A Trip To Faeryland

I spent Thanksgiving with dear friends in sunny California. A welcome respite from soggy Seattle. Friday after the feast, I met their friends about whom I have heard many fabulous stories, and it was good to put names with faces after all this time. It was also good to sit with more artists, even ones I had just met, and feel such an unspoken kinship.

Beyond the dead end of their street, a sign at the entrance of a narrow boardwalk says “Welcome to The Elvin Forest”. Of course, there was a picture of a small, open-handed Elf with pointy ears and shoes. I felt a familiar tug in the center of my palms, a sensation I have come to understand that alerts me to the proximity of a numinous experience. I had been told about the Faery Oaks that lived in this forest, some for at least a hundred years, and I was excited to meet them.

The boardwalk turned this way and that at a slight decline toward the water, and at times it felt as if I was walking through a labyrinth, unable to see where I had been or where I was going next. Which did much to confirm the presence of the Fae for me; who doesn’t know that their realm is one in which time runs differently and disorientation is the lay of the land?

A cool breeze blew through the tunnels the boardwalk created and as I walked, I kept searching the vegetation that grew on either side for oak leaves. Artemesia, some kind of sagebrushy kind of shrub and even poison oak, but not an oak leaf was to be found. I did see some of the most amazing spider webs; dimensional, like gossamer cubes with odd angles shimmering in the sunlight. They made me stop and stare. I wanted to see what kind of spiders had spun these into being but none were to be found. Maybe they only come out at night.

Around one corner, the boardwalk stopped and the banister on either side joined together to form a barricade. And beyond it, there they were. A grove of the Faery oaks! Their tops formed an umbrella above their long and winding, low growing limbs, some of which barely skimmed the soft looking forest floor, beckoning as a comfy sofa. How clever of the Faeries to grow them without leaves mortals would recognize as oak!

I couldn’t help myself! I climbed through what was intended to keep me out, drawn beyond my capacity to resist. The light inside was truly otherworldly. The air was easy to breathe. Spanish moss hung everywhere softening the already curved lines of the flora. I could sense the sentience of the old oaks. I could feel the presence of magick throbbing like my joyous heart. It was all soft green and dove grey above a carpet of faded yellow, sweet smelling leaves.

Then, that weird way of spying fleeting things out of the corner of your eyes began to happen, where no matter how quickly you turn to look, there is nothing to see. The itch in my palms threw currents to my shoulder blades, right where my wings used to be. I knew I was among Them. I felt I had come home. I didn’t need to close my eyes to pray to the Fae. I sat perfectly still, feeling tiny and grand, and softening my gaze, prayed with my smile. Thanksgiving, indeed.

My friends back on the boardwalk wanted to move on. Tearing myself out of the grove felt physically painful. Achy like. With a pang of sorrow. And a side of dizzy.

The triumphant destination of the boardwalk was a vista of the estuary that snakes through the mud flats toward Morro Bay. Where the late afternoon sun sparkles on the mirror of the water. Where hawks circle silently, the edges of their wings like the graceful hands of ballerinas. Where, off in the distance, long legged birds peck at the damp and delicious earth.

But I knew the triumphant vista was one that can’t be seen with our determinate eyes. It was back in a thunderously silent grove, thick with magick, and luminous from an invisible moon.

A Naked Moment

I was enamored and enchanted and somehow reminded, when I read in Marian Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, how the cycles of nature coursed through the very blood of the Priestesses on that holy isle because they were so magickally tuned in. It filled me with longing to return to that deep a relationship with nature as fervently as one yearns for a lover; to feel the silent rush of energy that signals the exact moment when the moon flips from dark to new, the exact moment of an equinox or a solstice.

But I am a modern day Priestess, who relies on her alarm clock to wake her, her calendar to track the passing of her days, her ephemeris to note the planetary changes. I live in a time when electricity keeps our world illuminated long after dark, cooks our food in seconds and brings the madness of the entire globe into our homes on television and the internet. Still, I get my hands in the earth as often as I can in my urban garden, I keep the Sabbats holy, I worship the Moon. I make do.

Between the last of late summer’s heat carrying on into the night and my own hot flashes, uninterrupted sleep has become a thing of the past. Usually I awaken between three and four in the morning and get up to drink a cold glass of water to bring down my internal heat in order to fall back to sleep. But on this September Full Moon night, my eyes flew open at 2 a.m. exactly, a trickle of sweat sliding down the side of my face. I tossed and turned for about 20 minutes, trying to still my mind, to think cool thoughts, to slow my breathing, anything to seduce slumber. Alas, it would not be won.

So I arose, and when I stepped over the threshold of my bedroom door, the dining room was flooded with moonlight! She was so high in the sky, I had to crane my neck to see her through the window; a luminous spotlight in the cloudless, inky blackness, beckoning.

I could not resist. Opening my back door, I gazed at the Faery land I have sensed my yard to be, now made visible to any watchful eye under the Moon. Each blade of grass, each petunia in her pot, each pear on her tree, bathed in luminescent shimmer. It was otherworldly quiet- no barking dogs, no playful shouting from the neighbor’s children, no distant hum of a lawnmower- just me and the Goddess. So quiet I could hear the nightshades singing. Their song carried me between the worlds and with the bravery found only in extraordinary moments, I stood, the cool breeze caressing my body in that naked moment of eternity, drawing down the Moon.

In the solar light of day hours later, I checked said ephemeris to learn that the Moon had reached Her fullness at exactly 2:27 that morning. She woke me up to come out and play! Apparently, the tides of the Moon still course through my veins despite electricity, despite menopause, despite sleep. The Goddess is alive, and magick is afoot!