You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting
You only have to left the soft animal of your body
love what it loves
- Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
Maybe it is the pub-lover in me (not the 'spoons kind, the rural pub kind), but I can never conceptualise myself as a moderated, temperance-based, minimalist philosophy type of devotee. Of course, those that choose a monastic path will feel the opposite to me and we have a healthy amount of respect for each other (I hope!), but so much of my life is built around hearth and sharing and communality and unbridled love that devotion without indulgence seems too far removed.
I know in my path, it is impossible to separate devotion FROM indulgence. It includes good food, good drink, overindulging with friends, well stocked pack lunches on hikes, warm fires and too many blankets. It explicitly requires letting go a little, no longer having a death-grip on life. What will be, will be, everything will happen EVENTUALLY, life is a ride and I'm a passenger. Of course, not to say I let it roll by passively. I seize life with both hands knotted into it's mane and hold on for dear life. A devotion that's clean and pristine is something I can't stand, I want to be devoted with dirty fingers and a bloody mouth and look half unhinged while I scream at the sea all my loves and woes.
Perhaps it's rooted in the land, or rooted in the rebellious Celtic identity, or rooted in the systematic othering a broken state does to its marginalised peoples, or all of the above. Maybe it's the anarcho-animism, maybe its the inherent desire to be more like a beast! Maybe it's the late night winter madness when the fire is still burning too bright to look at. The Bucca would never discriminate in mazing, or madness.
It's something I realised and truly crystallised during a camp near Stonehenge - what's the point in my life if not to get drunk and high in some freezing woods, on sacred ground, screaming at a burning effigy of parliament half naked? A deity that demands nothing concrete beyond to be the best version of yourself leaves so many pathways open to devotion. Perhaps it's Bucca Dhu's introspection that's made this spiral into base animal needs, or maybe it's fun to strip back all the fanciness of human-animals and show that maybe badgers, rats, foxes, choughs and fish have it right in the way they live to live.
Maybe I should take back the language of lunatics and madness for spirituality too, and not just the political spectrum. A lunatic is based in being driven wild by the moon and I think that's just the finest thing to be.
