Finding my true self through Druidry

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1:31CHOIR SINGS I'm Maura Morrison and this is the documentary from the BBC World Service. For this week's Heart and Soul, I've come to Anglesey in Wales. I'm here to meet local witch and druid, Mara, and learn why she and others around the UK are increasingly drawn to the nature-based religion of druidry. And I'm curious about what it can teach us about connection and community. One, two, one, two. Okay, I'm set in the car outside of Bangor train station with Mara Starling. Mara, thank you so much for spending time with me. Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to take you on a little bit of a magical tour.

2:13Amazing. So we are going to head to the Isle of Anglesey. Where are you going to take us first? Tell us about our first stop. Well, the first stop is on our way to the second stop, strangely enough. but it's the banks of Ar-Avon-Bright, the River Braint on Anglesey. This river in particular is rather sacred to me and to many of my fellow druids and witches who live on the island. It's a river that flows pretty much throughout the entirety of the southwestern part of the island and she is very much a goddess within our tradition. So I want to introduce you to her and to her waters as well. Amazing.

2:54Let's go.

3:04just for the listeners we're currently stood on a small bridge above a small river surrounded by hedges fields there's dog walkers behind us and it is a little bit windy so we're just standing looking down at the water so as a druid the natural world presents to me all of the wisdom of life. We very much are natural beings ourselves, but because of the modern world we live in, with our technology, with our advancements, with our lovely air-conditioned and heated homes, we always feel kind of separate. And one thing that Druidry kind of teaches us is that we're not separate. So to me, Druidry is about living in accordance with the wisdom of the oak, the wisdom of the trees in general.

3:50And the trees remind us that no tree ever exists as a singularity, as a unique individual. A tree is constantly connected to all the other trees, shrubs, plants, fungi that exist in its environment. And it relies on the waters that flow through its land and such. So when I'm out in a natural place like this, next to a river, which is one of the veins of the landscape, I'm reminded of that deep sense of connection that we have to all things. I wanted to ask about that, the relationship that you have with nature. How has being a druid impacted how you feel in your natural surroundings, how connected you feel to the landscape?

4:29So I remember quite vividly when I was younger, and I was just getting my head around paganism and magic and druidry, I remember I had a dream where I was sat right here, right on the banks of this river on a very hot summer's day. and I was looking over towards kind of where at the moment you see mostly brambles and such. There's also a little kind of outcrop of rocks, which almost looks like a little bank. And when I looked over in the dream, I saw a woman sat there dressed entirely in white and with long flowing red hair. And I remember this dream came to me when I was in a very sensitive and very painful time in my life, when I was coming to terms with my identity, coming to terms with who I am as a person.

5:13And in this dream, I remember looking up and seeing this goddess-like figure sat there. And I remember she kind of waved to me with her hands as if it's a motion to hold my hands up as well. And then she cupped her hands and took some of the water of the river and washed her face with it. And I copied her motions and I washed my face. And when I woke up, it was almost as if I'd been refreshed, regenerated, changed and healed from the things that were paining me that day. And personally for me, that was one of the first occasions where I felt the presence of the divine in my life reaching out to me via dream.

5:51And when I came here next for the physical time, not in dream, I remember that vision of her washing her face in the river was so vividly imprinted on my mind that that is what I always see when I come here now. I see her cupping her hands and telling me that the waters of this place will wash away all of those fears, all of those doubts, all of those feelings of heaviness that sometimes linger within us. Tell me a little bit more about those feelings that lingered. What kind of things were you going through at that time? What was your relationship to your spiritual practice? Well, I grew up in a very rural area.

6:30and as such it was kind of daunting being anything that chafed against kind of the norm in that place. So I grew up as a person who was essentially always seen as the weirdo. I was always the person who had the strange interests, who wasn't into what everyone else was into and then on top of that I was also grappling with my identity, whether that was my gender identity or my identity as, you know, when it comes to sexuality and such. and in that period, that was around when I was 12 or 13 years old and these feelings were really bubbling to the surface and I remember in that moment I felt broken I just felt like there was something deeply wrong with me that I didn't fit the mould that everybody else seemed to fit into and people were so adamant to let me know that I didn't fit that mould so it was kind of difficult to imagine and envision a life and a living for myself as I grew up where I was happy and content.

7:30And in those moments, I remember feeling like I had no friends. I didn't know any other queer people. I didn't know anyone who, you know, had gone through the things I was going through. And I didn't even know words like transgender or anything like that at that point. I was just completely oblivious to it all. And then these moments like that dream or finding books on witchcraft or finding books on folklore, they kind of brought me out of that they brought me to this place where I could escape into a realm of enchantment where the world isn't black and white and binary in its thinking where the world is much more expansive expressive and kaleidoscopic in its scope and where a variety of different people who fit into various different ways and expressions of being could exist happily and that was when I kind of found my people and my sense of self and stability.

8:32Okay, Mara, where are we now? So this is Brinkehidhy. So before you, you might see a mound of earth and a few stones scattered about in the middle of a field where there's a fence going all the way around us and such. But this monument right here, this landscape here, is one that humans have interacted with for thousands upon thousands of years. So this site is important to us in particular because it creates essentially a spiritual home for us. And right here to the right, there is a stone and we usually place our hands on the stone and just spend a quick second in reflection and reverence of the space before we enter.

9:15So if you want to follow me. Okay, we'll just place our hand gently on the stone. I'm very aware that if I was here without you, Mara, I wouldn't know any of this, and I'd probably walk in a circle and then leave without feeling this connection to the site. A big aspect of our personal practice and our faith is a belief in sacred breath. So in this moment, as you're holding the rock, I'm going to ask you to just take three deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth, just as a way of acknowledging the sacred air and breath of this space. Breathe with the monument, essentially.

9:57And then we give a nod to the chamber and we enter. Okay, so we're approaching the entrance. It looks dark in here. We'll just duck as we go through. Squeeze through some big stones. Oh, it's actually really cold. And you walk along a tunnel and the wind's stopped. Marvellous. So yes, this is the inner chamber of Brinkhide. Inside the chamber, there's a stone shelf where people have left little offerings. There's shells, pennies, painted rocks. But Mara prefers a different kind of offering. Morn Mam Kamere, clo' av t 'in galù. Morn Mam Kamere, clo' av de gan. Morn my mother, I hear you calling.

10:57Morn my mother, I hear your song.

11:19It's just a call to the mother. That was so beautiful. And the acoustics in here were actually incredible. They are perfect. Okay, we're going to leave this lovely space so people outside can also enjoy it. And we're going to duck back through the long stone tunnel. I can see the sunny blue skies at the end as we re-emerge into the sunlight. Before we leave this site, I want to ask Mara about her thoughts on Druidry being recognised as a religion, which it was in the UK in 2010. I tend to call it a religion for me personally, but I know that some people take huge umbrage at the idea of calling it religion and I think the biggest reason behind the kind of feeling of unease with calling it a religion comes with the baggage that comes behind that word religion when people hear religion they think of dogmatic very controlling and personally because I was not raised religiously because I did not grow up in a church because I did not grow up surrounded by a very dogmatic religion I don't have the same qualms about the word religion and to me it's a kind of a matter of semantics where it's kind of like what do we mean by religion and to me religion just means the way in which I walk my walk in the world the way in which I interact with the divine and the way in which I frame the life that I live and my life is framed by ritual my life is framed by my relationship to the natural world but also my relationship to my gods.

12:54It's framed by my community and the way we gather together at certain times in the year. And it's framed by my belief in magic and in the innate living quality of the world around us. So to me, that sounds like a religion, but some people would wholeheartedly disagree.

13:17I'm Maura Morrison, and this is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

13:25America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

14:20Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

14:50into purpose. Therapy for me is being in the boxing ring. It's just good for your soul, good for your body. This is season four of Legacy, Defiant. Search Defiant Legacy wherever you get your podcasts.

15:08For this week's Heart and Soul, I've come to Anglesey in Wales. I'm here to spend time with local witch and druid Mara Starling and learn about how druidry has transformed her life. One key person in this transformation is a man called Christopher Hughes, who's been the head of the Anglesey Druid Order for 25 years. I'm eager to know about his role in Mara's life. So, we set off to meet him.

15:38OK, we have arrived at the office of the Anglesey Druid Order.

15:45and just come through the main door and hopefully we'll find Christopher.

15:54Hello. Hello, hello. Hi, Christopher, I'm Maura. Hi, Maura, Christa, how are you? Very good, how are you doing? I'm good, thanks, yeah, yeah, good. I'm here with a familiar face. With a very familiar face. How are you both, good? Very good, yeah. Yeah, we were hoping you could give us a tour of the headquarters. I can. Well, welcome to the office of the Anglesey Druid Order. Amazing. It's great to be here. It smells fantastic. It does, doesn't it? I've got all sorts of lotions and potions burning to make it smell less like an old school and more like a druid's office. Describe the smell. What have we gone for?

16:30It's a blend of pine resin and copal. I think that's burning. I'd really love to go back to that moment where you guys first met. and Mara, we were talking about this earlier by the river and that feeling of acceptance when you became a Druid. How pivotal was someone like Christopher in welcoming you into that community and how did that change your relationship to your own community outside the Druid community, your local community within Anglesey and just how did that develop? It was really meeting Christopher that came to this point in my life where I started seeing queer people, actual people who were living their lives openly being themselves, and yet they weren't miserable, which is what I'd always been fed from as young of an age as I could remember.

17:20I remember people telling me that, you know, if you quote-unquote choose to be queer, not that it is a choice, then you are choosing a life that's going to be filled with misery, filled with depression, filled with angst and anguish and such. And so as a teenager, as a very kind of early teenager who was just coming to terms with who I was and was very malleable in that moment, it was really easy to kind of feel almost as if there was nowhere to go from there. So I remember at that age I was very much in the mindset of, I'll move away to London or Manchester and I'll just blend into the crowds and I'll live my joyous little life in private and in secret.

18:00And then I met Christopher and it was like, oh no, you can live in a little cottage on Anglesey and live your brightest, most radiant queer existence whilst also fitting really well into community, but not sacrificing any aspect of your own authenticity in that process either. So there was this kind of, I remember that moment when I was sat in Christopher's office for the first time and I asked him a question. I don't remember what the question was now. And Christopher was just kind of waxing lyrically about this thing that I'd asked him. And I just remember I kind of zoned out and kind of disassociated for a moment.

18:35And I was just watching the way he moved and the way he talked. And I was thinking, oh, my goodness, like, this is an example of somebody who is somewhat like me. Like, I can see myself in him. But at the same time, he's not miserable. And he's not living in complete anguish all the time. like everybody told me queer people constantly will be. He's a drag artist. He's a death professional. He's a druid and not just a druid, the head of a druid order. He's part of this thriving community. And in that moment, it was kind of like, oh, this could be a life for me. This could be something that I could do in future.

19:14So it was almost like finding somebody who was a direct inspiration. And since that moment, Christopher has kind of been my main inspiration in life, of my mentor and somebody I look to as kind of a figure that I really admire.

19:32That's big words of praise. How do you feel? I think within the spirit of druidry, we have this concept called awen, which means blessed holy breath. It's the creative outpouring of the universe itself. And it's often not mistranslated but perhaps loses its nuance when it's translated simply as inspiration but inspiration is certainly a part of our way and and that is the task of any druid of any magical practitioner is to to inspire and I think when you have inspired and you feel that you've inspired it inspires you to inspire more right so so through all of my work whether it's writing whether it's television, my ultimate goal in life is to be as inspirational as I possibly can be and to glean inspiration from the people that inspire me and keep that wind, that breath of Auin continuously flowing because we can very easily fall into anxiety.

20:34So many of us can become easily addicted to anxiety just by looking at the state of the world whereas we are able to find ways to transcend that anxiety and turn it into finding our own joy whether that's through spirituality or through a hobby or through any other drive that somebody might be attracted towards I think ultimately if we can be forces of inspiration in the world we leave a rather lovely legacy. A lot of people might not have that positive relationship to a religious and spiritual practice. Why do you think it is that Druidry allows that? I think by its very definition Druidry because of its tertiary component so not that we denounce the binary but rather we transcend the binary and seeing the universe running on a tertiary or a tripartite function.

21:32So you have dark and light, but you also have an energetic principle between them, dusk and dawn. And when you consider that the world is significantly more than just that which is visibly binary, that there is something else in between, it becomes something that attracts people towards it because they instinctively know on some level that I'll be welcomed with open arms in that particular community. It's not going to judge me if I feel that I am other because we celebrate the other. I also felt othered when I was growing up but I chose to use that otherness as a strength rather than as a weakness or even worse a perception of failure that somebody else might have placed upon me.

22:25I determined at a very young age that I can use this otherness to my own power and to my own empowerment which I feel that I've succeeded in doing but then you know it's an ongoing battle right it's an ongoing task to be able to maintain that because we get caught up in daily life as well as caught up in the semantics and logistics of druidry and that whether you're a druid whether you're a witch or whatever other word you might use to describe yourself it's simultaneously expressing mystery MUSIC PLAYS

23:25of magic, which is all about magic, Welsh folklore, and the magic that we all have within to transform our own lives. There's around 40 people in the room. Let's find out why some of them have come. Hello. Hi. I'm working in a documentary about druidry on Anglesey for the BBC World Service. Would it be okay if I asked you a few questions? You can ask some questions, whether we give any answers. My name is Janet Farnell. I'm not actually a Druid, so I'm not a member of the Order. But I have been to one or two of their little shindigs, let's say. But what I like about Druidry is it's a simplicity.

24:10And probably that's why I prefer the Druid Anglesey people. They seem to simplify everything. and it's about worshipping the earth and we are here to look after the earth. Every one of us is an earth keeper, you know, and it's about respecting the water, respecting the seas, the land, the skies and what lives in those elements as well, you know. So I just love it. I am a sound healer. I am a healer myself, you know. And I suppose really when I come here, I've come in here for a little bit of spiritual nourishment as well. It's like touching base. It's like touching base again. I'm Sharon Thomas.

24:56Sharon, do you call yourself a druid? I wouldn't call myself a druid, not at all, no. I'd say that I've been a very quiet and shy observer for quite a while. This is my first time at a full druid event, apart from the open event at Solstice. okay so what made you want to come today I've just tried to think how I've summed that up and I think personal development and then connection with others and then a wider connection outwardly worldwide I'd say yeah would you call yourself a religious and or a spiritual person definitely not religious definitely spiritual and that again is an individual thing and part of, you've brought it really nicely back to one of the reasons that I'm here is that I'm wondering whether that my personal spiritualism is enough it has been for a while I'm not sure whether it's enough now whether you know I think it must have to give an answer from what I've experienced store ready today, the answer is no, it's definitely not enough.

26:17It needs to be developed and grown. Yeah. I've been quite solitary, I think is the easiest way to put it. I've been a very, very solitary person, hence the solitary spiritualism. And I've kind of came here today to dip the toe into the community kind of thing. Thank you both so much. I hope you have a fantastic day.

26:52I don't think it's happened much to me because I tend to choose very isolated secret places to do my things if I'm doing them outdoors and such. I've just asked Tamara if she ever feels any form of persecution when she practices in public. like the solstices and such. But I did have occasions in my youth when I was just getting started. And I would wander over to the trees behind my house, or I would go and, you know, stand in the fields in order to try and kind of like light a cauldron fire and do a few spells as like a plucky 16 year old who was just getting started. And I'd have people making the odd comment here and there about, you know, like, are you getting up to some satanic stuff and all that?