If you’re looking for sacrifices to offer up to your gods, or with which to honour your path, then acting with integrity is a good candidate. Acting with integrity is expensive.

All too often it’s the people who push and shove, shout and demand who get ahead. If you are prepared to act fairly, not exploit others or blame them for your errors, that comes at a cost. If you aren’t willing to use your power to undermine others, or compromise on the truth for your own benefit, this will impact on your life.

If you are kind and co-operative that won’t always go in your favour. You’ll be the safer person to let down, or mess about. You’ll be more likely to have to pay for other people’s mistakes. You are likely to be expected to pick up the slack, and suffer the consequences when things go wrong. Less co-operative people often get a better deal.

We don’t reliably treat with most kindness and respect the people who are kindest and most helpful. We appease the people who have power, we go along with what’s going to cause us least trouble. Failure to do this has consequences. Refuse to support injustice, refuse to play nicely when situations aren’t nice at all, and it can cost you.

Apathy is often the easier choice. Life is simpler when you aren’t inclined to care about anything very much. Shrugging and going with the flow takes very little effort. Refusing to cooperate when things are unethical is hard.

What do we have without integrity? Look around you, and the injustice in the world, and the destruction of life itself, and that’s the answer. When greed, disinterest, selfishness and cruelty lead, this is what we have. There are many battles I can’t wade into, but the one thing I can do is act with integrity at every turn. I can do that when it hurts, and when it leaves me exposed, when it comes at a high price, when it massively inconveniences me. I can try.

We live in systems that often make it hard to take honourable action. To be online is to be ethically compromised, there are no innocent platforms. To be offline is to be silenced, and to reject many of the tools that allow those of us who have little influence to try and make a difference. So many things are like this that it can make the idea of acting with integrity seem impossible.

But, there are always opportunities, and those opportunities are always worth taking. If you want to make meaningful sacrifices for your Druidry, then sacrifice ease and comfort. Sacrifice what would cause you least hassle in favour of upholding what is true, and fair and necessary. Even though you probably can’t do that all of the time, doing it at all is a powerful choice, and one the living world urgently needs us to make.

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