Wanders, Nomads and Outcasts

Wanders, Nomads and Outcasts

"Alone in the greenwood must I roam,
Hollin, green hollin [holly],
A shade of green leaves is my home,
Birk [birch] and green hollin."
   ___'Green Hollin,'   anon. Scots ballad


    Among the Celtic peoples, young warriors were temporarily outcast from their tribe as part of their rite of passage into adulthood, under the guardianship of elders and teachers. Some of our young people today purposely choose to enter a period of nomadism during which they can learn the freedoms and hardships, learn the self-sufficiency, practical wisdom, and unfettered vision of the 'uncivilized.'
     The choice of the wanderer to live a nomadic and unsettled life is often bewildering to those who are settled. Before civilization, many lived in encampments, while others followed the movements of animals. Settled folk have often denounced nomads as low-class, uneducated, and suspect - easy scapegoats upon whom accusations of murder, theft, and black magic might be lodged.
     In our own era, we see new patterns of nomadism emerging as civilization begins to swell and become unwieldy. Those who no longer 'fit' either become exiled from settled existence as outcasts or choose to 'drop out.' The outcasts of civilization roam the streets in homeless vagrancy. Some have merely fallen through the cracks, others have chosen to scavenge the society in which they cannot succeed, and still others are natural nomads or solitary hermits who need a concrete wasteland or a natural wilderness to encompass them.
     We who are settled do well to consider the strengths of the nomad, to honor the wisdom and freedom of having no roots, to respect another way of living that we may one day need to learn.

"Monitor your own attitudes towards nomads and wanderers. What part of your own being and beliefs is nomadic in character?"
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Authentic Spiritual Traditions

Authentic Spiritual Traditions

"The Druid system forbade learning from books...... and insisted
on oral and meditational communication with other people and
Nature.... sustaining spiritual Traditions through individual relationship with the Infinite, rather than by ready-made recitations from previous people's findings."
   ___W. G. Gray, Patterns of Western Magic, in
    R. J. Stewart, Psychology and the Spiritual Traditions


     Genuine, living spiritual traditions arise from our own life-context, not from our adoption of other people's experiences and teachings. This rather startling revelation is the received tradition of the Celtic realms and of traditional societies worldwide that rely upon oral rather than written sources.
      Today, when so many people are seeking to appreciate their ancestral spirituality, there is a hunger for 'authentic sources.' Unfortunately, many seekers gravitate to poorly research or speculative commercial works that have no basis in any kind of practical spirituality.
       Our individual relationship with Spirit has to be personal and immediate for it to have authenticity. It cannot be gained by reading books. In every place, in every time, with every person, Spirit communicates in its own ways. Those who advance their spiritual lives by spending time in nature, in meditation, and in practice learn the eternal knowledge which is the heritage of mystics in every tradition. To simply make repetition or to blindly accept the findings of others, without personal perception and understanding, invalidates our spiritual path.
     The truly authentic spiritual tradition is the one we are actively practicing: while it may indeed correspond with that of many other people, there will always be features within it that arise uniquely from our own living context, which we know to be authentic to the very core.

"Recognize at least three principles discovered from your own life-context by which you spiritually steer."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

The Seasonal Thresholds

The Seasonal Thresholds

"This has been our way: Spring for plowing and for sowing; Summer for strengthening the crop;
Autumns for grain's ripeness and for reaping;
Winter for consuming its goodness."
    ____ Cath Maige Tuired, from Caitlin Matthews, The Celtic Book of Days (trans. CM)

     The gifts of each season create thresholds and doorways of opportunity for us as the year turns. The circuit of the earth about the sun is like the turas (TU'ras), or revolving walk of a pilgrim about a sacred site: at each point of the circumambulation, there arises a different symbology in the changing weather and in the correspondences of the growing world. As we become more sensitive to the annual turas of these changes, we can become attuned.
    When the first spring flowers emerge, the winter may still hold sway, but we sense the time of beginning; we struggle, like the young plants, to bring ourselves over the threshold of emergence. When summer's heat encourages us to leave off our warm clothing, we pass through the threshold of confidence and action. When autumn leaves drift from the trees, we look for the threshold of gathering. When winter fastens its grip on the world, we cross the threshold toward reflection and stillness.
     Through every station of the earth's revolution, we pass through a kaleidoscopic variety of moods, expectations and opportunities. Everyone has preferred seasons, accepting their gifts with pleasure. Those seasons that we actively dislike may be offering us opportunities to come to terms with aspects of our own annual distress - with depression, impatience, anger or fear. If we can live each moment of the year as it is happening, with attention to the seasonal thresholds and their gifts, we may discover a new resourcefulness that will enrich our lives with special joy.

"Consider the gifts and opportunities that you receive from each season."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Conversation

Conversation

"What is sweeter than mead? - Intimate
conversation."
     ____ "The Wooing of Ailbe," early Irish story


    The kindling of mind upon mind, the flame of word upon word, is the essential fire that brings hearts gladly to the hearth of friendship. In the charmed circle of intimacy, friends lean together just as stars in their loneliness seem to draw closer together at nightfall. In our separate revolutions in time and space, we sometimes become like planets, solitary and aloof from all others, unable to bring ourselves into the fold of intimacy, able only to preach portentously from a high pulpit, untinitated into the vulnerability of the truly human.
    But in our special relationships, we can enjoy a wonderful exchange when we take time to draw together, to share and to listen, to quicken to the ideas and viewpoints of another. In intimate conversation, our thoughts and opinions find a yoke-fellow who will help draw them nearer to manifestation. In deep converse, our uncertainties and anxieties can be uttered fearlessly, and just as trustfully received and allayed.
     An intimate friendship passes beyond the intimacy of lovers; they shared currency is not physically sexual, although it can prove just as intoxicating. As ideas cascade and themes are tracked to their very source, a heady ferment fills the cup of friendship. It is in the quiet times of intimate talk that we really come to know each other and realize how much we share.

"Make an opportunity in the next month to have a really good, deep and intimate conversation with a close friend."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Protecting The Boundaries

Protecting The Boundaries

"Cuchulinn's geasa were that no woman should
leave his land without his knowing of it; that no birds
should feed upon his land without leaving something
for him; that no warrior from another tribe should be
upon his land without his challenging them."


    The untranslatable Irish word geis (GEE-YES -- the plural form is geasa) means a binding obligation that has to be upheld at all costs; it is sometimes also used in the sense of 'taboo,' something forbidden. The concept of geis, in the obligations or prohibitions it entailed were often pronounced by seers directly after a child's birth or at her initiation into adulthood. We each have things we must observe and actively do, as well as things we must strictly avoid. One geasa are our boundary-protectors. If we observe them, they will insure our own survival and integrity; they will keep us from harm.
    Our geasa increase or evolve as we ourselves grow. Self-chosen geasa - "I will always dye my hair red" or "I will never meat" - are joined by geasa that are laid upon us - "My employer requires me to wear a black suit" or "My religion enjoins me never to make war on others."  These may be followed by stronger and more binding geasa - "I pledge to keep faith with my country" or "As an addict, I must never use alcohol."  Our identity, talents, and integrity all have their own special obligations and prohibitions.
    We do not choose all our gaesa; those that are laid upon us are often highly inconvenient, restricting our freedom. Yet they protect us and remind us of the boundaries of our honor, and, as the contracts of life itself, they maintain the boundaries of the universe in a special way.

"What are the geasa of your life? What obligations are you bound to perform? What prohibitions must you observe in order to be safe?"
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Cutting Through the Celtic Twilight

Cutting Through the Celtic Twilight

"Fachs are chiels that winna ding. [Facts are
things that cannot be shifted.]

    ____ Scots proverb


    The reappreciation of the Celtic tradition in the nineteenth century led to an overly romantic view known as the 'Celtic twilight.'  Professor J. R.R. Tolkien once remarked that 'anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.' It is a very dangerous place to inhabit, this twilight, as the poet W. B. Yeats discovered; he, who had himself been instrumental in the formation of that twilight, hit the hard iron of reality during the savage Irish civil war, writing in "The Snare's Nest by My Window".

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart;s grown brutal from the fare,

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love.

    Many of the popular myths and fantasies that have been woven around the Celts - some self-fabricated - have been designed largely to mantle the unpalatable facts of conquest, colonization, and cultural diminishment.  Romantic traditions are tales that both colonizers and the colonized have spun after the event. The living, transformative myths are those speak out to us of all eras and conditions. But the minutes we listen to romantic traditions, with their victimhood and inadequacy thinly veiled by bombast and boast, we mire in a quicksand that will suck us out of reality into a jealous cauldron where bitter nationalism and retributive terrorism can be brewed.

"Take a hard look at the romantic traditions concerning your own people. What enemies to the common good are lurking behind them?"

[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews] 

Homecoming

Homecoming

"Come you in and sit you down,
What you lost shall here be found.
Bowl and cup shall slake your lack,
Cast the bundle from your back.
No more wandering, no more war,
Come you in and close the door."
   ____ Caitlin Matthews,
       "The Wanderer's Welcome Home"

    The annual sense of settling down to things as the year turns toward winter makes us appreciate our home at this time. Home supplies us with roots, it nourishes us and makes possible all that we do, holding and cradling us when our activities are concluded for the day.
    Yet there are many for whom the family house is no home: young people who yearn to fly the nest and who are dissatisfied with their paretns' way of running things, for example, and relatives who have to live with their family as dependents because of age or infirmity.  And there are many who are with a home of their own, who lodge uneasily in inconvenient, noisy apartments, in temporary accommodations, in dirty alleyways or on draughty doorsteps. For wanderers and travelers, the home is wherever they lay their heads.
    The home that lives in our hearts and minds forever calls out to us to come and be where we are most true to ourselves. It is a strong spiritual calling to our soul to inhabit our body in the fullest sense. When the spiritual concept of the soul's home and our desire for a place to live become confused, there is a remarkable upheaval, even war.
    People move from one land to another, seeking a home of their own. When we acknowledge and welcome the soul within, we come home in truth; we can jettison the burden of expectation that we have been carrying this long while and, for the first time, come home, really home.

"What or where is home for you?"
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]
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