bish blog

Well, that’s Druid Camp over for another year and what an excellent few days it was! If you weren’t there or don’t get to see the Facebook photo’s just remember I’m a very sensible and sober individual who would never do that! Ahem.

The picture is shot with my nice new Canon 10-22 wide angle lens. I was only a couple of inches from the pots in front of the chair. This lens is so much better than the kit lenses I’m kind of leaving it on the 450d and using the nifty 50 1.8 II for the more normal shots. Limiting, but challenging too.

Just back from this year’s Druid Camp. After only five days in a field I can’t get over the feeling that the house feels enclosing and dark! I found myself putting all the lights on as I walked around the place unpacking, where I would have been perfectly fine with the evening twilight before – it’s so much lighter outside! The weather was … variable! That is to say varying between roasting sunshine, howling winds and drenching rain; sometimes all within ten minutes. The music was great – from Seize the Day (protest in song and action), Mad Magdalene (pagan folk), Sian James (wonderfully liquid harp and song), Rachel Gittus Band, Damh the Bard, Paul Newman, Paul Mitchell, Tallyessin and MagicFolk. The workshops were as good, and a couple of the rituals worked unexpectedly well for me. And then back to the camp fires for a small mead, a wee dram and perhaps a touch of bish’s Chilli Vodka under starlit skies (if they could shine out past some of the homely touches… have to try harder next year Kris!)

Blessings of the passion-fires of Beltaine.

It pays, I find, to mark the seasons as they pass by. Not only as a pagan, but as someone for whom time flies past ever faster! It doesn’t seem yesterday that Imbolc celebrated the new buds of spring and now the May is already in full blossom. Come to thnk of it, it feels not so long ago we were waiting for the Y2k bug to bite!  Time flies.

Celebrating the Wheel of the Year is a splendid means of being wakeful to the turning of the seasons. It’s far too easy in our always available, fast food, 24/7/365 online culture to miss the wonders of the ever changing Land, Sea and Sky. Having a festival pop up every six or so weeks provides a focus; to stop, observe and simply delight in what might otherwise be overlooked. Enjoy.

It’s been hard to get back to this wibbling stream of unconsciousness. I think it’s been since attending a family funeral… the funeral service went as well as these things can do; the service was a Catholic Mass which was fine and apart from the obvious issues of being on ‘the wrong team’! But after the lengthy and emotionally charged Mass we drove the five miles from the church to the crematorium.

Now, I’m no fan of crematoria or cremation. It’s a funny thing to know that a self-identified Druid, William Price, established the right to cremation at the end of the 1800′s. It feels wrong to me, to burn something that is so well designed to melt back into the mother Earth. Not to mention the pollution and the fossil fuel used in the process. Hey ho, horses for courses… rant over. Well… that particular one!

We made good time to the crematorium, being only a minute behind the funeral cortège. However, by the time we’d made the short walk to the actual venue we were just in time to see the curtains close – folk behind us, some several dozen, never got to see the final journey at all. It felt as if the whole thing was an industrial process (which, of course, it is) with little or in fact no respect for the body thus transformed. There were several folk and boxes queued up behind us as we left, not to mention the folk before us who were still wandering around looking lost. It just felt disrespectful, and an anti-climax to an otherwise honourable and loving farewell ritual.

I promised myself I would have my own burial plan sorted out by Samhain this last October’s end. I failed. It happens. However, I am thrice committed to a natural woodland burial now and plan to have bought my plot by the New Year. The burial land I am looking at only ever allows one interment per day, allowing a full ritual burial and a respectful and peaceful farewell for all. I plan to be buried as soon as possible after decease, so that preservatives and chemicals are not used, thus avoiding poisoning my landscape. And then I will melt into the roots of a tree, to feed it and become in many ways a part of it, to home new life, to bring pleasure to others for many years to come… rather than a mercury and dioxin smog issuing from a blackened chimney.