Join Druid Journal on Facebook to view the Word of the Week. This week: daffodil. Jeff Lilly is a druid, linguist, and author of one of the most popular druid blogs, much to his surprise. He writes about druid things -- meditation, relationship with Spirit, soulful fulfillment in scholarship and art, reconnecting the ancient with the modern, creating beauty, and healing the world. He is a member of a number of druid organizations, including AODA, OWO, and OBOD, and does ritual rather ineptly but earnestly in the Pittsburgh, PA area with the Sycamore Circle. He lives with his partner Ali and her cat Cu.
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In the winter woods the world is all black and white, branches and trunks and twigs crosshatching against the sky and snow. Here there are edges and limits: the white polyhedra of sky with hard black wooden frames, the unambiguous snowline between earth and heaven, the icy and unyielding tree bark, the frozen water, even the mucus building up in my esophagus to reinforce the boundary between me and the chilled air. The woods are drawn with pure black ink on pure white paper.
We walk out, listening to the silence enclosing the small sounds of our boots in the snow and the little whispers of wind. At the top of the hill, we can see the lights of the homes and streets through the trees, a sea of city surrounding an island of park. We are going down into the woods to meditate and connect with the new moon, the new sun, and the new year.
This is the shape of a world at its birth: simplicity, edges, purity. At the beginning of the universe, mass and energy were one, and the four forces were united into a single field, in a cosmic egg of such primal simplicity that it had no size, shape, or duration. And now, with the rebirth of the small, weak sun, the world is reduced to frozen waste punctuated by isolated chunks of hibernating life, each huddled alone against the cold.
Loneliness may not be pleasant, but it is simple. Continue reading Winter’s Woods
Year is originally from way back in Proto-Indo-European, yer, meaning “doer”, i.e. one who does something or makes something. It became jæram in Proto-Germanic, and gear in Old English, before softening to year in modern English. Energetically, year packs a lot of punch; it’s a forceful, powerful, high-strung burst.
2009 definitely packed a punch. A lot of folks I know had a pretty rotten 2009 — losing jobs, losing marriages, losing family. 2009, as a doer, seems to have done a lot of people wrong. I had a great year myself, but certainly I went through a lot of changes, not all of them easy.
Overall, our species is in quite a fix: the world economy continues to sputter, the world environment is under constant and accelerating attack, and people just keep on going to war, and murdering each other. On the other hand, the chances for improvement have never been better — so many of us are connected to each other, and committed to change, and believe change is possible…
But we need more than connection, commitment, and belief. We need maturity. And it’s going to be hard to get. Continue reading Year 2010
There are only two kinds of plots in true science fiction: Science is a Hero, and Science is a Villain.
In Science is a Hero, there is some problem or other — an asteroid is going to hit the Earth, the Galactic Empire is falling, there’s a Plague IN SPACE!! — and the heroic characters unabashedly use Science to deflect the asteroid, restore Galactic civilization, cure the plague, and, not infrequently, have sex in zero-G. Ain’t Science great?
In Science is a Villain, Science itself is the problem. Science unleashes dinosaurs, Frankenstein monsters, unstoppable robot armies, murderous computers, super-soldiers, atomic horror, etc., and humanity has to fight them off. Sometimes humanity barely wins, at great cost. Other times we lose. Science makes a nasty Villain. Moral: Science sure can be dangerous, kids!
These two kinds of stories echo our ambivalent attitude towards technology, of course. Real life science has cured countless social ills and brought previously-unimaginable wonders, but it has also caused social upheaval and brought previously-unimaginable horrors. It’s no surprise that the stories that are most famous, the ones that keep us up at night, are the villain ones: HAL 9000, velociraptors, Terminator, the Matrix… The villains, the nightmares, echo most closely the demons we’re wrestling. Continue reading Man vs. Machine: John Henry, Science Fiction, and the March of Progress
A Guest Post by Ali, of Meadowsweet & Myrrh
 Jeff’s last post illustrated very well the kind of divisive rhetoric utilized in most political speeches these days, language that takes for granted an implicit superiority of American citizens and soldiery, and that rejects understanding, compassion and forgiveness for fear that such things will lead to acceptance of and complicity in violence (that is, those forms of violence deemed unacceptable by the State). His post, by reversing the target of this rhetoric, raised a lot of hackles and provoked a lot of feedback, through comments and email, about the basic immorality of justifying violence and excusing killers. Now, with his gracious permission, I would like to try my hand at rewriting Obama’s speech, not by reversing its aim, but by turning the rhetoric itself on its head, and speaking in terms of inclusion rather than exclusion, connection instead division. This is the speech I wish Obama had given, though for reasons that will become obvious, it is not one I ever expect any political leader in this country to give.
A tragedy like the one that claimed the lives of thirteen people at Fort Hood, indeed any tragedy of sudden and senseless death, challenges us to reevaluate our priorities, as individuals, as a community, and as a nation. In our grief, we reach out for meaning, for reassurance and comfort, and for a sense of peace and goodness in the world. During such times, it would be so easy to turn like those before us have done, to familiar words of patriotism and national pride. It would be easy to give these deaths the meaning of noble sacrifice in a greater cause — and to name that cause with words like “freedom” that we have claimed as exclusively our own, though truly such things belong to all people, inalienably, as the founders of this country knew so well. Continue reading On Grief and Connection: A Response to the Fort Hood Deaths
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For the whispering poet and enchanted naturalist that dwells within each of us...  Thoughts and experiences of a practicing Druid, writing from a place of connection, longing and curiosity about the sacredness of ordinary life.
Sky Earth Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality
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