Woodspirit

Desert Dreaming of an untamed soul

2010-08-12T19:18:00.010+01:00

Cold in the bush early in the mornings

In September 2009 I was very fortunate to go to Namibia, Africa. A childhood ambition to go on safari, but with a difference, this was a self guided, self drive safari and Namibia, the land, its people and its wondrous wildlife found a place in my soul.

Quick stop in the desert!

Namibia gained its independence from South Africa in 1990 and has a very strong Germanic community. Being an old colony of Germany, today it’s still a top destination for Germans and Afrikaans; with its largest towns/cities being very European in style. So it’s off the beaten track you need to head, away from Windhoek and Swakopmund and head for the Namibi Desert, the Skeleton Coast, Etosha Pan and Damaraland, as well as all the small villages and settlements in-between. The deeply proud, friendly and struggling, animistic tribes still sing, dance and hold firm to their beliefs in a very fast changing and developing country.

The women of the Himba Tribe

The Himba is perhaps one Namibia’s best known tribes. They are a semi-nomadic, cattle-herding people, with a deep reverence and veneration of the Ancestors. They are described as being monotheistic, with their god Mukuru being an omnipresent deity that created man, woman and cattle from a tree. Mukuru rules the elements, the weather, the very land; such a busy and remote god, he has the spirits of the dead, the ancestors, working for him. The Ancestors are responsible for the more day to day lives of the Himba. While Mukuru offers blessings, the spirit of the Ancestors can offer both a blessing and indeed a curse if they are disrespected or ignored. Both the Ancestors and Mukuru are contacted via a special ancestral fire known as okuruwo. Each family has an okuruwo which must be visited by the fire-keeper every seven to eight days to commune with the spirits, on behalf of the family. Members of the extended family will live in a hamlet of small huts that are centered on the family ancestral fire and a central livestock shelter. It’s believed that the livestock facilitate the connection between the living and the dead.

It was this ancestor worship, that I found a kinship with the Himba people. The Ancestors are central to their daily lives. They are consulted on everyday matters, offerings made via the Okorowo. The main tribal rituals were also held around the Okorowo, even in these rituals there seemed little actual worship of Mukuru, I got the sense that Mukuru was more a kin to the notion of ‘Great Spirit’ of the Native American indigenous peoples. If a family member or one of the livestock was sick, it’s believed that the Ancestors were not pleased and have punished the living. Therefore the fire-keeper would attended the Okorowo, make offerings or sacrifice and divine what needs to be done to appease the Ancestors and therefore gain their blessings once again; allowing the person or animal to begin to recover. This punishment is known as omiti which is something like ‘bad medicine’. However it’s also believed that some people who know how to use omiti can influence the minds of others and bring curses upon them. Sometimes the family would call upon a ‘shaman/medicine man/diviner’ to determine the source or cause of omiti.

Okorowo

I was very fortunate to be allowed to make offerings on the Okorowo. I was asked by the family’s fire-keeper if my Ancestors traveled with me, I said yes and showed them a Scottish brooch that was my grandmothers. He reached out and ran his fingers over the brooch and sung a brief song. I felt this deep within me, he was honouring my ancestor. It was, as if his fingers were feeling the blood web connections of my ancestral past. He then motioned me to follow him to the Okorowo and sat me down beside it. He poked and prodded at it, and a flame emerged. He added some more wood on the fire, he gestured to me to make an offering. I panicked, not wanting to offend, and having little in the way of offerings or indeed sacrifice! I placed my hand into my rucksack and found an acorn, one from my many wanderings in the English countryside! I knew instantly, this was to be my offering; the quintessential English acorn. I held it close to my heart, I felt my land, the chalk hills and greenwoods, and I felt my ancestors gather behind me as whips of thoughts. I made my prayers to the Ancestors of the Himba and gently released the acorn into the fire, and spontaneously began to sing words and sounds in honour of the dead of tribe and land. When I stopped I noticed the fire-keeper next to me in his traditional squatting posture, rocking back and forth with a tear running down his cheek. I waited till I felt his spirit return to his physical body and held out my hand, and shock his in a traditional Himba hand shake. I felt a connection to a far distant, strange land and its Ancestors.

I felt that I wanted to stay here with this tribe but alas our time was short and we had to move on before sunset to our campsite in Etosha National Park. We spent three days in Etosha exploring the salt pans and the wonderful wildlife, seeing every animal but cheetahs, which are very shy animals and Hippos, as there were no big lakes in the desert!

Carved spirit tree at Lake Otjikoto

After Etosha, we began making our return trip and stopped at a so called animal park/zoo and beauty spot; a huge crater that had flooded with water to create a very deep lagoon. Unfortunately the name is lost in a sea of memories of my trip (Remembered! it was Lake Otjikoto). As we entered and paid the chap a modest entry fee we first come to, as in all good tourist attractions, a shop! However this shop was divided into two ‘sheds’ facing each other. To the left were the usual Namibian wares and souvenirs; to the right was something completely different. Outside was a large table full of locally hand mined crystal, huge pieces of quartz, amethyst, carnelian all in their raw state. I stooped low through the shed door to be greeted by shelves and artifacts from which looked like a voodoo supply shop. There were jars of snakes, small vials of snake venom, powders and herbs, names of which I had never herd of. There was San Bushmen hunting tools, baboon heads and wooden carvings, the shop was intoxicating in its repulsiveness yet also fed my curiosity. Soon a man appeared a small black chap with white linear painting on his face. He spoke much better English than I could Afrikaans! He seemed to look at me for a few moments making feel uneasy and wanting to leave, when he said ‘Hey! You white medicine man?’ I really was not sure what to say, and said that I suppose you could call me that, as I follow a spirituality that is native to my land. He picked up a large quartz point, put it in my hands and held his hand around mine and said ‘You have the mojo! Take this crystal; it will give you a story one day when you need it’ Believing this to be simply a ploy to get you to buy their crystal, I reached into my pocket to buy the crystal; it was very cheap compared to prices in the UK. He refused and was annoyed I offered him money; he pushed me out of the door and stood their laughing as I joined my friends to tell them what happened. His laugh was one of knowing; that somehow I was not fully accepting the gift I had been given, not fully accepting I have the mojo!

Wide, long, straight roads of Namibia

It’s been nearly a year since I was in Namibia and only now am I starting to find tattered fragments and threads of connection to those 13 magical days. The quartz crystal still sits upon my altar waiting to tell me its story, I have a spirit guide that has slipped into my soul consciousness, known as my primordial ancestor who has a very ‘African’ feel to him, and painted like the man who gave me the crystal. And the ancestral fires of the Himba, well even now I go to my grove in the woods, rekindle the fire and commune with the dead of my land and blood………….and have I accepted my mojo! I don’t know, but is one hell of journey to try and find out, so there will be more to this story soon…………….

WORKSHOP relating to this post: Re-kindling the Ancestral Fire, Saturday 26th February 2011

Welcome

2010-08-06T14:49:00.001+01:00

At the Midsummer of 2010 I decided to finally, openly offer my shamanic healing, the Ovatic arts of the Druids, services to the wider community, which I have practiced for many moons, yet without formally making it known. Clients often approached me about my celebrant work then soon realised that I could help even further, or they found me simply by word of mouth. The work of Cunning Folk stretches back for hundreds of years in England, where cunning men and cunning women offered healing, herbal and magical services to their communities; I am providing a similar service, continuing the tradition of the cunning folk into the 21st century.

Here on this blog I will talk about the way in which I work, my experinces as a Pagan Druid and my spiritual path of a wild soul upon a wild land.

Blessings of the Chalk Hills and Greenwood

Rob

Cutting the Corn

2010-07-31T07:54:00.001+01:00

Here the harvest has started, the sun baked fields of golden corn, wheat, barley and flax has begun, as the hot dusty days cling to weathered skin and muscle. The monstrous heavy machines thunder through the fields, with little reverence for the sacred act they perform. Sunrise to sunset the sacrifice is made and we see the year turn, the Sun changes and now we find that strange time of bounty and loss; and I am reminded of the need of service, to the gods, my community and indeed the very land that sustains us. We may make our prayers and offerings, but can we sit within or beside an harvested field and offer unconditionally something of value, in a wondrous and age old notion of sacrifice.

Even with all the available knowledge and understanding of the degradation of the environment, the natural world, we still strip earth of resources, will still strive to have more, eat more, take more, want more. Even our spirituality becomes a form of 'spiritual consummerism' as we look to see what we can take from nature, our gods or our spirit connections.

Lughnasadh is an act of love to bring death, in order to be of service to the world. A sacrificial offering in the hope that the world is sustained and nourished. So what can we give?, what action can we offer as a service to our gods?, what thanks holds us as we weep in tears of loss and smiles of knowing joy? this is our Lammas Song.

Blessings of the sickle cut corn.

Rob/|\

Stripped to the bare bones

2010-07-26T16:21:00.001+01:00

Is our paganism in danger of becoming psychotherapy? Is our paganism in danger of becoming just as dogmatic as the orthodox religions we shy away from? I think it is!

For the past year I have attended workshops/groups where Seers, Pagans, Druids, Witches and Shamans have all been speaking about a great sense of change; an undercurrent that seems to have given the symptoms of the recession, greater awareness of climatic change and social change too. We could all be forgiven for thinking this is rather apocalyptic, end of the world coming, 2012 not long around the corner. However, it seems that is about us flowing with the tide of change, in all that we are and do.

This has affected my spirituality profoundly and taken me to the bare bones of my spiritual expression. Something that is new to paganism in twenty first century is that people often now choose to be priest/shamans/seers/healers. In traditional societies this was often the result of some trauma, disease, some brake down in the physical or mental state of the individual. Today we seek to find the expression of a more natural, free and unorthodox spirituality, fuelled by the importance of a need to deepen our relationship to the natural world. There is nothing wrong with this, yet we can also slip into the wrong focus, as our paganism becomes nothing more than escapism. Also we crave to understand the tradition within which we work deeply and find answers in the books from the local “New Age Shoppe”, websites and often clutch a host of titles and qualifications of proficiency within those traditions. I think we are in danger of losing the pivotal notion of paganism; that nature is our teacher and guide, that we find true inspiration from the natural world, our land, that we allow our paganism to evolve and flow with the tides of moon, sun, seasons and stars. While much of the structure and ritual of Paganism provides the new seeker some clarity and sense of confidence that ‘I am doing it right’ it can sometimes hold us and limit us in the wild soul expression that our paganism so craves to be.

Much of this change has been hard for the wilder community to accept, as old age concepts are challenged and the very notion of Tradition is readdressed. For me, I have been seen, in my public work as a Druid Priest for the past 20 years, and suddenly now the process of braking down the preconceptions and ‘ways of working’ within Druidry has led people to wonder who or what I am. I am no longer able to offer the same style of teaching, the same level of support, the impetus to lead/facilitate. Suddenly it seems that I have changed, loved and supported by those who find similar inspiration. Loathed and even offered sympathy by those who hold on to what was. Yet for me the freedom is deliciously wonderful, and challenging at the same time; the process of being soul naked and true, to dance beneath the dark Yew on a full moon and the ecstasy of sweet dark inspiration. I am wild soul, on my wild land; I find a common expression through Druidry yet am I a priest? Who knows I wait till the community adjusts to the wild insanity of my new yet familiar journey. I don’t seek to heal myself through my paganism, healing may simply be a by-product of my spiritual practice, I don’t seek to become a better person or more enlightened, in fact I think you soon realise you become “endarkened” celebrating the mystery rather than the knowledge of why. We don’t need to call the quarters, we don’t need to know what we are doing, we just need the intent and focus and open to the flow that is nature and our sacred relationship we form there. Who knows you may find me as the wild Merlin naked with nothing more than a pig and apple in my grove……

Rob Wilson /|\

26 October 2009