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Post by Lady Anastasia on Nov 5, 2006 16:26:29 GMT -5
So, I posted this topic in my group on myspace, and, then, this big evil man came along and told me that I should post it here....lol, Oh, Goddess, I'm kidding John, don't hurt me....lol
Anyway, I was asked to post the topic here, so, that is what I am doing.
I just reenrolled in a class and, have been working on the introduction assignment. I seems simple enough, but, when you sit down and really think about it, these are some of the Hardest Questiong to answer.
I wanted to share the questions here, I think it's something that everyone can do to learn more about themselves. If You choose to answer them here I welcome you to do so, but, I do not expect it.
Contemplate the following questions and their relevance in your life:
1: What brought you to the current phase in your Spiritual life. 2: What drew you to Celtic (or, insert your belief system here) spirituality? 3: Where do you see your path leading you?
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Post by Lady Anastasia on Nov 5, 2006 16:27:02 GMT -5
I appologize to any of you who have seen this more than once.
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Post by Lady Anastasia on Nov 5, 2006 16:27:59 GMT -5
I cut peices out, and, it's still fairly long...My appologies
What brought me to the current phase in my spiritual life? I think that my life and my experiences have brought me here. I'm not sure if there is a specific point or occurrence, so, I'll just say it was my life.
I was raised in an open minded family. My parents encouraged us to be what we wished to be, that included religious practice's. We didn't have religious ideas crammed into our heads, if we were curious about something in particular, we were given the freedom to go and look into it. Well, growing up, I had friends that fell into many religious categories, and, so I experienced religion and church with them. I never quite fit though, so, I never stayed with one church for very long, my search to find something that I fit into continued.
When I hit my teen years, I started reading about astrology and vampires, because, you know, that's what's really important to a teenage girl. But, my books were now in a different part of the bookstore, I was into the new age section. I started reading other books that I found there that caught my attention. I think that the next thing I fell into was something written by Buckland oh, I know that it is not considered some of the best material, but, it was a starting point. I continued to read about the witchcraft and the like while I grew up. Nothing really changing, and, still not having found a faith.
What drew me to Celtic spirituality.
Well, when I was taking a creative writing class I decided that I wanted to write something that would be based on mythology. I wanted to add a little bit of my own flavor to it. So, I went and tore through the college library and took home every book that I could find with Celtic myths in them. I fell in love with them. I also happened across the name of the Morrigan on more than one occasion, and, I felt drawn to her. I felt such a strong connection to this Goddess, I continued to try to find more information about her. While doing this, I started to see things that had happened while growing up in a different light.
I had fallen so much in love with the Goddess, that I started reading about other Gods and Goddesses. I started reading about Wicca and some of the Native American practices. I felt that I was finally finding something that made sense to me. I knew that I was a pagan, but, if I fit into any category, I wasn't sure. I now had a nameless God and Goddess that I spoke to daily. It was just a practice that worked for me.
A few years ago, I ended up very sick, and, had to have rushed exploratory surgery. I was put into a medicated coma. I walked somewhere else, for two weeks of time. I still cant find the words to explain what happened, where I went, or to express what I felt when I woke up.
I felt a presence behind me the entire time, and, though I was scared, I knew that I was protected. I knew that I was still here because she had allowed me to be.
I started my journey after that. I've been searching since then. I found a way that made sense to me.
Now, for the last question, where do I see my path leading me? I don't know, it's my path. I know that I will learn more about myself while on it. I think that I will find out more about who I am, and who I'm meant to be. I will find my place among the many wonders that are on this earth. I will find that within myself, and, in nature and in the essence of everything that is here.
I know that my path is a path of self discovery. I don't know exactly what I will find, and, what kind of answers that will be there, if I will find any, or, If I will only find more questions.
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Post by wren on Nov 5, 2006 17:51:38 GMT -5
*oh, bother*
You're just going to get me to answer this, aren't you? Hmmm... from my own essay...
The trip to this phase of my Spiritual life may be a common road to that of others in some ways, different in other ways. Mostly, my path has been led by questions. Having been raised a Methodist by my parents, I was a member of one of the more liberal church congregations. My parents encouraged me to ask questions and discuss everything, read everything and research everything. This was true in all aspects of my life, not just my religion. Politics and world events were just as much to be questioned. My father always told me, “I don’t care what you believe, just be able to tell me why you believe it.” I now tell my two children the same thing.
The questions I had, as far as my religion and spirituality in my life, centered on the lack of common sense in most of the stories about Jesus and in the Bible in general. Why would Mary have told anyone she was pregnant, knowing she’d be stoned, let alone enough people to have it be part of her son’s story and eventually written down? Why was the Virgin Birth and Immaculate Conception so central to the story, other than to fulfill the Old Testament scriptures? Why were the miracles so much more important than what Jesus said and seemingly taken out of context? And, how had the fact that he was never anything but a faithful Jew escaped the stories so completely?
Even as a kid, I questioned the basis of the Bible, written 500 years after his life by the Nicene Council, and the reach of the Catholic Church into current Protestant beliefs. Literally or figuratively, it made no sense to me. In short, the story and the contradictions did not speak to me.
Still, I sought the answers to my questions within the framework of my upbringing. After all, the only choices were to believe or not; to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim or not. Or, were they? As I got older, I also learned of the difference between professing a religion and having a spiritual life. I had one. I began to long for the other. I began to study Celtic Spirituality and the customs of the Scottish highlands...
Personal, personal, personal, yadayadayada...
By tist time, I had no idea what the questions even were any longer. It was more just an empty sort of feeling; a hole that I knew should not be empty and a nagging sort of hunger waiting for the right meal.
My children grew. My health deteriorated rapidly and I began to wonder if perhaps I’d been looking down the wrong road for my answers. Just because I’d been walking in that direction, having my feet set that way by my parents, did not mean I could not turn right or left, or even step off the road all together. Still, I had doctors to see and medications to take. I had children to raise. These things would have to wait.
Unfortunately, things don’t wait for us to be ready for them. John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens are you’re making other plans.” Well, I was making doctors’ appointments and dance lessons and baseball practices when life happened. My dad… my dear sweet, kind dad… who had driven me to every doctor’s appointment for two years so my husband could keep working… dropped over and died one Tuesday morning in May four years ago. He was gone before he met the floor. I know it’s the way he wanted to go. I also know he would have stayed if he could. I never knew anything could hurt as much as having a miscarriage years before, while ending a marriage. I thought I’d felt the worst thing I could feel when I lost my dad. I wasn’t even close. My mother died two months later.
So, there I was without my support system and my best friends. I had two children grieving their grandparents, who had been in our home every day for those last two years of their lives, and asking why they had to die. Someone told them it was God’s will. They stopped liking God. I told them that their bodies just stopped. PopPop’s heart simply stopped beating. Grandmom’s body was tired. Nevertheless, I wondered, where was God when we needed Him? Why couldn’t He make me feel better about all this or help me give my children better answers? Were there better answers?
I’d like to say here that I had a great epiphany, perhaps a bolt of lightning, a message in a bottle, a rainbow to end all rainbows. Instead, I only had more questions. Nothing made sense any longer. God didn’t seem all that benevolent and loving and certainly far from omniscient. I had some thinking to do.
Why was God male, I wondered one day as I looked at my beautiful daughter? Why was Eve the scapegoat in the story of Eden? Why were women subjugated from the beginning of time, just because Eve exercised the curiosity that God had given her? Why, if God made Adam first and then realized Adam needed a partner, was God considered omniscient? Seemed to me He’d made some mistakes along the way, that being only one of them. After all, He’d made Lillith and cast her out for being independent and began again with Eve, who ate the apple. Not a good track record, even if you do remove Lillith from Genesis and turn her into a demon. Or, perhaps, it was only men who written those stories and God wasn’t to be found there at all.
So, I began to Google and check books out of the library, my normal course of action when I don’t know something. I visited websites and chatted in forums and read and read and read. I sat outside in the backyard, feeling the breeze and listening to the birds, and wondered if the reason I’d always felt so drawn to our Native American cultures was because they’d had it right all along. They knew we were tied to the Earth. They knew we were all interdependent. They knew magic was not something ‘super’ but something inherent in the world around us. They knew better than to ignore the spiritual essence in all things and they knew that having dominion was not carte blanche to pillage and destroy. In that moment, I began to discover the spiritual being that had patiently waited inside me all these years. I also discovered something else.
I didn’t know Her name at first. I found Her in my garden one evening. Being a rabid gardener and a long-time lover of herbs and herbal healing, I nurture a large garden in my little corner of the world that is filled with all manner of plants, flowers, herbs, and trees. The back yard ends at a State Forest, so only wild beings will be my neighbors there in the future. First house I’ve ever owned, first garden I won’t have to move one day, it is a thing of wonder and beauty and healing for me. And, on an evening constitutional, I found Her there. I’m not certain I can fully convey that first meeting in words.
I’ve always known there was an essence in all living things. There is something that ties us all together, binds us and equals us. I’ve felt the vibrations in my plants, knowing them intimately from seed to harvest back to seed again. That night, I felt the cycle in those seeds and plants as I never have before. That night, I felt my place in the cycle, outside of the artificial clocks and calendars of men. That night, She told me what that essence was and that I was a part of it. She was the voice I’d been hearing whispering in my ear all along but, on that night, I opened my heart along with my ears and truly heard Her for the first time. So, I searched for Her name.
Of course, I easily found books on the Goddess and all the contradictory facts of matriarchal societies and suppression by the victors. I found all the arguments on both sides as to whether those stories were true. I found witches and wiccans as well. There was Dianic Wicca and all its tenets, for those who wished to worship only a Goddess. So, perhaps I should be worshipping a Goddess instead of a God?
Even as I considered that question, I still felt as if something was not quite right. I almost heard Her laughing in my ear! How could a world with only a Goddess be any more balanced than a world with only a God? I didn’t think men were better than women, so why would I think women were better than men? Even as I studied other forms of Wicca, though the natural magic spoke to me, the practices and the ideology did not. Something could not be made from nothing. Something was still out of balance.
And, there it was. Balance… the word echoed in my heart and my mind and my soul. It was balance that I was seeking. There was that ‘something more’ still beyond me that I knew I had not yet found. Outside in my garden, alone but for the birds and squirrels and a couple of very sweet dogs, I closed my eyes and asked for balance. Danu answered me. The world is to be in balance for us to live, She told me, though nature is at odds with humans. Still, all things in balance…we are all one. We are in balance.
Danu was a name I’d never heard before, until I’d begun studying the Goddess. Having always been drawn to all things Scottish and Irish, and having a bit of Scottish blood in my veins, I felt right at home as I learned all I could about the Celtic Gods and Goddesses, while listening to my Scottish and Irish folk music. I found Them in the most obvious places. In a project for the National MS Society, I had begun sketches for a site which would be first and foremost a tree, surrounded by a garden dedicated to hope. People will add metal leaves to the tree, with their name or wish, and it will be a permanent memorial to hope for everyone. Only after I’d designed the idea, did I learn of the rag trees at Brigid’s Well. That well I’d learned of from a song by a favored Irish musician years before and I always wondered about it. I’d just never took the step to find out more. The whispers had been there all along. Everything came together in a quiet moment of awe and peace, rather than a huge flash of lightning. Everything came back into balance.
Wicca, even Celtic Wicca, did not feel right because, for me, it was out of balance. I was a mouse in a maze at a crossroads. A single post on a pagan forum caught my eye and I began to look into Druidry. A daunting task that is, given the different views on what is or is not a true Druid, what is or is not fact, what is or is not the basis of the Ogham and so forth. These were questions I could enjoy. Learning has always delighted me. Suddenly, even as I searched, I felt at home.
The ways of the Druid allow me to honor the Deities and feel their strength and power and place in the world around me. I am able to connect, not only to my own ancestors, but to those who walked this land before me and bring honor and tribute to them as well. I am finding new ways each day to connect to the natural world, both within and without, stepping into the flow of time or stepping away from it. I am neither blind to all that is out there nor am I wearing rose-colored glasses and pretending it is something else.
(wrote this months ago, remember) I have no idea what part my illness and pain will play in all of this. I suffer intense pain from the neck down; no other sensation from my neck to my toes than pain. Despite the earlier hunger metaphor, I do not feel any sense of hunger or feeling of fulfillment when I eat. My children know the hugs they need cause me pain. That sweetly-scented evening breeze causes havoc on my skin. Perhaps, the inner focus I will learn and the new eyes with which I will see will see my past this pain. Perhaps it will turn out to be a gift that allows me to transcend the physical to some other level of being. The questions alone excite me. The possibilities propel me forward.
And, that is where I see myself going... toward learning with both hands outstretched, both eyes open inward and outward, and a heart full of desire. That Druid studies can and should take twelve to twenty years does not daunt me. In fact, it delights me. I want no easy answers to my questions. I would prefer more questions. I would rather see Druid study and knowledge as a bottomless well than a book of pat answers that can be closed and shelved. I see myself with an empty bucket in hand, filled with questions as I lower it into the well of knowledge to be refilled each and every day, and delighted when it comes up full yet again. I see myself with questions and the longing to rise each day to continue the lessons they bring.
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Post by Lady Anastasia on Nov 5, 2006 19:51:48 GMT -5
that is very beautiful Wren, thank you for sharing it, I feel such honor that you would choose to do so..... Love and Light to you.
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Post by wren on Nov 6, 2006 14:27:32 GMT -5
Well, you asked... *grin*. Can you believe that's the shortened version?
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Post by Lady Anastasia on Nov 7, 2006 15:18:13 GMT -5
lol... Yes, I can believe it.. I very much liked it though...
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Post by Marcus on Nov 9, 2006 12:57:33 GMT -5
Im not sure how to answer the first question. Sorry.
2. I draw my inspiration, faith, believes and energy from the beauty of the land around me. The land around me is considered celtic and for that i beleive it is the land that has called out to me to love it. I am part of the land.
3. I hope to spiritual maturation and hopefully to influence and educate others.
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Post by Lady Anastasia on Nov 9, 2006 19:45:29 GMT -5
Im not sure how to answer the first question. Sorry. 2. I draw my inspiration, faith, believes and energy from the beauty of the land around me. The land around me is considered celtic and for that i beleive it is the land that has called out to me to love it. I am part of the land. 3. I hope to spiritual maturation and hopefully to influence and educate others. thank you for responding
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