Open Post

[kimberlysteele]

Woot! My first ever Open Post. Please feel free to comment on anything and everything. Thank you for not using profanity.

Comments

[tamanous2020]

Hey Kim! Happy holidays and blessings for you and the family. Thanks a bunch for all your useful and accurate ogham readings. What book or resource did you rely on for your initial foray into ogham?

As a fellow former atheist, its amusing how the world works and leads us to this experiental spirituality. What was your journey away from the point of view like? It must have lead to a lot of confused looks from friends and family :p

Do you know of any specific prayers, prayer bead repetitions or other devotional material for the druid revival gods and goddesses?

Thanks so much for everything. In March, I'll be cleaning out a number of books from my storage and would love to donate some to you. Would it be ok if I message you with the various titles to see which you'd like?

Andrew

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you Andrew! Blessings to you and your loved ones as well. You're welcome for the Ogham readings; it is my pleasure. I found Ogam: The Celtic Oracle of Trees by Paul Rhys Mountfort useful when I started studying the Ogam. He uses a different order of letters, but he has an effective way of tying mythology to tree letters that helped me to think deeply into each letter.

I think the biggest step away from atheism happened when I accepted that magic isn't whatever I or most people assumed it is. Especially as a child, I expected magic to happen in a Disney-fied form. Wish gratification and rays shooting out of fingers. It took Druidry and a load of discursive meditations to sort out my wish-fulfillment fantasies and ego from stuff that actually happens as a result of will.

This Christmas, my brother casually said something about me being an agnostic and I said "not so much". I told him I was a Druid and I worship trees. My husband, still atheist, has a good sense of humor about my Druid practices. One day while waiting outside the laundromat, we came up with an entire abecedary of alternate names for the Sphere of Protection: A, the Arc of Aspiration, B, the Bowl of Beatitudes, C, the Circle of Consecration, etc.

I say the Druid Universal Prayer quite a bit. I say it every day when I leave work to bless the space and I say it every night when I kneel and give a prayer of gratitude for the past day.

Druid Universal Prayer:

Grant us, O Holy Ones,
Thy protection, and in protection, strength;
And in strength, understanding;
And in understanding, knowledge;
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice;
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;
And in the love of it, the love of all existences,
The love of Earth our Mother, and of all goodness.

Awen

Yes, I'd love more books. I don't see myself as being able to open a library space until 2022 at the earliest, but I'd like to have a big offering of books once I get there.

[(Anonymous)]

I have a question about the subscription library: will it be open to Canadians? I'd happily join such a library, but I can't find a local one, so I figure if there's talk of it here, I'll happily join. I can understand if the hassle of including another country is too much, and also will happily pay a little more if need be.

[kimberlysteele]

I will definitely think about doing that -- the first thing I need to do is catalogue the books I have so far, then obviously I'd have to make the catalog available online somehow.

[(Anonymous)]

In my experience, there are two types of atheists: those with zero interest in the spiritual, and those who are but are terrified of the implications. I think a lot of us who were in the first category have experiences which convince us there's more to it; I know that's what happened to me!

[kimberlysteele]

I agree with you. There's also the issue of many so-called spiritual people being given over to total lunacy and/or hypocrisy. Joel Osteen springs to mind. If he's in contact with any form of spirit, I'm going to make an educated guess that it is a demon or the underling of a demon.

For me, spiritual experiences were always there, except I was blind to them. Mass media had me programmed to discount those subtle modes of thought as "not real" or all in my head.