Transforming Our Rage

Transforming Our Rage

"It is in bringing the rage of what hurts you personally into the world that you have the power to bring neart, this active spirituality, out into the world."
    ___from a speech by Nuala Ahern, Irish member of the European Parliament

   The Irish word neart (NYART) is one for which there is no English equivalent. It means 'strength' or 'power' in the sense of 'the energy of life'. This sacred energy is the source of all movement in the universe. People who have been disconnected from the health and harmony of their neart for any length of time, lose contact with their essential power. In people who have been disconnected from their neart, rage is often a positive sign of returning life and power. People who are totally downtrodden and powerless do not have the energy to be angry. But what do we do with our rage once it is awakened? The transformative aspect of rage is found in reconnection with our neart: instead of being stuck in victimhood and persecution, we step out powerfully and acknowledge our strength. Rage can be destructive if it remains in a mentality of victimhood, for it never properly connects with the primal power of life. However, it can become a revolutionary force that rights many abuses when victims decide to band together, to blow the whistle and ensure that others do not suffer in like manner.
    But rage can be an important gauge of distress and neglecting its warning is dangerous. If rage flares out of self-protection or warning and we ignore it, we begin to lose our neart, we give it away to others and let them walk all over us. The life-power that courses through us is a gift to be protected and guarded; it cannot be taken from us unless we allow that to happen. If righteous rage arises, listen to its warning voice and act to protect your precious gift.

What kinds of things enrage you? Correlate your findings with the boundaries of your own neart.
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Selling Our Souls

Selling Our Souls

"Very early in the life of every youth there will be ....the question of how far he ought to sell his soul for the sake of his life."
    ___ John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture


   How can we be true to our vocation in situations that call us to sell our souls? We must remember that there are two criteria in the workplace: we work in order to gain a livelihood, and we work in order to honor our soul's potential. It is becoming rare for workers to be able to meet both criteria. Many people who feel that their talents have been used for unspeakable ends have found more satisfaction in menial work well done than in their chosen profession. But to maintain this kind of professional honor is to take the high moral ground, a stance that may not support a home and family.
    For many people, work is a compromise between livelihood and soul's honor. They cannot be without work, but they can search out ethical employers and forms of work that do not exploit their skills without proper return. This return is not only monetary, however: there must also be respect for the worker and his rights and a proper appreciation of the work done. When the return is absent, we feel cheated, short-changed.
    When we prostitute our talents to purely exploitative ends, we risk divorcing ourselves from our primal vision. Such a divorce is a separation from the greater reality of which we are a part, and a selling of our souls to those who will wring out every last essential drop of our vocational skills.

"Meditate upon your vocational vision, even if you are not actively performing or fulfilling at this time. What qualities and features characterize it? How have these been employed, recognized and acknowledged in your life to date? How and why are you dissatisfied with the work you currently do? Are there remedies for the dissatisfaction?"
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Clearing the Way

Clearing  the Way

"The plow must go five times over the site of a wood before it can become a field."
   ___ traditional Welsh saying (trans CM)

   The sun has returned and the light is growing, but the plans we have been brooding upon may show little signs of  progress. Now is a good time of the year to prepare the ground for the projects whose unfinished important to us. Make a list of plans and projects whose unfinished rubble clutters your forward. These may include long, ongoing plans that are not going anywhere fast, and short-term projects that are unfinished due to a lack of resources or energy. Look down your list: Which irritates you the most? Which nags at you as unfinished? Which did not work out according to plan, and why? Do not be surprised if you access deep emotion, and do not be afraid of what you feel.
    Go through this list, creating questions that challenge and uncover the roots of the problem. Has your vision for each of the plans changed?  Are your projects still workable as they stand? Evaluate long-term projects for significant progress and assess which approaches might loosen things up. Do you perhaps need to break down long-term plans into shorter achievable components, for example?  Are there associations with partners or friends that are impeding your progress? If someone else is involved, what contribution has that person made? Finally, go through your list item by item and mark projects for eradication, rethinking or fresh effort.
    This procedure requires hard mental effort, but it can help dig up the soil of our potentiality and prepare it to receive new growth.

"Set aside time to clear your way and root out outworn strategies and failed plans."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Spiritual Navigation

Spiritual Navigation
"O where will I get a gude sailor,
To take my helm in hand,
Till I get up to the tall top-mast,
To see if I can spy land?"
   ____ 'The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, ' Scots folk song


  The art of spiritual navigation is one that few are taught in our era. If we are fortunate enough to have a spiritual director or advisor as companion along our way, then we receive expert guidance when difficulties arise. A sensitive adviser does not attempt to solve our problems but makes suggestions and give resourceful clues.
    The chief aid to our personal exploration is our own spiritual practice. In our meditation, in our prayerful listening, in our silent attunement, we derive a good deal of navigation information. Most of this is likely to go unnoticed if we do not record and correlate it. Like any explorer to an unknown realm, we need to know the contours of the land, its flora and fauna, its friendly and hostile inhabitants. The mapping of our spiritual progress will certainly not be straightforward or easy to record. We will have to be alert to subtle changes and correspondences between what we experience and what seems to be true for us. Like the navigator who steers his ship through the fog, we have to sound the waters ahead of us and proceed slowly, always acknowledging that though we cannot see the stars, they still shine above us.
    We each have an in-built aid to spiritual navigation in our dreams. In those nocturnal journeys, we visit new zones, and landscapes, encounter archetypal and mythic beings who speak directly to us, often in pun-laden language. Our mapping of the otherworldly shore is based on a set of sequential explorations and recognitions that grow in confidence and trust as we take our spiritual voyage.

"Begin to note and map your spiritual navigation journey using a diary, chart, and/or set of pictures which you can refer and add regularly."
[From: The Celtic Spirit  by Caitlin Matthews]

Mediating the Primal

Mediating the Primal

A culture that doesn't have ... a shaman, that doesn't therefore have access to the potencies of the beginning, is in trouble,
    ____John Moriarty, Turtle Was Gone a Long Time


   The ability to access the primal powers of life, to connect with them and mediate them, is the task of the shaman. Today most of us have forgotten to honor (or even recognize) the primal powers of life. Life is merely the stream of existence in which each of swims. We move along this stream largely unaware of the larger reality to which we are involved.
   The shaman stands at the threshold between the worlds with the duty of honoring the powers of both apparent and unseen worlds. On the druid path, this role is fulfilled by the ovate: the vision-seer who walks between the worlds in order to bring the apparent world into harmony with the unseen world.
    Without such mediators, who are aware of the primal otherworld, our own world can become disconnected from the larger harmony. A shaman's work is primarily healing the fractures that separate our world from the other so that power can once more flow; this task is performed for people, animals, plants and places.
    The potent primal world of beginnings is potentially accessible to all of us by virtue of the life within our veins. The spiral ladder of DNA is itself a pathway of life, a circuit of power connected to the primal source of life from which we can consciously draw the healing that we need. But we still need our shamans - our mediators and healers - who can pass beyond physical boundaries to effect the work of reconnection; we need them to maintain an embassy at the threshold of the worlds so that the ways of negotiating remain open.

"Meditate upon the source of primal life. How are your body and soul connected to this source? By what evidence do know this?"
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Merlin's Isle

Merlin's Isle

"She is not any common Earth,
Water or Wood or Air,
But Merlin's Isle pf Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare."
    ____Rudyard Kipling, Puck's Song


       Merlin trains King Arthur to be a worthy king, but long before Arthur passes to Avalon, Merlin retires from his role as prophet and adviser to a tower that has seventy doors and windows. From which he can see the whole realm and maintain his guardianship. It is for this reason that the name Clas Myrddin (KLAS MER'thyn) was given to the island of Britain, for it falls under his watchful protection.
    Man y countries have a secret, hidden or poetic name that describes the true nature of the land in a deep, mythic way. When wearing this name, the country becomes a realm that somehow lies beyond its geographical location and given name, leading us into a hinterland that can be crossed only in dreams and visions perceived only in stories and legends. Something in our hearts speaks to use of the mythic reality of Merlin's Isle, a place that yet abides.
    Beneath the history of every country there is a gramarye - a secret magical teaching - to be learned the lore, the stories, the enchantments that only the land can teach us. It is so in Merlin's Isle. There the
gramarye is written not in the common elements but in their subtle counterparts, which are perceivable at dawn and twilight, at the between-times when color and light merge into sound and distance.Within the folded hills, by the singing streams, deep in the secret hollows, Merlin keeps his school; and there, under his intimate tutelage, we can read the book of nature, and of story and know our own land's
gramarye.

"What are the rudiments of your own land's gramarye? Which figures in story and legend are associated with the keeping of your country's secret wisdom and power?"
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

The Twice-Born

The Twice-Born

"To dare the incarnation; to take the road in silence.
To know the ascension; to will the resurrection.
The song shimmers in the golden people."
   ___Andan Andrew Dun, Vale Royal


      There comes a stage upon our spiritual path when we stand at the threshold of serious commitment: Do we enter into the unknown mysteries of the deeper way or remain on the safe, known pathway? This process of going within is called 'initiation,' and the one who enters within is called the 'initiate.'
This is a scary threshold to cross because no one can share the experience or explain it in advance.
   Within the Celtic tradition, there have been people in every generation who have gone consenting to the threshold of initiation in order to learn from and be taught by the teachers who are no longer incarnate. It is they who have kept open the ways and been the mediators of the mysteries. Their commitment and avowal of intention to serve their spiritual tradition may have been hidden, arrived at in solitude and struggle but they have stretched out their hands to the ancestral teachers nonetheless and become the 'twice-born' - initiates who have been born anew into the life that is beyond physical existence.
    The twice-born, like the bards and druids of old, access the help of spiritual guardians for whome time and space are no obstacle. Over many centuries, to the mundane eye, they have arisen and disappeared, quietly stating and living the ancient wisdoms. These courageous wisdom-keepers have in turn become teachers for the next generation of seekers.
    So the old songs have become new: not only by studying and researching, but by crossing the bundary between the worlds and entering into direct, living relationship with the mystery of the ancestral wisdom.

"Which initiatory threshold have you encountered in your life?"
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

The Well at the World's End

The Well at the World's End

"Those who in youth and childhood wander alone in the woods and wild places, every after carry in their hearts a secret well of quietness and..... they always long for rest and to get away from the noise and rumour of the world."
  ____ W. B. Yeats, Letters


     The Well at World's End is one of those secret places of restoration, healing and beauty that are sought in faery stories. To carry its refreshing waters, we have to overcome obstacles in our path, identify and ask the help of allies who may not be human and purify ourselves in order that we may be worthy to receive the immortal draught.
    The surest doorway to the secret threshold between the worlds likes hidden deep in our experience of childhood. Search your memory for the sweet, essential time of childhood play when the universe was in your grasp: when your own body became the horse that you (now rider too) intrepidly rode, snorting, and stamping along the path. Remember the dappled jungles of undergrowth wherein toy figures became heroic in their adventures, battling with mighty ants. Recall the stories that you told yourself, reading the landscape with masterful childhood senses that instinctively knew the way between the worlds.
    Those stories, feelings and perceptions are you childhood passport to the realms of the Well at World's End. Those magical waters have power to revoke the march of mortality and to invoke the wild places of the heart. They recall to you the allies that you made when you played unselfconsciously - allies that you have ignored through lack of trust and because you have 'put away childish things.'  When you long to rest from the whirling  everyday world, remember your own Well at World's End and drink deeply of its water.

Recall your childhood allies. (These might be places, toys, books, games, friends, animals.) Give them thanks for their companionship."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

The People of the Gift

The People of the Gift

"Give humble respect to each of the wise people of the gift, for honor is due them."
   ___ The Book of the O'Connor Don, Irish text (trans CM)

    In Celtic society, the people of the gift - the aos dana (EES DAH'na), or artists - were given the kind of respect that we now accord to great religious leaders, political leaders, actors, and singers. They were honored because they had the power to go beyond this world, to commune with otherworldly powers and to meditate  their inspiration to the community. Respect was given because they represented the unseen reality to our world in a process of mediation.
  In our society, the ability to convey sacred reality in living forms has become the preserve of the religious painter, poet, or performer, and only in the highest forms of aesthetic, appreciation do we see a comparable attempt to convey the beautiful and simple truths of the sacred. Only when performers and artists come close to the heart of the mystery of their craft do they feel the impinging power of the sacred. Those whom we universally regard as especially gifted, because of their ability to convey something beyond the music, the script, or whatever art form corresponds to their skill, have humility and regard for their sacred art. But today the respect that is due to the gift is often accorded solely to the artist and appropriated by her as a personal honor.
   People of gifted vision are generally unable to live by their art because so few people are able to apprehend and receive the gift. It is not a question of money but of our interest in and involvement with the gift, with the art itself. This alone creates a climate wherein the gift of the otherworld can be receive and welcomed, and true respect for the people of the gift can flourish once again.

"Meditate upon your personal relationship with sacred gifts of art, music, performance. Your respect changes everything."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Restoring the Enchantment

Restoring the Enchantment

"Without the enchantment to kindle the beckoning flame of mystery and wonder, we lost touch with the on-going story of the soul."
   __Caitlin and John Matthews, The Little Book of Celtic Wisdom

     The ancient bards of Britain maintained 'perpetual choirs of song' that kept the Land harmoniously connected and whole. As long as there was one voice, the Land and its inhabitants remained within the enchantment. We now think of enchantment as a malign magical spell, but the original meaning of 'to enchant' was 'to infuse with song,' which is what the ancient choirs of song once did, maintaining the interconnection between this world and the otherworld. When awareness of this sacred link is severed, we lost the enchantment and fall into a sorry condition of disconnection.
   Disenchantment happens to us all, taking the familiar forms of depressive illness, addictive behavior and malaise from which there seems no escape. It is important to act quickly when these states begin to set in, to realize that our soul's story is out of phase with its sacred connection.
    How can the soul or the world be re-enchanted once it has lost the enchantment? Only be returning to the story of the soul and retelling it up to the point of fracture; only by placing our own story within the context of the greater song. When Myrddin (MER'thyn), now known as Merlin is exposed to the carnage of battle, he runs mad through the forest. Many try to calm him and bring him back to society, but only when the Welsh poet Taliesin (Tal-ee-ESS'in) comes and sits with him, does Myrddin respond, asking the odd question, 'Why do we have weather?' This seemingly trivial query is all that Taliesin needs to help his friend. He begins to recite the creation of the world. At the end of Taliesin's recital, Myrddin is restored as the sacred context of his story is given back to him.

"Consider the enchantment that keeps your soul's story on track."
{From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

The Meaning Beneath the Meaning

The Meaning Beneath the Meaning

"The journey we begin as we answer the call is long, and filled with all that we have been and all that we will become."   
   ____ Cairstiona Worthington, Modron of the
     Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids

  Our spiritual journey leads us through many stations of experience. We feel the need to travel in company with others: we join churches, courses, movements, and groups, learning all that we can from their leaders and exponents. Sometimes sharing the journey is helpful and supportive to our unique spiritual call; other times it is very dissatisfying, causing us to give up and continue our journey elsewhere. This period of spiritual nomadism can be lengthy, as we move from place to place, from religious movement to spiritual group in search of the meaning beneath the meaning.
   It is good to realize early on that whatever is spiritually important to us must be identified and made use of, not discarded later in the journey because it does not 'fit' our current spiritual practice. It is in the experiences that have along our way that our spirituality grows and matures. Dancing, catching leaves, meditating in the bath, praying while singing, walking in the countryside - all these are ways to honor Spirit.
   In order to live our spiritual path, we cannot leave out any part of ourselves to our experience: every single bit of who we are and what we do has to be included. It is in recognizing the mystic we always were rather than in mimicking the pious practices of our faith that we discover the meaning beneath the meaning which has always been calling us.

"What causes you to be aware of the meaning beneath the meaning? Begin to incorporate your own innate spiritual responses into your daily practice."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Month of January - smoky is the vale;

Weary the wine-bearer; strolling the minstrel;

Lean the cow; seldom the hum of the bee.

____  anon. Welsh poem

January see the growing of the cold. This month's meditation themes include: the soul's circuit, beginnings, and approaches, the gifts of youth, mediators, mutual care and separateness with clarity.

The New Year

The New Year

"Wind from the West, fish and bread;
Wind from the North, cold and flaying;
Wind from the East, snow on the hills;
Wind from the South, fruit on trees."
    ___ Scots new year weather omen


    New Year's Day is a time of reading omens for a fresh beginning. It is widely held that the first twelve days of the year will reveal the disposition of the weather for the year ahead. This is a good day to go for a long walk, to divine the possibilities of the year ahead in a very simple way.
    Before you set off on your walk, stop and tune your intentions to the unfolding year ahead; sense the pathway of the year that stands ready before you. Now begin your walk, attentive to everything that is about you, including the mythscape, story, folklore, and feeling of the Land. Keeping the year ahead in your conscious, allow your attention to widen to include everything about you. If you come across something that draws your attention with urgent filaments of greeting - it might be the sudden movement of a bird, the beauty of a patch of moss, the intensity of the light through the trees - stop and be attentive to what caught your attention.
    Listen and attend to the greeting and intuitively reach out for and feel its meaning - a meaning that might not be experienced in words or even in sound but may come to you as a subtle understanding. Appreciate it, note it, and then pass on. Keep repeating this throughout your walk until you have had twelve such experiences.  Each time stop, attend, and intuit (without fishing for a rational explanation) why your attention has been engaged. Then return home and review the omens in the order you experienced them, relating them successively to the months of the year. Next New Year's Eve you can  check your findings.

"Take a walk as suggested above."
{From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]