Unrequited Love

Unrequited Love

"To luve unluvit is ane pain."
  __ Alexander Scott, "To Luve Unluvit"


   Unrequited love is painful to both the lover and the putative beloved. It is an urging that comes unbidden and makes a wasteland of the heart. The lover's longing for reciprocation and union is met with the beloved's disdain and separation. All offers of affection are distasteful, all gifts returned. Nothing can change the heart that is not pledged.
   Unrequited Love, though overwhelmingly powerful, usually is of finite duration simply because the beloved does not respond. The one who attempts to persuade the beloved to attend, who goes beyond the normal limits of trial, courtship, and persuasion, merely makes himself a nuisance.
   When someone with whom we have had a long-standing relationship leaves us suddenly, there is little time to retract love: one side of the bridge of partnership is just no longer standing one day, but the old traffic of love does not come to a halt. The lyrics of songs of unrequited love now have a dimension of their own, as love enters the twilight zone of bereavement.

"Send greetings of affection to your beloved. If your relationship has come to a sudden end, express your love and sorrow in verse or song."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

The Cosmos of the Soul

The Cosmos of the Soul

"One soul in the immensity of its intelligence, is greater and more excellent than the whole world. The ocean is but the drop of a bucket to it, the heavens but a center, the sun obscurity, and all ages but as one day."
  ___ Thomas Traherne, "Centuries"

   The druids believed that the soul encompassed the far extents of time and space, uncircumscribed by temporal dimensions. For the Celtic peoples, the physical world was seen to be made up of three elemental dimensions: the depths of the sea, the breadth of the earth, and the airy regions of the heavens. Fusing these three dimensions together was the fiery sun, whose diurnal circuit maintained the life of the apparent world. Each ensouled body lived within the dispensation of these dimensions. But the soul was regarded as yet greater than these, able not only to move through water, earth, air, and fire but also to travel beyond these modes into the wider domain of the unseen world. For the soul, the passage of ages is but a day in cosmic time, there is no sense of time passing, only an eternal present to soul-travelers who enter the otherworld. 
   When we begin to pay attention to our soul, rather than ignoring its needs and urgings, we experience a sense of inclusion within the universe. If we learn to pass beyond the limits of our body as soul-travelers, we discover that the constellations and planets that spin within the soul are qualities, intelligences, and allies we have always longed for.

"Look into the depths of your soul, as into the immensity of inner space. How is the cosmos reflected within your soul?  What constellations and planets are featured within therein?: Within the solar system of your soul what major features do you recognize?
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

Finding Our True Song

Finding Our True Song

"Only when I gave
my fame to the Hazel shade
did the true song come."
    ___ Paul Matthews, "The Hazel Shade"


    Finding our true song is about relinquishing the burdens of ego and the false choruses that it sings. Self-importance causes us to dance to strange tunes that our feet find unnatural. When we act out of self-importance, we trip ourselves up, make Freudian slips, inadvertently revealing to ourselves and others how far we are from our soul's circuit.
   The false songs that we sing are out of tune with our soul; they are merely the responses we have adopted from others, not utterances from our own deep core. Our uncertainty and lack of conviction echo in them. The solution to these false songs is to forget ourselves and concentrate upon what we are doing, refusing to engage with fear and self-disclosure. It is not that we should ignore ourselves, but rather that we should attempt to step out of our own way. The Irish poet W. B. Yeats noticed this for himself: he discovered that whenever he went out of his way to create something purposefully beautifully, he sabotaged his poem.
   The same is true of our own deep song, which is forever singing its beautifully melody beyond the reach of our ears. When we act sincerely, when we speak from the heart, when our passion is engaged, the true song is heard in all its glory.

"Meditate upon who you truly are - not upon what you have achieved, nor upon background and antecedents, nor upon your social status or reputation. When is your true self allowed to express itself in your life?  If you do not like what you find, do not suppress your realizations; invite your true self to sing its own song and help the false personas step out of the way."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

A Life Deferred

A Life Deferred

"Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart."
   ___ W. B. Yeats, "For Anne Gregory"

    We all know someone who has put her own life on hold for the benefit of another person or for a project. This is a fine thing if there is eventually a turning back to the heart's desire and one's own way of life, but too often this does not happen.
    Deferred life inevitably means lost opportunities. We can stand only so much of this. To refrain from action, from personal engagement, from practicing skills and talents, from the formation of satisfying relationships is to marginalize our power. Never being attuned to our power, never being able to cooperate with it, sends the message of despair to our soul.
    If our life's purpose is not to curdle within us after deferment, we must set to fostering it again and learning how to move from the place of imprisonment into a wider place. This may mean relinquishing our service to another, or delegating or sharing it. It may mean a total change, a turning of the back upon the service in question, the opening of a new door.
   Before the heart becomes a stone, we must seek out the cause of our joy and integrate it fully into our lives, or else discover the joys within the way of service.

"What is the joy of your life?  How are you serving it?  If you are not, where has the joy gone? Take steps to engage with it."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

Innocence Abused

Innocence Abused

"Who is it that laments in this house of stone?.... It is
Mabon, the son of Modron who is here..... and no imprisonment was ever to grievous as mine."
   ___ Culhwch and Olwen, from "The Mabinogian"

   In the story of Culhwch and Olwen, Mabon, son of Modron, is a primal being of innocence, abducted from his mother's side when he was only three nights old. No one knows whether he is alive or dead, as the young hero, Culhwch (KIL'ook) discovers when he goes to liberate the Child of Light from his long imprisonment.
    The gifts of innocence are eagerly sought by those who have lost their own. Those who have spilled and wasted in hideous ways the hope, freshness, vigor, openness, directness, and joy of youth seek to replenish their stores, and so the cycle of the abused preying upon the innocent goes round.
   How can the cycle of abuse be short-circuited in our society? Only when each of us decides to break the circle that keeps us imprisoned as victim, in fear of predator. It is only by liberating the Mabon of our innocent selves that we can find the strength to overcome abuse and violence: we need the primal help of our innocent, lost, and imprisoned soul-fragment, which was overwhelmed in childhood.

"Has your innocence been abused or lost? Over a period of time, begin to create the components of your quest for the Mabon of your own lost soul-fragment. Where does the crying come from? In what circumstances do you access the memories and pathways? Follow these until you find the place in dream, meditation, and soul-flight. Envisage the innocent becoming the strong liberator."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

Disorder

Disorder

"The three oppressors of the wise are drunkenness and adultery
and bad disposition."  ___ triad from "Laws of Hywel Dda"


   These aspects of disorder are thieves that break the sacred contracts upon which society is based. The misuse of intoxicants creates a muddied perception of reality, resulting in disorderly behavior. When we misuse sacred substances for mundane recreation, we poison ourselves and lose the pathways to bliss.
   Sexual desire has its own sacred contract, grounded in the consent of two hearts together. Adultery attempts to steal the affection of another person's partner and violates this sacred contract.
   Those who set their faces against the tide of the society in which they live are thieves of the common good. All societies are based upon the contract of good order. Those who exclude themselves from upholding the common good parasitically bleed the resources of their society.
    The contracts that we make within our society are what keep it orderly. When these are subverted, turned aside, or appropriated, we do not merely hurt other people around us; we also sever pathways of connection between ourselves and the spiritual allies who interface with our world.

"What contracts have been severed by disorder in your life? Ask help of your spiritual allies to reconnect what has been broken."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

The Mythic Present

The Mythic Present

"It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us,
but images of the past embodied in language...  We must never cease renewing those images; because once we do,
we fossilise."
    ____ Brian Friel, "Translations"


    For contemporary society, history has become factual and finate, an index of deeds done and words spoken. This literal past grips our imagination, disabling our vision from ranging wider and seeing the infinite variety of possibility, shape and pattern that could be revealed.
   Finding the living context and eternal resonance of the past can deliever us from the bondage of history. This means allowing the silt of history to fall and the living metaphors and images to rise up buoyantly to the surface so that we can understand the mythic present. True myth is a living entity that clothes the present in wonderful ways. It comprises both the received awareness of popular consciousness and the archetypal metaphor of history, being a collection of symbols, images, and metaphors that abide beyond the context of history.
    The mythic present is continually reshaping events, whereas history alone merely chronicles the tides of time. History deprived of its mythic context becomes petrified into sound-bites of the timeline; but when myth inspirits history, we hear the voices of the past with our own ears, see the images with our own eyes.

"Remember an incident in your past in which you were actively involved. Now retell that incident as if it were a folk story or myth, putting it in the third person and allowing the parallel story to unfold in its own way. Draw upon metaphors, symbols and images that the incident evokes for you. Note the differences between your myth and your history. What is changed by this process of narration? What is made clear, and what new insights do you have?"
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]