Awen and the Art of Urban Druidry 
By Brendan Howlin and Stuart Lythgoe © 2003


Have you ever felt that you just don't have the time to practice the Druidry that you want to? Wouldn't you like to be
out in the woods meditating for hours, getting in tune with spirit and nature but the reality is a nine to five job in a 
town or city. You come home in the evening stressed and worn out and after you have spent some quality time with 
your partner, played with the kids and had some dinner, you just want to roll into bed. Then the whole sorry business 
starts again. I guess that like us you also thought of getting up half an hour early to have time for meditation or to 
greet the sun. You probably also have heard the alarm go off for that early start, reached out to turn it off and woken 
up exactly half an hour later at your normal getting up time. What if it didn't have to be like this? This is where 
Awen and the Art of Urban Druidry (with apologies to Robert M. Pirsig) comes in. Even in the most built up of 
cities there is life bursting out everywhere. The first stage on this path is to see it. 

Stage 1 Learn to See.
If you have observed your fellow wage slaves on their respective ways to work you will see that they walk along 
almost in their sleep, eyes cast down, obsessing over their problems. These days there are also the music heads and 
the mobile phone pests but they fall into the same category. You can be different. Raise your head and look around 
you. Look at the sky, observe its colours, watch the clouds. Strangely enough this makes you happier. The down 
side of this is that very occasionally someone will look up and see you staring at the sky and smiling. Don‚t worry 
they will just think that it is their turn to meet the looney this morning and it will give them something to talk about 
over morning coffee. Cunningly, you are carrying out the Druid grade practice of constantly revealing the way and 
constantly concealing it by doing this as well. The observer might even remember seeing you and be tempted to look 
up sometime. Obviously you can't do this all the time as you also have to see where you are going. If you do this 
every day you start to see other things, like birds flying across the sky. So you continue stage 1 and watch them as 
well. You will start to be able to distinguish the different bird types from their silhouettes and count them. Whilst 
this is going on you will want to see other things too, like trees. There are a lot of trees in the urban landscape, many 
different kinds. Most of which are not in the Ogham Tree alphabet but that doesn't make them less important. Look 
at their shapes, colours, leaves. Of course some of the trees are actually in the Ogham alphabet and you will learn 
how to identify them. 
If you are fortunate enough to live in a town that still has front gardens, look at them too. See the flowers, their 
colours and textures but be discreet in areas with a neighbourhood watch because you could find the police coming 
after you. Incidentally with the trend to two or more cars in a household, front gardens are increasingly becoming 
concreted over so you need to do this soon. If you are fortunate enough to walk to work you can observe these things 
over the course of a year and see how they change. One of us walks over a bridge that crosses the river Wey every 
day and watches the river flow at different rates in summer and winter. 
Travelling by train is an excellent opportunity to put your skills into practice. Whilst your fellow commuters are 
reading their newspapers, annoying each other with their mobile phone conversations or quietly snoozing, you can 
look out of the window. There are some marvellous sunsets to be seen from train windows (sunrises if you are up 
early) and almost no-one sees them plus if you pass any fields you will see pheasants, deer and foxes. 
Foxes are increasingly present in the urban environment and just trot about in the broad daylight where they will. 
Brendan has watched a fox jump over the wall in a car park near him and stand still whilst people walk right past it 
to get to their cars and they didn't even see it. We recently heard about a party of foxes that have made their home 
under the platform in Hackney station. 

Stage 2 Meditation
This is the place for a quote from the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who when asked about 
meditation said how important it was in his life. When asked how long he meditated he said five minutes a day 
because people are crazy anyway and too much meditation makes them crazier. We all have time for five minutes 
meditation a day and to be honest five good minutes of meditation feels like a long time. Try it and see. 

Stage 3 Get in touch with Spirit
After you have been observing your surroundings for a while, it is time to extend your sensitivity and start feeling. 
When you look at the sky, bird, trees, flowers, etc also try to feel something from them. After a short while you will 
get all sorts of impressions. You will sense a bird passing in the sky and look up to see it. You will feel the moods of 
the river, the moods of the sky, the energies of the trees. Naturally you will eventually want to talk to your new 
friends. It is advisable to do this without speaking out loud otherwise you will become the person that goes along 
to be barking mad but Stuart has a respectable position in the community to uphold. Now you are ready for the 
advanced stuff. During one excruciatingly boring meeting Brendan was watching two magpies playing on the roof 
of a neighbouring building and extended his senses to them. When one of the magpies landed on the roof the sound 
was so loud to him that he was surprised no-one else heard it. He also made friends with a White Willow that 
overhung the path to his workplace. He was later to find out that White Willows help you get in touch with your 
deepest emotions but that's another story. 
Walking to work also has it's disadvantages as Brendan got caught in a torrential downpour with wind blowing the 
rain vertically at him in the middle of the High Street once. He was extremely unhappy and felt he couldn't endure it 
any longer when he suddenly relaxed and accepted it. It felt like being in an oasis of calm, literally the eye of the 
storm. Experiences like this happen all too rarely however but rare is better than not at all. 

Stage 4 The Urban Druid
Actually there is no stage 4. That's all there is to it. If you have got this far you can now call yourself an urban 
Druid. There are no profound mysteries to Druidry, it's all about living fully in the here and now. 
"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring shall be to arrive where we started ... and 
know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot

Dr. Brendan James Howlin 
Admissions Tutor 
Senior Lecturer (Computational Chemistry) Chemistry
School of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences University of Surrey 
Guildford 
Surrey 
GU2 7XH (Internal Postcode C4)
UK 
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/Chemistry/staff/research/bjh_research_interests.htm