Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. People all around the world will come together, in gatherings or in private, silent thought, to remember and honour the millions killed in the Holocaust. Today is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and I am sharing here a very moving and poignant guest post from Siggy – a member of OBOD from Austria – about her experience with Felix, a concentration camp survivor. With thanks to Kate for fine-tuning the translation and for Siggy for her wonderful words and images:

Siggy’s candle for Felix

Making candles is a tradition in my family, and I was fascinated by the art as a child. Then, as an adult, I started doing it myself.  At first, I made decorative candles for friends or just for me, and it was only years later I realized that candle making can have Druidic power, combining the creativity of the Bard with the healing work of the Ovate.

As an Austrian, a tour guide and a historian, I always felt a very strong connection to WW2. It was a shock to my soul, at the age of 13, to learn about my country’s role in it – and that motivated me to study history. I had visited some former concentration camps, but somehow I could never go to the most infamous one in my own country,  Mauthausen. Even the thought of it was like a black, beating heart, but at the same time, it called to me.

One morning, I suddenly felt I could go, but something within me said “not alone”. I was stunned to get a call that very day from a tourist office, asking me to go there with Felix, a holocaust survivor of both Auschwitz and Mauthausen. I agreed.

It was an amazing experience, as though we were walking into the past. I had been so afraid of being overwhelmed by the energy of this place, but I felt completely protected, as if there were a shield around me. I told him, “Officially, I am your guide, but actually you are mine”.

Deep within me I wanted to make a candle for him, and I asked him for the most important date in his life. It was May 5th 1945, the day of his liberation, and I resolved to make it in time for the next anniversary.

When I make a candle, first, I wait for a colour or symbol to appear. Usually, it doesn’t take long, but this time months passed. I even took it to a Samhain ritual, hoping for a sign, but nothing happened. I started to get nervous – perhaps this candle didn’t want to speak to me.

Then, one day in January, I heard Auschwitz mentioned three times on the radio; it was the anniversary of the liberation, and this was the sign. Red and black came to mind. Felix had become a number, so that featured, as well as a swastika, a symbol I never ever thought I would make but I felt the candle wanted it. Fire erupts from it, with blood dripping down, and the letters KZ (the abbreviation for Konzentrationslager – German for concentration camp). Barbed wire symbolizes imprisonment and mortal danger, and the broken candle is for broken lives. Felix’s survival is represented by leaves growing towards liberation and becoming a human, a name, again. I included the Hebrew words for peace and life, and eventually, only one last symbol, two laurels, remained to be added, but I couldn’t do it. Making candles is to listen to the candle itself, and it was a definite “wait”.

I wondered why, then I realized that I had a visit to Poland planned, to Lodz,  where Felix was born. I took the candle with me and finished it there, in his home city. In the morning of my last day there, I held it up to the light of the rising sun. It was very, very magical as I connected with the spirit of the land and the sun to ask for blessings and healing for him.

Felix received the candle in time for May 5th. His daughter wrote to tell me he could read the story I had put into it, and that it meant a great deal to him. 

Now, I go to Mauthausen to create and light candles, and sometimes I take groups there. I tell them the story of the camp on the bus, and then when they arrive they can go wherever they feel drawn. When we meet again, I give each of them a candle and ask them to light it wherever they feel they want to.

Through Felix, I realized the very place I had feared so greatly was actually the place I had been searching for, and his candle gave me a connection to the spirit of the candle and to what it means to be an Ovate. ~ Siggy

I’ve just discovered you can listen to the 4 hour long complete audiobook recording of DruidCraft we made with Damh the Bard for free if you take up a 30 day free trial offer from audible.com, which you can then cancel, of course, if you don’t want to carry on with membership.    In the UK/Europe go here.    In the USA go here.

Druidcraft Unabridged Audiobook Play it Free With 30-Day Free Trial
Written By: Philip Carr-Gomm
Narrated By: Philip Carr-Gomm, Sophia Carr-Gomm, Stephanie Carr-Gomm, Vivianne Crowley
Duration: 4 hours 42 minutes
Summary:
Druidry and Wicca are the two great streams of Western Pagan tradition. Both traditions are experiencing a renaissance all over the world, as more and more people seek a spirituality rooted in a love of nature and the land. Increasingly, readers are combining the ideas of both traditions to craft their own spiritual practice. In this down-to-earth, inspiring guide, Philip Carr-Gomm offers a name for this Path that draws on the common beliefs and practices of Wicca and Druidry: DruidCraft. DruidCraft draws on the traditions of scholarship, storytelling, magical craft and seasonal celebration of both the Craft and Druidry to offer inspiration, teachings, rituals, and magical techniques that can help you access your innate powers of creativity, intuition and healing.

If you were in Berlin  last night, you may have been able to celebrate the movement from the winter solstice towards Imbolc with an extraordinary event put on by artist and OBOD member Ceven Knowles. What a talented guy! Here is how he describes it:

DEEP WINTER – a celebration of the six-week period of time beginning with the Winter Solstice (December 21st) ending on Imbolc (February 2nd). It is part film, part live performance, part concert and part installation piece. The show will only be performed once. This is Ceven Knowles’ second Berlin event after WORDS in June 2014 and is the prototype of a his new audio-visual event series following the year cycle mixing original video works with performances and musicians Ruby, Matthew Fennemore, Alfred Ladylike, Martin Watkins, Scott Firth & Kathy Freemann.

Have a look at videos of the artists and look out for the next event here!

Meanwhile, here’s a video ‘Waiting for Light’ of one of the artists, from Glasgow – Ruby.

A guest post by Penny Billington. Many thanks to Tim Woolmington for the use of his images.

 Wassail (Old Norse “ves heil”, Old English hál, literally ‘be you healthy’) refers both to the salute ‘Waes Hail’ and to the cider traditionally drunk as an integral part of wassailing, an English drinking ritual in January to ensure a good cider apple harvest the following year. “Was hail”, and the reply “drink hail”, are a drinking formula adopted widely by the indigenous population of England

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassail

Today I came home to hear that Brian Clemens had died.  Aged 64, said the radio.

Two minutes earlier I hadn’t heard of him, though I must have seen his name hundreds of times in my youth. For he was the script writer, editor and co-producer of the iconic BBC TV series ‘The Avengers’, which reinvented the spy drama and was a smash hit in England and the USA in the 1960s.

And today, near the time of the old twelth night, a bunch of us, largely Druids, went wassailing the orchard in Glastonbury Abbey.

So what connects the two?  If it seems a surreal proximity, then that is entirely the point.

For it seems to me, in post-wassail euphoria, that both the Avengers series and our singing spring from a creative attitude to life; and an unusual expression of that attitude. Both in turn come from an internal sense of a Britain that has never existed in the real world, but is of intrinsic worth to the way we live our lives; part of the spirit that informs us. For behind our reality of the grey, faceless, conforming present, most British people still hold firm to the image of themselves as eccentric. Britain is still a place that, although tiny geographically, yet has enough esoteric space to allow each person their own individual way of connecting and making decisions on the way that they engage with life.

By Clemens direction, The Avengers never left England, unlike contemporary spy dramas; and although the role model Emma Peel was a fabulous sop to swinging London, she and the suave John Steed inhabited a totally invented England. This was timeless with classic Edwardiana and Savile Row suits, and with surreal activity below the radar. A land where dark and subversive elements could emerge with impunity from behind lace curtains, within leafy suburbs and chocolate-box picture villages.

When a genius bends his mind to creating classic telly, then for an hour a week we can inhabit the world he has defined: of SMOG (scientific measurement of ghosts) mad professors, pet cats becoming miniature tigers, killer robots, mind-transference machines and invisible assailants. In Clemens capable hands, it was a world where wrong was always defeated with a stiff upper lip, a rolled umbrella and a judo throw.

When a community group run with creativity, they are making a conscious choice to create defining and significant moments of ‘otherness’ in their lives; to punctuate their everyday reality.

From this instinct, on this occasion, fifteen people shared the experience of an enchanted afternoon in the Abbey, with the sun pouring from the ‘Italianate blue’ of the Glastonbury sky, and the birds joining our songs. Irrelevant as it might seem to some people in the context of the ‘important’ things of the world, it was a choice that asserted our belief in the here and now, our relationship with locality and nature and an hour of refreshment in busy lives. And, along with our thanks to the trees and the blessing of the elements on the orchards, it was a laugh!

Brian Clemens’ achievement was to practically singlehandedly invent niche and cult drama, described in his obituary and both ‘erotic and menacing’. Our wassailing did not go into that territory… But there was a deep two-way connection, an intimacy with the magical and brooding orchard.  Our singing procession, with an awareness of the weather, birds, the dark living roots beneath, and the sleeping trees surrounding us, evoked a change of consciousness; a depth and sense of reciprocity. And when at the end we each praised the apple, the last toast was to the awe of life; to the mystery, which can sometimes only be hinted at through the surreal. For that place is both light and dark, with the potential to be simultaneously ecstatic and menacing. It is that force that through the green fuse drives the flower, the life force that causes the apples to fruit each year. And it is the force brings us all in turn to our seasons of birth, experience and death.

So, somewhere amongst all those fruity, funny, fantastical Avengers scripts, along with Morris dancers, cheese rollers and tar barrellers, I hope that there were a small group of wassailers. Who better to provide the depth and resonance of actual bizarre and beautiful eccentric reality to the magical imagined England which is Brian Clemens legacy? I like to think that the inner vision of film writers can inspire our creative relationship with our inner and outer reality, and make the latter richer for observing the former, and acting on its impulses.

I for one would be glad to hone a life wherein, like the Avengers, ‘The surreal is perfectly balanced with deadpan wit.’ Juxtaposed exquisitely with the necessary demands of the mundane world, what a delightful country to inhabit.  And as a motto to carry into 2015, that coined by the pragmatic Mr. Clemens, ‘Arse on chair, pen on paper’ which I less elegantly interpret as ‘put the creative work into your life: and don’t just think about it; get on and express it’ seems a pretty good dictum to follow to achieve it.

‘First-rate man of mystery’: Brian Horace Clemens OBE (30.7.31 – 10.1.2015)

Holders of the mysteries of regeneration; the Glastonbury apple trees 2015.

For services to the regenerative spirit of creativity, a toast to both:

WASSAIL! DRINK HAIL!

Penny Billington *** www.pennybillington.co.uk

*All quotes from Brian Clemens obituary: http://www.independent.co.uk/

Full biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Clemens

The web is perfect for stumbling on interesting or amusing tidbits. And with this kind of stumbling there are no lamposts in the way…

Here’s an amusing piece I found  from ‘Scrapper Duncan: The Archbishop of Southover’

Yesterday morning I accidentally joined a pagan gathering at dawn on Firle Beacon. Me, an Archbishop! Am I the only man of the cloth who has communed with the cosmos according to our conception of pre-Christian belief structures? What will my fellow clergy say? I have yet to answer to them and my congregation. Luckily I have eleven months to prepare for that showdown…

Go to the post on Scrapper Duncan’s site

Yews hold great significance within modern Druidry; traditionally associated with death, transition and rebirth, their potential longevity can produce individual trees of extraordinary beauty and inspiration. Janis Fry and Allen Meredith have created a delightful booklet about one such ancient tree – the Ankerwycke Yew – entitled The Ankerwycke Yew, Living Witness to the Magna Carta. Here is a short excerpt to whet your appetite:

The Ankerwycke Yew may originally have come from a tree in Egypt in a tradition of branch or staff carrying…The origins of the site and the yew tree are certainly ancient…It seems most likely that this place was once a nemeton, i.e. an ancient Druidic site or centre with a sacred tree… Ankerwycke is a raised Bronze Age burial mound and would have been a nemeton before it was a Saxon site. A nemeton was a sacred space of ancient Celtic religion, where ceremonies were held and incorporated the modern idea of a shrine or temple. At one time too there were carved, inscribed stones which have been reported as having been on the site.

The 20 page colour booklet costs £3.95 + 95p P&P and is available here, where you will also find Janis and Allen’s other works about Yews.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Here is a thought-provoking article in the New York Times from Chris Lebron. It has a stirring conclusion with a fantastic quote from King:

What, To the Black American, Is Martin Luther King Jr. Day?

 By Chris Lebron

I am very honored to be addressing you here today, though it is not without some trepidation.

You see, the distance between where I grew up, where I come from in the world, and where many of you sit is significant. That I am where I am in the world sometimes surprises me. So I consider it an especially pressing duty to be mindful of my journey; and, when possible, to remind others that such a journey is just that for some of us — a setting out without a clear sense that we will get where we intend to go.

If you are celebrating this holiday as a victory over racial injustice, I cannot join you.

Representing the point of view that I do — as a brown American from a lower-class background, with the good fortune today to walk the halls of one of America’s most elite institutions as a teacher of philosophy — Martin Luther King Jr. Day is taken to represent a triumph. But here is an uncomfortable truth: It is a triumph of acceptable minimums rather than full respect for those who continue to wait for Dr. King’s dream to become reality.

My purpose is to challenge the common belief that honoring of Martin Luther King Jr. means the same thing to all Americans. Recalling the sense of disconnect expressed by Frederick Douglass in his speech “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?” — between himself as a former slave and his white audience — I want to say there is also some distance between black and white Americans today, between “you” and “I,” as it were, and that this day has increasingly become “yours,” not mine.

That may seem narrow or bitter. You may argue that the holiday has taken greater hold in the nation over time. Who today questions the validity of this holiday? Many of us have been given a day off work to reflect on it. A blockbuster Hollywood movie about Dr. King’s role in one of the civil rights movement’s greatest victories is playing in theaters nationwide. Clothes, furniture, bedding and cars are on sale to honor the man. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it seems, now belongs to more of the nation than ever before.

But I maintain that it does not fully belong in the most profound ways to many Americans, and to some of them, it does not belong at all.

I think it goes without question that not only has the idea of a post-racial America proven to be a myth, but that racial inequality remains a tragic mark on the character of this otherwise great nation — a nation founded on respect not only for what persons hope to accomplish in life but for what they are: humans owed rights, liberty and respect because of their humanity. The equal recognition of humanity has only intermittently taken hold with respect to black lives. The closeness of Emmett Till and Eric Garner attest to that.

This was Dr. King’s great struggle in his life. While he indeed fought for the security of a full schedule of rights for black Americans, he was in fact fighting for something greater and more difficult to articulate — the hope that white Americans could extend a hand of brotherly and sisterly love to blacks. The mark of true love, for Dr. King, was to embrace strangers as familiars, and conversely, to deny that blacks’ humanity was a new and strange thing. There is hope in the thought that Dr. King is fervently embraced by so many Americans today, and there is consolation that his struggle gave us the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

My purpose today, however, is to reflect on the nature of this embrace. When you celebrate Dr. King, what are you cheering? Do you cheer the greatness of a man who fully knew his journey’s destination was insecure? The greatness of a man who paid the ultimate price so that my son could vote and sit in class alongside your children? If so, I am happy to join you. Do you celebrate his struggle as a resounding success that ushered in a new age of race relations? Do you intend to show appreciation for the notion that he helped us move past a difficult moment in American history? If so, then I cannot join you. And I fear that I observe the tendency to celebrate not so much the man but the hope that claiming him for all Americans exculpates us from the sins of inhumanity that is racial marginalization…to read the entire article click here.

A beautiful Scottish Gaelic Folk Song sung by Julie Fowlis…

A funny and insightful TED talk by Brene Brown about the power of vulnerability…

What happened last week in Paris was so shocking it has taken a while for its wider implications to be articulated. But, if you are interested in considering different ways to think about the event, the following article is instructive, together with its links to other posts and articles. I’ll just quote a few lines and then the link can take you to the whole post:

‘The cartoonists now join the growing number of journalists killed ‘in the line of duty’. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that over 1100 journalists have been killed in the last twenty years (with 60 killed in 2014 alone). They include not simply the high-profile murders of reporters by Isil in Syria but also cases like the 16 Palestinian journalists killed by the Israeli army in Gaza together with the 16 reporters killed by US military fire in Iraq. Strangely enough, these latter killings do not seem to have generated the same claims from leading commentators that they constituted a ‘murderous attack on Western freedoms’. Yet the fact remains that it is an outrage – whatever the identity of the assailant or the victim – that a single journalist should have lost their life simply for covering or commenting on a conflict.’

‘Those commentators peddling the argument that the shootings were all about a ‘mediaeval’ determination to stifle free speech and undermine our free media have sought to marginalise the wider political context as if there are no consequences for the ‘West’ of interventions in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan let alone the situation in Palestine. In their obsession with the sanctity of freedom of expression, they seek to bury the notion that there might be ‘blowback’ as a result of Western occupation and intervention along the lines predicted by the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, when she talked about how ‘our involvement in Iraq radicalised a few among a generation of young people who saw [it] as an attack on Islam’. But of course it is far more convenient to adopt a ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis and to shunt aside uncomfortable geopolitical realities for the more soothing talk of free speech and absolutist speech rights.’

Read the full article here