Fellowship of All Life

(Image : The Sanctuary, soul card, SG, 2005)

…Personally, I think that “Ecopsychology” is another name for Neo-Druidry. Some may not agree of course, and that is OK, they say that among 10 Druids there are 11 opinions! Lol.

In general and very roughly, there are four groups of so-called “Druids”, and I think that it is very useful to learn how to distinguish them, because they show vastly different ways of being in concrete reality, and also vastly different aims.

The Old Ones, of which practically nothing is known. They didn´t write down their teachings,have never built a temple in stone,  and have not left a mark in History, apart from some really faint traces that have been handed down the long corridors of Time. I list them because they are the genesis, the origin, true or false, of the other three groups.

The Romantic Ones, which are a re-creation of what a past century felt about the subject, a century in which there was no electricity, no highways, no Internet – and in which nothing was really verified. That´s where you can find the robed Druids and Druidesses who know all about casting spells and calling to the ancient gods, though they often dine at McDonald´s; those are the ones that are traipsing through the new forests, or even public parks sometimes since not so many forests are left, in flimsy fake-medieval robes, and trying very hard to look ancient, though most of them haven’t even got to the ripe age of 50. (No offense meant, it is just a passing remark, that happens to be true.)I think that these people are compensating the harsh reality of modern life, the very hardship of what our society has become, through happy dreams.

The Reconstructionists, who are very serious people who think that intuition is a valid way to perceive History, (particularly “His-Story”, lol), and are very precise about a lot of rather vague stuff,

And then there is a new group, which is still largely a sort of seed-group, which is pushing through the earth, straining towards the Sun, like a very modest plant still, – The Future Druids, the Gaian Druids, or Neo-Druids.

Our Druid Grove is part of this last group. We do believe in intuition, use it a lot, but do not think that it is really a valid way to “re-construct” the past, because such an enterprise as rebuilding an imagined past according to non-verified present beliefs distorts what is happening in the present, and sometimes even veils what should be happening if we are to correct past facts that have brought us to this collective disaster of a present, (yes, a long sentence, read it again, lol); we don´t need robes and wands and staves, but yes, we care about the Future of Earth, and in midst of this preoccupation for the becoming of the human species of which we are a part, absolutely, we understand that humanity needs a new Myth, for “without a Vision the people perish”, so, having gone through a real Druid training (OBOD), we might as well be called “Druids”, OK, Neo-Druids, if you will.

…This Vision that we have been so clearly a-creating in our far away valley these last few years, is that of a Humanity that would finally consciously acknowledge the simple fact that we human beings are Children of Planet Earth. Whatever our nations pretend to be, first and foremost we are Gaians, Earthlings. From all Internet users down to Eskimos and Bushmen.

(Sorry to draw such a scale, I actually do not mean to imply that people who are not Internet users are not human, lol.)

Yes, we envision a number of people starting to live the Gaian vision, very discreetly at first, inside themselves to begin with, people living with the clear knowledge that some things have to stop, like the desecration of the planet. I´m talking about people who would truly understand, because they have been coolly trained, that things cannot go on like they are, running around in stupid circles, that something must change, and that this “something” is the very structure of the patriarchal ego, which is an extremely limited historical view, even of physical reality: since man walked on the moon  (at the very least) and invented quantum physics,  we do have a pressing need to get out of the Freudian back alley:

Everything in our lives can be aligned to prosperity, agape *and abundance of intelligence, which is how Nature really works. There is no real necessity to botch human evolution.

We could, yes we could. We could do it, you know. Difficult ? Yes. Impossible ? No. Anyway, what with Climate Change and Peak Oil, we may be forced to change. Change into what, is now The Big Question.

If you find it difficult to accept the idea that our civilization is still barbaric, and that we DO have to evolve as a species, don´t change anything except this basic understanding, which you have to “grok” with your very bones : we are Earthlings, and we will have to deeply acknowledge this fact. Or we will disappear. Easy choice. And a long long process. Do we really have the time?

It all boils down to the fact that all of us are collectively responsible for the welfare of all of humanity, and of the entirety of the planet.

War is a boorish, unrefined, uncultivated, churlish way of facing collective problems. Warriorship as a patriotic demonstration can best be used on an entirely different  level : I mean, a mental way of tackling problems, of grappling with reality. I do think that we have enough enlightened brains on this planet to create an entirely new game.

As for us as a group, as a Project, as a Neo-Druid Grove, we have made that choice already. Actually, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, we are deep into the consequences of it. As a group we have touched the brass tacks of what it means. This sense of consciously  “being on the side of the woods” (as Tolkien says through Treebeard), is what makes us Neo-Druids. We may even, if the Myth becomes as necessary as bread, sew some nice white robes and dance through our very own woods. We may as well, since we so deeply feel part of the Great Fellowship of Life on this Earth.

In this deep sense, we have the Vision of a huge Rainbow of Consciousness/Energy spanning thousands of years, from the Old Ones right down to us, the Druids in jeans. A new Ark of the Covenant, if you will. Or a new lease on our renting this planet from our great-great-grandchildren.

…Rivendell lives! Long live Rivendell!

 ;-)

 PS.- Agape  : Christianity. Love as revealed in Jesus, seen as spiritual and selfless and a model for humanity.

1. Love that is spiritual, not sexual, in its nature.
2. Christianity. In the early Christian Church, the love feast accompanied by Eucharistic celebration.

In the New Testament, the fatherly love of God for humans and their reciprocal love for God. The term extends to the love of one’s fellow humans.

The Final Initiation

(Image : “Druid Review”, final exam, SG, 2009)

A year or so after receiving the lovely scroll that marks the end of my formal training as a Druid at OBOD (actually you may find out that it never ends!), the final Initiation.

…I was in the kitchen, talking with Mika and Adam (the other two parts of the Earth Sanctuary Project´s coregroup) over coffee one morning, about how hard it is sometimes to maintain this land, and how sometimes we would love to travel or go someplace different, smaller, easier, – and how we couldn´t ever go back to living in a town flat, when a sudden realisation hit my brain.

I, who thought I couldn´t ever live in a town again, had the sudden vision that all the trees of the world were now rooted in my heart, and the mountains, and the rocks, and the little river, and all the animals, deer, fox, squirrels and eagles, and that I could, without batting an eye, pack my suitcase and go…anywhere!

Tears just welled up in my eyes.

All the forests of the world are now rooted in my green heart.

I have become the Grove.

Dear Reader and Friends

…I´m up to my ears in “green days”, everything in the gardens is shooting up, up, out and away, the birds that are nesting make a wonderful racket just outside my window, and I´m truly exhausted with so much sheer activity! At night I just want to sink into the cushions of my sofa, and watch some really stupid television programme, which rests my mind no end, and then go to bed and sleep like a log until the birds start their racket again the next morning!…

So, not much time or psychological space for blogging, just now.

´Scuse me, I´ll be back when things go back to normal.

PS.- Mika has started a new blog about her latest passion : ecopsychological macrophotography. (Whoah! A mouthful!) It´s…wow!

A Druid´s Eye

Ya-Ya

(Image : Alex Little, one year old, MDG, 2010)

Note : Ya-Ya means Granny in colloquial Spanish.

It goes something like this…I call my daughter on her cell phone, and Alex responds…

- Bonjour, Alex. It´s me. La Ya-Ya de la gallinas (the granny of the chicken coop, a very fresh discovery) How are you ?

Comes a small lilting voice, but with a very precise lilt, like an early imitation of grown-up language…

- Ya-Ya? Ya-Ya-ah! Deh-deh-deh-deh-deh-deh-dhe…

- Hello, my little heart. And how are you today?

- Ya-YA! Ya-YA! Ghe-ghe-ghe-ghe-ghe-ghe-ghe!…

(OK, not a poem from Aristoteles, but hey, it makes sense, at least to this ya-ya!)

- Yes, my love. Now we come for you. Let´s go to the beach. Would you like that ?

- Ya-Ya! Ya-Ya!  Bah-bah – mahhhhhhhh…(=más/more/yes)…

And a piercing scream…Screeeeeeeech!!!

My daughter´s voice  :

- Mum? Can you call me back now? He doesn´t want to let go of the phone!…

Aaaah. To be loved by a one-year old (who looks like Leo di Caprio, but the tinier version!)

The Mystical Experience

(Image : Soul card,  SG, 2009)

“The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darknesses.” (N. Kazantzakis)

“God has no religion.” (Mahatma Gandhi)

…I had several deep mystical experiences from the age of 8 to the age of 30, “peak moments” as they came to be called in Humanistic Psychology; all of them, each one of them, changed my life in a profound way.

I´m over 60 now, so it took me at least 30 years to completely integrate what happened when I was younger.

The first difficulty, as one can imagine, is how to remain rooted in reality when one just had the realization with all one´s senses and with absolute certainty that one is a conscious part of what other people have been calling “God”. I never ever said that I was “God”, but I said that I was an awakened part of what people call “God”, the same as us all. You really get to have to make sense of what you´re saying, and that wasn´t easy. Fortunately for me the contents of the experiences and the Vision that I slowly acquired also showed me that there were ways to say what happened without offending anyone! My experiences never inflated the ego, as they so often do. The heart of the mystical experience is too beautiful to be mistaken for something that an ego could produce, that much was clear from the start.

After that, after having been shown the interconnectedness of all, of the Great Chain of LIFE, of which I was now a conscious link, I really studied hard to get a sense of normalcy again. Except for a certain dancing light in my eyes, I functioned in the most normal way. Being “enlightened”, as they say, is no guarantee for being a balanced human being. And it is so, point-blank right on the nose! Hard work on oneself does that. I understood that very early on. And I did work hard on the person that I also was.

The sense of awe and the certainty that “all-is-Light” never left me. But I came to understand what the experience meant in contrast to what we are being fed through “education”. I studied hard then to be, one day, able to help others out of the dark tunnel of ignorance.

I also learned – sometimes quite painfully – that not everyone wants to hear the good news.

All in all, and with all, my life was changed forever and the more I understood, the more my view of the human plight changed, became more precise, more defined. The process of enlightenment is a gradual one, a continuous one, though the experience itself is more like a flash, out of time. If you think that it is a “wambam thank you m´am!” (lol)type of thing and you´re done, no, that´s not it at all. It is a long process of becoming more and more able to contain the Light, and to reflect it in a safe way. Progressively all functions align to the inner Light, until you are completely “normal” again, and seen as normal by others. The difference is just that you are being awake where most people seem to be fast asleep. This sleep being an illusion, as I learned going through the process of becoming a guide.

Enlightenment, my dears, is the basis of the normal human state of affairs, so you can measure how far we have strayed, as a species, from Home.

The Prajnaparamita Sutra

(Image : A snowy day at the Sanctuary, MDG)

…I am re-reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav – a little gem of a book about the New Physics.

Read this : (…)” The neutral K meson decays into a positive pi meson and a negative pi meson. The lambda particle, and this is the interesting part, decays into the original two particles (a negative pi meson and a proton!). It is as if we smash two toy automobiles together and instead of shattering into bits, they come apart into more toy automobiles, some of which are as large as the originals.

Subatomic particles forever partake of this unceasing dance of annihilation and creation. In fact subatomic particles are (author´s emphasis) this unceasing dance of annihilation and creation. This twentieth-century discovery, with all its psychedelic implications, is not a new concept. In fact, it is very similar to the way that much of the earth´s population, including the Hindus and the Buddhists, view their reality.

Hindu mythology is virtually a large-scale projection into the psychological realm of microscopic scientific discoveries. Hindu deities such as Shiva and Vishnu continually dance the creation and destruction of universes while the Buddhist image of the wheel of life symbolizes the unending process of birth, death, and rebirth which is a part of the world of form, which is emptiness, which is form.”

“…form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” (Prajaparamita Sutra, The Heart Sutra, Mahayana Buddhism).

Other extremely interesting books in the same line :

- The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra

- The Quantum self, Dana Zohar

- The Physics of Consciousness, Evan Harris Walker.

PS.- Every time the wind blows hard up at the Sanctuary, the lights go out, power lines go too, so no computer, no DVD, no warm water (the heater has gone too!), no nothing, lol, and I´m reduced to reading a book, in my bed (for warmth!) in the light of candles!… For others a nuisance, for me…heaven!

…Back to work!

(Image : The Coming World, collage on paper, SG 2004)

Whoah. Mika showed me two articles that jolted me awake!

I want to share them, they contain so much information about what we are really about, that I simply had to come back:

Theodore Roszak  (Ecology : Eight Principles)

The Forsaken Garden  (Nancy Riley, a must-read)

The Lady Dragon turns about in her lair, and turns and turns around and around, and settles down again, back to her winter snooze (…not guaranteed not to be interrupted again!)

It´s the connection, silly!

Hello, Friends.

Have been doing other things, out of the virtual world, because I have had problems with my computer.

Last week, it was Wuthering Heights-time again up our mountain, the autumn winds were howling through the house, and I could have knit socks for my daughter´s baby just waiting for the comp to click from one page to the other! (Actually, in-between pages I´m reading a Medieval thriller, Sovereign, by C.J. Sansom, it´s a fun and fascinating view on the Tudor  times). I have been jumping out of my patient self quite a few times now, so we called a technician, and I´ll just take the week-end off to calm down. Hooray.

(I still don´t get it, though, they tell me (“they”,you know, the computer geniuses I have around me!)… “Oh, it must be the connection! It´s awfully windy outside!…” What connection ? What has the wind outside to do with the computer ? Aren´t the cables safe or…even worse, are they leaking? Are the cables leaking words ? Hahaha. ¿Or?  Lol.)

Anyway, I´ll switch it off now, and let the professionals have a go at it…;-)

Ciao, see you on Monday, then..

Be well, be safe, be content.

Angel Mandalas

(Image : Angel Mandala, SG, 09)

…Finished my Module 3 of Diana Cooper´s Angel Correspondence Course. And no, I haven´t gone gaga, for me angels are bits of our potential energy that we cannot recognize yet as our own, so it´s nice to know more about the flying armada, lol. Been involved with the angelical Hierarchy, and it´s been really nice, from Baby Alex as Little Angel, to the Archangel Michael and His companions, lots and lots of material for me as an artist. I was really inspired to draw some magnificent Mandalas.

Also, I have finished my OBOD Course, and am “officially” a Druid grad now. It´s been a lot – a LOT - of work, and very intense, for four years (not to mention the twenty years before joining OBOD, which were my real Training as a Druid). So now I have to think about the next step. I feel a bit disoriented without the Gwersu (OBOD monographies).

Anyway-s, this is Samhain, and I´m sorting stuff, as I told you.

…Have to think ´bout this blog too. Happy Birthday, blog, you´re one year old now! (And you have travelled a lot!…)

Love and Blessings Most Bright to all readers,

The Lady Dragon.

(PS.- Yup, next blog I hope will be a picture of my new dragon tattoo. Have to stop Mika in her tracks, she´s the one with the super camera and is up and down the stairs preparing for a visit from England.)

Art as Magic

(Image : Art Journal, SG 2009)

I am in the process of creating my own School, (Druidry and Ecopsychology), and I want art to be a priority in the School´s curriculum, this is very important to me. Where people cannot *think*, they can usually draw, or do collage or other easy stuff, and the results are almost always amazing.

I´m not interested in art for art´s sake, my own brand is more adventurous, and less conventional. I have called it “soul-connected art”, and that is exactly what I mean.

A friend has expressed her opinion of my point of view so well, in answer to an e-mail of mine in one of the art groups I´m participating in, that I will just copy what she said :

“I think you defined what art means to you very well indeed.And I also think it will be fairly easy to integrate art into your School of Psychosynthesis. Almost all of the things/styles/ projects you do, and the things we’ve done in the various groups, can be used as tools to help the people who come to you develop and deepen their insight into self and connectedness, whether it be handmade art journals, soulcards, spirit dolls, painting, altered books, objects, or any of the many other things. Like you, I think art can and should be an integral part of your curriculum, because both the process and the product are important to self-actualisation and a path to empowerment. I’ve found that many people have been brought up to consume art, but what they need to learn is how to create art and through that to communicate who and what they are, what they may be, first to themselves and then to others.”

That is it, in a nutshell. My friend calls this “art-ing”, art as a verb – and I also see it that way : art as a verb, a living energy that moves, a process, not as a dead “thing”, not as an end-product. My joy is to see other people ex-press themselves, giving a voice, a visible space to the wonderful images that they carry inside.

Art, in our Druid School, has to do with the Bards, of course. As Ecopsychology has to do with the Ovates, and Psychosynthesis with the Druids.

I´ll keep you informed on SYNERGY´s progress, we want to take it step by secure step.