Little Druid on the Prairie

As a note – this post is pretty personal. It is 100% my personal opinions and experiences, and does not represent anyone other than me and where I am right now. Please take it for what it is, and know that I am sharing out of a desire to help myself process what I’ve been through. 

I’ve been an ADF priest for just over a year now. In that time, I’ve also become first a Dedicant and then an Initiate in another tradition (that is currently closed, so beyond calling it a polytheist religious order, I can’t say much about that other than that it was an intense experience and extremely powerful).

Also in that time, my grove has lost all of its founding members, and most of its regular members as well. At the time of my ordination, we pulled together a ritual team of almost 15 people to perform the ordination/May Day rite. This May Day we have – on a good week – 7 people. Our ritual attendance is down from 30+ to 10+. I have lost friends, deep heart-friends who I thought I could not run a grove without, and here I am… without them. I am burned out on service, and the grove is taking the whole month of May off to regroup, that I might come back ready to be their priest fully and with my whole heart.

ADF is a hard place to be right now, especially as a Mother Grove member – we had a hotly contested election where the people who I believe were looking to bring ADF forward into a more modern and streamlined version of a religious nonprofit (and who were eminently qualified to do so) lost their elections. I don’t think the people who won are terrible, and many of them are my friends, but I worry for the future of the organization that I’ve spent the last seven years devoted to, and through which I have my priestly credentials. I will continue to serve, because that is what I was elected to do, but deep worries niggle at my heart.

I’m going to quote Elie Wiesel here, because it says what I think I feel about all of this:

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

And in the midst of all that, my Gods have gone quiet. I was warned that Herself would do so after my Initiation – that she wanted me to make my oaths and then she’d be off until She needed me. But Himself usually has lots on his plate during this growing time of year, and I’ve felt so distant from it.

I’ve also felt distance from the Clergy Order work – I’ve missed our mutual trance journeys multiple times, nobody is really talking. I have supportive friends, but it seems like we’re all struggling right now.

In many ways I feel like I need to go seeking again – I’ve had these huge goals set before me, and step-by-step I’ve achieved them, despite sometimes insurmountable odds (bipolar disorder, getting divorced, massive life upheaval). And now that I am without a goal, without something I’m working towards, I find myself looking for the next thing as though what I am is somehow not enough.

But I am a Priest – I am a Priest of a deity who called me seven years ago and who showed up in my living room in 2017 and said “why aren’t you my priest yet” and then took from me the oaths He wanted. I am a sworn druid, witch, and client queen to a goddess I never saw myself working with, and who made no bones about exactly who and what She wanted my life to look like (which is not being Her priest, but is certainly a pile of responsibility). I carry the sickle and the black-handled dagger, both as weapons and as art upon my body – I made oaths, and I will keep them.

I am a Priest of ADF – oathed to serve the Gods, the Folk, and the Land – an oath I repeat to myself frequently, as it defines the core of my spiritual practice. I serve a Grove – even if that Grove looks nothing like the Grove that my heart-siblings and I set out to build when we started it. I serve a community, on interfaith councils and through open ritual. My work is grounded in being a priest of the Many Gods, in serving the Folk, in honoring the Land. I wear and honor the stola of a priest, and have the sigils of the cosmos permanently inked upon my arms that I may be always the sacred center itself.

I am an Initiate of the Henge of the Cobbled Path, with more work and one more step ahead of me on that path. Work that is deep and old and new and strange and strong. Work that sets a part of my life aside as “other” and sacred, and yet is 100% a part of everything else that I do. I am a standing stone, one of many who together make a place of great devotion and magic.

I am the Druid of the Swamp, a Druid of the Bayous, a devotee of the Bayou Woman and the deep sovereignty that flows in her waters. I have always talked about being the Druid of This Place, and since I moved into this apartment I don’t have land, and so I’ve set about becoming the druid of my local waterways – and that means the bayous that surround me, the salt marsh, the brackish waters and the liminal waterbirds. I slip between the worlds, the cormorant who slips into the water in search of her prey, who nests in the trees around the bayous.

And that should be enough.

I need to go deeper into the things that I already am – I have so much growth to do. So much that I need to learn, and practice, and do. I am no mystic, and yet I have one foot in that world, and I will do my best to serve where I am called.

So tonight, I will go to the otherworld, and I will find the fires and tend them. I will do the work that is called of me. And I will try to understand that I am enough – and if I am not enough, then that work will be set before me. I have been told to rest, that I am not needed yet, that I have the work of a devotee to do, and no more for now. That is and must be enough for me right now. And when They come calling, I will – hopefully – be able to answer fully with all of the things that I have become and learned and integrated into my being.