Druidry Your Own Way - Tradition

Personal Ways Worth Preserving

Something personal can be discovered through many different ways and from diverse origins such as through rural customs, society norms, community practices and directly from family members passing down what has been important in their own lives. As a species, human beings have been travelling the vast terrains of the planet as long as we have been here. Making crossings, moving from place to place and learning from other peoples and their traditional ways, often leaving something of their own behind as they move on to new lands. People share what is meaningful to them, something that shows who they are, where they have been and what matters and inspires their attitudes and values. A long time ago these stories were shared orally through song, artwork and dance. Nowadays they are shared on social media.

Many of us will have an ancestry that involves migration or displacement at some point along the journey through time. And there will be many different reasons for this. Many people have had to move for environmental reasons when their home became uninhabitable. Events that affected their safety, shelter and food sources could come from climate change, loss of resources and war. This is why so many of us feel a special close affinity to customs and spiritualities that are not local or currently active in the larger population where we live now. We may feel something in our blood that calls us to another cultures values and beliefs because something within us, buried deep in the past belongs. Druidry offers a beautiful diversity in its community. People from anywhere in the world with any blending of race, culture, religion or spirituality can be a Druid. This is why no two Druids are the same. But there are some things that are the same and are important to all Druids and one of them is the core principle of Tradition.

This idea of tradition has been sitting with me for a number of weeks. As has a lovely noticing of how my own Druidry has become something deeply personal to my own individual way. My Druidry has become integrated in my everyday life, aligned and complementary to my own attitudes, values and beliefs. Druidry for me feels more like a way of noticing something that is present, an awareness of something experienced with the senses, a way of understanding life and experiencing relationships And so when I was considering what tradition meant, I wanted to understand what it meant for me. I wondered how I might be observing traditional ways that are personal to me. Especially as I didn't really consider myself a traditional person when I was younger even though I have lived by societal norms and followed traditional customs such as being married and raising a family. I have noticed that traditional ways have become more important to me as I have got older. Yet I always followed my own spirituality, identifying as a pagan from childhood even though my family were Catholic. Something in me just new who I was.

I looked to my spiritual path for traditional threads. I hail from Irish and Scottish decent, with a smidge of European from my Polish grandfather. I have always felt attuned with an indigenous instinct, aligned with Celtic spirituality, with old folk practices and animistic beliefs. I recognised my work with The Celtic Tree Calendar and Tree-Centred Practice as a personal tradition. I have developed this tradition over time and shared my ideas and practices in the online community even before I took formal Druidic training. The roots of these traditions lie within Druidic history, a history that itself has been migrated across the great times-capes of human existence and been further developed into new iterations by other inspired people who have shared their adaptations of it all. My work in Tree-Centred Practice and the creation of the Tree Whisper Oracles also has their roots in animism and shamanism, a distant echo of my Celtic ancestry. And somewhere blended in there from my matrilineal lines are the folk traditions and the whispers of seers and psychics who see signs, omens, spirits and have visions.

Spiritually, I follow the seasonal rhythms, through The Celtic Tree Calendar, but I also observe the seasons and their cycles of change. The Wheel of the Year recognises celestial events and natural rural customs through the Equinoxes and Solstices and then there are other blended spiritual observances with religious celebrations that are important to people as a global community such as Christmas and Easter. As a community we move in ways that are like a murmuration, moving in an attunment with nature. When to sow and when to grow, when to hunt and when to harvest and when it's time to lay fallow. And we celebrate tradition all along the way as the wheel of the year turns.

I also searched for something traditional in my local community. I wondered about the people here and what they did everyday that held meaning to them. And then I recognised collective experiences and noticed all of the pathways that cross the land. The one thing that everyone does where I live is go for walks and be beside nature. I live in a beautiful wild landscape, surrounded by woodland, rivers, mountains, moors and the sea. People walk everywhere and often they walk the same routes, I know this because I walk and I often meet the same people along the way. Where I live there is a well known hill called Fyrish that everyone and their dog has climbed, more than once. For some of us we climb Fyrish every year. Fyrish has become something of a pilgrimage for many people of all ages and hailing from all places. These paths around my community are well worn, people have been walking them for hundreds of years and I sense into this feeling when I walk them.

Another tradition I recognised was the local custom of fishing. Even though we now have many laws that govern who can fish and when, typically barring the common person from performing a natural instinct in favour of placing high values on permits for the wealthy. Nevertheless fishing is a traditional custom for peoples who live by the seas and on rivers and lochs and is a inherent and natural practice that many people feel called to do. It is in their blood and something of the water calls to them. There are also remnants of folk healing traditions being preserved across the local countryside with healing wells still being visited today, the most well known is the Clootie Well on The Black Isle. And we have a Fairy Glen where people walk through the woodlands to the waterfall and hammer coins into old tree stumps for the faeries. There is a historical record of Fairy Glen in which two children where brough in front of a judge at court to give evidence of what they seen there. the story goes that they witnessed the fairy procession leaving the glen to return to the otherworld, when they asked the fairies why they were leaving they said that they didn't like what humans were doing.

I wondered about personal family traditions and found a very many precious repeated moments and patterns in family life. This is where I found so much richness and found that here is where tradition was very important to me as a mother and home maker. Our family values were centred around quality family time and making meaning moments and repeated patterns through life. This often involved going to the places in nature, walking those pathways in the woodlands, visiting the rivers, walking along the beaches and swimming in the sea and fishing as a family. Another family tradition I recognise is my love of gardening and especially caring for roses, this was instilled in me in early childhood when I would help my Grandfather in his garden with his roses, then we would sit on his bench and drink tea.

I also found an importance on history in my family traditions. Remembering and revisiting local historic sites and sharing the stories of individuals who played a part was important to us to keep alive .This became a focus for my children's home-education and also with the formation of our 'The Adventurers Club' for the older females of the family when we would meet up and go for days out in the car to visit historical sites like castles, a thousand year old Abby, places of battle, mausoleums and churches, ancient trees and tree museums, the ancient standing stones of the Picts and the burial grounds of the Cairns. Deeper traditional roots lay here in the human beings desire to explore, travel, discover and tell stories.

Tradition feels like something important. Something that preserves human history, customs, stories and meaningful ways. They can be observed by the world wide community or more personal having been passed down from a grandparent. They share something instinctual flowing in our ancestral blood and they reflect Earths nature within us through rural customs and practices complementary with landscape we live on. They are what each of us find value in and recognise as worth practicing and teaching to others. They foster community, connection and closeness to something that feels important and special. It seems the more I search for tradition, the more I uncover. I wonder what your personal traditions are and how they hold meaning for you. So many things we share, but some stories are unique to each person. I invite you to consider what tradition means for you and how tradition aligns with your own life and spiritual path.

Your in the woodlands and wild places,

Mags Black.