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Weekly Rune Drawing – March 4

March 4, 2013 by Lauren M

Last week’s rune was Dagaz – the rune of daylight and hope. Aside from an amusing (and frustrating) correlation to problems I had with the power company on Tuesday (whereby I literally had to deal with “the lights”), I’m not sure I get a strong feeling where this rune applies to last week. There are a few situations that are minorly improving or showing signs of awareness of a need for improvement, but no great realizations or hopefulness or anything. Perhaps drawing the rune was little more than a joke about keeping the lights on.

This week’s rune is Berkano: Birch, Strength, Flexibility, Resourcefulness

      The poplar bears no fruit; yet without seed it brings forth suckers,
   for it is generated from its leaves.
   Splendid are its branches and gloriously adorned
   its lofty crown which reaches to the skies. – Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem

This is the rune of resourcefulness and making something from nothing, and Rev. Dangler speaks of it as the rune of “female strength” (Very Basics of Runes 47). It speaks of birth and rebirth, and physical or mental growth. There is also an element of strength and pride to this rune meaning, alongside the current of fertility and creativity, that you can see in the last two lines of the rune poem. I see self-sufficiency as well, in the first lines of the poem (the tree that brings forth new trees generated from its own leaves).

I have a scheduled “girl’s date” this week that I hope will be reflected in this poem – though admittedly that will be a gathering of female strength and about sharing our burdens and working together as much as it will about self-sufficiency. The self-sufficiency aspect I hope will be more reflected in my work this week, as I could use a dose of this sort of energy in my professional life in a big way. Hopefully both of those will come about this week.

Posted in Runes | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Meditation Journal – Week 17

March 4, 2013 by Lauren M

Three sitting meditations this week, plus tea with the kindreds. Nothing particularly noteworthy about any of it. I’m becoming more sure of the spirit that has been visiting during my meditations, though I didn’t feel like I made particularly strong contact this week.

I think mostly this exercise has become very perfunctory – I’m doing the exercises to complete a requirement, but I’m not getting a ton out of it right now, because I haven’t had a ton to actually put into it. This is a common thread in most of my practice of Druidry over the last few weeks, related directly to other things in my life. I’ve got some thoughts about that to post later.

Posted in Dedicant Path Essays, Meditation Journal | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Weekly Rune – Feb 25

February 26, 2013 by Lauren M

I talked a little about last week’s rune yesterday, so today we’ll just look at this week’s rune. As usual, the question was “What do I need to focus on this week?”

Dagaz: Day – rising sun, new day, deliverance

Day, the glorious light of the Creator, is sent by the Lord;
it is beloved of men, a source of hope and happiness to rich and poor,
and of service to all. – The Anglo Saxon Rune Poem

This is a rune of a bright future, of good hope and promising things to come. It’s certainly a pleasant rune, and one that has a lot of promise to it.

Also, in Dangler’s Very Basics of Runes, he speaks of a sort of divine intervention aspect to this rune, that the blessings it brings are “heaven sent” (53).

I am not sure how this rune will apply this week. Hopefully some aspect of my life will experience a little “redawning” or turning over of a new leaf. Perhaps I’ll have some new clarity on my path in ADF, or some new insights into the relationship I’m developing with the spirit who has been visiting in my meditations? Perhaps this is a runic nudge to “count my blessings”? Or perhaps I’m just due for a few good things to come my way. I find this to be a hopeful rune, if not one that I can immediately place into a situation that’s currently going on in my life. I look forward to seeing how it pans out this week.

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Meditation Journal – Week 16

February 25, 2013 by Lauren M

Not a lot to report this week. I did two sitting meditations that went reasonably well. I spent more time this week thinking about meditation than I did actually meditating. While this is somewhat fruitful and brings some measure of insight, I think I need to channel that impulse into actually doing more meditations.

I did not do Tea with the Kindreds this week, simply because I forgot on Sunday to sit down and do it. I remembered as I was getting into bed last night, and by then it was late, and I start work very early. I’ll be sure to do it this week, maybe more than once. I’m hoping to have a little extra time tonight after work, so I will probably do a mini-Tea then. Since I usually do my weekly rune drawing while I’m doing tea with the kindreds, I didn’t do that part either. Yesterday was just nuts! I’ll do that drawing tonight instead.

Last week’s rune was Kenaz, which I read as “pain” – which turned out to be actually pretty applicable to my week. I had an appointment with one of my doctors. It was a rather surreal sort of visit, as I was told that I should continue to do something (in this case strength training exercises) even though they caused me increased joint pain, since it would be protective in the long run. While I understand the point, it’s still pretty hard to get up the enthusiasm to exercise when I know I’ll just be taking pain medication to help deal with the aftermath (not muscle soreness, actual joint pain).

Posted in Dedicant Path Essays, Meditation Journal | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Getting Ready for Spring

February 21, 2013 by Lauren M

With the last frost date less than two weeks away, it’s time for me to really start thinking about my garden. It’s sat, rather sadly neglected, since last June, so I have some work ahead of me to get the ground ready for transplants. (I use transplants since our growing season is rather short, and I like to get a head start on things like tomatoes that will suffer in the heat.)

I suspect, with as mild as our winter has been, that I could probably get my first plants in the ground as early as this weekend, but I still prefer to wait until that official frost date. Maybe it’s a bit superstitious, but I don’t want to freeze my tomatoes.

My garden is about 10×12, raised bed and mostly organic. I compost all my kitchen scraps and yard waste in two bins on the side of the house, but I’m not sure either is ready to go into the garden just yet. I’ll have to check them and see. They’re both pretty full at least, so once things warm up I’ll have lots of compost to spread around the plants.

The whole garden needs to be cleared of weeds and grass and turned over to be ready for this year’s plants. Since we don’t own a rototiller/cultivator, I have to till the earth by hand. It’s always kind of cleansing (as well as somewhat back-breaking) to grab a shovel and turn over all of the earth there.

I’m probably mostly going to put in green beans and tomatoes – for some reason I have a great deal of trouble with curcurbits (cucumbers, zucchini, squash) getting downy/powdery mildew and dying on me (or getting big but not producing any fruit). I’d like to try melons this summer as well, but beans and tomatoes are my staples. They grow well for me, and last year I ended up at one point with over 15 lbs of tomatoes – out of which I made a delicious vinaigrey, peppery salsa. This year I’d like enough to make some marinara sauce to freeze in quarts. I’d also like enough green beans to make another few batches of “dilly beans” – spicy dill pickle green beans that I eat by the jar if I’m not careful.

I’ll also grow hot peppers, but I put those in pots. Hot peppers of various kinds tend to like to have periods of dry, and tomatoes need at least an inch of water a week, so if I water the tomatoes enough to be fruitful, the peppers don’t do much. They do well in pots for me though – I’d like to grow a nice assortment, from jalapenos and hot banana peppers to some larger Anaheim peppers that I can stuff with sausage and roast. Yum!

At some point I need to figure out what’s causing  my problem with curcurbits (I suspect it’s a fungus problem with the soil), but with as much time as I spend at work, I don’t really have time to troubleshoot a lot of garden problems. I wish I had more time to devote to it, since I get a lot of satisfaction out of growing things, but work has to take priority over hobbies, even useful ones like growing food.

Posted in Druid In This Place, Seasonal Things | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Oath-shy

February 19, 2013 by Lauren M

I was thinking about my post last week, and about how I never made the first oath to start the Dedicant path, even though it was given as an assignment in the WOTY book and suggested on the website.

I’m oath-shy, I guess? I didn’t want to promise anything that I couldn’t fulfill to any Gods who might want to be listening. I take that very seriously, and at the time I didn’t think I could honestly promise anything more than to give it a try and see what happened.

I’m still not sure I’d make much more oath than that.

This week’s assignment is to start thinking about the Dedicant Oath, taken as the last step on the Dedicant Path. I know I don’t need to be ready for that step yet, but I’m really not looking forward to it right now. It’s probably the thing that will hold me up on completing the DP – all the other work is fairly methodical and finishable, but an oath? That’s much more complicated.

For one thing, it’s not just you that makes an oath – it’s a resounding sort of thing that you’re swearing to the Kindreds that you’ll uphold, and they will hold you to it. That’s pretty serious business, and I hesitate to make an oath that will be binding for the rest of my life when I really don’t know how the rest of my life will shape up. I know I can word it so that I’m only on this path as long as I want to travel it, but it still makes me altogether uneasy. I especially don’t want my words to be twisted to mean more than I intend, or to be held to a promise I didn’t intend to make, so there’s a lot of deliberation here.

Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be, that it should be a little uncomfortable and challenging, something to take the step forward into being recognized as a Dedicant (though I think what I’m doing now is a pretty full practice of ADF style Druidry, I’m just not labeled as having completed a particular set of coursework yet). And maybe I’m a little bit afraid of commitment (I’ll admit to that much).

I know the Norse took oaths very seriously, and if I end up actually making an oath, I intend to do so very seriously as well. I’m just not really in a place with Druidry where I’m ready to swear anything to anyone about it, yet. Maybe I will get there and maybe not, and I really do have quite a while to make these decisions. It seems a bit early to be thinking about it, honestly, but I guess for some people this comes much more easily.

My tendency to overthink things may be kicking in here, but I feel like I should really mean it if I’m going to make an actual, serious, legitimate oath. What I want, more than anything, is to find the place that I fit into paganism (regardless of what that path is). Maybe in 6 months I’ll be more sure of how I want to address the Dedicant Oath and my eventual place in ADF.

Posted in Dedicant Path, Kindreds | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments »

Meditation Journal – Week 15

February 18, 2013 by Lauren M

3/4 of the way done recording my meditation experiences for my mental discipline requirement!

Another 3 sitting meditations this week, plus Tea with the Kindreds. All went well enough, though my focus is still inconsistent. I did a slightly different version of the two powers this week, this time combining the two powers script with a tree visualization (roots stretching down, leaves reaching upwards). I think I liked it better than without the tree visualization. I like trees, and I’ve been doing various tree visualizations for years, so the combination feels very familiar in a good way.

I encountered the same presence in Tea with the Kindreds this week that I’ve encountered a few times before. Mostly I just said hello and that I was pleased he was there. He and one of my cats have now been introduced as well, since Max came and sat on me in the middle of my tea. I get a very positive energy feeling from these encounters, which is encouraging.

I also thought I might start drawing a rune a week, to help familiarize myself with them more. This week, of course, I drew Kenaz – a notoriously difficult rune to interpret. The question I asked was “What do I need to focus on this week?”.

Kenaz: Torch, Ulcer, Cheer, Pain, Death

Kenaz can be read either as torch (from some rune poems) or ulcer (from other rune poems). I get a generally negative feeling from this rune this time, so I’m not going to jump immediately to the more positive interpretation. I think, though, I understand what this particular rune drawing is trying to say. Not that I am supposed to focus on pain in a wallowing, self-defeating sort of way, but that I should focus on managing and dealing with pain (something I deal with frequently, as I have chronic pain from a joint disorder, as well as dealing with mental illness). It’s not exactly a happy omen, but one that I probably needed to hear.

I’ll try to remember to check back in with this rune throughout the week, and see if my gut reading about it is correct. (On a much more mundane note, I’m going this week to see the specialist who is helping me with pain management as well, so there may be some of that referenced in the reading.)

Posted in Dedicant Path Essays, Meditation Journal | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments »

Secret Druid Tips: Nature in the Cubicle

February 15, 2013 by Lauren M

I’m a Druid of the Office more than any other specific place, even though I try very hard to do daily devotions with my landbase. As such, I’ve tried a number of ways to make my little corner of this cubicle (which I share with other people) as Druid-friendly as possible. Plants have really helped warm up my space.

If you’re also an office-bound pagan, try getting a plant or terrarium for your desk (something that will tolerate low light, unless you have a window). Use it as a focus for 3 breath meditations when things get stressful and enjoy the extra oxygen!

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Thoughts about the Dedicant Path

February 14, 2013 by Lauren M

So this week’s assignment in the Wheel of the Year book has you revisiting a lot of the whys and wherefors of the Dedicant Path, with questions about why you got started and how you think you’re doing.

It’s gotten me thinking, since a lot of my practices have changed to be more in line with ADF since I began, but I don’t know how much I really feel like this is going to be the end path for me. I’m not going to rule it out, but after four months, I still feel strongly drawn to the Wicca tradition that I was previously part of. Thing is, I’m not sure I can go back. Not that I don’t want to, but that I’m not sure there’s a place for me there, and with a close knit coven, you can’t ask them to change their mind about something like this. (And solitary work wasn’t really working out.)

Also, I decided to do this “Druid thing” for a year, and I’m going to stick to that. I think I’ve done pretty well at keeping up with the various requirements, and I’m nearly done with several of them. I didn’t take a “First Oath” because I didn’t feel particularly prepared to make any oaths at that point, though I did promise myself that I’d give ADF a try for a year, which I guess is kind of oath-like. On that level, I’ve done pretty well so far, since I’ve made good progress on all of the essays (and am even ahead on some, like the book reports).

I’ve found what I think will be my hearth culture, after some experimentation, and I’m working on deciphering Who it is from that culture that has been visiting my meditations. (I have a pretty good gut feeling, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions. So I’m going to read more and meditate more, and maybe draw some runes.) I like the idea of having a focused few Gods that I work with regularly, while still having a Pantheon to draw from if I need them.

The requirements so far haven’t been particularly hard or challenging, though some of them have made me think a bit (which is the point). Honestly, I’ve done more thinking and questioning outside of the actual DP requirements than I have for the actual essays. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, since I know that self-discovery comes from that kind of introspection and questioning, but it wasn’t what I expected. I’m feeling a little like the actual requirements are just elaborate hoop jumping, on some levels. I understand why those hoops are there, but many of them are little more than pagan busy-work. But, of course, finishing the Dedicant Path is as much about having completed a course of study, so I’m not too upset about it.

Overall, I’m pleased with the last four months of work and feeling like I’m making some progress towards the end goal. Or at least AN end goal, as I don’t really know what my eventual end goal actually is!

Posted in Dedicant Path, Kindreds | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Into the Googler

February 13, 2013 by Lauren M

One of the things I like best about my wordpress stats is the list of search terms that have led people to this blog. Usually it’s things you’d expect for a neopagan blog, but occasionally I get things that I wish I could actually answer (or things that are amusing). While mine are not nearly as hilarious (or obscene) as other bloggers (NSFW), I still like looking over them to find out what people are actually reading.

Also squirrel.

Anyway.

god of the swamp – I … don’t actually know of any swamp gods. Other than the usual local swamp spirits. Maybe you can talk to them?

druid grove meditation – I’m a solitary Druid, so I don’t do much grove work. Frequently, Druid groves use a variation on the Two Powers meditation, or another grounding and centering meditation to prepare the group for ritual.

how to use a druid phone – there’s a druid phone? Can I get one? I’d like to use my Druid phone to call up my ancestors and chat with them. I wonder what the long distance rates would be?

the magical druid – is an excellent shop run by two dedicated members of ADF. You should check them out.

significance of my ancestors essay – I think this is as significant as you make it. I am still learning to work with my ancestors, but it’s been the ancestors of spirit (other Druids and ancient people) who I’ve had the best luck connecting with. I’m trying to connect more to my own actual family ancestors now.

mental discipline essay – is a big requirement. You need to do 5 months of weekly mental discipline practice and then either submit your journal or an essay of reflections on it. I’m still working on the 5 months part. My best advice is to schedule time to write the journal, and if you’ve not done any meditation that week, you’ll at least do one immediately before writing.

druid tarot app – There’s not specifically a Druid tarot deck that has an app (that I’ve seen), but I like the Mystic Dreamer tarot app.

squirrel – OVER THERE. LOOK!

non-religious/secular/thanksgiving grace – this is by far the most common search term that brings people here, so I thought I’d repost the non-religious, secular grace I modified for Thanksgiving, that you can read about in this original post.

For this meal we are about to eat, let us be truly thankful
for the blessings of sun and wind and rain, that grow the fruits of the Earth

Let us be truly thankful
for those who planted the crops
for those who cultivated the fields
for those who gathered the harvest

Let us be truly thankful
for those who prepared this food and those who served it.

In this time of plenty let us remember too
those who have no festivity
those who cannot share this plenty
those whose lives are more troubled than our own
and all those who are hungry, sick or cold

As we share in this meal, let us be truly thankful
for all the good things we have
for warm hospitality, loving family, and good company.

Our thoughts go out to family and friends who are not here with us;
We hope that they are safe and well.

May this bountiful meal strengthen our bodies, our minds, and our ties to each other.

Which seems like a happy note to end with.

Squirrel!

Posted in General Things | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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