Problematic Perceptions

Walt Whitman writes in his poem, "Song of Myself":

"Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd
     the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? 

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the
     origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are
     millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor
     look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the
     spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things
     from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self."

The last line sticks with me: "filter them from your self." What a marvelous, potent phrase about understanding

Remember that game of Telephone? I remember how teachers would use it as a way to exemplify how rumors spread. Basically, everyone gets in a circle of five or more people. One person will turn to their right and whisper a phrase. That person will then turn to their right and whisper exactly what they heard. And so on. This process morphs the phrase so that by the time it reaches the last person, the phrase is almost (if not completely) indistinguishable from the first phrase. A phrase like, "I like to buy shoes at the market" becomes "Eyes are hard to mark." This is due to a number of human error problems, like speaking too fast, stuttering, emphasizing some words over others. Etc.

There is a website called Bad Translator that mimics this almost by taking a phrase in English, translating it to a different language, then back to English, then to another language, and so forth for how many iterations you set it to. I typed in, "I like to buy shoes at the market" and it became "I want to buy shoes."

My point is: the further from the source, the more distorted the message.

Druidry, Books, and Reflections

"Berrymore" by Kylie Stillman

This reflection spawned from trying to answer a crowd-sourcing question and spiraled into analyzing what I have so far read regarding Druidry and Celtic neopaganism. Coincidentally, Agora's columnist Nimue Brown wrote a related article yesterday called "Books for Druids." I highly recommend reading Brown's article to get an understanding of what books are relevant to aspiring and current Druids as well as a short overview on how to evaluate books about Druidry. 

However, this article is instead my own reading and what I was able to take out of it. A reflection, if you will, on books and articles.

Review of "An Abundance of Blessings" (and, to a lesser extent, "A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book")

An Abundance of Blessings by John O'Donohue

A fair amount of stress has entered my life within the past few weeks. Among the problems with my immediate local pagan community, there have been very upsetting posts on the Tumblr blogosphere, and as well as my own mental health management. While Next Millennium just provided two more examples as why I should continue to boycott them, I am going to step back from addressing the community and community circles (online or otherwise) to address a collection of blessings I picked up while shopping yesterday.