Working with nature
is what druidry is all about, I am, first and foremost a tree worshipper. My
childhood memories of happy times involve a lot of riding my pony through the
woods, finding leaves I didn't recognize and taking them home to my mother to identify,
or finding the "hobbit houses" under roots at the bases of trees, and
making them little furniture out of sticks and acorn caps. I learned young
which plants I could pick and eat, and which ones I should leave alone. Which
ones would make a comfortable bed, and which ones would make me itch, or had
thorns to scratch me.
Working with the
Earth as an adult is harder and more fraught. We are faced with difficult
choices regularly. Using electronics is a modern necessity, but which is more
harmful: Using an old model which is not power efficient, or buying a new more
efficient model whose components contribute to strip mining all over the world?
I try to weigh the cost of each choice and do the least harm, but there are no
hard and fast rules to tell us how to live.
I have made several
changes to help reduce my footprint, and though they are small, I hope they do
contribute something. I have eliminated disposable cookware from my home, no
plastics, no styrofoams, no paper towels. What we use for cooking, cleaning, and
eating we reuse. We also reduced this year to one vehicle. Sometimes
coordinating our schedules has been difficult, and it may not be a change we
can maintain forever (living where we do), but our fuel consumption and overall
mileage is cut by at least half this way.
There are also
several small things I do out of respect for nature. I don't buy crystals or
stones unless I know how they're sourced. I'd rather work with natural stone
from my local area. I don't want to contribute to the leveling of mountains for
the crystal inside. I don't harvest woods from live trees, I use deadfall when
it's available, and if it's not available, I wait. When I cut plants or flowers
for ritual purposes I don't cut the whole plant, I only take part. I try to
make clean cuts with a sharp blade and not twist and tear. I don't know if
plants feel pain, but it seems kinder that way. I try not to be indifferent to
suffering in plant or animal form.
Lastly, I set aside
one of my raised bed gardens and let whatever wanted to grow there. My landlord
was somewhat less than impressed, but he can't say much in my "wildflower
garden". That spot has been host to chickadees, chipmunks, squirrels and
rabbits, and once a skunk (who was removed for everyone's safety, including his
own, as a dachshund-skunk standoff is in nobody's interests!) The wild turkeys
gather around it and eat. We had bees and dragonflies and spider webs galore. I
think it's beneficial to give the native wildlife a spot to call their own, and
I think the nature spirits are pleased.
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| Townsend's Chipmunk, photo by US Fish and Wildlife Service |
The Kennebec river
is the heartblood of the area I live in, and the primary face of the Earth
Mother in my personal practice, so I also want to find a way to show honor to
the river by working with a conservation project. I have some health
constraints, so I still researching where I would be able to help, but that is
definitely something in the plans for the future.
There are other
things I would like to do in the future that we can't quite manage right now.
We keep fish, which is a wonderful hobby that puts nature in your living room,
but our large tanks are energy hogs, and in the case of power failure, tropical
fish die and that is not a kindness. I would like to convert those tanks to
plant filtered, cold water tanks with fish that can survive the cold. I would also like to be able to grow more of
our own vegetables. I already make an effort to buy local, but growing our own
would be ideal, I'd love to get my hands in the dirt and reduce the strain,
even by a little, caused by factory farming. We've had a small vegetable garden
for two years, but constraints of time and money have kept it very limited.
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