Amazon.com Widgets
Currently viewing the tag: "Trees"

THE DRUIDS ARE COMING! Plant a tree.

Written By on

Open yourself to the movement of creativity in your life, and there is no telling what will happen.

I have a tradition of rearranging plastic, magnetic letters on the back of my local coffee shop’s espresso machine to make ridiculous phrases. While waiting for my chai (much lower in caffeine than the triple espresso I used to drink), I make my silliness all over the silver, Italian shininess.

A few examples of my literary genius:

(Many will testify to the truth about Dave)

(This one inspired many a sour expression from behind the bar)

And, this heartfelt confession:

(MD, that is.)

This tradition bring me great happiness. I cannot tell you how giddy I become as shuffle through the available letters. My imagination goes wild. It’s childlike, and rather amusing to my friends at Kaladi Coffee.

Yesterday, in a particularly inspired moment, I assembled a rather large phrase. Rarely have I brought elements of Paganism or Druidry onto the magnetic board, but I was inspired to make an exception.

Where it all began.

I couldn’t stop giggling. I giggled all the way home, like a This Little Piggy. This one made me so happy.

Once home, I opened up my computer to discover that it had made a lot of other people happy, too. There was a tremendous response on Facebook to the phrase. In less than a few minutes, over 35 people had liked the picture, and a few had even shared it.

This may be something, I thought.

So, I thew it out there:

Again, the response was tremendous.

Yes, yes, yes, I heard. I would buy that. I love that. That’s awesome.

The giggling, it appears, was contagious.

I’m not sure what happened next. The subsequent four hours were a bit of a blur.

I know that Photoshop was involved, and a furious hunting through fonts. I pulled a public domain graphic of an acorn (appropriate for Druids), and arranged a few different designs of the phrase. I set up a Cafe Press store (which was much easier than I imagined), played with some HTML, registered a domain name (TheDruidsAreComing.com), and set up a Facebook page and Twitter account (because branding makes sense to me).

Seriously, I was a little manic.

Then, without giving it much more though, I let my new creation loose into the world.

THE DRUIDS ARE COMING!!

Yes. I went to town.

I share this story not simply to hawk my wares. I think the story illustrates an important lesson we often forget.

Magick exists, it is real, and it isn’t necessarily the bi-product of complicated ritual. It’s much more immediate than you might think. You can create change, even a small one, with the directed, focused use of your own will. You can do it with a humorous flavor (i.e. farting unicorns), or in ways that draw attention to important matters, like planting trees. But it’s right there at your fingertips, waiting for your giggle to unleash it.

This TDAC venture isn’t me trying to save the world. It’s just an example of how a person can bring something into being which was not there before, and how the process can be so much fun.

To do my part, though, I’m donating 10% of my humble TDAC profits to ADF and 10% PlantABillion.org. Seems like the right thing to do, considering that one grows Druids and the other grows trees. I might end up giving away more. This could end up leading to something much bigger. Who knows?

At the very least, I hope that my TDAC experiment will raise some awareness about Druids, about the need for more trees, and about the amazing, abundant, ever-present creativity that exists in each of us.

So tell me —

Have you ever had a burst of creativity that led to an unexpected project? Have you discovered ways to support your religious and spiritual communities that seemed to come out of thin air?

Share them!

Then, plant a tree.

You Can Take a Druid Out of the Woods…

Written By on

In the morning, after (almost) sleeping through a night of 28 degree weather, I headed to the edge of the water to make my offerings. Pumpkin seeds were what I had to give, for they were what I had to eat. I proceeded through the same ritual I outlined in my post last week, only this time I did it while standing in the morning sun.

When I’m in the city, I sometimes lift my hands up toward the ceiling of my bedroom, my office, or whatever sacred space I’ve constructed, and imagine that I’m feeling the warmth of the sun. I also imagine that my feet become roots and extend deep into the earth, deep into the coolness of the underground waters. This practice is a part of the Two Powers meditation, a grounding and centering meditation used by ADF.

Standing beside the reservoir, I thought perhaps I should do the Two Powers meditation now. So I lifted my hands up to the sky, and when I felt the warmth of the sun — the actual warmth, and not the imagined warmth — I was taken aback.

I opened my eyes and I saw the water. The actual water.

The Two Powers meditation felt a little silly to do at that point, ’cause I was in the sun and I could almost feel the water on my skin. I didn’t need to imagine anything.

Instead, my mediation would be to open my eyes, open my heart, and feel with all of my being what was around me; to recognize that all of this was the Earth Mother.

This weekend in the mountains gave me some perspective on my religious practice.

Druidism will be a living religion so long as it continues to focus on the living earth. As bookish as we Druids may be, the soil is our truest scripture. The work we do at home, the practice we develop in solitude, should — perhaps even must — inform our experience of the living earth, not simply the metaphoric earth.

One can make the sun into a symbol, or the water into a symbol, or just about any tree, bird, and plant into a representation of some human experience, but concordances which seek to place all of nature within a human framework (this tree represents this emotion, or that god is good for this human activity) are little different than a Catholic concordance of saints. Plus, they can trick the city-dwelling Pagan into thinking that the natural world is only metaphor for the inner human world.

It’s more than that.

The tree doesn’t always need to represent something. It can simply be alive, and beautiful.

I came back to the city with a real desire to return to the mountains; to be outside. I spend a lot of time in my head each day, but not near enough time in the dirt.

I need to find a way to bring an awareness of the living earth into my daily life.

The question is, how? (My husband says, “Weeding, sweetie. There is weeding.”)

So, I turn to you, friends. You showed up in droves to share your intense nature experiences, and I’m going to ask that you join in the dialogue again.

How do you do it? How do you bring an awareness of the living earth into your daily life? Do you do it by getting out into your neighborhood? By gardening? Do you volunteer with the park service? What do you do?

Or, if you’ve found yourself in a state where you don’t do this, what could you imagine doing to bring this awareness into your life?