Language of the Flame

Tonight is my Flamekeeping shift. I’m trying to take this time to be more definite in my beliefs, and laying out a solid plan of practice. As I sit and ponder, I struggle with the all too familiar, growing knowledge that often haunts me as a writer: what I say cannot capture what it is I am feeling or understanding. Sometimes, it is very close. Other times, my words utterly fail in the face of pure perceived experiential knowledge.

The more think about my path, and the more I sit and look inside myself and try to define what it is I believe, the more trouble I have with this inability of language to capture what it is I feel about the world, about myself, and about my place in it. These key ingredients to a coherent set of assumptions about the world–spiritual beliefs–should, if anything should be communicated, if only to myself for greater clarity. The closer I seem to come to something, the stiller I become, waiting for it to manifest as a clear thought that I maybe, maybe will finally be able to capture on paper. The closer, the quieter I become, straining hard to hear it sound through my inner ear.

Still closer, and still elusive.

As I focus on the flame tonight for Brighid, I think of how easy it is to see the hotness of the yellow color, to feel the tiny warmth radiating and the pulsing light gently wash on the immediate surroundings. How easy it is to perceive, and understand, without the medium of words. Even my words here, trying to describe what I see, and what I feel, take far more time to process and only then approximate my experience.

An Seanchas Fior is a path based primarily on the power of words to shape our lives, to form patterns to live with. My path therefore appears to be founded on something weak, insubstantial, and ultimately, inconsequential. Words are a product of our imagination, stories the product of words.

But suddenly a last thought shimmers through my head as I prepare to extinguish the flame, and go to bed. What if, my thought whispers, what if it is the other way around?

What if words are a product of stories? This seems logical. After all, our experiences of life came first, and our words came second to try to share them. Thus, my world, based upon words, is actually based upon stories, not words; on events, not things.

What if, that tiny thought says, what if that path, and everything my world stands upon, is a flame–an event based upon the interaction of other things, which are themselves, a result of the interaction of other things. What if words are in fact far more powerful than we often consider them to be: what they fail to capture may not be a thing at all, but an event–insubstantial, but not inconsequential. Their power, or lack thereof, hints at the truth: that what they fail to capture cannot be captured at all.

I am a flame, ready to ignite, ready to be blown out. I am a word on the breath, ready to exhale, ready to fade.

 

Universal Values

Once again, over at Pagan Prompts, there is a another question to help me get my thoughts together:

What values and virtues do you believe should be universal for all pagan paths – not just your own – and why are these virtues/values important? How should they be practiced?

The language of this question is at once intriguing, and unnerving. The way I read it, this question could be (or maybe should be) asking what values and virtues should be universal for all paths, regardless of whether it was pagan or not. And that is when a line that is far too easy to cross should be tread upon very, very carefully.

After all, what person won’t espouse some particular value of hir belief system as being universally important? And yet, so many values of so many belief systems are out of balance with each other and our way of life; so much so that they cannot be cast universally upon humankind without seriously retarding and restricting our moral and ethic growth.

Still, it is an interesting question to ponder, and an opportunity to examine various faiths to find the common points between them all. These similarities, these values, can maybe point to an ethics system that evolved purely from the social interactions and relationships between humans, regardless of how they mystically experience their world.

 

The Living Tree

If there’s one thing I need to be reminded of sometimes, it’s that looking at new stories, not just the old, is a key part of my path, and essential for my own spiritual life. I need to look for inspiration and thought not just in contemporary authors’ works of fiction, poetry and sundry, but in the new storyteller and medium unique to the twenty-first century, the blog and its author, the blogger. Heck, it’s one way I’m telling stories, after all.

One of these new storytellers is Cuan, at Song of the Old Wanderer. I recently discovered him and am intrigued by his own Celtic pathbuilding work. This post in particular, Life Is…, has some resonance with me, not just for its poetic sensibility, but its attempt at codifying and communicating the basic values and principles of his path (called the “lifeway”) in a unique and, moreover, consistent and intelligent manner.

This description sounds too clinical to really convey the sense of story and language Cuan expresses here, but I find that one of my main issues, particularly with keeping up with this blog, is finding a unique and succinct way of communicating, and distilling, all the thoughts that roam around my head that concern my pathbuilding work. Laying out my principles and values took a lot of out me, and the work isn’t even over yet. My basic beliefs are in a constant state of flux because my specific view on spirituality and my personal expression of them is constantly changing.

In the coming weeks, I hope to have a new list of my principles, and I want to try to look to work’s like Cuan’s, and my friend Juni’s at The Path of Mist, for inspiration and motivation.

In closing, I’d like to take this thought and dream it out:

The living tree makes natural, pure poetry by its standing, its growing, its leaves shaking, its blossoms opening.

Sometimes I think that in order to be considered seriously in my search for wisdom I have to be flawless, static, and above all, solid, in the sense that I cannot be vague, or dreamy, or be open to changing my mind or refining my essential viewpoint. Poetry is built on a sense of the concrete giving way to the abstract; it is in the stasis of the language that the flow of the emotion can be discovered.

It is however, more subtle than that. The tree, the woman I am, is rooted and immobile in deep soil, but is subject to change. Her leaves fall, and grow again, in season, and she bears fruit and blossom in her time. To be principled is not be to be a boulder, but to remain upright even while the seasons change, and you with them.

To be a poet, principled and strong in her beliefs, is in fact, to be a poem: every word, every letter placed deliberately, with meaning and intent behind every action, but overall open to a myriad of interpretations and emotions. Poems change through drafts, and revisions, in constant change and fog while the initial intent remains the same. I make poetry through my own changes; it should naturally follow that my path should do the same.

 

Housekeeping

I’m sick today, and so am not really up to writing out a meaningful post. However, I went through and did some tagging clean up and now I would like to address where this blog will be going in the future. I’m probably going to be musing on various subjects still (see earlier posts), but in an effort to get back into a conscious pathbuilding mindset, I am looking back over my blog and thinking about how I’ve changed in my viewpoint, how I’ve matured (hopefully) and how I’ve also lost some of my focus. As such, I may be revisiting some old posts and revising them, and reposting them with a thought to how things currently stand.

I’ve reopened my old files on my computer with all of my religious pathbuilding essays and stuff in them, and will likely be revisiting my old notebooks; at the worst, I’ll give myself a laugh or two, and at the best, I’ll be able to revamp some of my earlier thoughts and refocus my current thoughts.

For one, I no longer feel quite right calling what I do filidecht, though the jury is still out on what it is I am actually doing. An Seanchas Fior is at the moment more feeling like a curious blend of Celtic polytheism, Zen Buddhism and Story, but it’s still no more than a feeling. In the next few weeks (and posts) I hope to have pinned down a little better how this is growing and changing. I suspect it will mainly be a matter of streamlining, in language and concept, in order to get back at the heart of, and back to actively building my path, but I’m not sure.

 

Independence

I’ve been thinking a lot about my current situation in life. I’m back in Texas for good; or at least, as far as I know. I’m back in my parents’ house, not for good, most assuredly. I’m trying to find a job, which will then lead to my own apartment for the first time (since I’m determined to live alone for at least a little while), and I’m trying to find a way of getting around on my own without having to own a car.

This has naturally got me thinking about independence, in the financial sense of the word, but in other ways as well. Upon reading a prompt over at Pagan Prompts again, this sentence stuck out to me: “Is it important for you to take the journey alone?”

Independence is not only a virtue in today’s society: it’s necessary. Our whole economy is modeled around the satisfaction of the individual unit (person, family, business). America is founded upon the philosophy that the individual has inherent worth, regardless of where, when or in what circumstances he was born. Few other texts match the nearly religious transcendence in its commitment to independence than Emerson’s Self-Reliance and The Declaration of… well. You know.

I have thoughts about the individualism of today in an economic and secular, cultural context, but today I’d like to think a bit about what it means in a spiritual context.

 

My First Post In a Long Time

And probably my shortest.

Today over at Pagan Prompts, the topic was this:

In a single sentence, what is the essence of your spiritual beliefs and/or principles?

So here is my answer(s):

“The Multiverse is a story which we must keep writing, telling, editing and remembering.”

“Read books, and write your stories.”

“Breathe in the wind, carry the light, and tell true stories.”

Okay, so I can’t choose just one. But any one of them taken at a time is basically correct. I shall probably post more on this later, but once I grok it a little more.

 

Impermanence

The fundamental tenant of Buddhism is that the world is an illusion. Beneath our own fears and fantasies, the world we dwell in is pure emptiness. Nothing lasts. It is only when we realize the transience of being, the essential nothingness that is the whole of existence that we can begin to break free of the endless cycle of reincarnation and fear. Note, however, that acknowledging the impermanence of being does not acknowledge the emptiness of right action and right thought. Though the world may be nothing but illusion, Buddhism asserts that we must yet work and be in this world, and act in the right as yet.

Existentialism follows the same line of thought, emphasizing the absurdity of the world, and the chaos of the world, rather than the illusion of it. Meaning, in existentialism, is the agent of impermanence; only our conscious making of meaning can assert any notion of permanence to our world, and assert our actions in it as right.

Modern science asserts impermanence as the essential state of the universe, as entropy. Entropy is part of the second thermodynamic law which states:  the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value. This means that entropy will either stay the same, or increase. It will never decrease. It also implies that all states of high order will eventually move to lower states of order, to disorder.

In essence, the universe, as a considered whole, is moving along the arrow of time, and is falling to disorder every second. Nothing, indeed, lasts.