Musings on the Ovate Path

This was taken from the highway I was driving on to get to the OBOD East Coast Gathering in 2012.  I have no idea where exactly this is, but the weekend included my initiation to the Ovate Grade.  My life changed pretty dramatically, and five years later, I will say, for the most part, I am pretty content. The path did not go anywhere I thought it would.

Cerridwen's Cauldron? Maybe.  The story of her brew and the process of change can provide a way to see transition and change in life and living. YMMV. I have spent a good couple years dealing with the changes from my marriage.  The idea that relationships should last a lifetime, is a bit of a dream.  For some, they figure out a way to make it work.  For others, they suffer through a disappointing horror.  However, somewhere in all of this, I have come to understand that relationships provide us with both the experience of being with another and learning about ourselves. There were many things I learned about me, looking back.  I think it's more about what I was. When I started my business, I did not expect that running it would force me to grow, to reach out and beyond myself.  When you are a self-employed person, there is no one forcing you to do things.  You are the boss and the employee.  What I learned was that the strengths I l...

It took me a while to sort out what has been making crazy influences in my life.  Vodoun.  Someone was crazy enough to call on a trickster spirit that is into mind games, torment, and creating self-destruction in the intended victim.  But, it showed itself to me. At least, it showed itself to me using those images.  The thing is,  I know what this is.  I have a passing familiarity with it.  I study and have studied religion and spirituality for close to 30 some odd years now, only because I am interested. And finally, that relief from the Catholic Church visit, and that Welsh parish priest, and his recommendations, all make sense. Vodoun is a synthesis religion, with some practitioners seeing the saints as avatars for the lwa.  And, now that I know, I have a plan to address it. The thing is, some spirits are amoral, and rather neutral.  They do not necessarily favour the one who called them up.  And if the party that sent this afte...

The Rosary is a form of prayer beads that Catholics, at the Roman Catholics, have been using as a structured form of meditation and devotion.  Reflections on Mary, Jesus and his path on Earth, and the Father in heaven, are all part of the form. However, it is likely the early Christian Monks borrowed this from Eastern practise; monastics in the East were using prayer beads far sooner than in the West. It is a funny thing, to find myself going to attend church for the first time willingly in about 25 years, for me.  I know my father is not well, and I also know that in time, I will find myself spending time in there.  What it was for me was a homecoming I was not expecting. This druid is well aware that specific beliefs on the path require no doctrine, dogma, or books.  We learn directly from our experiences, the book of nature, life itself.  All the wisdom of every story of human experience is out there, whether it be in various religious texts, the lyric...