Crumpled pumpkin maple leaves are loud when they fall. The green forest fading to fire tones has a crescendo song of dry snapping and rustling. It sounds like Spirits walking in the thicket. It probably is, some of the time. And it has me thinking.
A few years ago I went on an ancestral pilgrimage. The forests of my homelands across the Whale’s Road are such kin to this forest. The Spirits in those woods were so clear, so tangible.
I knew that I was being summoned to the Old Isle
s. Stories were calling me in. I could feel the gravity in my bones, a literal ache, in the heart root depths. I had been studying Martin Shaw’s work for some time, reading every book, listening to every story online. I saved and scraped and suffered and somehow got enough to pay for a tuition to his School of Myth, the bardic storytelling school, which happens in Dartmoor, in the south of England. I planned to attend the course for a week, and then spend a month or two hitch hiking around the Isles by myself, doing Magick, listening for and to my dead, attending to the call.
I had a few things in mind to do. Folks to visit and learn from, things to investigate, trails to follow. But mostly I just wanted nothing scheduled, nothing planned, wide open space to say yes to Spirit and the mysterious Quest upon me.
I had a backpack. Not much in it. A tarp, bedroll, a jacket, and a travel size magickal etiquette kit - my father’s wooden box filled with spring water and earth from my home, ashes of my aunt and uncle, powdered eyeballs of deer, elk, and antelope. The usual.
As I began the journey to the airport, the earth split in two. Or maybe it was my life that split in two - the time before that phone call, and the time after. The agonizing, irrevocable newness that happens with a call like that. I travelled somewhere, but it wasn’t England right then. I was summoned somewhere else first, to the actualy beginning of the Quest. But it isn’t the time to tell that part of the story. I hold it close, and protect it. Let’s just say it gave the Quest its purpose, stunningly so. I was to carry a big, painful story with me to the misty shores of my Old Ones.
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