Our Heart's Desire

Our Heart's Desire

"You shall receive whatever gift you may name, as far as wind dries, rain wets, sun revolves; as far as sea encircles and earth extends."
   __Culhwch and Olwen, from The Mabinogian (trans CM)


  How many times since childhood have we pondered our heart's desire3? When we were young, we grasped the notion of bountiful giving and the granting of wishes very easily from the folk and faery stories that we read. In  our growing up, we begin to struggle against the denial of heart's desire. As adults, most of us have given over even contemplating it.
    The heart's desire is not an illusory or unachievable ambition if we can suspend our adult disbelief. The true heart's desire is an integral potentiality, a germinated seed waiting to manifest. So what prevents us from achieving it? Our lives may be littered with unresolved and undeveloped wishes, all of which block the way to our true heart's desire. If we are to achieve the core of our wish, we must first rescind and cancel our immature wishes, unless, of course, we still wish to grow a monkey's tail, obtain a rocking horse, drive a steam engine, or marry Elvis Presley! We must cancel our old and immature wishes by calling them back and revoking them, along with other idle wishes we may have uttered and since forgotten. Then the way stands clear.
    If we can commune deeply upon our true heart's desire, rather than upon our fantasies, if we can envision it with every cell of our body and call to it, then we send a true song to make the pathway between ourselves and our heart's desire.

"What is your heart's desire? Which former wishes are preventing you from attaining it? Cancel them, as suggested above."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Sacred Life

Sacred Life

"Everything that lives is holy."
      ___ William Blake - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell


    For many hundreds of years, the false tale that whatever is alive is evil has been told: this tale has been told from fear and denial, from pain and rejection, as a way of explaining why things go wrong and why perfection cannot be expected. Many people regard the living world as a predominantly evil place, full of beings of whom we should be suspicious. For such people, the only good place, the only good beings are in heaven. Living defensively in the eye of evil is not a happy to live. Fear and suspicion darken everything with a sad pall.
    The opposite view sees all life as worthy of respect, as potentially able to achieve its fullest stature. Of course, not every being alive reaches its potential; but then neither does it sink into irredeemable iniquity. Entertaining the possibility of all things living being able to achieve their potential of holiness is a powerful and supportive way to live. But, like all life-ways, even this view can be abused: when we live as though no harm could come, we are foolish rather than innocent.
    Life is a sacred gift that all beings receive. It is the manner of our living that makes the difference. The way in which we relate to other living beings encourages them to change the world for good or violate the world for ill; the way in which we spend our lives illuminates or darkens those around us. But if we are not aware of the sacred potential in each living being, if we do not acknowledge it and respect it, we may become active agents of the soul's darkening. Everything that lives is holy because it is an abiding place of Spirit; every body is a home where the sacred gifts of Spirit may be born anew.

"Contemplate the living beings with whom you are in contact - not just human beings but other living beings of nature as well. Hold each of them in your heart and acknowledge their sacred gift."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

The Gifts We Really Want

The Gifts We Really Want

"Be sensible of your wants, that you may be sensible of your treasures."  
  ___Thomas Traherne, Centuries


    At this of the year, when the commerciality of Christmas swamps sacred and seasonal considerations, we ask and are asked, 'What do you want this year?"  True wants are not easily satisfied by prettily wrapped parcels; they immensities of space within us that we often block up by needs and yearnings. To consider our real wants is often too frightening.
    Our wants are sharper than super large screen TVs with 3-D or video games with super special effects, jewelry that dazzles the eye
or beautiful clothing.  Our real wants eat holes in us: never resting, never loving, never greeting, never finding, never seeking, never ever being satisfied deep down.
    Those ravenous wants define our treasures so truly. They create a Christmas list that no department store could supply: time to stop and enjoy, in a space of quietness and contentment, all the things we were put on earth to do; space to give and receive love reciprocally; grace to seek and find our spiritual joy; freedom from the tyranny of others' expectations and judgments; acceptance of ourselves as we truly are. But we can discover our true treasures and how near we actually stand to them. When we really listen to ourselves say, "I haven't  time to...... I never get to ..... I'm sick of ......," we come within sight of our treasury - that wealth that goes on being unvisited year after miserable year.
    The miracle of self-permission and allowance, the willingness to receive, the gift of truth - these are the keys to unlock the treasury that has been open to us this long time.

"Make your list of real wants in order to find your true treasures. Make a present to yourself of one of these by turning one of the keys above. "
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Aids to Healing

Aids to Healing

"Three things bring healing at Myddfai: water, honey, and work."    ancient Welsh triad

   The healing arts of the Physicians of Myddfai (MUTH' vay) in North Wales were renowned throughout Britain. This famous family was descended from the alliance between a human man and a faery woman who came out of a lake and taught her healing skills to her children.
    The source of illness lies not with physical symptoms but with some spiritual cause and that cause must be treated if healing is to come about. Many things cause illness to constellate: not only physical predispositions such as infection, lowered resistance, bad hygiene, and physical weakness, but also messy relationships, fear, anger, neglect of vocational or emotional needs, and so on. Any good healer knows that these factors must be understood and included within any diagnosis. This means working to establish a basis of trust with the client.
    The work of the client is also important. The minimum requirement of the client is that some benefit should come and the minimum obligation is a readiness to make radical change in order to facilitate healing: we may have to leave a situation or relationship or reform beliefs, attitudes, or ways of life before healing can have its effect.
    Our society embraces the concept of  'self-healing.' In its truest sense, self-healing is not about taking credit for health. It is about our willingness to change our ability to receive; about taking steps by which healing can happen. Healers know that healing comes with the help of many things: plant, chemicals, human support and attention, and spiritual guidance of allies, as well as the client's predisposition to be healed. The miracle of healing lies in treating the cause of illness not by merely quelling its symptoms.

"Consider a current or past illness. What factors cause the illness to constellate? Which healing agents were helpful? What changes in situation or attitude had to take place before healing could come about?"
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

The Tasks of a Druid

The Tasks of a Druid

"The three tasks of a Druid: to live fully in the present; to honor
tradition and the ancestors; to hear the voice of tomorrow."
    ____Phillip 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 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 Boeheme knew the secret of this riddle: "He to whom time is the same as eternity and eternity the same as time, is tree 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 a 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 unbalance to the now of this present moment.

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

Reality and Belief

Reality and Belief

"Nothing here is real without belief."

     Belief continually changes the way we perceive reality.
When a group of people speak of 'reality' they are not actually understanding the same thing, since each individual invests reality with many different sets of characteristics. Spiritual belief invests reality with many different qualities: simultaneously a fundamentalist believer will see the world as a place of fear, a mystical believe will see it as a place of peace, a creative believer will see it as a place of potentiality, a pragmatic believer will see it as just a place to live. It is the same for ideological beliefs, which define reality by different criteria.
     Reality and belief simply cannot be disentangled from each other.
     Beliefs evolve their own mythology and symbolism, methods of encoding meaning into the perceived and observed correlative of life. It is only when our views are challenged that reality shakes. True belief beings trust with it, a trust that things will not change,  that we will be supported. Belief can both support and enclose us, so that the nature of reality seems to become unchanging.
    The changing views of reality during this century have shaken many, causing fear and consternation. It is at this point of panic that fundamentalist beliefs become strangely attractive, for their dogmatic character ensures an unchanging stability for the fearful. For the rest, our own beliefs walk beside reality, giving it color, meaning, and purpose. Its subtle messages are the signposts of a greater reality that embraces both the seen and the unseen.

"How do your own beliefs color reality? Compare your views with someone else's."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Rediscovering Sacred Places

Rediscovering Sacred Places

"Through the medium of revelation, forgotten sacred places can re-manifest themselves."
    ___ Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes

    What makes a place sacred? Is is some hallowed action? Is it the sitting of a shrine or temple? Is it the occupation by people who have honored the spirit of that place? Although there is no part of the earth that is not intrinsically sacred in its own right, our recognition of a place's sacredness tends to rest upon what other human beings have done at that spot, what they have erected by way of memorial, what holy actions and rites they have conducted to hallow it.
     Certain spots draw us to them, there is no doubt. Even if they harbor no ancient monument, if there is no story associated with their borders, we feel somehow at peace or exalted when there it must be through just that intangible process that our ancestors discovered their own sacred places - places of natural beauty whose drew them again and again to spiritual exploration. Some places act as natural thresholds, junctions between this world and the other where we feel in communion with the unseen world and its inhabitants.
    Some sacred places can be lost through neglect and forgetfulness; others are lost by a gross act of descralization. But a place can be rediscovered and resacralized if we attend to the spirit of the place and learn what it is that makes that place sacred. The prospect of the resacralization of the earth is just a lofty idea for many people, but it is one that all of us can foster, in cooperation with the spirits of the earth itself.

"Call to mind a place - it need not be recognized by others s a sacred place - where you have felt empowered and uplifted, Dwell upon the qualities and gifts that you associate with that site and how they make a connection with your own spiritual path. Take the first opportunity you can to verify your meditation by visiting  this place in person. Sense again the spirit of the place."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]