Midsummer: What the Wren Knows

When you walk a magickal path year in and year out, dancing that Wheel over and over, it gets in your blood. You become the Wheel, and the Wheel becomes you. In this state of Union, the Gods can speak to you clearly through tokens and omens that come through the spirits of Nature, and I don't just mean Otherworldly spirits. I'm talking about the plants, animals, and birds that you encounter as you go about your daily life.

Last summer it was crows and dead cats all over the place, and we all know about the shitty transformative energies of the Summer o'12. This year, it's a wren.

Our washer and dryer are in an outbuilding, and we often leave the door open so the cats can go inside when it rains. There's a shelf full of dryer lint and various stuff near the machines. I went in a few weeks ago and startled a little bird flying around. The door had been closed at that time, and I thought the bird had been caught inside accidentally. 

The next day, it happened again, and this time I saw it: a hollow hive-shaped nest deep within the dyer lint, and several speckled eggs inside. Ah! 

It took a few days to figure out what kind of bird it was, and it is a Carolina Wren:

Of course, it's always cool when the wildlife comes near, but it took a while for my mind to shut up and listen to Wren's message. 

Which, when it came through, floored me, and by that I mean, shook my very foundations.

This is what She said:

Druid.

You're a Druid. 

Or, as you prefer, a Druidess.

You've called yourself Witch, you've called yourself Wiccan, and you've earned the right to call yourself those things. But I know what you really are. And so do you.

What are your earliest memories? It's the time your mother got all the big pine trees cut down in the front yard. It's the way the light looked on the tree leaves before a thunderstorm. It's the smell and curious shapes of the sassafras leaves. It's the color of the willow oak leaves against the blue sky in autumn. It's the glory of the yaupon in winter and the filigree of bare branches against the sunset sky.

It's a hundred memories of trees, and plants, and birds, and all the things of Nature, wherever you go, Hawaii, California, Washington, Germany, Massachusetts, Indiana. What do you notice? The trees. The birds. The weeds. What do you remember, after all these years? The way the Light and Dark play on the Land. When do you mourn the most? When trees are killed and weeds are killed and the secret places are desecrate. When does your heart soar and sing? When you are talking to the wild flowers, and the weeds, and the trees.

And who is your Goddess? Who, after all these years, did you finally meet and know? Cerridwen. Do you remember your poetry? Do you remember how you used to be able to sit  down and compose a 20-page term paper in your head, and type it out completely intact, with endnotes, with no rough drafts and no revisions - on a typewriter, and get an 'A'? Why do you think you loved William Blake and John Keats so much? They knew the Awen, She gave them the Awen, a word you started to chant by instinct 10 years ago this Midsummer. Your officemate, not a Pagan, out of all the words in the world names her business "Awen;" can We send any message clearer than that?

The Witches, your friends, your family, your kinspeople, they're fine. Nothing wrong with them. Stay with them. But not for you the world of perpetual Halloween, of autumn-tinted shadows and the night-mysteries all the time; for you are also of the day, the green and the gold and the blue, the clear fine sky, and the Alban Heruin, the rays of Light on the Shore. And you have always known and felt this. Stop pretending.

For you not just the Sacred Union, but the fruits of the Union, which are the poetry and the song and the art. 

And you are a philosopher. Like your forebears, like William Blake himself, you can speak many languages of Spirit. Jesus is okay. Perhaps his feet in ancient times walked upon England's mountains green.

 Druidess you have been, and Druidess you are, and Druidess you will ever be. Dryw, my name in Welsh, which means "Druid" and "Wren." 

For I am the King of the birds. I have flown higher than the Eagle, and I give the power of prophecy, which you have already discovered. I was Taliesen, who is in you. I give the power of song, and I give the power of cunning. 

Having come home now to what I truly am, I feel no need to rush off and join a Druid organization. My current spiritual technology can serve my needs just fine, I think, for the time being.

I am in awe of how clear and direct these omens and tokens are. It stirs in me a desire to create, to worship, to serve Her and emulate Him. What a marvelous multiverse.

What a relief no longer to be an oval peg trying to fit into a round hole - more frustrating than a square hole, because that's obvious, but with an oval peg (to extend the metaphor), one keeps feeling as if one could and should fit. It's the almost-ness that gets you.

Blessed Alban Heruin. May the Light shine brightly on your Shore.