The marvellous thing about the OBOD Facebook page is that all sorts of people visit it, not only Druids. Molly Ramsay contacted us via Facebook asking for some information that she could use to help develop her University project. Molly is a talented interior design student and had been asked to design a Druid Shrine for the United Nations Building in Guadalajara as part of her course. Here Molly talks about her project and shares photos of her wonderful Druid Retreat Centre:

My name is Molly Ramsay and I am an interior design student at Florida State University. In one of my classes, students were asked to design a religious shrine dedicated to Druidism for the United Nations building in Guadalajara, Mexico. After extensive research of Druidism and Druid ideals, I began the project with the concept of the four elements– earth, air, fire, and water. The design solution succeeds in accommodating the United Nations Druid retreat center’s visitors through its dynamic interpretation of Druid ideals through the use of color, materials, and structural elements. While standing on the south deck of the space, users are greeted with an expansive view of the landscape to the left and right. The building’s front façade is a live wall with the religious logo and signage protruding from the foliage. Upon entering the space, visitors are provided with clear sight lines to the back of the space where the worship area is located. The user then encounters a blue interactive pathway reactive to his/her body heat, alluding to the interactive qualities of water. Along the outskirts of the pathway are columns that resemble trees to further connect to Druidism and their ideas of nature, and trees specifically, being sacred. These columns connect to the top of the space forming a veiny leaf pattern along the ceiling. As the user approaches the worship area, he/she will be framed by art installations to his/her left and right. To the left is a string piece backlit by a partition wall reading “We are all connected by the web of life.” To the right is a series of pictures and windows. The pictures represent the four elements while the windows provoke the user to consider the four elements at play in the outside world. Once reaching the worship area, the user is confronted by four columns, each containing an element: earth, air, fire, and water. ~ Molly Ramsay

From the BBC:

A mummified monk found preserved in Mongolia last week has been baffling and astounding those who uncovered him.

Senior Buddhists say the monk, found sitting in the lotus position, is in a deep meditative trance and not dead.

Forensic examinations are under way on the remains, found wrapped in cattle skins in north-central Mongolia.

Scientists have yet to determine how the monk is so well-preserved, though some think Mongolia’s cold weather could be the reason.

But Dr Barry Kerzin, a physician to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, told the Siberian Times that the monk was in a rare state of meditation called “tukdam”.

“If the meditator can continue to stay in this meditative state, he can become a Buddha,” Dr Kerzin said.

The monk was discovered after being stolen by a man hoping to sell him on the black market.

Go to article

Snowdrop – the Imbolc flower. Galanthus nivalis – photo by André Karwath

Imbolc was one of the first festivals I experienced when I encountered Druidry. Nuinn, the old Chief Druid, explained to me that it was dedicated to Brighid. As we sat in the circle gazing at a bowl of water, out of which eight candles rose, we listened to poetry devoted to the Goddess. It was touching and beautiful. I’ve never forgotten that evening. On Sunday Stephanie and I held a quiet ritual on our own – reading the same poems I had heard almost fifty years ago.

In celebration of this time of year, let me offer three inspirations on the theme of the Goddess: the first a very short essay on what a particular Druid thinks about the Goddess and the question ‘Why gender Deity? The ‘Seaside Druid’, Bill Bitner, writes: ‘When I use the term “Goddess Spirituality” to affix one of many adjectives to my spirituality, it’s not because I believe “God is a woman.” God isn’t even a person. I don’t even like the word “God.” I believe “there’s something out there.” But I don’t know what…’ Read more

Joanna van der Hoeven writes a short article on ‘Women in Druidry’: ‘Within Paganism, there appear to be an equal number of women and men in leadership roles.  One of the most popular Druids today is Emma Restall Orr, one of the most popular Wiccans is Starhawk.  Heathenry has Galina Grasskova and Diana L Paxon.  There are countless others in all pagan paths and traditions that stand alongside the men in equal roles of leadership, teaching and more. We know historically that there were female Druids, often termed as Druidesses…’  Read more

And then, just today a beautiful essay arrived from an OBOD member that touches on the experience of the Feminine in a very personal, but universal way. My assistant, Maria, pipped me to the post and has just posted this up on the blog, so you can read it in the post below…(scroll down to ‘Skyclad, the previous post, or click here)

Lots of food for thought! Happy Imbolc!

OBOD are in the process of putting together a book to celebrate our 50th Anniversary. It will be a collection of 50 articles and 50 pieces of art/craftwork that will share experiences of what it means to be an OBOD Druid. I include here a wonderful and moving submission for the book by Sue Lobo. If you would like to contribute to the book, please send submission in to Maria at philip@druidry.org and Sharon at sharon.zak@slipperyjacks.com.

When I went through the  journey of Bard to Druid a few years ago,  it coincided with many milestones in my life: with children leaving home, my husband working overseas & away from home for months on end, death of friends, family members & pets & all merging with the menopause which is such a bridge to cross. I started studying with OBOD while going through all this because I felt I wanted to go home, back to myself & wow what a journey of emotions it was. I can honestly say that it saved me from deep depression & probably auto-destruction by turning to pills or some other crutch. (I think it’s helpful to others who struggle with such things to share that last sentence, but equally if it feels too self-revelatory for you, that last sentence could come out and it would still read well). When I finished studying the course, I came out of the tunnel a completely new person, reborn, & knew that although the course had ended, the real studying had just begun & by this time I was officially now a crone & knew how to celebrate this fact & embrace this new woman with such joy. I also started writing & have now published many poetry books & also my autobiography. Life has taken on a completely new meaning & although I am a solitary Druid, I enjoy every minute of it, rejoicing in my continuing path. To celebrate my Cronedom at the end of my course, I did a Skyclad ritual & wrote about it. I would like to share it with you, as I feel very much a part of the OBOD family & maybe it will give a spark of hope to other women who are going through the same feelings I went through at the time.

SKY-CLAD:
The passing of passage is marked by many calendar moons, birth dates, entering & exiting the teenage years, engagements, marriage, motherhood etc. I decided to celebrate my coming of age, my entering into crone-hood & it merited a ceremony, my own private getting-to-know-me-as-I am-today-ceremony:
I drew back the curtains of a new dawn; I lit my bees-wax candles, cast my magic circle & dropped my robe. I stood completely sky-clad/naked, feeling dawn´s billowing caress as I searched for the real me in the ancient mirror on the wall.
I looked down at my ageing body, starting at my feet, feet deformed by bunions, crooked toes bent & crippled like an old tree. My eyes moved up my legs which are knotted by thick blue ropes of veins, bulging & throbbing. In between these blue pathways, scattered in array over the bumps of flesh, criss-crossing, red spider veins, mapping the failing secrets of life beneath my skin.
My soft belly protruding south towards my sadness & flaccid transparent breasts following the rest in resigned silence. Sloping shoulders, not as upright as before; before what? Before life happened.
All that my shadowed eyes beheld was encased within a white creased sheet of skin, like that of a newly hatched moth that has never seen the light. My lank grey hair was as colourless as a blind man´s stare & I felt older than life itself:
I pushed away all the age-depressing images, closed my eyes against the woman in the candle-lit mirror & took a deep breath.
I gave myself over to the Goddess, the Gods & the Elements, feeling myself whirling into time´s spinning vortex & all around me & within me, the beautiful choral voices of the singing matriarchs of the ancient tribes of my ancestors, serenading my senses, my womanhood, & the path I was about to enter.
Entering into the realm of the Goddess, I opened my eyes & I felt younger, lighter, stronger & wiser. My eyes sought the flickering mirror once again, but now with the wiser eyes of ancient knowledge.
I now saw my feet as the beautiful gnarled roots of the ancient tree of knowledge & realized that these same feet had carried me through life & the five continents, safely & steadfastly, leading me to where I stood today. The thick knotted veins on my legs converted to the rivers flowing with my life-blood, as precious as the great rivers of this planet, of the African rivers where as a child I had swam deep & content. Those red criss-crossing spider veins vying for importance on my flesh now became the map of path-ways & routes, taking me through my many travels in this life upon earth, some leading to where I had to go, others misleading me, making me retrace my steps, simply so that I may learn a lesson. Dusty pathways through the African deserts I had walked in childhood, but all steps leading to where I stand now.
My round protruding belly, the cauldron that protected my sons, many, many moons ago. My tired breasts, a testimony to the nurturing & comfort bestowed upon babes & men in my long-ago youth of another era, now grateful to be left in slumbering peace. My sloping shoulders, those hills that have carried weighty problems of the past, now slipping & sloping down further into nothing, oblivion, leaving my now-shoulders free & weightless, yet marked by their duty in the past, of continuous support.
My skin, not bronzed by the sun of Greek Gods, nor burnt to cinders from summers past. I now see my skin as a silken mantle, kissed by the beams of many ancient moons, giving it the hue of an open creamy rose, old velvet petals, drooping, ready to fall with a beauty with which no bud can compare. My breeze-billowing hair is now the silver surf of oceans, caressed by millions of moon moths, softly illuminating the nights of life.
I have studied my being from toe to head, getting to know the woman I am today & I am content.
I turn around in my circle three times, feeling the power within. I dedicate my profound & eternal gratitude to the Goddess within me & within all women. I thank her for the beautiful maid I was all those eons, yet seconds ago. I thank her for the loving, nurturing mother I was but yesteryear. I thank her for the lover I was & the men I have loved. I now thank her for the wonderful, wise crone I am at this moment in my life. I don my robe & continue down the corridors of the rest of my life. SUE LOBO ©

I am just writing my responses to interview questions for the next issue of Aontacht the Druidic Dawn magazine. I have just written this, and I’m interested to know if you agree with me, or whether you think it’s hopelessly optimistic!

“If you love something, you want to protect and nurture it, and so most Druids today (and many other people too, of course) are interested not only in their own spiritual progress or development, but in the welfare of the planet and its inhabitants. This is such an obvious idea it is easy for us to miss a significant point here, which is that the spiritual quest – while including an emphasis on care and charity, in the Christian world, and compassion and seva (service) in the Dharmic world – has always been primarily about gaining salvation or enlightenment for oneself. Now I believe there has been a shift in the Collective Mind, and that many people are as motivated by the desire to be of service to the world as they are by the idea of gaining personal enlightenment. Now both goals are seen as equally important, both are primary – that’s the shift, or the evolution, I believe that has taken place over the last decade or two.”

What do you think?Has there really been this shift?

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. People all around the world will come together, in gatherings or in private, silent thought, to remember and honour the millions killed in the Holocaust. Today is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and I am sharing here a very moving and poignant guest post from Siggy – a member of OBOD from Austria – about her experience with Felix, a concentration camp survivor. With thanks to Kate for fine-tuning the translation and for Siggy for her wonderful words and images:

Siggy’s candle for Felix

Making candles is a tradition in my family, and I was fascinated by the art as a child. Then, as an adult, I started doing it myself.  At first, I made decorative candles for friends or just for me, and it was only years later I realized that candle making can have Druidic power, combining the creativity of the Bard with the healing work of the Ovate.

As an Austrian, a tour guide and a historian, I always felt a very strong connection to WW2. It was a shock to my soul, at the age of 13, to learn about my country’s role in it – and that motivated me to study history. I had visited some former concentration camps, but somehow I could never go to the most infamous one in my own country,  Mauthausen. Even the thought of it was like a black, beating heart, but at the same time, it called to me.

One morning, I suddenly felt I could go, but something within me said “not alone”. I was stunned to get a call that very day from a tourist office, asking me to go there with Felix, a holocaust survivor of both Auschwitz and Mauthausen. I agreed.

It was an amazing experience, as though we were walking into the past. I had been so afraid of being overwhelmed by the energy of this place, but I felt completely protected, as if there were a shield around me. I told him, “Officially, I am your guide, but actually you are mine”.

Deep within me I wanted to make a candle for him, and I asked him for the most important date in his life. It was May 5th 1945, the day of his liberation, and I resolved to make it in time for the next anniversary.

When I make a candle, first, I wait for a colour or symbol to appear. Usually, it doesn’t take long, but this time months passed. I even took it to a Samhain ritual, hoping for a sign, but nothing happened. I started to get nervous – perhaps this candle didn’t want to speak to me.

Then, one day in January, I heard Auschwitz mentioned three times on the radio; it was the anniversary of the liberation, and this was the sign. Red and black came to mind. Felix had become a number, so that featured, as well as a swastika, a symbol I never ever thought I would make but I felt the candle wanted it. Fire erupts from it, with blood dripping down, and the letters KZ (the abbreviation for Konzentrationslager – German for concentration camp). Barbed wire symbolizes imprisonment and mortal danger, and the broken candle is for broken lives. Felix’s survival is represented by leaves growing towards liberation and becoming a human, a name, again. I included the Hebrew words for peace and life, and eventually, only one last symbol, two laurels, remained to be added, but I couldn’t do it. Making candles is to listen to the candle itself, and it was a definite “wait”.

I wondered why, then I realized that I had a visit to Poland planned, to Lodz,  where Felix was born. I took the candle with me and finished it there, in his home city. In the morning of my last day there, I held it up to the light of the rising sun. It was very, very magical as I connected with the spirit of the land and the sun to ask for blessings and healing for him.

Felix received the candle in time for May 5th. His daughter wrote to tell me he could read the story I had put into it, and that it meant a great deal to him. 

Now, I go to Mauthausen to create and light candles, and sometimes I take groups there. I tell them the story of the camp on the bus, and then when they arrive they can go wherever they feel drawn. When we meet again, I give each of them a candle and ask them to light it wherever they feel they want to.

Through Felix, I realized the very place I had feared so greatly was actually the place I had been searching for, and his candle gave me a connection to the spirit of the candle and to what it means to be an Ovate. ~ Siggy

I’ve just discovered you can listen to the 4 hour long complete audiobook recording of DruidCraft we made with Damh the Bard for free if you take up a 30 day free trial offer from audible.com, which you can then cancel, of course, if you don’t want to carry on with membership.    In the UK/Europe go here.    In the USA go here.

Druidcraft Unabridged Audiobook Play it Free With 30-Day Free Trial
Written By: Philip Carr-Gomm
Narrated By: Philip Carr-Gomm, Sophia Carr-Gomm, Stephanie Carr-Gomm, Vivianne Crowley
Duration: 4 hours 42 minutes
Summary:
Druidry and Wicca are the two great streams of Western Pagan tradition. Both traditions are experiencing a renaissance all over the world, as more and more people seek a spirituality rooted in a love of nature and the land. Increasingly, readers are combining the ideas of both traditions to craft their own spiritual practice. In this down-to-earth, inspiring guide, Philip Carr-Gomm offers a name for this Path that draws on the common beliefs and practices of Wicca and Druidry: DruidCraft. DruidCraft draws on the traditions of scholarship, storytelling, magical craft and seasonal celebration of both the Craft and Druidry to offer inspiration, teachings, rituals, and magical techniques that can help you access your innate powers of creativity, intuition and healing.

If you were in Berlin  last night, you may have been able to celebrate the movement from the winter solstice towards Imbolc with an extraordinary event put on by artist and OBOD member Ceven Knowles. What a talented guy! Here is how he describes it:

DEEP WINTER – a celebration of the six-week period of time beginning with the Winter Solstice (December 21st) ending on Imbolc (February 2nd). It is part film, part live performance, part concert and part installation piece. The show will only be performed once. This is Ceven Knowles’ second Berlin event after WORDS in June 2014 and is the prototype of a his new audio-visual event series following the year cycle mixing original video works with performances and musicians Ruby, Matthew Fennemore, Alfred Ladylike, Martin Watkins, Scott Firth & Kathy Freemann.

Have a look at videos of the artists and look out for the next event here!

Meanwhile, here’s a video ‘Waiting for Light’ of one of the artists, from Glasgow – Ruby.

A guest post by Penny Billington. Many thanks to Tim Woolmington for the use of his images.

 Wassail (Old Norse “ves heil”, Old English hál, literally ‘be you healthy’) refers both to the salute ‘Waes Hail’ and to the cider traditionally drunk as an integral part of wassailing, an English drinking ritual in January to ensure a good cider apple harvest the following year. “Was hail”, and the reply “drink hail”, are a drinking formula adopted widely by the indigenous population of England

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassail

Today I came home to hear that Brian Clemens had died.  Aged 64, said the radio.

Two minutes earlier I hadn’t heard of him, though I must have seen his name hundreds of times in my youth. For he was the script writer, editor and co-producer of the iconic BBC TV series ‘The Avengers’, which reinvented the spy drama and was a smash hit in England and the USA in the 1960s.

And today, near the time of the old twelth night, a bunch of us, largely Druids, went wassailing the orchard in Glastonbury Abbey.

So what connects the two?  If it seems a surreal proximity, then that is entirely the point.

For it seems to me, in post-wassail euphoria, that both the Avengers series and our singing spring from a creative attitude to life; and an unusual expression of that attitude. Both in turn come from an internal sense of a Britain that has never existed in the real world, but is of intrinsic worth to the way we live our lives; part of the spirit that informs us. For behind our reality of the grey, faceless, conforming present, most British people still hold firm to the image of themselves as eccentric. Britain is still a place that, although tiny geographically, yet has enough esoteric space to allow each person their own individual way of connecting and making decisions on the way that they engage with life.

By Clemens direction, The Avengers never left England, unlike contemporary spy dramas; and although the role model Emma Peel was a fabulous sop to swinging London, she and the suave John Steed inhabited a totally invented England. This was timeless with classic Edwardiana and Savile Row suits, and with surreal activity below the radar. A land where dark and subversive elements could emerge with impunity from behind lace curtains, within leafy suburbs and chocolate-box picture villages.

When a genius bends his mind to creating classic telly, then for an hour a week we can inhabit the world he has defined: of SMOG (scientific measurement of ghosts) mad professors, pet cats becoming miniature tigers, killer robots, mind-transference machines and invisible assailants. In Clemens capable hands, it was a world where wrong was always defeated with a stiff upper lip, a rolled umbrella and a judo throw.

When a community group run with creativity, they are making a conscious choice to create defining and significant moments of ‘otherness’ in their lives; to punctuate their everyday reality.

From this instinct, on this occasion, fifteen people shared the experience of an enchanted afternoon in the Abbey, with the sun pouring from the ‘Italianate blue’ of the Glastonbury sky, and the birds joining our songs. Irrelevant as it might seem to some people in the context of the ‘important’ things of the world, it was a choice that asserted our belief in the here and now, our relationship with locality and nature and an hour of refreshment in busy lives. And, along with our thanks to the trees and the blessing of the elements on the orchards, it was a laugh!

Brian Clemens’ achievement was to practically singlehandedly invent niche and cult drama, described in his obituary and both ‘erotic and menacing’. Our wassailing did not go into that territory… But there was a deep two-way connection, an intimacy with the magical and brooding orchard.  Our singing procession, with an awareness of the weather, birds, the dark living roots beneath, and the sleeping trees surrounding us, evoked a change of consciousness; a depth and sense of reciprocity. And when at the end we each praised the apple, the last toast was to the awe of life; to the mystery, which can sometimes only be hinted at through the surreal. For that place is both light and dark, with the potential to be simultaneously ecstatic and menacing. It is that force that through the green fuse drives the flower, the life force that causes the apples to fruit each year. And it is the force brings us all in turn to our seasons of birth, experience and death.

So, somewhere amongst all those fruity, funny, fantastical Avengers scripts, along with Morris dancers, cheese rollers and tar barrellers, I hope that there were a small group of wassailers. Who better to provide the depth and resonance of actual bizarre and beautiful eccentric reality to the magical imagined England which is Brian Clemens legacy? I like to think that the inner vision of film writers can inspire our creative relationship with our inner and outer reality, and make the latter richer for observing the former, and acting on its impulses.

I for one would be glad to hone a life wherein, like the Avengers, ‘The surreal is perfectly balanced with deadpan wit.’ Juxtaposed exquisitely with the necessary demands of the mundane world, what a delightful country to inhabit.  And as a motto to carry into 2015, that coined by the pragmatic Mr. Clemens, ‘Arse on chair, pen on paper’ which I less elegantly interpret as ‘put the creative work into your life: and don’t just think about it; get on and express it’ seems a pretty good dictum to follow to achieve it.

‘First-rate man of mystery’: Brian Horace Clemens OBE (30.7.31 – 10.1.2015)

Holders of the mysteries of regeneration; the Glastonbury apple trees 2015.

For services to the regenerative spirit of creativity, a toast to both:

WASSAIL! DRINK HAIL!

Penny Billington *** www.pennybillington.co.uk

*All quotes from Brian Clemens obituary: http://www.independent.co.uk/

Full biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Clemens