(David)
Our family companion and my familiar, Blaze, left this life three weeks ago. We are still hurting, each in our own way. I remain hopeful that he will visit me, wherever he is now in the Otherworld.
On his final day with us, I spent the early morning sleeping and dreaming with him, sitting beside him on the sofa from 6 until 8. I held him and spoke soothingly to him from time to time, but mainly we slept and dreamed, and for a time we flew together over lands and sea and a vast forest, at the edge of which we landed and entered its cool green beauty.
I feel that forest will be where he will start his life in the Otherworld. It's where I will look for him after he's passed, in the first instance anyway. If I don't find him there, it will at least be a beautiful place I can remember sharing with him on our flight together that day.
My grief has had the not unexpected effect of opening my mind and heart even more than normal to the spiritual world. Exploring an entirely new-to-me practice of possible devotion to the spirit of this valley rather than simply talking with her and asking for protection each day when I'm getting in and out of the shower. I'm not a deity worshipper, but without searching for the practice I formed this gentle intention of offering devotion to her.
I hoped to learn her name. I'd told her like that, if she was willing to tell me. My instinct is that she was here for prehistoric people, before the valley was named by Anglo Saxons. So that's a name I was hoping to learn, from prehistoric times.
Things remained quiet here, both in our home collectively and in my mind. The heat wave over Britain had a heavy effect on me, pressing me down and sapping my mental energy to nearly nil. I couldn't find any energy to write anything at all, including for Druid Life. I was grieving and letting the grief work through me.
Until then, I accepted that this exhaustion is like any and every other symptom of ME that I've experienced over these 30-odd years, and I need to manage it the same way.
Oh!!! Then one morning I was visited by twenty or thirty sparrows having a party in the broad, shallow, clean birdbath outside my study window. In those moments I felt strongly that the spirit of this place was answering my question through them as they flew back and forth for the high wall to the bath, back and forth, fluttering and splashing and I felt laughing with glee. Five minutes of them performing, then my friend Gentlebreast the wood pigeon landed to paddle and drink while the sparrows darted in and out of the apple trees up in my grove. The visit filled me with peace.
Next day, I delighted in a new gladiolus that's suddenly grown and flowered in a different flower bed outside my study window. The second tier up in our deep, high, strong retaining wall of three semi-circular, tiered beds that holds back the hillside from slipping into the back of our house. It's deep lilac and stunning. We've had them in several colours before, including this lilac, but never on this level. It's ten feet distant on the horizontal and four feet higher than what we've had before, so something must have moved a bulb from the existing patch to this new one. My best guess is one of the magpies who visit, and I'm taking it as a lovely encouragement from the spirit of this valley.
On Friday 1st September, I stood outside our back door looking across the valley and shaped my (winter's coming) beard square in honour of the spirit. Not ceremoniously, which isn't my style, but quietly and thoughtfully.
The spirit made herself known to me one day thirty years ago when I was in a dreadful condition, physically paralysed and mentally desperate. She filled my bedroom with her beautiful floral perfume and filled me with peace. Right then, that day, I thought of her as an angel. In the decades since, my knowledge and understanding of such beings having grown way beyond that it was back then, I have come to realise that she is the Genius Loci, or spirit of this place. I have communed with her via trees and plants and creatures here. In these weeks since Blaze passed, I've asked if she might reveal herself more openly to me, and there were signs that she might be willing to do that. I awaited her with respect.
Then, at the end of last week, she gave me her name. She is Lady.
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