Lullaby by W.H.Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Now This is How You Play the Bodhran

Self Worth

This is hard for me to admit but I have issues about self worth, they are not as bad as they were when I was in my teens, age seems to have brought about some sense of freedom in this area. I am less likely to base my self worth on what people think of me than before, but I still catch myself thinking in the old way sometimes.

A case in point is my poetry web page on witchvox. I look there and see that in the two years it has been in existence over 32,000 people have read something that I have written and I am chuffed to bits at this. But the old me creeps in and at the back of my mind I ask why. I don't want to sound as if I am blowing my own trumpet here but I know when I have written something that is good (we are always are own best critics) but accepting that others might agree with that assumption comes hard sometimes.

Lazy Days

Just for you MoonFrog.

Lazy Days.

Lazy hazy sunlit day,
Bees hovering over
Earth toned wallflowers
And purple lavender
Drunk with the scent
Of Summers colour.
While my cat slumbers
In the midday heat
Dreaming of birds that whirl
In the blue soaked sky.
Then at days dusky end
I sit listening to the drone
Of bees returning to
the hive sounding
like squadrons of planes
returning to their base.
Then my cat, charged with
Sun stored energy
Wakes, stretches,
And goes on the prowl.
While I sleepy
From the days heat
Sit and ponder.

Pangur-ban 24/04/2008

New Name

I have changed the name of my blog, I have not been overly happy with Bakers and Bards but it has served a purpose till I could come up with a better one. So with out further ado welcome to "The Way Through The Forest" Much better for a Druids blog.

Gwers 5

This is where for me it all starts to come together. To a great extent the previous teachings were almost like a history lesson, which of course is what they were meant to be. But how could I relate them to my circumstances at the beginning of the twenty first century and here in this Gwers we have the link between then and now and it is Mysticism.

It is this mystical view of life that forges the link from the Proto Druids down through the millennia to the Druid of the 21st century. The phrase in Gwers5 “The world of spirit transcends time” says it all to me, when I enter my grove I enter a place that is outside of time where anything is possible. And that means that when I meet the Horned God there in one of his many guises it is a meeting that is outside of reality. To some this will be classed as fantasy or wishful thinking, but mysticism transcends reality.

All the questions that the mind throws up such as do the Gods exist? Is there such a thing as a spiritual connection to the land? Can we communicate with trees? All these questions when viewed from the mystical viewpoint in my opinion are answerable in the affirmative. Again and it is only my opinion that mysticism transcends the laws of physics.

Journal

I have been putting something off and that is starting my Journal for the Bardic grade. Well no more as I have started it today.

The time honoured way is to do this is in a hand written book I suppose but my handwriting is appalling, even I have trouble reading it. So I have decided to do this in word and save it as a document. I must remember to back it up on a disc regularly though.

Actually it will be quite therapeutic I feel to have somewhere to put down my thoughts, hopes and dreams in a place only I can see.