The Druidic College

A friend posted on her blog recently about her ambivalence toward the Second Life cyberspace community. (Second Life lets you construct the person you might wish you were in real life and roleplay their story online.)

She notes that pouring one’s energy into creating a fictional alter ego in this way distracts from making needed self-transformations in the “first” life. On the other hand, it can create a mental map of where you want to go, which can be very helpful.

Her memoir, due out soon, is a moving tale of her own intense and painful metamorphosis in real life, which she was called to do rather than suffer the alternative of throwing herself into a fantasy world.

I sometimes read plaintive commentary from others about how the Internet can be a blessing and a curse: opening worlds and knowledge and community but in many cases draining the resulting creative energy away and lessening our accomplishments in “the real world” whether it be creative work, self-empowerment, activism, or philanthropy. (Or laundry or yardwork! You get the idea.)

I understand the ambivalence. The human spirit wants to find ways to re-form and shape our lives or escape from the mundane or a combination of both. It is rare to find someone passively content, without the urge to be different, to make a difference, or to change. (And I worry about those people.) Cyberspace just highlights this urge in a different way.

I also understand that the transformative process can fold the spirit in on itself in its most intense times, whether this sends the spirit into isolation online or shuts off overstimulation and connections in the real world. Yet, there comes a time when that contraction process lets go and the human reaches for connection with the universe again.

What does this have to do with Druidry? Druidry as we know it in our time period is a look at the interconnectedness between all beings and forms in our mundane world, the divine and the Otherworlds. Myth, folklore and Celtic tradition is our roadmap to transform us into the higher beings we would like to become and bring us back into connection in a way which fuses the material and spiritual worlds: we can walk between them and through them outside time and space, transformed by the journey and wholly connected.

And now? Now, I need to get off the computer….

Bright blessings, Arvanna Redmantle Chosen Chief, Silver Birch Grove