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Thank you for considering my candidacy for membership in the AODA.
At the beginning of 2020, becoming a Druid was not even on my list of life possibilities. I couldn’t even have defined the term! I was perfectly satisfied as an agnostic atheist, and working long hours in the tech industry to try save up enough money to keep ahead of the racing housing market. Though I didn’t consider myself to be spiritually searching, I often felt like I was “floating” – not entirely sure where the ground was under my feet. I read broadly and extensively as a hobby, but no matter what I read, I couldn’t see much of a happy outcome to the path we were collectively walking on as a society - even as I personally rushed along it. Cognitive dissonance was a daily part of my thoughts. I knew quite well that my lifestyle did not match my values, but told myself that “eventually” I would be in a position to figure all that out. Once I bought a house, surely, then I could start to make changes…
It’s hard to say when – or if – that “eventually” would have come, if life had worked out the way I expected. But during 2020, COVID-19 raced across the globe, society shut down, and a life of good friends and long city walks and screens became a life of screens, screens, screens and nothing but screens, screaming fear and hatred and misery at me every second they weren’t displaying bland and meaningless spreadsheets. The good friends vanished one by one into the digital fog. The walks were discouraged – everything and everyone I would have visited shutting down and wrapping itself in caution tape. Mental health crises marched one by one through the people I lived with. The dream of owning property vanished like a mirage. Only my increasingly wretched job, doing everything it could to torture me, stood between my family and a bread line. I’d stumbled into a living nightmare that my agnostic atheism could not ameliorate. Throughout my extremely wide-ranging Internet blogroll, very unexpectedly only the peak oil writer John Michael Greer’s felt anything close to sane; I read everything he’d ever written, to try and cling to sanity myself. And to my surprise, once I actually looked into his writings on religious concepts, they started to seem… familiar.
And then, in early spring 2021 – in the middle of writing a SQL query, of all things! - I had a spiritual realization. I “remembered” (for of course it was both that, and a very different feeling) that I’d once been a different person. In this life, I am a woman living in America. In my past life, I was a man, living most likely in Great Britain, who passed on during or shortly after the Great War. He—I—had done extensive practice and studies in occultism in later life and had read most of the books on the topic published in his day. I “remembered” with startling clarity the regrets he—I—held on his death bed. I recognized that what I had pursued so intently and systematically in my younger years, without completely knowing why I was so driven, was in order to settle those regrets.
First, I have a happy marriage and a child, against the trend of most of my peer group and extended family. My past life has either no marriage or a very unsuccessful one, and no children. I have a distinct “memory” of eagerness to be a woman in the next life, and a gauzy Victorian sentimentality about how that would surely make the family issues fall into place… in this life, I roll my eyes at this assumption, yet paradoxically have worked tirelessly to bring it into existence. Second, in this life I renounced Christianity the first time I tried to read straight through the Bible as a preteen, exactly 92 pages in. I still remember the overwhelming sense of spiritual relief the decision brought me! And even as I have come around to a deeper understanding of and respect for Christianity in my adult life, I cannot bring myself to practice it again. I have connected these particularly strong feeling with my past self being finally, in this very different era, able to struggle free from what his conscience could no longer acquiesce to. My past self did not believe that Christianity was an ethical path by the end of his life, even though he was nominally of that faith.
But alongside this realization – and all the extremely fascinating spiritual truths it opened up before me! – I had a second and perhaps greater realization. I have succeeded in resolving my previous life’s greatest regrets. And yet I also have regrets in this life--which after clearing away so much my past life’s karma, I have not only the possibility to tackle, but as one to whom much has been given in so many ways, a spiritual obligation to take on with the time left in this incarnation.
I have done intense research into occult-adjacent paths ever since “remembering” – I am fairly certain that my past self did some variety of Kabbalah practice and/or Golden Dawn. That spiritual practice, at least as I conducted it, focused “upwards” – it was very intellectual, very intent on “reaching the higher planes”. As I began my own practice in this life, the “solar current” energy was immediately accessible to me, and I can tell that I’ve spent quite some time cultivating it.
But my lived experience of this age is that the majority of modern society, including and especially myself, already spends life trapped in their own heads. Too much time on screens. Too much time arguing endlessly about the equivalents of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Too much time pressing buttons to make things happen, expending barely any effort of our own. The sharp shocks and immense physicality of the laws of Nature need to be given their proper due, for the sakes of our individual and societal health. We need to reconnect with the animal parts of ourselves, in a balanced and respectful manner. And we need to reconnect with the Earth that feeds and shelters and supports our lives in every way.
All of my observations and readings over many, many years and many, many topics have led to one inescapable conclusion: This society in which we live has dedicated itself wholeheartedly to Death. “Business as usual” will inevitably destroy us and everything we value, and much of the beauty of our world alongside. If we want to resist that – if we truly love Life itself, plant and animal and human alike, and want to support its continuation – we have to resist business as usual. We have to make bolder, harder choices. We have to take responsibility as individuals, instead of waiting for someone else to do something. And we have to start somewhere.
I will probably never be as attuned to Nature as the average Druid candidate – I have spent way too much time in ivory towers of all kinds. I’m guessing this is probably among the candidacy statements you have received that speaks the LEAST about Nature, in fact! But I have concluded that what I am immediately called to do in this life, and to build upon in all lives that follow, is to seek out balance, and live according to it. I have decided to proactively face up to to this entire category of Life in which I lack experience, and adapt a systematic method to become comfortable within it.
Attempts to access telluric energy the same way I do solar energy have not gone so well, and I can tell that in my previous life’s practice I avoided cultivating it, probably due to common prejudices of the time. When I read in The Druidry Handbook that Druidry focused on cultivating both energies--and that there is no good/evil dichotomy between them, only different ways of looking at and experiencing our one reality—I recognized immediately that this was the correct and righteous method to bring a much-needed balance into my life.
Alongside these esoteric spiritual realizations, this year, I’ve started my first garden; I began buying 50% of the family’s food at the local farmer’s market; I’ve stopped purchasing things from large global mega-corps like Starbucks and Amazon; I’ve cut out the news and hot takes on national politics, and instead spend my light reading time on the history of the place I live in, particularly focusing on the native peoples and their traditions and lifestyle; and I left my horrible job in tech almost 2 months ago, and have intensely focused on learning how to properly (and frugally) run a household ever since. My life has changed so much, internally and externally, that the me who existed at the beginning of 2020 would barely recognize it.
Over the last few months, I have been reading the AODA website and laying the groundwork for my candidacy. I’ve taught myself the SOP, taken up a daily divination, and waded into discursive meditation. I’ve read through two and a half books on local ecology and have several more on hold from the library. I plan to attend my first official Druid holiday celebration today (the summer solstice), and am tentatively planning to spent 20 hours this year learning disaster first aid, in order to make myself more able to heal and help others, and to prepare in a suitably low-tech way for some near or far-off disaster. And finally… a brave little oak tree that poked its way up through the clay in our backyard is now in a well-watered pot on the kitchen windowsill. I am looking around for its proper forever home!
I am a little nervous (who wouldn’t be?) and yet also as prepared as I will ever be to take on the responsibilities of the Candidate Year and to seek the First Degree of AODA, that of Apprentice. I deeply appreciate the time of all who read through this statement, and hope to one day stand alongside you as your fellow. And I wish you a very happy Solstice!