The Tasks of a Druid

The Tasks of a Druid

"The three tasks of a Druid, to live fully in the present; to
honour tradition and the ancestors; to hear the voice
of tomorrow."
    ___ Philip Carr-Gomm, "The Druid Renaissance"


   The most difficult task is to live fully in the present. We are nearly always ahead or behind ourselves, planning the future or reminiscing and reliving the past.
    For the druid, the past is a potent place, redolent of past glories and triumphs. Nostalgic for authority and respect, the druid, along with other spiritual seekers who follow an ancient path, is tempted to bathe indulgently in the rosy glow of myth and history. Yet the druid has to find ways of honoring tradition and the ancestors that truly respect them rather than enshrining and fossilizing them. And that can be done only in the now.
    The future is such an unknown quantity that it is easier to project scenarios of doom or bliss than to hear its echoes. It is peopled by our descendants and by the sacred lore of tradition that we will have surrendered into their hands for practical use. The only way to access that future voice is to listen now.
     As we meditate upon the conundrum of these druidic tasks, we find ourselves rebounding from invisible walls. The sixteenth-century German mystic Jakob Boehme knew the secret of this riddle: 'He to whom time is the same as eternity and eternity the same as time, is free of all adversity." 
      Those who walk the druid path and regularly walk between the worlds learn that time does not run in the otherworld: past, present, and future are all accessible in an eternal now. The traditions and ancestors live now; the future is seeded in the now. There can be no disrespect or sentimentality forward or backward in time without severe imbalance to the now of this present moment.

"In the silence of your own grove, your own sacred space, consider your own tasks upon the path and what they entail."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]