Let me try to explain how I’m feeling right now.

When I exhale, my breath shakes a little. Not the crying kind of shake, but almost the laughing kind of shake.

My fingers are cold, which is partly on account of the freezingness of Colorado (and I’m using that word, regardless of what the auto-spell says), but they’re not so cold that I can’t type. A candle is burning on my desk, lit from the candle on my shrine, and I’m smiling.

I’m happy.

The first Solitary Druid Fellowship liturgy is now available. I just published it.

I suppose this feeling is related to nervousness, but it isn’t exactly that. It’s more like a nervous/pride/relief cocktail.

I didn’t know if this day would come. I didn’t know if this out-of-the-box approach, this new form –which even for me is an experiment– would live. For a while there, mostly through the months of September and October, I was a wreck about it. It was like I was living in suspended animation, unable to really move forward in any of my projects.

But once the approval from ADF leadership came, everything opened up. And now, just a few days out from the Winter Solstice, there are the beginnings of a shared practice.

I am chugging this cocktail.

All of what SDF is doing is necessarily incomplete. It is not a finished product, because it isn’t a product. It isn’t a thing that’s being sold. It’s a service that’s being shared, and it will necessarily evolve as we move forward and get a better sense of what kind of service truly needs to be provided.

So far I’ve been fortunate enough to get the support of two ADF members to post to the SDF blog, Kristin McFarland and Rev. Michael J Dangler. There are other writers on board whose upcoming posts will include reflections on the solitary practice for an ADF noobie, what resources a solitary Druid might seek out in order to deepen her practice, and [CALLING ALL ADF SOLITAIRES] how people from different hearth cultures incorporate their cultural idiosyncrasies into a solitary practice.

There has also been discussion about creating some kind of daily practice. I love this idea, and I haven’t really wrapped my mind around it yet. I almost think we’d need to develop several different kinds of daily practices to suit the needs of different solitaries. There could be a more formal liturgy for daily practice, which might be slightly  longer (say, 10 to 20 minutes). We could also have a brief, 3-5 minute liturgy, or even a series of brief prayers. There are already wonderful resources for prayers, like A Book of Pagan Prayer and A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book [Fields Bookstore links], but even the author of those books encourages us to write new words that resonate with us.

The long and the short? There’s a lot more to come.

About a dozen people have received the liturgy as of writing this post, and more keep coming. It’s surreal. I hope that they like it. And I don’t say that because I hope that they like me. I just hope that it resonates for them, and that it’s useful.

One last bit:

I’ve made the choice to keep SDF a mostly comment-free site. There will be posts where dialogue is invited, but there is also a desire to keep some of the pages and posts streamlined and clear of conversation. I think this allows for certain information to remain true to its published form, at least on the site itself, so that newcomers to SDF will not feel so much like they are walking into a conversation that is already taking place.

That being said, I’m a big believer in dialogue. If you’ve read my blog for any period of time you know that.

So, if there is anything that you’d like to voice about SDF that you haven’t been able to on SolitaryDruid.org, please feel free to open up that dialogue in this post. I’d love to hear from you.

Then, pop over and get your copy of the first Solitary Druid Fellowship liturgy!

*sips cocktail*