Saint Dwynwen's Day

Today, January 25^th, the Welsh celebrate Dydd Dwynwen San – Saint Dwynwen’s Day.  Dwynwen is the matron saint of lovers, comparable to Saint Valentine, and the protector of midwifes and mothers in childbirth.  The day is celebrated in Wales with flowers, poetry, and visits to sacred springs and wells.  Lovers who invoke her on this day will either find true love or be cured of their lovesickness.

Legend says that Dwynwen lived in the fifth century and was the daughter of King Brychan.  She was in love with Prince Maelon, but her father refused this match and promised her to another.  Dwynwen fled to the woods in grief and she begged God – or more likely the gods – to help her forget Maelon.  In a dream or vision a visitor gave her a potion which eased her heartache and cause he to forget him.  Christians would have you believe that the visitor was an angel, but most in Wales know that the caller was of the tylwydd teg, a fae.

Dwynwen lived alone for the rest of her life.  Some say she became a nun.    Her holy well on Ynys Mon – the holy island the English call Anglesey - is a site of pilgrimage and divination for hopeful or forlorn lovers.  Until well into the nineteenth century, a woman seer could be found at the well.

In her isolation she learned to speak with and heal the beasts of forest and moor. Thus Dwynwen is called upon to heal sick animals, a tradition which has survived in parts of Wales to the present time.  

The legend of Dwynwen may have evolved from Welsh tales and mythology since lost.  (Wales has many sacred springs, holy wells, and other sacred sites that are dedicated to female goddesses loosely disguised as saints.)  Like Diana, the Roman goddess, Dwynwen’s symbol is the crescent Moon.  She wore a golden belt similar to Venus. 

But I think more importantly, Dwynwen symbolizes an Earth-centered culture with the goddesses as central figures undergoing submission to a patriarchal faith.  She challenges patriarchy in the form of her father, standing in for the Christian’s patriarchal god.  Thus she maintains her integrity and remained a natural woman.

How do you stand up to the powers that be?  Do you maintain your integrity?

Thanks to Cymdeithas Gymraeg yn Ngholorado and Edie Stone for background on Saint Dwynwen

Knowing One's Terrain

  

“One must know one’s terrain” - George Garrad 

from The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain

by Colin Monger

It is important to me, as a natural man, to be in touch with the Earth where I live.  This has always been so, though there have been places where I dwelled where I was just not able to establish a connection.  I always was able to figure out the reason that a place wasn’t right for me – at home – but it took me a stubbornly long time in some cases to admit why.

At present I am reading Thoreau’s Country: Journey through A Transformed Landscape by David Foster.  Using Thoreau’s extensive journals Foster relates how the New England that Thoreau knew has evolved from an abode of small villages and farms populated with yeomanry to what we see in our era.  The extensive cleared fields, small managed woodlots, hay meadows, tidy hamlets, and clear flowing brooks of Thoreau’s nineteenth century have given way to forests, cities, and subdivisions.  Only the occasional stone wall running straight and true through the wooded landscape is evidence of the past time.

There is such a stone wall along the back edge of Shamans’ Rest.  It is the boundary between our wooded meadowland and Sherwood Forest, a whimsically named subdivision of houses in cape and garrison style.  That wall prompted me to do some research; what had the land of Shamans’ Rest been before?

It had been part of a ten-acre tract that was subdivided into two, then three, then four lots.   It was open field through at least the 40s; photos from the late nineteenth century show that this was tilled land or hay pasture and treeless.  There was a stone wall along the road, since removed.  The terrain has since begun the process of reverting to mixed oak white-pine forest except where humans have chosen to retard the process.

What about before that?  Sometime in the seventeenth century English settlers began to clear the land, periodically interrupted by war parties from what was then New France. 

Before that?  Well I can only speculate.  The glaciers were here many centuries ago and created the mound that is the sandy drumlin on which our home lies.  (Making possible a good site for a septic system; our neighbors had to blast a cavity in the granite to build theirs.)  Millions of years ago the land shook with earthquakes as it passed over a plume of rising flowing magma from deep in the Earth, a hotspot much like that residing at present under Yellowstone.  And an eon before that Shamans’ Rest was the slope of a continental shelf of the small continent of Avalon, since torn in two to form old England and New England.

We humans like to imagine – that is the right word – that things will never change.  We can control our environment and make the way it is permanent.  That’s arrogant and a fairy tale.  For once upon a time the land was very different, and it is continually evolving.  It responds to what we do, not always in ways that we would like.  This latter judgment applies to the larger Earth, not just the localities where we find ourselves.

So I will love the place I live, much as I did Fletcher Dole’s pastures when I was a child.  And I will let the land be itself and tell me what it needs from me.  We can live together and both be happy.

What is your sense of place where you live?

The night sky is glorious this time of year.  Cariad and I frequently walk out into the meadow, sit by the Faerie Fire, and stare up at the stars.

Venus hangs low in the west at sunset, but climbs higher in the sky each night.  In the evening Jupiter is visible over the woods in the south; he can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants to reside with the Ram or the Fishes.

In the morning when I venture out to the deck with my coffee to await the arrival of the birds at the feeders, it is still dark enough to see Saturn cozying up to the Virgin while Mars is tweaking the tail of the Big Lion.

The land where we live is now Certified Wildlife Habitat.  This is a program of the National Wildlife Federation.  Even if you have only a small urban lot, you can still participate in this valuable program.  The smaller creatures such as voles and burying beetles who live with you, but whom you are not trained to see, will appreciate your doing so.

Comes Now The Turn Of The Year

For my Welsh ancestors the turn of the new year came at Calen Gaeaf, the eve of November 1st.  By then the harvest was in, the animals bedded down in winter quarters or slaughtered for the larder, and life settled into a routine for the coming cold and darkness.

They lived much closer to Nature, the seasons, and the land those people.  They saw themselves as part of Nature, and She was a source of the sacred, not something to be bulldozed and paved over.  Nature still supports us and keeps us in Her loving arms if we let Her.  I do my best as a natural man to be open to Her blessing.

Now we moderns use a calendar no longer really tied to the seasons of the year, more a convenience for marking the passing of time and planning the future.  But it in no way changes our place in Nature; we are still very much part of and loved by Her.

So may Nature’s blessings be upon you in the coming year.  May you be healthy and whole and your families and loved ones remain vigorous and happy.  Let there be peace in your lives and may you grow in the spirit.  And may the coming months bring you to the close of another year more fit, more prosperous, and more in harmony with Nature.

Stepping Into The Cauldron

Since rising this morning, I've had a painful tendon in my lower left leg.  It began as a cramp in the night, then didn't go away.

I thought that a hot bath - hot bath - with circulating water would ease the tension and tenderness in the tendon.

A natural man is, by my definition, uninhibitedly sensual.  So as well as taking the bath to heal the tendon, I also savored its wonderful warmth.  I imagined myself stepping into a cauldron of healing, slowly lowering myself into the circulating draught I had prepared.  Ah!  This to be relished.  My body adjusted to the hotness of the steamy water and took pleasure in its stimulation.  It calmed my being.

This was not the end.  Upon rising from the water, I put on my red terry-cloth robe and went outside.  I allowed the robe to fall to the deck, taking in the sensation of the old air of the night on my warm bare skin.  Wonderfulness!  What a feeling!  Arousing and enjoyable!

And my tendon is relaxed and no longer painful.

NATURE NOTES

Still no snow.  We had a flurry or two today, nothing more.

Last night we had a fire, quite a large blaze.  It was a clear night except for some haze on the edge of the northern sky, so we were able to share the blessing of the fire with the stars.  There is something about a fire that brings out wildness and the primal.  Sitting at the fire and taking in its light, warmth, and crackling flame is a return to our true nature and to the sacred.  It helps us forget for a time the submission we have made to dominant culture, a capitulation not all together holy.

I found a dead mouse yesterday morning, a nighttime victim of the two feline predators who live with us.  I took it out to Leo's altar.  By afternoon it was gone.  There are ravens about - saw two this morning - and crows.  I suspect that they are responsible for the mouse's disappearance.

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.

I Rejoice In The Natural World.

As a Natural Man I rejoice in the natural world.  All about me is beauty. 

I think of this each morning before the dawn when I bundle in my thick coat and leave the house to sit in Nature.  I take my seat the deck just off the sun room, looking out over the meadow, the rock garden, and the pine woods.  Here I watch the sky lighten, the clouds take up a lining of red, the stars fade into the brightening sky, and the birds begin to gather at the feeders.

Rejoice in Nature!  Exult and be glad in the natural world!  This is at the heart of living as the Natural Man.

How long have I reveled in Nature? 

I began in childhood.  In the wedge formed by Union Street and High Street were Fletcher Dole’s pastures.  Mr. Dole – as a small boy growing up in the 50s I would never have thought or dared of addressing him any other way – managed a dairy herd of registered Guernseys.  These grazed in one of several pastures, all bound by stone walls and a wire fence.  (Occasionally a heifer succeeded in breeching the fence, and Mom would find it calmly foraging on the lawn beside our house when she came home for lunch.)

I devoted a lot of time to being there alone in the pastures roaming and exploring.  On reflection, the moments spent there were special.  As a child I couldn’t put into words why this was so, any more than I can now.  But I felt at home.  I made a connection with something larger than myself.  It was as if Nature was reaching out to me without words, befriending me, embracing me.  I felt “at home” and connected with the divine in ways that Christianity never offered.

I have felt this connection and wholeness in other places as well: Hunt Road woods as a teenager, on the Grand Monadnock, in the red desert country, in Elk Meadow, and in the woods and meadows of my present home.  No religion of The Book can provide this sense of serenity.

I could expound my experience in any one of these places and more.  So can you.  What is your story?

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In the past month I have seen two buddies pass on from this natural life. 

Anson, the giant orange tabby tomcat that nobody wanted passed over just before Thanksgiving.  “Mister A” was my companion for nearly nine years.  A stray who eluded a local animal control officer for two years, he was brought to a shelter from which we adopted each other.  He helped through some difficult times. 

Leo, the little orange lion, died four weeks to the day that Anson passed on.  Leo was Boo Boo to Anson’s Yogi, his constant companion.  While kidney failure is the official cause of death, I suspect that he also had a broken heart and missed Anson terribly. 

Well, they are together now hopefully happily cuddled up somewhere.  Rest in peace, dear friends.  You are deeply missed.

Being A Natural Man Starts With What The Natural Is

I sit outside each morning in my shaman coat experiencing Nature all about me: rising sun, setting Moon, birds, wind in the oaks, fog on the land.

Is this all there is to Nature?

I think not.

Sit quietly and look about you, out of doors preferably.  At night when the stars course above is even better.  What do you see?

You see the world on which you live by Nature’s grace.  Above you extend the heavens, the Universe of matter and energy confined by space and time.

Is that all there is to Nature?

I think not.

Space and time… four dimensions.  Quantum physics postulates that the existence of our Universe of matter and energy requires as many as ten dimensions, maybe more.  We are but a piece of something much much more awesome and which we find it difficult to comprehend with the mind.

I postulate that in multitudes of places in our matter-energy-space-time Universe sentient beings evolve that are capable of multi-dimensionality, to experience more than what seems to be all there is.  We as a species are such.  We have grown a part of self that touches the more-than-all-there-is; this is spirit.

What to call this bigger picture?  Ultimate existence?  Larger reality?  Astral plane?  I choose to call it the Natural, Nature in its unlimited fullness.

My intuition feels this rings true.

Yet we have no experience in how to fathom the boundless depth of the Natural.  We have not the talent, at least most of us.  This is foreign territory.  Nonetheless, we “cross over” and go into the fifth and who-knows-how-many-dimensions because we can: in dreams, in moments of exceptional openness, because we are invited.  We’re just not skilled in how to handle it yet.

Sometime in the future, if we survive that long, being in dimensions of the Natural beyond those in which we evolved will be second nature. 

I’m working on that now, and so can you.  I am part of it, the Natural, and so are you.  This is what it means to be a Natural Man.

If this isn’t a “wow!” moment, I don’t know what is.

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The past two mornings the humidity in the air has hung low over the meadow which I look out upon as the sky lightens with the coming of the sun. The air was thick with fog yesterday morning, almost but not quite hiding the tree-rimmed horizon along the stone wall. This morning the wetness came to ground. As I rose to return to the house, I felt the first hesitant raindrops which progressed to a steady but pleasant light shower as I left for work.

A change in the weather is coming, and this rain is its omen.  It has been warm – unseasonably warm – these past four or five weeks.  This is about to change.  Air cold enough to have some sparkle will be here in a few days much to my delight.