More Than Stones

Syncretic Thoughts

I began my journey back in 1989, fumbling with ideas of Jungian archetypes and shamanic travelling and anthropological understandings of spirit.

I took my first steps on that path with the goal of learning who these gods were, and how to do them proper honour.  Before long, I had returned to my homeland Wales for a visit, and from the resonance with those ancient places it seemed clear that I should be devoting myself to Welsh and Brythonic deities. 

At first, I was a determined reconstructionist.  It was my academic background, I’m sure, that demanded I know what the “truth” was and adhere to it. I’m sure many new converts of any spiritual path are the same – and like those others, I gradually grew out of it.

Beginning the Path - Part 3 - The Door

Part 1
Part 2

Realising that I needed other guides was a big step forward –

A door had opened.

But the problem was that I had little idea where to turn: The local pagan community had given me support, but as anyone with this experience knows there is only so far others can lead you. The library had already given up all it could offer in this area.

I had struggled and read and asked all the rational questions that were possible, and now it seemed as though I had come to the end of the road.  For weeks I wrestled with the problem, tied up in my need to find signs, a map, a guide – something to tell me where to step next, how to lead myself out of the maze.  I spent the summer plagued by insomnia as I lay awake thinking.  Most nights, I eventually gave up trying to sleep and walked for hours, alone in the early hours of the morning – bathed in moonlight and soaking up the silence of the sleeping city streets. My summer job suffered, my friends thought I was cracking up, and maybe they were almost right.

The Dancer

While I struggle to put into words my experience of discovering the door to my gods in the third and final post on that narrative (recognising of course that it was really just a first step onto the path) I thought I'd comment on something I saw today that strikes quite close to home - an article on why cities are so much hotter than the countryside.

Where I live, what I do, it's sometimes difficult to really get away from the heat of summer.

Thankfully, I live outside Tokyo and commute daily - this gives me a bit of respite each and every day, and of course on weekends.  Tokyo has tried very hard to undo the damage of the 70s and 80s though, and the city has not only retained many of the little parks and shrines that dwell here, but has deliberately built up a few green zones and some buildings even have green spaces on the roofs. 

I'm desperate for more of course, but the little islands of green help a little.

Beginning the Path - Part 2 - Mazed

Part 1

My new path was confusing.

The Elders were good to me. They could tell that something different had happened to me than to any of he other visitors, and while the young First Nation participants went to join a discussion circle and the visitors went to join a seminar, I ended up sitting at a desk in the back office of the community center, shuddering like a new-born colt as I stared into a cup of black coffee.

The kind Elder who had tended me in the last moments of my journey had gone, but in her place was a younger man who lived in the city. We talked about my experience, explored it as best we could, but he had no context to work with and I was completely unprepared for the strike of lightning. When he was sure I wasn't just having a trip and was safe to go home he let me go. He gave me his number and offered to talk again, but I could tell he wasn't sure what he thought he'd be able to do for me. I did call a few times, but he was right. 

I needed other guides.

Beginning the Path - Part 1 - The Path

It was 1989, and I was a student.

I was confirmed Anglican, enrolled in the Anglican college at Uni, but I had long been curious about the old gods.

At that point it had mainly been a matter of reading – Wales has its fair share of myths and storied locales, and I’d inherited a deep interest in such things from my grandfather.  I’d read kids versions of the Mabinogi, I’d gone to see stone circles and wells and valleys with reputations.

But it was all academic, you know?

Then we moved away, emigrating to Canada, and I found myself stuck far from home in the prairies.  Interest didn’t wane, exactly, but it was a harder thing to follow.  And anyway there was church, which I went to mainly for the politics of it, and the locals were sometimes terrifyingly evangelical so it didn’t do to say too much about such things.

When I went to Uni, and everything changed.