We’ve been through a few minor family hardships lately. Nothing we can’t get through, but I have been left feeling raw like a scraped knee. At about 5PM on Labor Day I stepped out of a hospital to bring a loved one home, and the angle of the sun made it suddenly feel like autumn. The equinox is upon us.
New Age spirituality often means sitting in a quiet room, surrounded by whatever trinkets make you feel good. Perhaps you imagine your body filling with light and you step through some magical door. In druidry we can do this sort of thing too, but we also find spirituality by living in the world and experiencing it completely. The angle of the sun, and this rawness and exhaustion feels like its own sort of magic, beautiful somehow. Perhaps my life and my magic are like a pine cone, with a spine on each scale such that it is painful to hold it, even gently. It is a plain brown color, an earthy object. But it holds food for the birds and squirrels, and it forms a gorgeous spiral shape simply by doing the job of making one scale after another after another.
I go for a walk, and when I get to the sandy scrub next to my neighborhood I take my sandals off. This yields the delightful feeling of the fine grained sand under my feet as I walk, but also all the prickles from dried grass and plant detritus. I must pay much more attention to sand spurs and broken glass than I would with shoes on. I could step on a green plant without hurting my foot, but now that I am paying attention anyway, I would rather let it be and step around it. This is druidry.
