There are mornings when the world is so quiet you can almost hear the spruce breathe. On those mornings I take my prayer book and a thermos out to the bluff, and I sit until the fog decides what it wants to do. The fog has its own pace. It is not in a hurry to reveal anything, and it has a way of teaching you not to be in a hurry either.
I came to druidry sideways—through poems, mostly, and through the slow accumulation of small noticings. A friend once told me I had become “the kind of person who knows the names of ferns,” and meant it as gentle teasing, but I took it as an unintended blessing. To name a thing is, in both traditions I love, an act of attention. Adam in the garden. Taliesin at the cauldron. Both, it turns out, are listening.
The three rays
The bards drew awen as three rays falling from above—/|-–and meant by it the flowing inspiration that fills the singer when the singer is quiet enough to be filled. The Orthodox iconographers paint the same gesture, more or less, in the haloes of the saints. Three points of gold, three rays diffusing. The vocabulary is shared. The grammar is not always the same.
What I keep returning to is the posture. Both traditions teach a kind of waiting that is not passivity. The druid in the grove, the monk in the cell. Neither is bored. Neither is impatient. Both have learned, by the slow erosion of years, that the wind comes when the wind comes, and that the work in the meantime is to remain a worthy instrument.
I do not know what to do with this yet. I am writing it down.