Midsummer Madness – and Beauty!

I am proud to be associated with a spiritual path that includes the zany and the sometimes-irreverent with the respectful and the mystical. Spirituality can be stifled with too much piety!

Midsummer brings out the best, and the zaniest, in the Druid community. I see that someone has started to produce Druid underwear. I had predicted this years ago, when I learnt that Mormons and Sikhs both have special under gaments. Well, someone has made use of the internet to attempt to sell pants to OBOD members. No-one asked anyone at OBOD central. We just found this on a google search: obod underwear.

Let’s have a Midsummer Poll:

Now to more serious matters! Our weekend Summer Gathering is over, and what a weekend it was! Will Worthington retired after 19 years service as Pendragon of the Order, and Damh the Bard took up the mantle (or sword, in the Pendragon’s case) in a moving ceremony that included the hymn to the moon (‘Casta Diva’) of the Druid priestess from Bellini’s ‘Norma’ (and sung for us by member and opera singer Henriette De Groot). Earlier that day we had woken at 4am to travel to Stonehenge for an early morning ceremony, and the day before had climbed Glastonbury Tor for another ceremony. As several hundred of us stood there in a timeless magical ritual, a beautiful greyhound entered our circle, walked around the inside perimeter twice and then left by the eastern gate. The dog had a mysterious otherworldly quality that is captured here by a photograph taken later on the Tor by Paul Beer:

Tor Greyhound. Photo Paul Beer