Here Comes the Sun
It’s a refrain we’ve heard before: we are so often poor stewards of the natural world. The 2018 Living Planet report from WWF is a great example of this chorus of doom. Though the message may still have value, the methodology of this report has its flaws — and by presenting itself as something that is easy to understand, it adds to the challenge for the layman trying to understand the state of the natural world. Even for those who have the time and patience to shuffle through layers of data and abstraction, the reward seems to be a pervasive feeling of helplessness. You can almost feel the underlying thrum of anxiety in online reactions: nothing I do matters. Nothing I do can fix this.
It doesn’t help that even our attempts to do right can be misguided. The ideas of restoration and rehabilitation litter the ecological assessments of oilfields and urban developments alike. One might assume that those assessments, provisions, and requirements will cover off the important details. They won’t develop if it’ll be all that harmful, right? Or if they do, it won’t be perfect, but we can probably put a lot of it back the way it should be. Eventually. Mostly. Maybe.
Anyone who works in the environmental field will tell you that is not the case. Decisions around oilfields and urban developments do not exist in a vacuum; the environment is only one stakeholder in any assessment. In cases where restoration is mandated, the belief of what ecological restoration looks like is often worlds away from reality. For what we so often fail to ask is this: what does it mean to restore a disturbed ecosystem? And are our actions — meant to speed healing — really doing what nature cannot do on her own?
I want to be careful here: I am not casting blame on the scientists and citizens in the field and the fens working to understand and protect our natural world. Ecology is hard. Review articles from various corners of restoration research show a history of trial-and-error leading to inconsistent outcomes for recovery. In some cases, active restoration is worse than allowing an area to naturally recover. So what are we to do?
Notably, even these pieces of evidence must be considered with a thoughtful eye. The definition of restoration — or successful restoration — may differ from study to study, from place to place. Science isn’t perfect, and any given paper only represents the work of a small subset of researchers in the field. People make mistakes. Research is targeted and conclusions cannot be broadly applied the way we would like. The amount of information you need to find, to digest, to understand, and to know feels insurmountable. So we hide, and hope, and trust processes and paperwork as forests fall around us.
A clear tenant of Druidry as defined by the AODA is focus on personal change, not pushing an agenda. John Greer is emphatic that activism is not a valid answer to Druidry’s ask that you live a more sustainable life. With that said, I am not sure that it is prohibited, necessarily, and I feel a sense of responsibility to help others wade through the glut of available information. I find it difficult to reconcile the idea of stewarding nature with a life that looks only inwards at one’s own actions. It will be something I will need to learn more about in the coming months.
The Sun Path is the shortest of the three, in terms of written requirements, though it holds rich tradition and history in its paragraph of asks. This is the path that brings a candidate’s mind and heart to center on the holy days of the Druid year. The requirement is simple:
During your Candidate year, celebrate a cycle of Druid holy days.
That is, in essence, is the whole of this path. The AODA mandates only that the candidate celebrate the two solstices and equinoxes, but offers up the option to celebrate the “cross quarter days” between them as well. These holy days are common across a wide variety of pagan faiths, though they may carry a different name. It is the natural cycle of the year that drives these celebrations, allowing them to carry through to many faiths that incorporate a reverence for the natural world into their belief structure.
This path continues the AODA’s tradition of encouraging practice that carries personal meaning. There is no mandated way to participate, simply an ask that you take time to actively recognize and celebrate the meaning of the day. I respect the flexibility here, because it acknowledges, at least in a roundabout way, the modern nature of the wheel of the year. Like many elements of revival Druidry, it incorporates elements that have been borrowed and shaped from cultures new and old.
The only strict request here asks the candidate to write an account of their celebrations alongside a consideration of how these celebrations fit both in one’s personal path and in the broader scope of Druid tradition. In this way, the Sun path strays somewhat from the highly practical and action-based nature of the Earth path. The personal challenge here for me will be to engage fully in these practices of celebration and ritual without the nagging feeling of doing something that feels, well, a bit silly. I have lived for a long time in a rigid world that dismisses anything that is based too strongly on feelings or mysticism. It is important to remember that there is value in things that are hard to quantify, and in celebrating and appreciating the breadth and depth of human experience.
