Communicating with Nature
While there are shamanic paths throughout the world, the shamanism of the Celtic peoples was usurped by the Judeo-Christian religions. The vision-seeking techniques and practices of our Celtic ancestors were largely lost with the coming of Christianity, but the Druids and the Celts left behind tantalizing clues to recapturing and reconstructing the Way of the Druid. Many of these clues lie hidden in books written by Irish Christian monks who obviously painted a veneer of Christianity over the older legends. That veneer is occasionally thin enough to see through. Once it is peeled away we may peer behind it to catch a glimpse of what ancient Druids may have practiced. By adding this knowledge to the wisdom gleaned from other shamans from around the world, we may begin to rebuild what our Ancestors lost.
There’s a joke in the Druid community that if you ask three Druids a question, you’re likely to get five opinions. Coming up with a definitive answer to the question, “What is the Way of the Druid?” can be frustrating to the novice seeking to walk the Druid path, simply because the Way of the Druid is such a highly individualistic journey.
So what sets the Black Mountain Druid Order apart from other Druid Orders and other Pagans in general?
Nature is the Druid’s “bible.” We get our spiritual enlightenment from what we learn about nature and the world around us. We do this in a variety of ways. One way is to realize that matter, energy and spirit are not separate things. Druids do not see the world in dualistic ways. To a Druid, everything has a life spirit or a life force. When you realize that matter and spirit are not separate things, then everything is alive. And everything that is alive can be a teacher.
The secret to learning from nature is to accept that not all wisdom is gained from books or words. Various studies have demonstrated that somewhere between 70% and 90% of communication between human beings is non-verbal. This means that only a small part of communication relies on the words being spoken. The rest is in the inflection, the body language, the mood, the general feel of the conversation. There may even be communication at work on a psychic level between individuals. The fact that so much of communication doesn’t depend only on the words is one reason that the world of Internet chat invented “smileys.” These text characters are designed to convey feelings and expressions that are normally present in spoken face-to-face communication, but that are absent in a text-only means of communication.
Think about the idea of non-verbal communication for a moment. How could this idea translate to communicating with nature? If you own a pet, has your pet ever made its needs known to you? If so, then your pet was able to communicate with you on a non-verbal level.
Could trees communicate to us as well? If we learned to listen to the trees and learn their ways of speaking to us, what could they teach us?
One of the goals of the Way of the Druid is to seek out the ways nature communicates to us, and to learn how to listen.
For this reason, your first activity on the path of the Druid is to find your birth tree and to spend a year and a day with it. The first step is to figure out which tree is your birth tree.