Recently, I reached a milestone in my journey through AODA that has been many years in the making: I completed the requirements to become an Ollave. In doing so, I became the second Ollave in the history of the Order. That is still a little strange for me to say. Within AODA, the title of Ollave is given to someone who has reached the Adept level in all three branches of the Order. Each branch has taken me down a different path of study, practice, creativity, and discovery, and each has asked something different of me along the way. As I reached the end, I found myself thinking less about what I had completed and more about what all of this had come to mean.
Ollave means learning to receive, cultivate, embody, and ultimately pass on Awen.
We first learn to receive Awen. We listen, observe, study, and wander through forests and books and ideas. We experiment. We make mistakes. We pay attention to those little sparks that appear unexpectedly and ask us to follow them somewhere. Then we learn to cultivate what we receive. A spark of inspiration is wonderful, but a spark alone does not make a fire. It has to be tended. Awen asks something from us in return: practice, patience, curiosity, discipline, and sometimes the willingness to begin again when something does not work. Over time, what we cultivate begins to become embodied. The things we study stop being only things that we know. They begin finding their way into how we see the world, how we create, how we relate to the land, how we serve others, and how we move through our everyday lives. And then comes something that I have come to believe is just as important. We pass it on. Awen was never meant to stop with us.
We pass it through teaching, writing, art, ritual, service, conversation, or simply through the way we live. Something that once came to us as a small spark may become something we shape and offer to another person. What they do with it may look nothing like what we did with it—and I think that is part of the beauty of Awen. Someone else catches the spark. They tend it in their own way. And the fire continues.
Completing all three branches has also taught me that these paths are not really as separate as they first appear. Eventually they begin weaving together. Knowledge feeds creativity. Creativity changes practice. Practice gives us experience. Experience gives us something new to contemplate. And contemplation opens us once again to Awen. It becomes a kind of cycle.
The title Ollave itself reaches back into the Irish learned tradition. Irish ollam (modern Irish ollamh) referred to someone who had attained the highest grade within a learned profession, particularly in the poetic tradition. It was not simply a word for someone who knew a great deal. Reaching that grade came after long training in a craft and carried a recognized place and responsibility within the tradition. Something in that older meaning speaks to me. At first, the idea of the “highest grade” can sound like reaching the top of a ladder. But I do not experience becoming an Ollave as standing at the top of something and looking down. I find myself looking outward and forward.
The older meaning makes me think less about what someone has achieved and more about what becomes possible, and perhaps expected, once they have spent years learning their craft. Knowledge has to go somewhere. What we receive from our teachers and traditions eventually becomes something we are responsible for tending and carrying forward. That fits closely with what Ollave has come to mean for me within AODA. I have gathered tools, experiences, mistakes, discoveries, friendships, and many sparks of Awen. Now comes the responsibility of continuing to work with them, deepen them, and share what I can.
Perhaps that is what Ollave has come to mean most strongly for me.
Mastery is not an ending. It is the beginning of responsibility.
And part of that responsibility is sharing the work. Each of the three branches ended with a substantial project. These projects were created to demonstrate what I had learned, but somewhere along the way they became more than requirements. Each became a vessel for a different part of my journey and a different way that Awen found form through me. Some came easily. Others had periods of stopping and starting. There were times when I stepped away from a project and later had to find my way back into its current. Looking at them now, I can see pieces of the person I was when I began them alongside pieces of the person I became while making them.
So I would like to share those projects here. These are offerings from the path that brought me here. Maybe somewhere within them, someone else will find a spark for your own Awen to flow.
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