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Posts Tagged ‘community’

Spiritual Snacks

Posted in ADF, priesthood, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I’d like to invite you to join me over on Facebook, where I’ve started a series of FB Live videos called Spiritual Snacks. These not-quite-daily (but hopefully frequent) little videos are 2-4 minutes long, and feature me talking about an aspect of spirituality and religious life that is relevant to my life and hopefully to yours as well.

You’re welcome to add me as a friend (though if we don’t have friends in common, please send me a message with who you are), or to just follow my profile, as the videos will be publicly shareable.

I have three done so far, and I’m enjoying getting to speak to the challenges and joys of my spiritual life right now.

I hope you’ll listen in, and I hope you find them nourishing – like any good snack should be.

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G is for Grove

Posted in Pagan Blog Project 2014, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 3, 2014| 1 Comment »

Grove is the (slightly cliché, I’ll admit) term for a group of druids. It’s the standard operating system for ADF, and the point toward which the majority of ADF ritual is designed. Groves are groups of ADF members who meet regularly and celebrate rituals together at least for the 8 major high days of the wheel of the year.

The heart of ADF, groves provide places of community, worship, and learning. There are currently 75 groves in ADF, spread around the world (though most are in the United States). Unfortunately, while that seems like a pretty big number, and it is constantly growing, there are still big gaps between groves in a lot of the US (and even more so worldwide), so a lot of druids end up as solitaries (and some may even choose to remain solitary even in a place with access to a grove or protogrove).

My local group is a Protogrove – the step before becoming a full grove. It requires fewer people, but the ultimate goal is to work towards full grove status. Groves perform regular community service and provide a space for public ritual and community, fulfilling the vision of ADF to become a public Neopagan church.

Grove-centered spirituality is a different beast for me, since I am so strongly tied to my solitary practice. I’ve enjoyed working in the small group that is my study group, but I still do solitary rituals for high days. My local protogrove is also strongly Irish/Welsh focused, and while I don’t mind doing rituals in whatever hearth culture the group prefers, I still like to have my Anglo-Saxon/Germanic rituals when possible.

Still, plugging into a local Neopagan community, however small they may be, has been useful for me, at least in terms of inspiring me to stick with the practices that I know are important to my work, and in giving me something to help keep me accountable (the study group is really good for that).

I am hoping that our work as a study group will help further the local protogrove and vice versa, and I really do think that the two will work well together, blending their ritual practice with the more academic side of Druidry. And hey, maybe we’ll rub off on each other a bit in the meantime, and start to see more crossover between the groups. From what I have seen of the two groups, they can bring us some of the joy and levity that is so important in a good working religion, and we can provide the reverence and study that form the other half of ADF’s work. I think it will be a good partnership.

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C is for Community (and Cranes)

Posted in Pagan Blog Project 2014, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 7, 2014| 1 Comment »

This week Yngvi and I finally got to meet up with three members of the local protogrove. They were all very friendly, and I think we’ll get on just fine. They are okay with us continuing our study group as is, and at least one of them would like to join up with us, since she wants to work on her DP.

Also the local Grove Organizer and I have the same birthday (March 2) and two other people (Yngvi and another lady) also have March birthdays, so we’re thinking of doing a Druid Birthday Bash of some sort, to celebrate.

My “radar” is still in good working order – I walked into the coffee shop and immediately picked out the people I was going to be chatting with (as did Yngvi, who I made do the first introductions, because I am kinda shy). Dunno what led me to go “those ladies. Those are the ladies from the PG”, but I did – and apparently they picked me out as soon as I walked in as well. Hooray for good intuition and “radar”.

I don’t know yet if we’ll be joining them for rituals regularly or not. They do rituals on the official “day” of the high day (so Beltane is always on May 1), which means weeknight rituals, and that’s tough for me. They aren’t far away, so it may work, but I’ll have to rearrange my whole weekly schedule to make it fit, and depending on the week, it may just not be possible. Plus, the study group will still be having high day rituals as we work our way through the different hearth cultures, and that may conflict with the PG rituals. My primary loyalty right now is to the study group, and since I’m leading that, I can have the rituals at our regular meeting time, so the high day is on the closest Friday to the actual official “day”. (We did Imbolc on Jan 31, for example.)

The PG is primarily Irish Celtic (they call themselves the Houston Celtic Druids in some online forums), but they weren’t phased by Yngvi and my Germanic/Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon hearths. In fact, they seemed interested and curious, which I took to be a good sign. As well, my dreams about herons and cranes have continued – and I found out yesterday that one of the locals is a member of the Order of the Crane in ADF. I am not sure I’ll bring it up with her until I know her a little bit better, but it was interesting to hear that she’s involved there.

All in all it was a good first meeting. Yngvi and I will continue to lead the study group, now possibly with some new members from the PG, and we’ll see where things go as that progresses. Now that I have some faces and personalities to put with names, I’m more comfortable going to a ritual at someone’s private home, so that hurdle is out of the way as well.

ADF serves both communities and solitary pagans. I’ve spent most of my ADF time as a solitary, but that seems to be rapidly changing. It brings up a lot of my fears about being “out” as a pagan (I really don’t want a potential employer to be able to google me and find out my religion, among other things), but for now I can still fly under the radar, since leading a study group doesn’t require my name to be on any of the websites anywhere. I know I am somewhat gun-shy of joining up with a new pagan group, especially with how quickly my involvement in previous groups ended, but hopefully this will be good for me and my spiritual development.

I’m also taking suggestions for a name for our study group. Right now we’re calling ourselves the “Clear Lake Druidic Study Group”, which works, but isn’t very creative. There are four of us so far, but we may be growing. We’re primarily split between the Norse/AS and the Hellenic hearth cultures so far, but that may change as the newer folks start doing their own rituals at home and creating a devotional practice. Any suggestions are welcome!

 

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Meditation Journal – Seat of my Pants

Posted in Meditation Journal, tagged , , , , , , on April 29, 2013| 3 Comments »

This has been one of those weeks where meditation has felt like I just can’t settle in, so I’ve tried not to force it too much. I’ve done lots of mind-quieting meditations for just a few minutes, and I’ve kept up my daily devotions that I do over my morning cup of tea, but this week has just been too hard to really focus. So I did my meditations by the seat of my pants, and tried not to worry about it too much. Distractions happen, and things will settle back down soon (I hope).

There are several parts of my life that are unraveling at the edges right now, so I’m feeling a bit frantic, and I have several friends and family members who are in need of a lot of support right now.

I’ve actually wished for a sort of Druid prayer or healing or magic circle, where we can go to pray and do magic for each other as we need support. I am feeling like I can’t do all the things that I feel like I need to do right now, without taking a day off work and doing nothing but ritual and magic for a day (and I can’t do that, especially not since I’m already missing a day of work this week for jury duty). Maybe there’s a ritual and healing circle that I can be a part of.  Here’s me looking to be part of some kind of a community again. This is a common thread for me.

Maybe I just need more butt-on-floor time at my altar, and to just let things go.

And maybe I’m just learning the lesson (again) that I can’t do anything to help when bad things happen to people. It’s just very hard to sit by and watch and not be able to help out as friends and family go through hard times.

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