Druidry is a lot of things to me. It is a framework upon which my daily devotional practice works from. And a lot of people can grok the concept of the Spiritual practices held within one’s Druidry; however, there is more to Druidry than just this for me. There is a continually desire to educate myself – on topics I already know something about, as well as those I know next to nothing, aside from a name. The act of studying, assimilating knowledge, looking for new techniques to try – all of that is a part of my Druidry as well. There is also the ceremonial side of life as well, and I do not mean just rituals. There are certain routines I follow in my day – rituals in their own right, but not necessarily spiritual. All three are important to me, but study and the growth of knowledge are probably the most important to me.

The Druid Prayer has a statement that resonates deeply with me:

Grant, O Great Spirit/Goddess/God/Holy Ones, Thy Protection;
And in protection, strength;
And in strength, understanding;
And in understanding, knowledge;
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice;
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;
And in that love, the love of all existences;
And in the love of all existences, the love of Great Spirit/Goddess/God/Holy Ones/the Earth our mother, and all goodness.

Knowledge for me is a form of freedom. I can undertake any aspect of information that I desire, and dive as deeply as I wish into it. This only is the reason that my bookshelves are filled with works on World History and lexiconic tomes on a wide variety of programming languages. I am completely intrigued by how history has unfolded, and some of the variables surrounding various events that have shaped our wider society. As for the programming languages, I am lucky to be employed in a position that allows me to utilize my passion for logic puzzles with fashioning programming code to provide information that is utilized in critical decision-making within the college I work for. My desire to assist others plays a key factor in the support function that I am in.

In this manner, my everyday practice of key parts of my Druidry cross into my mundane life in ways I never thought it would. In fact, I used to compartmentalize my life — I had one side of me that was work-related. The other side of me was focused on my Spirituality. For the first three years that I worked on my Bardic Grade material, I lived this peculiar life, and I struggled mightily through all of it. I never realized that in order to get things to “gel” for me in my lessons, I needed to allow both sides of my life to intermingle and essentially “inform” one another.

The catalyst in getting to this point came at the first Gulf Coast Gathering, where the OBOD Tutor Coordinator attended. I lamented that I was four-plus years into my studies and struggling throughout it. She noted that you could set your studies into a small, mental box where the environment was essentially sterile and confined. However, it would be more helpful to embrace the studies and find ways to correlate what one was learning into your own life in other ways. In that way, the material had a better hope of coming to life. While I wrote this down, I never really considered it until nearly a year later when I happened across my notes in a spare notebook I was transcribing to parts of other journals and notebooks. I decided to give this a try since I had still been struggling with my studies.

The change did not happen over-night. It took a particularly difficult data study at work for me to realize how my Bardic studies could be helpful in looking for a creative way to work through the issue at hand. Once I opened that doorway, learning has become a different experience for me, and my work processes have become more “fun” like solving logic puzzles than trying to just get a data-set that might look “normal” to the requester.

So all of this really begs a larger question – what is like to be a Druid? And while I could answer the similar question of “What is it like to be  Pagan?“, at this time I don’t really have the adequate words to describe what it is like to be a Druid. I feel like I might be likely to just point and go “ugh” as a response, hoping someone can grok what I am getting at. However, I can say that my Druidry is about interconnectedness and the wider implications of inter-relations. I see similar points of cause and effect within World History. How an assassination of an Arch-Duke started a chain of events (through connected treaties of mutual defense) that eventually led to the event we call World War I. And how the surrender terms of World War I led to a near continuation of the same conflict as a part of World War II – though there are a lot more complicating factors to all of that. But the threads between the two are there; however faint one may perceive those threads to be (or not).

In my mundane job, I utilize SQL queries to connect databases together to pull related information into a singular data-set. That synthesis of information happens because I find a faint connection between the tables, and reinforce that within the code by joining the tables together. That inter-related aspect, for me, is a key part of my Druidry. Finding the threads that bring us all together, connect us with our environment – reminding us that our environment does not survive, exist, thrive or decline independent of us. Nor do we survive, exist, thrive or decline without some aspect of our environment being a part of that process. Sadly, it is difficult to get most modern Christians to understand this – since they see the world and our environment as a resource that was placed here for human kind’s use. And as this world is merely a temporary one according to their translated holy writ, there really is no need to be a good steward or custodian of a place that is just a weigh-station within their existence. After all, the true final place that matters is Heaven. But I digress. Sort of. There is interconnectedness in all of that and the state that our environment is in now.

I learn, therefore I am. Maybe. But I enjoy learning because I have a love for knowledge. I have an innate curiosity of how things are connected to one another. I learn and understand the world around me as I look through this lens. And for me, that is part of what it is like to be a Druid. But there is so much more of Druidry that I just cannot explain adequately in words. Bardic circles around the campfire. The people that you connect with – Druids, Pagans, and all the others I just do not have the time to describe here. Cause and Effect observations. The beauty of the landscapes. The rituals, both spiritual and mundane, that we have. Our innate differences. I do not really have the words to explain all of that because my experience is more in terms of emotions. And if only I could put the emotions behind the hugs I have gotten from all those experiences into words – I would be one very expressive author. For the time being, I will just manage a post like this one. However, I will keep trying to write those emotions into some set of words because there has to be some thread that will get me there. Challenge accepted. 🙂