Drew the Druid

I discovered recently that one of my favorite pagan podcasters, feithline, is back at podcasting at spiritscast.com and hosting a once a month podclass.  The first class was about establishing a daily spiritual practice.  And the second was about seeking out your own understanding rather than relying on the words of others., with the specific task of exploring the correspondences you feel exist for the four elements.  I have to admit that i often find elemental correspondences unintuitive, and tend to avoid them.

Her podclass has motivated me to clean the cobwebs off my blog : )

I have an on-again-off-again daily practice of seated meditation, getting out into nature, watching the skies, herbal/aroma-therapy, somatic scans and some self-guided vision work.  For me, nature touches my spirit like no church or temple ever could.  But I have to remember to get out of my head space and let the sounds and smells of nature seep in thru my pores.  There is a child-like wonder that arises from watching moss grow on rocks during the wet season or spying the first sliver of the new moon appear between the clouds.  Vision work varies from simple journeys to a personal sanctuary to a simplified form of Chod practice, a Tibetan shamanist practice aimed at turning your personal demons into your allies : )  I use somatic scans (aka body scans) either for relaxation or to discover issues/stress hidden from my thinking mind.

Somewhere in her podcasts, feithline also encouraged her listeners to try a daily single card Tarot pull and again use ones intuition to do the reading.  Divination is something i have little experience in.  I understand it to be a tool to make connections that you would not be able to make with your thinking mind… a tool for semi-free association.  In this way it is similar to certain types of vision work that help you tap into somatic knowledge and make connections you otherwise would not.  So here it goes… my first Tarot pull… wondering what i am going to learn from the cards… and i pull the..

The Magician

lol.  A man, with the halo of the infinite, stands holding a light above the suits of the tarot laid out on a table, his other hand points towards the ground where vines and flowers gather.  It feels like a reflection of myself studying the Tarot.  Light is a symbol of awareness/attention to me.  The suits of the Tarot are the object of study.  The halo of the absolute is a spiritual mark.  The hand pointing at the earth is a statement that all knowledge is grounded in nature and the absolute.  And since i am studying the suits, i am also studying the element correspondences.  So, my first pull feels full of synchronicity.  An interesting start.

Allergies are a real struggle for me this time of year.  I know.. not exactly druidic… don’t laugh…  my sneezing fits can be quite disabling.  I generally treat them with daily loratadine and occasional benadryl (diphenhydramine hydrochloride).  Not very natural, but better than the alternative.  

I have come across a new treatment recently, and so far it seems to help a great deal.  The treatment is to cleanse your sinuses with salt water.  That’s it.  In all years I have talked to doctors about allergies and all the shots i received as a child, no  doctor has ever once mentioned this treatment?!?  I came across the treatment in this mother earth news article.  Thank you Mother Earth!

This practice has been going on for thousands of years at least in India (other cultures as well i am sure).  And there is a handy instrument called a Neti Pot to help funnel the salt water solution into your sinuses.   I have to admit feeling a little odd the first time i poured water in one nostril and felt it drain out the other, but hey, it works.  I also seem to have missed the bottom row at my pharmacy below the allergy meds.  There were several Neti Pot options there as well as other nasal irrigation options.  How did I msiss this?  Apparently, I have bought into pill culture too deeply.  Isn’t it amazing what you can miss if the mind is not open to it?  I am impressed by any design that lasts for thousands of years, so I went with the Neti.  It has the added plus of looking like aladdin’s lamp or a small herbal cauldron. 

I was surprised that even in the midst of a sneezing fit, I received some immediate relief.  I would say it was equivalent to a benadryl, but without the wait or the drowsiness (both of which are huge).  I will continue to use it and will see if I can manage my allergies with salt water cleansing alone.  Hopefully others will find this natural treatment a useful addition to their healing arts.

Ever wonder where the yin/yang symbol (or taijitu) comes from? What inspired those teardrop swirls? Apparently the symbol is an expression of the cycles of the sun thru the seasons. Specifically, the length of shadow cast by the sun at noon traced the teardrop shap of the taijitu within a measurement circle. A more detailed explanation is available here. The year was divided divided into 24 segments, identical to the use of fortnights in the west. The choice of 24 comes from there being 12 full lunar cycles during the solar year, or 24 waxing/waning half cycles. The concerns of ancient philosophers seems to have been largely the same; To understand the natural cycles they saw around them and in the sky.

Returning to what comes naturally to me means taking a new look at people who recognized their awareness of the spirit nature within everything.  By chance of me encountering this on the net recently, my first post on pagans is about a necropolis.  Enjoy:   

Apparently the ground upon which the Vatican was built, was hallowed ground prior to the Christian church.  The Necropoli dell’Autoparco (literally Necropolis of the Parking Garage) is an unfortunate name that downplays the significance of such a remarkable view of pagan symbolism and burial customs just prior to the birth of Christianity.  There is actually some confusion in the articles as to whether this is a pre-Christian or early-Christian site.  From the article:

…close ties between pagans and Christians during the Augustan era (23 B.C.-14 A.D.)

Most scholars agree that Christ was born around 5 or 6 B.C due to an error in calculation when the current year system was created by Dionysius Exiguus around what we now call 525 C.E.  Taking into account the lack of a year 0 in the Dionysius year structure, Christ would be 18-19 years of age at the end of the digs era.  This is a bit early for their to be a Christians.  Not to mention that Christianity would still be persecuted by the Romans for another 300 or so years, prior to being adopted as the state religion.  The BBC also has an article with a few pictures as well.  The article is from 2006… Apparently i missed it the first time around.

And in blogspace:Blog of the Grateful Bear , Rome’in Italia

I also stumbled on this interesting discussion of the layers underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, including discussion of both pagan and christian layers.

Props to John Paul II and the forces within the Catholic church that brought this historically important site to the public.  

    -Drew the Druid