Catharsis on the Fly

I had an ironic realization on the way to work this morning.  I could have remained involved with AODA indefinitely had I just remained a Christian.

If you look at the First Degree Curriculum, which is also a guide to the basics of Druid living, you’ll see four main requirements: the Sun Path of ritual, the Moon Path of meditation, the Earth Path of living more lightly, and the Spirals.  The Sun Path would have been satisfied by regular attendance at the Eucharist; the eight Neopagan holy days celebrated by the Order have close correspondences in the Christian calendar.  The Moon Path would have been covered by the Daily Office, private prayer, and journal keeping.  The Earth Path requirement of making small changes to reduce what one takes from the Earth is good for anybody, and the Spirals are specific to Revival Druidry but not specifically Pagan; the New Hermetics system, which satisfied the Magic Spiral for my First Degree, can easily be adapted to Christian Qabalistic symbolism a la the Golden Dawn.

Trying to be pagan screwed me out of being a Druid, you might say.  Or, to put it more gently and probably more accurately, I might still be a Druid if I had not felt impelled to be a Pagan one.

As much as I love AODA, I do not see room for it in my life alongside Buddhism.  Buddhist meditation is rather different from what the Moon Path suggests; Buddhist holy days are quite different from the Western seasonal calendar (which I still observe, just not ritually).  The Spirals are not particularly applicable to Buddhist practice, and I am not doing much with any of them right now; I’m not singing or doing New Hermetics work regularly, and I’m writing but not poetry.

What *am* I doing?  Well, I’m meditating daily.  I’m writing for Livejournal.  I’m moving toward original fiction writing.  I’m changing the way I eat.  I’m adding small bits of exercise to my day.  I’m looking for new people on Livejournal and new books of paper to read.  I’m doing my job or at least showing up and waiting for something to do.  I’m watching interesting things on video and trying to get to a few of the summer movies that I think are worth seeing on the Big Screen.  I’m going to weekly practice with my sangha and socializing with them, too. In other words, I seem to be Having a Life.  It’s rather a change to Have a Life instead of Worrying about My Spiritual Life.  That worrying I attribute entirely to myself and not at all to AODA and its requirements.  It took a major shift–Western religion to Buddhism–to begin wiping out the worry habit.

It was perhaps inevitable that if I could no longer make Christianity work for me, if it no longer satisfied heart and mind, I would wind up as a Buddhist.  I should have known from my past experience with paganism that I don’t do well with do-it-yourself religions.  I think a lot of pagans, neopagans, reconstructionists thrive on precisely that, on making it up as they go along, building new structures to serve their needs and other people’s.  I don’t.  I need to adapt myself to an existing structure, find a place in it, be able to lean on that support.  Buddhism seems to be doing the trick in that respect, and further, it’s doing things for me that no other spiritual path has done–like getting me to stop worrying, eat better, and exercise.