Moderation is a truly
embodied virtue. For a long time my religion was all spirituality – it was all
academic and rooted in thoughts and experiences. It has been a struggle against
years of cultural conditioning to bring myself into a more embodied practice
(and I will admit I am not there yet.) And really, ADF’s druidry is
fundamentally about practice, it’s about the things we do, and it’s firmly
rooted in the physical world. Moderation is a key virtue in remaining rooted in
the body because it’s so much about how we use our bodies. It’s a virtue of
balance, walking the key line between timidity and recklessness.
I think a lot of people
think of moderation as being a limiting factor, a restriction. You shouldn’t
eat too much, you shouldn’t have too much sex, you shouldn’t work too hard. But
moderation is the knife that cuts both ways, it also means that sometimes you
need to feast, sometimes you need a night of wild sex, sometimes a critical
success can only be achieved by powering through until the end. There are times
for everything, including letting go.
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| A fallow field, photo by Nigel Chadwick via Wikimedia Commons, CC-Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 |
Moderation also, I think
encompasses the cyclicality that is present in so much of our experience. We
balance sleep with waking, day with night, winter with summer. We balance feast
with famine, the planting with the harvest, the fallow with the fertile. No
life should be all fallow, no day should be all rest. I use this virtue as a
yardstick to measure my life and find the areas I lack – and I always find
something!
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