Thinking About – The Year Ahead and Remembering

Greetings!

This is my first blog post of the year so let me wish you a happy new year and may 2022 bring you wonder and joy!

New Year’s Eve is one of my favourite times of the year as it gives the opportunity to place a full stop, and start a new paragraph in life’s incredible journey. 2021 is now over, and a new year lay ahead. An open book, a blank page, a vast sea of endless possibilities. What a gift that is, particularly given the rollercoaster ride we have been on with the pandemic. As I sat thinking about 2021, looking back over the photographs I’d taken I saw that much of the year had been placed in some kind of holding pattern, circling, waiting, and seeing where things may go. The Summer weather was disappointing. I recall 2020 being quite lovely, but we couldn’t go anywhere, then 2021 was mostly wet and grey with a scattering of sunshine. I also became very aware that since New Year’s Eve of 2019 I’d been toasting the past year with a heavy ‘thank the Gods that one is over’ – 2019 because of Brexit and the divisions that brought to friends and family, 2020 and 2021 because of the ongoing pandemic. When I get to the end of 2022 I really don’t want to be saying that. I really don’t.

I’m always thankful for the good in my life, for making it through another year, but my aim is to make 2022 an awesome year. I can see that a new music album is coming – I have 8 songs written and so am ready to begin the recording process – something I absolutely love, painting a musical picture. I can also hear the Spirits of Y Mabinogi the Fourth Branch knocking on my door. What a story to tell, and after the music album is up and live I’ll be opening that door, letting them all in, and listening to the tales they want to be told. There are also some live shows appearing on my calendar as festivals are beginning to happen again. Yes, it feels like it’s time to step out again.

All of that already has the making of a great year.

Another thing you will notice is that I’ll be letting you all more into my Druid world through this blog. Without a doubt, the most popular articles on here are the ‘Druidry for Beginners’ posts. It’s very obvious that Druidry, Wicca, Witchcraft, Heathenism show no signs of slowing down in their growth and popularity, and that is no surprise to me. The demands mainstream society makes to conform to a materialist, consumer-led way of life denies and constrains the innate magical relationship that humans had with their environment for thousands of years. When a mountain or a lake is just piles of rock or a big puddle of water they are then easy to exploit for profit, growth, or to pollute. When we let go of that materialist way of looking at the world, open to a more Animistic way, we then see them as living beings, with their own tales to tell. We can listen, we become in relationship with our environment. Our modern Pagan Paths teach us how to remember who we are. We aren’t learning this stuff, we are remembering it, we know it already, and always have.

So this year will be a Journey. A Journey to remember, a Journey that turns down the noise of those voices demanding we adhere to their version of an acceptable, materialist, atheist, consumer way of life. And as those voices dim, so the voices of the land, sea and sky are heard.

These are the important voices.

And the first thing they will say?

“Welcome home.”