25  86%  28%  ompn SSE bar29.95 rises  windchill25  Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

The struggle I talked about yesterday is a symptom of a shift in attention in my inner life.  When I pursued meditative and contemplative practices related to Christianity, the experience enriched and deepened me.  When I moved away from Christianity, the only comparable practice left in my life involved Jungian analysis and the Ira Progroff journals.  Those took me further and, I believe, have calmed my mind’s chatter and prepared the soil for a new way, but in themselves they are not a way.

Now I can feel a shift in the inner cathedral, as Progroff called it.  The shift, under way for sometime in various manifestations, involves attunement, even atonement (at-one-ment).  Here are the disparate pieces that float in my inner life: my move away from metaphors of transcendence to ones of deepening, the  Great Wheel, the Celtic Faery Faith, Jungian thought, gardening, keener appreciation of the natural world, climate change, Taoism, Asian art and culture and transcendentalism.  Each one of these has a particular and peculiar role in deepening my inner life.  My hope is that the stirrings I feel mean that this complex has begun to move toward integration.

In a sense I believe all this began, or began to begin, when, in a session with a spiritual director, after discussing my then new admiration for Celtic spirituality, he said, “Well, maybe you are becoming a Druid.”  Maybe so.  Or, more likely, something akin to a Druid, but one with a Taoist bent perhaps.  A taoist Druid with a spading fork. 

We’ll see.