it. I think that this misrepresentation of signs comes from people who aren’t good at reading signs (myself included) and thus:

1. they see an omen
2. cant figure out what it means
3. blunder into that which it was warning about
4. associate the omen with the bad event

Sounds like a fair assumtion to make.

Reading omens

This is a tough one, considering that i’m not too brilliant at it myself. Is there a way to get good at it? Yes, I believe so. The key, I feel to omens is intuition. Omens speak to us through our intuition and it is here were work needs to be done to get  better handle on portents.

One of the major difficulties is that we are so mired in reason that if we can’t find a reason for something then we wont follow that path. Reason is a pretty useful characteristic but it needs to take a seat when information comes in through intuition.

The argument that following my intuition leads me into a mess. doesn’t hold very well for the simple “reason” that following your reason can lead you into a mess too. So where does that leave us?

Exercising your intuition isn’t about using it, but about following it. In my humble opinion it has to start with a little faith. This faith of course is in yourself, your trust in your intuition. Recent (the last 6 months frankly) have seen me follow my intuition and it has been an absolute blast. But that’s me!

Prediction

There is a certain element of prediction that goes in with signs and omens. I am in two minds, I have had experiences that have clearly broken temporal law (not only that but have had personal conversations with many others). I have also had ones where I think a confluence of events have precipitated a knowledge of where things seem to be going. As some wise-acre said, if we could figure out the position and trajectory of every atom in the universe we could predict the future.

Our intuition might simply be able to:

1. see a lot more of whats going on
2. recall a lot more than we can cosncioulsy remember
3. add all of this up and come up with a miraculous number
4. present this number to us in an out of the ordinary way

The above scenario is one that I like for most of my intuitive leaps, especially if you thro into the mix that intuition has access to what’s going on in the energetic domain.

It is also quite possible that other beings have access to more info or non temporal information and are passing it on to us. But again I don’t count this as signage.

If you push me for an answer I would say:

1. that energy has a non temporal component
2. this can echo backwards in time
3. because our reason is so stupid it gets in the way of reading this information
4. we thus feel it as an intuitive kick or perceive it as a sign.

Here again we are seeing that it is we that decide on what a sign is and thus we that choose our totems if you will.

A totem isn’t a totem unless you think it is!

Well, I hope that’s provided some points to muse over.

Kal Malik – following signs

The National UK Census is taken every ten years, and has been since the 19th Century. The census form asks a series of questions about who lives in your home, what type of nationality these people are, and then moves on to discuss some more personal aspects, such as a religious affiliation. Some organisations, such as the Druid Network and such are promoting the concept of the Pagan Dash campaign.

The Pagan Dash campaign is trying to get pagans to register their religion, in the “Religion – Other” section, and to put one of their pre-defined standard categories on the census form in order to demonstrate the depth and breadth of the pagan movement. The most appropriate category for me would be “Pagan – Druid“.

This is a very admirable cause and if you are the kind of pagan who believes in strengthening the pagan community then this would be a good way to add your weight to that campaign and who knows, perhaps something positive may come out of it. Which brings me on to why I will not be adding my category into that census form. There are several reasons for this, and I want to spend a short while explaining them, because I feel it also defines my concept of a Hedge Druid.

Hedge Druid – in our out?

Firstly, I’m not getting peeved because there isn’t a standard category called “Pagan – Hedge Druid”, OK? Even if there was, or even if I wanted to put that, I wouldn’t. It’s not that I’m not in favour of those people who like to be pagan and proud. I admire those people, I’m just not one of them, and I don’t want to be one of them for this issue. It’s not that I don’t support issues, either. I do. I tackle environmental issues in my local area directly, indirectly and in any other way that will achieve a positive result.

The sensuous census of 2011

So, why won’t I be putting “Hedge Druid” on the census? Because it makes no difference to anything. It’s not as though the Government is in any way going to change the way they form their policies if I do that. I will not be achieving anything by expressing this, or that I will be making a stronger pagan society by doing it. What I would prefer to do is to feel proud to be a hedge druid, and to continue to live the values that such a lifestyle demands of me every day in my locality. If anyone asks me, I ‘m a hedge druid. If the Government ask me then I wonder why they want to know.

There is a sense in which this desire to be recognised as a religion, or as a movement, a grouping, a cult, a social minority, a whatever – this desire for recognition makes us do things that distract us from the real purpose of being pagan, which is to serve and follow the course of Nature. Nothing will distract me from that, unless it pays my bills! I am not asking for nor seeking any form of external recognition for that fact. I just AM a hedge druid. I know it, and that’s all that matters.

Validate yourself, pagan!

Gwas.

Trees have always been an indicator of the health of our nation. When we had many varieties, many species and many acres of trees in Victorian times we could say that our nation was at one of its peaks. Similarly in the Elizabethan renaissance times. Yet, whenever we have culled those trees, or they have been otherwise decimated, our nation has suffered the consequences. The reflection is almost immediate. So much so that it is difficult to say which came first – the decline or the cull.
At the moment we are facing more tree deaths. Not, as usual, though new house building, although that is on the increase again. This time it is through another in a chain of terminal diseases affecting our beloved tree population and this time, like the dreaded Dutch Elm disease, it is decimating vast populations of trees.

Is this a natural process? When, in our long history, have we ever recorded such reductions in the population of trees through a virulent diease? Well, Google have kindly accumulated just that data, and here it is:

Tree disease timeline

Source : Google

I think the increase is clear – we are either recording such things more and more, or there is a vast increase in the amount of tree diseases around in modern times.

According to this article in the Telegraph, some 60,000 trees have had to be chopped down or marked for felling due to the disease “sudden oak death”, a disease originating from America which has thankfully spared our beloved ancient oaks. In our country it has been larch and rhododendron that has been affected.
I have seen evidence of this myself on the hillsides around where I live. Rhododendrons have been cleared away from paths to stop the spread of the disease.
Yet oaks have also got problems. They are currently being affected by a blight that is killing them off too.

This is all terribly sad, and I believe it is a reflection of how little we care for trees as a society these days. If we turn our thoughts around to help our beautiful and bountiful neighbours – the trees – then they will surely flourish again and we will see the recovery of our land along with them.

Gwas.