A journey through place

I’d always wanted to live in Israel. When I was in second grade at a private Jewish school in San Francisco, one of my Hebrew teachers told me that Haifa was a lot like my hometown. I decided then that when I grew up, I’d live there. The first time I visited Israel, I was 17 years old, and the experience confirmed in my head that I had to live there. Somehow, I just belonged to that place.

When I was 27 I moved there. People would ask me why. I’d joke that it was my Hebrew School brainwashing. “They told me that this is my Home, and I believed it too much!” They’d laugh or shake their heads with pity. What I didn’t tell them is how the Place made me feel.

I’d lived in other places before: El Salvador, Guatemala, Alberta, Texas. Even my hometown in California didn’t feel like this. In Israel I feel roots that reach down from the center of my body, wrap around my legs and grab hold of the soil under my feet. So strange. So comforting.

And why not? There’s nowhere else on the planet where the Jewish holidays line up so perfectly with the cycles of the seasons and the weather they bring. It rains when you are supposed to pray for rain. The crops ripen when you are supposed to hold a harvest festival. If you strip away Medieval commentary and religious rulings to just go back to the earliest traditions you can find, you suddenly realize that the Israelites practiced an Earth-based religion, and under all those clothes the religion still is!

Then, in 2000 I had to move again for a job in England. I found myself, so soon after the epiphany that my Judaism was more Pagan than Jewish, trying to process this idea in a completely different land. But this land, unlike Israel, actually has biological roots for me. My father’s paternal grandparents had come to the US from England. Soon after I settled in, I discovered that the local graveyard had many headstones with my family name on them. Were these ancestors? I don’t know.

What I do know is that, having heard the voices of a God and a Goddess in the waves at the beach in Israel, I was ready to listen very closely to the voices in this new land. I lived about an hour’s walk from work. After five minutes of city walk, the rest went through fields, the green yards of large homes and a park. I would walk and listen to everything. I opened my eyes and noticed raindrops that clung to leaves. I opened my heart and felt the souls of entities I’d never talked to before.

I believe that the Spirits of the Place, the same ones I was listening to and watching for, are the ones who arranged for me to learn about Druidry. It showed up to answer my burning question at the time, “If Judaism is an Earth-based religion inside of Israel, what practice would I consider authentic outside of Israel?” I began to study with friends in the British Druid Order. I went to rituals at Avebury. I was initiated.

During that time I struggled to find a place for my Jewish experiences and my Druid experiences to live in peace. They were both valid. For other people these two things were mutually exclusive, but for me, the two sides brought insight and meaning to each other. Understanding the cycles of the Jewish calendar helped me contemplate the Wheel of the Year in Druidry. Knowing that the Druids believed that writing down the Law and History would kill it and fossilize it, added meaning to what happened when transcribers of the Talmud broke the law against writing down the oral traditions of Judaism in their hopes of preserving it.

And then I moved again. And again. And again.

In Washington, California and Idaho I asked the same questions I had before. “What is an authentic practice in this place?” I found that Druidry had a flexibility to it that helped me process my relationship to each place. Sometimes the community of Druids and other Pagans helps me sort things out. Other times I have to dream a new ritual, listen closely to the land and ask it for guidance because there are no humans around pointing the way.

For now I’m in Scotland. I wonder if this place will open up to me, and what it will teach me.