Silver Maple

I had recently been working through some ideas about saille - willow and flow (usingerynn999  's ogam system).  Cat's mother's recovery began to involve breathing and fluid issues and saille seemed to be the right ogam to work with.  But different levels of meaning started to come forward.  I began to imagine flow as a thing unto itself - as the commerce between each of  us and the commerce between us and the Other.  Not commerce so much, as the giving and taking, the exchanging of gifts. 

Serendipitiously, Philip Carr-Gomm, Chosen Chief of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD),  had just written a very interesting piece about the importance of maintaining sanity in these troubled times by maintaining the flow between oneself and an anchor in nature - tree, rock, spring, whatever.  I responded with my own analysis of his words, drawing on an old ballad, RJ Stewart, Fiona Macleod, Doris Lessing and a few other sources.  My add-on point was that in addition to opening the gates of connection to Nature, Spirit or Whatever there was also an element of becoming the media of the energy/spirit flow itself.

My first encounter with this idea was certainly Doris Lessing's sci-fi masterwork "The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five" wherein individuals make gateway connections between different realms of consciousness.  The important thing there was that everyone benefitted from the exchange and the flow between the worlds allowed everyone to advance spiritually.

My third post on this blog  dealt with a different type of flow.  In that case, it was allowing the flow between true grief and true happiness to occur - to feel, with staying in the middle being true depression.

Another source for me was RJ Stewart's reading of Fiona MacLeod's Orchil prose poem with the crashing loom - birth and death, sprouting and rot with the weft of Eternal Beauty running between.  Also Stewart's Merlin story in Magical Tales - wherein Merlin openied  gates and allowing the dead to complete their journey

A very direct source was an unpublished ritual of Orion Foxwood's that he casually threw off at the very end of multi-hour lecture.  Without getting deeply into specifics it involved becoming the media between the elements and then grounding the multiplicity of connections.

And there was my own piece on Imagining Deity where I spoke of the third thing - that connection between us and the Other that is a thing unto itself - neither fully ours or fully the Other but a third thing - a vesica pisces.

What if the core of spirituality was not specifically worship - a flowing up of praise for a flowing down of blessings?  What if the core of spirituality was just flow iself - the flow of energy among us and between us and the other worlds - and that we were a link, and for this World perhaps a critical link, in making that flow work.  Some religions have the receiving of Light and the passing on of Light at their core (yep the Friends).  Some religions have the understanding of the Dark and its role as the place for seeds to germinate - the Earth itself.  But what if we are the mediators, in part, for allowing that flow to occur?  Between angels and the Other Crowd?

Philip's entry pointed to a world of strife wherein we were constantly being faced with unacceptable extremes.  Philip's advice was to avoid the extremes and connect with nature.  This third way - the road to Elfland from the ballad Thomas the Rhymer is my interpretation of that third way.  It seems also that we can become that third way and heal ourselves in the process of  healing a small part of the rift in our world and between worlds.

David
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