My four reasons are Conservation, Imagination, Order and Best Friendship
Every since I was a child, I’ve dreamt the future is a better world based on caring, responsibility, and ingenuity. In dedication to AODA, I seek to expand and improve my service to my world through richer understanding and a benevolent heart.
I look forward to further creative discovery of my magic life through a progressive order of Druidry. I also learn so I might share the advancement of my spouse and best friend, as well as other fellow travelers, some of whom will be the best friends of any life.
Cecil Lue Shins
Why am I attracted to Druidry? Well, I could say it is because I am a seeker who has dabbled in spiritual studies without any formal training for years. It could also be because, from all I read of the Druids, they revere the Earth. And those things are indeed true, but that is not why Druidry in particular. My interests in Druidry derive from an experience that continues to shape my existence to this very day.
First just a bit of back story, my husband Cecil and I had just moved into a new apartment at Merrimac Arms in Tuscaloosa Alabama, near Druid City, which was just a name to me at the time, having never heard of the Druids. It was 1998 and we were starting spring semester at the University of Alabama. Well, being our first day in the Apartment we didn’t know anyone in the complex, so when our lock stripped that evening after 5:00 p.m. we had to knock on the door of a complete stranger downstairs to use the phone to call a locksmith. As it so happens, Rebecca was about to move out so she was unloading quite a few books to make her move easier.
She had lots of Fantasy and some Science Fiction, and a few classics from her studies. As avid readers, of course we availed ourselves of as many as possible. I recall scant few details of our conversing with our soon to be ex-neighbor, but I do remember that it was lively. Then the locksmith came and we took the box of books we collected upstairs, waved to our new acquaintance, paid the smith and went for that all important meal we had been planning for before our lock stripped.
I don’t know how many days it took to get to that box. When I did though, everything changed for me. I, no longer a Christian at the time (though I did and still do believe in the Christ), found myself at decision making point in my spirit life...did I believe in anything at all. It was a question I kept asking myself. I did believe in survival of the spirit, having lived in a house which was quite haunted I couldn’t draw any other conclusion than that there was something after death….how that something would manifest itself was up for debate.
So I started putting away the books, mostly fiction of some kind. Well, I decided to take a smoke break, so I grabbed one of the books to take to the bathroom with me to start reading out loud to Cecil ( I smoked in the bathroom with the door opened to keep most of the tobacco smoke away from him since he wasn’t a smoker himself). That was my intention, but it didn’t quite play out that way. When I picked up the book I felt a buzzing almost like a ringing through my whole body and I felt as I looked down not really seeing the book that this book was about me…queerest feeling I’ve ever had. When it finally cleared enough to see the book title, I read out loud The Twenty-one Lessons of Merlin.
And even though I read very little of that book that experience set me on my path to seeking and is why I am doing this today. I had been hesitant to join anything formal, not sure what or who to trust, having had an off putting experience with the Baptist faith. But I don’t feel so unsure of myself after all of these years and a friend of mine, Father Palamas told us that we might find it to our liking …and after reading about your organization, I know the universe pointed me in this direct again for a reason.
the Marc Kane
http://www.aoda.org/articles/memory.htm
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