by Cathi Yarrow
I was drawn to Druidry by the idea that I could rebuild
my relationship with deity not through complex rituals, or the right robes,
or reading the right texts, but through breathing deep into my own creativity.
As far an easy conversion goes, I think that’s a winner! I headed
first for OBOD, and went through the traditional course, delving first into
bardic-ness, then very slowly into the Ovate material. But what I yearned
for was some connectivity, some cohesion between these elements. And beyond
that, a way of connecting this inner work with the world “out there”
– a world where I saw increasingly shattered communities from my neighbourhood
to global politics.
My Druidic journey since then has taken me on more of a
spiral than a linear path, which travels through bardic, ovatic and druidic
material in no particular order. I understand my bardic tradition to teach
me how to listen well, and then how to express what I hear through my own
individuality. I understand my ovatic path to take me deep beneath the surface
of events and matter, to plunge into the tides below so I can respond to
the world more wisely. And I understand my role as Druid to be one of service
to my communities – to be mediator, facilitator, teacher, to take
a public role.
When I consider the events of the last couple of months
I draw strength from all those traditions. First, for me, came G8 –
and what I remember from my few days in Scotland was the wonderful, vibrant
creativity of the “protest community”. The juiciness of creating
communities, and cultures based on respect for the individual held within
an awareness of community. It wasn’t so much about opposition and
protest, as it was about making the space and the atmosphere we needed to
express our potential as creatively, as freely as we could, whilst taking
care of each other as profoundly as we could. Then, came the bombings in
London, and I still search for an adequate response, beyond fear and sorrow,
beyond the dry rhetoric of politics. And following that, the experience
of Druid Camp.
We need to reinterpret the world imaginatively as bards,
ovates and druids. We need artforms suffused with the beauty of the wisdom
that grows out of relationship with our myriad communities, out of a deep
awareness of the tides behind ephemeral emotional responses to terror and
war, and we need to learn new ways with our art. The workshop at Druid Camp
on satire had me thinking – if satire isn’t simply “taking
the piss”, it’s about looking beneath reactions, finding the
reasons why our leaders and public figures act the way they do – demystifying
those actions, holding them up to the light and bringing sacred cows back
down to hard earth with a bump. If satire hurts, it should do so because
it goes deep, yet it should be rooted in our human commonality so it doesn’t
lose its heart.
What are the myths of our society now? What are the myths
that are now growing, with the threat of climate change, and of world terrorism?
What are we telling ourselves about death and life? What I hear, every day
from the radio and the newspapers, is that the world is a dark, dangerous
place, we are threatened by monsters and terrible neighbours and must build
walls against each other.
And then, I go to Druid Camp, or to G8, and encounter the
marvellous beauty in human relationship with each other, with the environment,
even with our so-called “enemies”. It gives me hope simply because
it gives me absolute bliss to be in this kind of creative relationship –
and these are the stories I want to tell, this is the humanity I want to
celebrate. I want more songs about how good it can be, and I want more humour,
more subversive clowns and fairies and Infernal Noise Brigades (carnival
marching band from Seattle) taking the wind out of the sails of the mythology
of materialism.
Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli writer, says of beauty that it
is “the ultimate manifestation of humanism”. I am reminded now
more than ever, that to create beauty is to give breath to every action
I take in the world.
by Cathi Yarrow
peace [at] druidnetwork [dot] org
August 2005
