Little Druid on the Prairie

My first week of this practice went fairly slowly. I am experimenting with how I want to set up my daily practice. Since I’m not in a position where I can do sunrise and sunset devotionals (I am in the car during the sunrise, and I am in bed before the sun sets right now), I am going to start a morning devotional that I can do either before I leave for work or once I get to my desk. Since I’m in the office at 6:45, and my nearest coworker doesn’t arrive until 7:30, I have a little time there where I can do the work.

Obviously I can’t light candles or incense at my desk, so the ideal place for something like this will be at home before I leave, but my brain is fighting getting up any earlier than I already do (5:15 is pretty darn early).

For this week, all I have been doing is saying Ceisiwr Serith’s prayer (start small and build, right?):

The waters support and surround us
The land extends about us
The sky stretches out above us
At the center burns a living flame
May all the kindreds bless us
May our worship be true
May our actions be just
May our love be pure
Blessings and honor and worship to the holy ones

It’s nothing fancy, but it at least gets me taking some deep, centering breaths and placing myself in a good mindset to start the day. (I’ve tried saying this in the car at sunrise, but since I can’t see the sun actually rising it didn’t work too well.)

This week I also participated in the Druid Moon Cast, a monthly ADF ritual that takes place via Google Hangouts. While I don’t participate in these every month, I do them fairly regularly, and really enjoy doing them. They are a take on the idea that the 6th night of the moon was sacred to the Druids, so it is fairly fitting that we do ritual at that time. This ritual was done using Nick Egelhoff’s Telepresence Liturgy Script, which makes several references to the (quite outstanding) technology that we’re using to do these rituals. This script is customizable to different hearth cultures (or an open hearth), and this month we honored the various bodies of water that are in our different locations.

(Also, since I’m writing this as an overview of what I did LAST week, I can say that I’ve already found a prayer to add to this for Fire/Well/Tree that Rev. Mike Dangler shared on Facebook this morning. I’ll write more about that next week.)