Walking the Cotswold Way.

A Pilgrimage to Sulis Minerva.

The Beginning and the End

The idea of pilgrimage is always one that has fascinated me; there is something very sacred about taking the time out of day-to-day life to devote to making a journey. As a teenager I studied Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and was swept up as much by the act of travelling to a place of reverence as the characters and their raucous stories.

In a world where we travel a hundred miles in an afternoon and think nothing of popping down the road by car to our ‘local’ sacred site, which may actually be 20 or 30 or even more miles away, so few of us know how it feels to walk 100 miles or more, or the effort, energy and the determination that takes even for someone as blessed as I am with good health and the use of my legs. Yet, it was a more common occurrence to our ancestors for whom often, walking was the only means of transport.

As pagans, we often talk of the act of journeying as being central to our spirituality. Whether we track the inner paths of meditations, the shamanic journeys of healing and divination or the perfectly orchestrated journey of a well planned ritual for a rite of passage or celebration, the language of the journey is common to most of us. But, how often do we make a journey that is consciously and actually walked, step by step and moment by moment, a journey that may last a few days, a week, a month or even longer; surrendering ourselves completely to where that journey may take us and the challenges that may be encountered along the way? Of course there are many ways to create this kind of journey but as I discovered this week, a long distance walk is particularly powerful.

When my friend Sophie asked me at New Year if I would like to walk the Cotswold Way with her in the coming May, a 102.5 mile route that stretches from Chipping Campden, down and across the entirety of Gloucestershire, to Bath in Somerset, my immediate reaction was ‘YES!” quickly followed by a feeling of trepidation and the wondering of what I had let myself in for. I was a casual walker, easily capable of 7 or 8 miles without a problem, but I knew that that was not going to be adequate for this kind of journey where a pace of 10 -16 miles needed to be maintained every day for 8 days. Not only that, but we decided very early on not to use the services of a sherpa to carry our bags. We were going to do this properly; carrying everything we needed was an important part of the journey.

For both of us, the Cotswolds are a sacred place. The escarpment that stretches from the Midlands to the south of England has been a backbone to much of our lives. For me, it links the Cotswold stone of my childhood, the bedrock upon which I now live, a significant part of my life for the last decade, and the ancestral land of my mothers line deep into Gloucestershire and Somerset.  We knew that to make a pilgrimage along the escarpment following that line down to its natural end in Bath where the steaming red water pours from the rocks into the roman baths at the shrine of Sulis Minerva, who became our constant companion en route, would be powerful.

Having trained extensively this spring, we both had a fair idea that we could cope with the maximum daily distance of 16 miles. But, we had no way of knowing whether we could cope with it day after day without actually doing it.  In the event, the repeated distance, carrying of a pack and the hot weather we were blessed with for the first three or four days became a recipe for blisters, sore feet, and a not insignificant amount of pain and it seemed to be so for many of the other walkers we met on route. We quickly realised that this too was a part of the journey and that the pain became a devotional act, a sacrifice to the gods of the landscape through which we passed and in sympathy with the many ancestral feet that had walked the path before us. We soon understood that pilgrimage is not supposed to easy and the satisfaction and achievement of reaching the end is in direct proportion to the trials experienced along the way.

We were overwhelmed too with hospitality, folk seeming to understand on some level the importance of what we were doing. We met friends, and relatives who took us in, fed and watered us, shared supper or a drink and walked with us along the way. Other walkers on the same journey became our companions and whilst we were all walking for very different reason, there was a shared understanding, each became an important part, the journey being as much about the people we met as the landscape we walked through. In Sophie’s words we “had one the most fabulous and memorable weeks of our lives. We giggled and sang our way along the Cotswold Way repeating the mantra that ‘pain is only sensation and will arise and pass away’, when the pain in our feet was hard to bear. We walked through blazing sun and howling gale, climbing up and down the escarpment time after time. We walked through bluebell and garlic filled woods, regaled by birdsong and the wind in the trees; over hill forts and long barrows covered in cowslips where we stopped for the odd extreme knitting session; crossed trunk roads and the M4 and finally arrived in Bath where we made offerings to Minerva at her spring,” tears running down our faces as we cast the traditional offerings of money into the blood-red waters, breathing the warmth and steam of her sanctuary whilst tourists snapped pictures and milled around oblivious. For most, the traditional end to the Cotswold way is the Abbey, but for us it was here, in the caves beneath the city.

Having completed the journey and today resting at home, I am left with a deep impression of the power of the pilgrimage. Its ability to challenge and focus us, provide a medium for the outward expression of an inner devotion to ancestors and landscape. I know that I will do it again and I know other pagans who are helping to resurrect that tradition within our religion where it is sadly lacking. For me it has been the ultimate experience of learning to walk this sacred land in a way I had not experienced before and one I hope that others might be inspired to explore.

With thanks to Chris Hastie you can see the route from our GPS tracks here

Very many congratulations to Sophie too, who raised over £1300 for Prostate Cancer UK. You can still sponsor her here

Place Magic

This month one of my posts has been included in the wonderful Animists Blog Carnival otherwise known as the ABC. This month it is entitled, Place Magic and is hosted by Heather at Adventures in Animism. There are loads of great articles to delve into, a kind of online magazine from animists around the world and hosted by a different blog each month. Enjoy!

Beloved and not so beloved dead.

I write this on a day when I have had to turn the radio off. Thankfully we do not have a television, so we have been spared from a good deal of the media frenzy surrounding the death of Margaret Thatcher this week. Having got through BBC Radio 4′s morning news program, just about, the prospect of a day full of obituaries, analysis of her life and work, frankly fills me with rage. It is a rage that seems to bubble up from almost nowhere and which, whilst to put it mildly I never lost any love for the woman, surprises me at its ferocity.

Growing up as I did, a child of Thatcher, born in 1979 the very year the Conservative party won the election and she became prime minister; for the first 10 years of my life, my understanding of politics was entirely shaped by the climate of Thatcher’s Britain. Not only that, but living in a green-liberal household my father standing as liberal candidate for local government, Mrs Thatcher became the closest thing to evil that my small mind could imagine. I was quite genuinely very frightened of her. When I remember the news stories of the time, I can recall the brutal and violent clashes of the miners strikes, the forced removal of the traveller folk, police with batons and riot shields, the soaring interest rates as my parents struggled to pay the mortgage and feed us, CFCs, holes in the ozone layer, famine in Ethiopia, apartheid in South Africa, war in the Falklands, the nuclear fears of the cold war. I didn’t know a child in my class who had not read Lawrence’s Children of the Dust or Swindell’s Brother in the Land . If you haven’t read them, I highly recommend them for the insight they offer into a child’s mind and fears of the time. They paint vivid pictures of a world post nuclear apocalypse. I think I genuinely believed at that time in the inevitability of it all. To a child in 1980′s Britain, the world was a grey and frightening place to be and Margaret Thatcher with her blue suits and strange monotone voice seemed (rightly or wrongly) to be the orchestrator of these things and will in my mind be forever connected.

As an Animist, understanding that we are constantly changing beings, made up of the stories that we gather along the way, it is no surprise that these particular stories have had a hand in creating who I am. If I dig hard enough I can in part trace my deep green environmentalism back to childhood fears of disaster and apocalypse, I am no longer so afraid of nuclear war as I am of climate change. Perhaps I have in some small measure to thank Maggie for my deep, wakeful paganism; determined as I am not to use, abuse and destroy the world in the ways that I witnessed in my childhood.

But, perhaps one of the things that has bothered me the most about the reactions to the death of this woman amongst all the obituaries and political comment, is the reaction to the celebrations. Whilst street parties are perhaps a little on the tasteless side, there has been a very natural outpouring of what I can only really describe as relief, followed by a resultant backlash of those demanding that we show some respect. Yet there is a deep and abiding sense, for those who felt so bitterly the injustices of her time in office, how wonderful it is that she is no longer with us, and it cannot be contained. I spoke to my father the day she died and he told me that he had been grinning for hours. He is not celebrating, not throwing a street party just as I am not, but he feels the relief as palpably as I do, it has shaken us and I was touched by his very human and honest reaction.

I am disturbed by the calls for respect in the hour of her death, because I find deeply uncomfortable the idea that we should never speak ill of the dead for a number of reasons. Firstly, as an ever questioning Druid, I have to ask the question “why not?” What is it about her as a dead person that means that I should suddenly start paying her respect or that I should not laugh at a cartoon strip or poem when I most certainly would have whilst she was alive? Is it that at the moment of death we are magically transformed into something blameless and untouchable? That is certainly not my understanding of the ancestors, within a tradition that acknowledges them as fundamentally human, we understand that there were bastards and rapists and kiddy fiddlers just as there is sweet old granny and granddad. We can’t conveniently forget the less than lovely bits of human nature, sanitising and idealising the past however much we would like to, for it is who we are too. Or, is it that she leaves behind a grieving family whose feelings we should respect? By far the most common complaint is that “she was someone’s daughter, was a mother, a wife… have some respect”. Yet I struggle to understand the significance of this. Surely by virtue of being human she is these things, they are not unique or in themselves particularly noteworthy and her family have certainly handled the vitriol up to this point, the press and public have always lambasted her; I would ague that it goes with the job. If by virtue of having a family we must afford respect to the deceased then let those calling for that respect pay the same dues to Pinochet, Sadam Hussein and Ossama Bin Laden, finding in themselves a deeper sense of compassion for all humanity rather than selected heroes, because after all we will never agree on those and they were all sons, husbands and fathers too. It is entirely appropriate for those who call these controversial figures their beloved dead to mourn them, but I would suggest that is their job not mine.

There is a danger too in this call for silence as Glen Greenwald thoughtfully points out in his article;

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political      influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn’t change simply because they die. If anything, it becomes more compelling to commemorate those bad acts upon death as the only antidote against a society erecting a false and jingoistically self-serving history.”

I would suggest that at a time when we are in danger of romanticising Margaret Thatcher’s life beyond all sense of recognition, those who have a different story to tell have the obligation to tell it, to speak out against the mawkish calls for respect and sympathy and remind the nation just why she was so loathed and with such bitterness by so many. Despite loathing her myself, I do not feel any sense of celebration, after all by the end she was just a little old women who had mostly lost her marbles, largely estranged from her daughter, and that is always sad, but I can understand that celebration as a natural reaction and conclusion to an era that left deep scars on so many.

Northern Tradition Paganism

Just to let you know that my re-telling of Skadi’s tale is now up here on her shrine at the wonderful Cauldron Farm website. There are some beautiful online shrines there with some gorgeous devotional writing to the Gods of the Germanic Traditions. I highly recommend checking it out, if you are also that way inclined.

She who just had other things to do.

This post has been gestating so to speak, for some time now. It began in early spring last year (hence the slightly unseasonal references), got added to when Cat Treadwell posted about a similar subject last year and got completed today when I recieved yet another well meaning but ill-considered comment.

As the cycle turns again past the Spring equinox, the days lengthen and the sun warms, the world suddenly seems alive with creatures busy becoming, or preparing to become parents as if their lives depended on it. It is a little early yet for the baby birds and many other creatures, but there are lambs – albeit brought on early by artificial farming systems. Most other creatures wait a while for the sun to be a little warmer yet and the food sources to be more abundant. The sap is rising though, and the first scents of lust are in the air. It seems that each thing is starting to express that primary urge to procreate, indeed the goddess of motherhood, that deep, aching, yearning drive, begins (for the females at least) to obliterate all else. For me she is not ever loving, nurturing, soft and yielding, but a demanding bitch who will get her way at all costs and damn who gets hurt in the process. Spiders eat their mates to provide them with the energy to gestate and birth sometimes consumed in turn by their offspring. Frogs mate themselves literally to death to produce clouds of spawn, and Blue tits run themselves ragged to the point of exhaustion, sparing little for themselves as they stuff another worm down a gaping baby’s mouth. As a midwife, I know that motherhood can offer moments of utter beauty and tenderness, but I also know that a good amount of the time, it is not ‘nice’.

As pagans at this time of equinox, we start to get busy with eggs, obscene amounts of chocolate, hares, daffodils and other representations of the spring. We celebrate the first scents of warmer air, fertility and life, the growing fecund earth, our Mother. Motherhood: it is a central theme that runs through out just about every paganism throughout the world, but where does Maiden-Mother-Crone leave those of us who are intentionally childless and intend to remain so, or those who so desperately wanted children but cannot have them for whatever reason. What of the Bitch, Witch, Barren-Woman, Working-Woman, and Woman-With-Just-Plain-Old-Better-Things-To-Do? She rarely features in the equation although she is abundant in Mythology. No, whichever way we look at it, the woman without children is an oddity, a challenge and often, the rest of society is just not quite sure what to do with her. If you are unable to have a child, in addition to having to deal with your own sense of grief and often rage, you are the subject of pity and hushed voices, ‘it’s so sad…, such a shame‘ the sense that no one quite knows what to say as if you have somehow failed in your essential duty. Conversely, woman who chose to be childless often appear to be unwitting prey to those in life who, bowled over by the wonder and joy of their own parenthood, consider it their personal mission in life to win you over, not realising that the source or their own joy is rarely, if ever, as interesting to the rest of the world.

It seems that as soon as a woman gets to a certain age, usually her 30′s, other women, always mothers themselves, seem to decide for you that your biological clock is undoubtedly ticking. How many times have I heard the phrases ‘so, it won’t be long now before…’, ‘you really don’t want to leave it too late…’, ‘you’ll regret it if you don’t, my children are my greatest joy..’ and other such encouragements to bite the bullet and join the mother club. As a woman in her 30′s who falls into the Woman-With-Just-Plain-Old-Better-Things-To-Do category, on explaining my position I am invariably met with either pity or a knowing smile that says ‘one day you’ll crack and then you’ll realise what you’ve been missing.’ On posting something similar to Facebook the other day, irritated beyond measure by yet another of these comments, I was amazed at the other women and a good few men too who empathised. Childless for different reasons, the majority were irritated, hurt or baffled by the assumption that childbearing should be the normal thing to do, that anyone who goes by a different path is somehow not normal, has something wrong with them or simply will not be complete without a baby.

Without doubt, the fleetingly rare times in my life where I have been even remotely tempted to have a child have all been motivated by my ancestors. The understanding that we are at the front of a long line of inheritance that connects us back to earliest humanity and beyond is where, if there is any sense of it at all, my greatest feelings of duty and responsibility lie. If I don’t pass on that inheritance do I fail my ancestors in my genetic duty? Within a religion that holds such deep reverence for our ancestors, I think perhaps there is the tendency for pagans to beat ourselves with this particular ceremonial plank more than others. Yet, in striving to be a thinking, rational, wakeful human woman, in a world where over consumption runs rife within a growing population who not only demand to be fed and watered but comfortable with it, I would encourage every woman to make a conscious choice, wherever possible about childbearing. After all, having a child (or three) will undoubtedly be the biggest increase to your carbon footprint you will ever make, it doesn’t matter how many transatlantic fights you may have made in the past, they will pale in comparison. Apart from anything else, are my genes really so fabulous, that I just have to pass them on? I am not so special and the flow of humanity will undoubtedly continue whether I reproduce or not and I can be sure it will be just as, well… human. I would like to see motherhood as something women opt into consciously and deliberately rather than an opting out of which confounds societies unspoken expectations.

So whilst not negating the role of the mother here at all, I would like to share a celebration of the childless woman. The ones who made the choice not to, the ones who couldn’t, the ones who tore their souls open in grief at the failure and found peace on the other side, the ones who still have to find peace, the ones who never will, the spinsters, the ones who maintained their freedom with fierce courage in the face of society’s norms, growing roses and dancing in the rain. The unheard stories. Sisters I salute you.

You, Me & Religion

There is an interview with me over on Debs’ blog; You, Me & Religion here.

Her site is well worth a visit and a browse, there are a great number of interesting interviews to read. Thanks for interviewing me, Debs.

Waincraft

It is always so lovely to stumble across something completely by accident that so closely reflects your own thoughts and experiences. This is another blog exploring the place where Druidry and Heathenry meet. I’d like to contact the authors to ask them if it is ok to reblog this and to say ‘Hi’ but there are no contact details on the site. If anyone knows who they are, point them in my direction, I’d love to discuss with them. Until then I will just have to satisfy myself with posting a link and encouraging you all to go and explore.

http://waincraft.org/world-view/the-vanir-theory/