Gwyllt (Cymraig), adj. – wild, to be wild
Gwyllto n.m.; gwylltei n.f. (plural gwylltiau) - an inspired
possessed person able to travel between the worlds, who is one with nature and
talks to animals, who is able to arouse primal wildness in others
It might be asked why, in the early twenty-first century, it
should be considered desirable to adopt the methods and beliefs of the oldest
spiritual discipline on the planet… The
messages [of the gwylltiau] which call out to us, in the modern Western metropolis,
are as vital and urgent now as they have ever been. It teaches us respect for the rest of
creation – a theme which, in our destructive age, is of the utmost importance –
and it shows us new approaches to living: ways beyond the linear time lines with
which we bind ourselves: out of the realm in which we see without seeing, hear
without hearing, touch without feeling, and breathe the air without tasting or
scenting the news that it brings us of our world. Shamanism can teach all of this. But above all it restores a quality to our
lives which many of us have missed for a long time. This is the sense of wonder, and of the
ability to pass beyond the three-dimensional world into the fourth dimension,
the Otherworld of which the Celts knew so much and of which they have left so
eloquent a testimony.
~ From the Celtic
Shaman, p. 5
The work of natural women and men is to be gwylltiau, able to
travel between the worlds, one with nature and talking to animals, able to
arouse primal wildness in ourselves and others, bringing them to ways of living
extending beyond the linear and showing them how to open the door to restoring
quality to their lives.
“Quality”, interesting word that, harking back to what
Pirsig said about it in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and how the
Greeks beginning with Socrates taught that quality is something that we can
only imagine, not part of everyday life.
He and his Western philosophical successors, including that old deluder
Saint Paul, took the perfect from us, telling us that we are imperfect – fallen
– and can never experience real quality as it is something that exists only in
a non-Earthly realm.
To be a natural man is to recover quality, to experience the
Natural as perfect, sacred, to be savored.
The corollary is that quality is something to be experienced and not
achieved.
So for those of you inspired to be a gwylltei or gwyllto, I
suggest that you use this changing of the season and lengthening of days to
give up the pursuit of perfection and to begin experiencing quality and the
wild in your lives. The Natural is all
about you, ready and waiting for you to do so.
Snow, finally last night, but not much, just enough to
whiten the ground. This is turning out
so far to be a winter without winter.
Here at Shamans’ Rest we’ve had rain and not snow as well as warm
above-freezing days. This is not
normal. Still, I remember years like
this from the past with winter finally arriving in full glory and with a
vengeance to make up for lost time.
For those who wish to know what winters past and present
here in North By East are like, I highly recommend Northern Farm: A Chronicle
of Maine, written by Henry Beston in 1948 and the contemporary Small Misty
Mountain: Nature’s Year in a Downeast Village by Rob McCall as well as Winter World by Bernt Heinrich.