Gwyllt

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

John Matthews ~

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.