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THE DRUIDS ARE COMING! Plant a tree.

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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.

Do Not Speak, and You Will Be Heard

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Today I approached my altar in silence. Speaking the words out loud, my standard approach to a daily ritual, felt unnecessary. In my mind, in my heart, the words rang out with perfect clarity, and I trusted that whomever needed to hear them would.

The effort I put into my daily practice waxes and wanes, and it is influenced a great deal by my emotional state. Some days I don’t feel I have it in me to make offerings of gratitude and thanks to the Kindred. There are financial concerns, piles of paperwork on the desk, and sticky-notes of errands that have been neglected. When I wake up with a busy brain I have a very difficult time making space for piety.

But today in my ritual, rather than using my voice to will the space into stillness, I went inward. I turned my gaze into the depths and found that there was already plenty of space for reverence. Caverns of it, really. And the stillness came.

To my delight, I found that the richness of my meditative, magickal work increased in this state of silent dialogue. My small candle flame transformed into the great, Sacred Fire with a force that it hadn’t before. The chalice became the Well, and reached deep into the center of the earth, effortlessly. In between the two stood the Great Tree, broad and majestic, and full of life.

All of this happened in a silent room, and it was only possible – I think – because I’ve been faithful to my daily practice to the point where the words I speak out loud could finally be internalized. The Kindred listen in ways that are beyond my imagination. The spirits of the land and of our ancestors are sentient, I believe, but I’m not sure how. I think that I was persistent in speaking out loud because I thought there was a connection between the sound of my voice and their ability to hear. This may have even been a lesson I was taught.

But I don’t believe it’s true. I don’t believe we need to approach the Kindred — the Gods of our heart — with the idea that their limitations are easily conceivable. They may not, as many Pagans have presumed, be omni-anything, but the exact shape of their being remains a mystery.

Sometimes I think the Pagan Humanists have it right in their approach to their practice. They see the Gods as archetypes, but they also see the archetypes as our entry into deeper engagement with the greatness, the expansiveness, the mystery of the Gods. In a way, I’d rather suspend my need to affirm some definite conception of the Gods if it allowed me to approach Them with greater reverence and wonder.

Does that make sense?

Before today, I spoke out loud in my room because I thought I needed to do so in order to be heard, in order for my ritual to be successful. But I’ve discovered that I can have the experience of being heard without speaking at all. It feels like there are greater ramifications to this discovery that I can’t yet see.

Does this inspire something in you?

When Psychic Attack Hits Home

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It was a normal morning at home. I was reading a book about Proto-Indo-Europeans while my dogs slept on the couch next to me, and my husband was off at our local metaphysical store, trading a psychic reading with an astrologer.

Admittedly, our “normal” is not really prime-time normal.

I looked up from what I was doing, and I saw my husband walking toward the house from his car with a horrible expression on his face. Agony, perhaps? Pain? He came in and I asked him what was wrong.

“Migraine. A terrible migraine.”

I ushered him to the bedroom, got him a rag for his head, and helped him lay down to try to sleep off the pain. He was out for almost an hour an a half, which is quite unusual for him, even in a situation like this.

When he rose, he told me that he believed that something was “on him,” but he didn’t really know what that meant. While he slept, he had a rather disturbing dream; one that woke him up with a fright. In meditation early that morning his guide said to be aware of someone or something coming after him. He didn’t know what to make of that message when it was given to him, but he was reminded of it now as we stood in the kitchen, his head still throbbing despite the nap.

“I’m thinking this might be… and I don’t really believe in this… psychic attack.”

My husband is a gifted channel and psychic reader, but he is also a very logical, skeptical thinker. It is common for him to encounter some widely accepted phenomena in the New Age world and have an immediate suspicion that it’s “just made up.” He also understands that psychic work is a balance of intuition and imagination, so one might say that what he does is also “just made up.” Nonetheless, he finds cause to question.

I think this kind of questioning is good among psychic folk and magick workers. We have to be observant of what our experience tells us, and if there is not yet an experience to inform what we know we are well served to be inquisitive. Blind acceptance leads to wishy-washiness, I think, and unreliable results.

But here we were, trying to sort through the cause of this unexpected pain, and psychic attack seemed to make the most sense. Neither of us had dealt with this before, but I, for one, was willing to accept that this was the cause and start searching for a remedy.

(Incidentally, if there is ever desire for proof that I possess a deep, ancient, earthy magic inside of me — something that my grandma has, and my mother as well — all you need to do is mess with someone I love. I guarantee you — you’ll feel it.)

I urged my husband to reach out to a fellow psychic and colleague of his, and while he did I called upon my Patron for Her aid in this matter. As I said, I don’t have experience at dealing with this type of situation, and I’m not completely sure what my beliefs are on the subject, either. So, it seemed best to place the whole thing at the feet of a Goddess.

My husband’s colleague confirmed his suspicion. It was, indeed, psychic attack. We went back to the metaphysical shop and reached out for help from our friend and in-house herb-worker, who made him a scrub and gave him a mantra to chant. We headed home, and by that time he was beginning to feel a little better. I, on the other hand, felt like my belly was on fire.

Something seems to have shifted now. His pain is gone, and there isn’t the sense of something heavy on him like there was before. I was able to work off the rest of my defensive anger at the gym before I did anything rash. It appears that the attack has passed.

Now, I’m left with questions.

What do you think psychic attack is? Do you understand it to be some form of malevolent magick, or do you think the whole idea is hogwash?

Have you ever been in a situation where psychic attack seemed like the obvious cause for a malady? Was your suspicion proven or disproven?

Even having had this experience, I feel the subject is worth some further exploration, and I’d love to know what you think and what similar (or vastly different) experiences you might have had.

The Spiritual, the Mundane, and the Cash Money

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Some days, it’s all we can do not to break.

Yesterday felt like one of those days.

I’ve done well to keep my focus on matters of spiritual growth since returning from my Pagan pilgrimage. I’ve kept my daily practice, and I’ve delighted in the conversations we’ve had here on the blog about leadership, purpose and the wants and needs of the Pagan community. I’ve approximated the feeling of being swept up in the fervor of rituals, workshops and sacred dancing, as best I could. But yesterday felt like a cold bucket of water got dropped on my sacred fire.

Discussions of finance, budgets, work prospects and work shortages don’t feel all that mystical. If there was a moment when the perceived difference between the magickal and the mundane was clearly evident, it happened yesterday as I sat at my dining room table, papers spread out in front of me, forehead to palm. Mundane is not strong enough a word to describe how un-enchanted the whole process felt.

I don’t suspect that I’m alone in this experience. How many of us feel weighed down by the practical matters of our life? The last days of the month, the first days of the month, the middle of the month — these are moment where we are called to focus on what it really takes to power our laptops, pay for our sage smudges and keep us connected to our real and virtual communities through sites like this. In truth, my transformative experience at PantheaCon was only made possible by charging a hotel room, a plane ticket and registration costs to my credit card.

I’m paying interest on my transcendental weekend. Chew on that for a second.

Judge if you will, but anyone with student loan bills understands what this feels like. We borrow money in order to have the experience we wish to have. It’s how it works for most of us, right? As I think about returning to college to become better educated in religious studies, the very real question of “How am I going to pay for this?” is on repeat in my mind, and I don’t know the answer right now.

(He feels his palm drifting back to his forehead.)

I took a Money Magick class once, and I loved it. The teacher, who has since become a friend, talked about money being magickal. She encouraged us to use paper money, and to think of each bill as a talisman. She taught us how to charge our cash-money with our intentions, how and why to keep it well-organized in our wallets, and she emphasized the value in only spending the money you have. She kept saying that money, a source of so much stress, should be thought of in spiritual terms. It isn’t mundane; it’s magick.

Now, on the morning after my stress-binge, I feel the need to consider, either out of a desperate desire to reclaim my lost PantheaCon-bliss or a less-selfish, more compulsive need to understand a universal truth, that there is no mundane reality; it’s all spiritual.

I’ve heard this idea suggested before. T. Thorn Coyle is campaigning across the Pagan world to eliminate the word from our vocabulary, and she’s not alone. It came up in several venues at PantheaCon. People want to ditch the idea of mundane, and I wonder if this is possible. More importantly, I wonder if that would really benefit us.

I know that when I do ritual, as many of us do, I envision the space being made sacred, either through some sort of visualization or through a physical act. If there is no mundane reality, and all is spiritual or holy, then is my act of sanctifying the space more about me than it is the space? I value my rites of sanctification. Whether or not they serve some essential, spiritual purpose, they are psychologically effective. I wonder, though, if that’s all they are.

How do you reconcile this difference between spiritual and mundane? Is there one, from your perspective? Could you conceive of the mundane as a kind of forgetfulness? A lack of remembrance about the true, spiritual nature of reality? If you’ve ever found yourself sitting at your dining room table, bills and forms staring back at you, did the experience feel particularly spiritual to you? Could you find a way to perceive it as such?

I’d love to know what you think about this subject. Sharing your thoughts and experiences in the comment section might provide me, or another reader of Bishop in the Grove, with some very valuable, very useful insights.

Where Does Belief Belong?

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I’m having a difficult time identifying the right place for belief.

I was brought up a Christian. Episcopalian, to be specific. Belief, for me, was connected to creeds. If you’ve never recited a creed, it goes like this:

I believe X, and X is this. X did this, was this, is going to be this.

I also believe in Y. Y is this relationship to X, and Y is this.

I believe in Z, too…

It’s a little math-like, when you remove all the personal pronouns.

Creeds are useful in the way that they unify a group, but they do little to inform the individual about beliefs. I didn’t really come to the believe in “One God” through any mystical experience. There just always was One. It was the first line of the creed, after all.

This morning I had a somewhat spirited conversation about the commonly held belief in certain Christian sects that the world is somewhere in the vicinity of 6-8000 years old. The notion raises my hackles a bit. An Earth timeline is nowhere to be found in the creeds of my youth, and it wasn’t something that ever came up in a sermon, either. We didn’t use the Bible to determine the age of rocks.

But, my resistance to this Christian belief was called into question. How could I, someone who has encountered a god that I believe to be Arawn, the Welsh god of the Underworld — which is quite specific an assessment for something so illusive as Deity — take issue with anything that someone else believes? Where exactly do I draw the line between empirical thinking and magickal thinking?

Schooled On Belief

I’m taking a class right now through Cherry Hill Seminary, a Pagan Seminary in North Carolina, called, “Why Magickal Thinking Isn’t Crazy.” The class is being taught by a Harvard schooled physicist, who is also a Wiccan. It’s a four week course that’s open to anyone, regardless of your level of education or experience.

We’ve been engaging a lot with the principles of scientific thinking in the first two weeks, looking at how information is gathered, calculated and researched. Magickal thought and practice, as we’re examining is, can be understood to encompass phenomenon that exist inside and outside of Pagan culture, including Meditation, Prayer, Remote Viewing, Psychokinesis, and Channeling.

The purpose of looking at things scientifically is to show that these phenomenon are real. They are measurable — at least, most of them — and they should be given legitimacy.

I’m mostly having an easy time with this class, but I’m running into some issues with reconciling imperial thought with magickal though. It turns out I’m more inclined to be a binary thinker than I would have guessed.

I want to say, without reservation, that the world is older than 8000 years. I also want to accept, whole-heartedly, that people can communicate with gods. I resist thinking that the world is 8000 years old because there is empirical evidence that speaks to the contrary. Yet, there is little to no empirical evidence that speaks to the existence of Deity in any form — singular or plural — and yet I have no problem with accepting my own personal experience.

Belief as a Catylst

Belief informs action. We believe something about the world, and then we relate to the world based on what we believe. If we believe that the world is constantly being held together by super-strong, invisible, winged and sparkly creatures, then we might live our lives giving thanks to those creatures. We might be on the lookout for them. Our actions, in many situations, would be informed by this belief.

I’m ok with that, even though I don’t hold that belief. I don’t see the potential for immediate harm done to me by another person holding that belief either.

But then I start thinking about the belief that some have the Deity bestows power, and that that power is being directed to a certain end. I’ve seen this in Christian circles (as has anyone been paying attention to the media these days), and I’ve seen it in Pagan circles, too. I was at a Full Moon ritual where the group raised energy and directed it to the universe in order to “bring to justice” a person who had inflicted harm on another person who was said to be “one of our own.” The working wasn’t explicitly malicious, but it had some ugly undertones.

People who do magick, who direct energy in a certain way, are operating on a set of beliefs about how that energy works in the world, and how it should work in the world. So, belief and action are connected there, too.

But should they be? What are we to do with belief, especially considering that belief has proven to be much more a divider than a uniter among peoples?

Should we throw belief to the wind, or can we imagine engaging with belief in a way that still allows for us to live in the world with people who believe something completely different than us?

I want to know what you think about belief. Do you see your belief influencing the way you interact with others? Did you come to your belief through a religious upbringing, or did you construct your beliefs outside of religion? Do you experience personal conflict when you encounter someone whose beliefs are radically different than you own?

Leave your thoughts and beliefs in the comment section. And, if you’d like to expand the conversation even further, share this post on Facebook and Twitter!