As long as I've been Pagan, and maybe even before, Beltane, May 1st, has been my favorite holiday along the wheel of the year. It is a time of flowering and fecundity, of joviality and whimsy, of Robin Hood and faeries. What's not to love?!
Picking up where my last post - Happy Birth-Fae - left off, this Beltane found me again at the Cedar River doing Sacred Pipe ceremony, and contemplating my ties to the Fae. I had a partially consumed pink cookie on my altar which, in honor of the Fae, I was sharing with Thomas, my crow friend. I stopped and realized that, on this day, rather than just thinking about and honoring my connection to the Fae, I should actually connect to the Fae! The power and profundity of what happened next was entirely unanticipated.
There is a shamanic healing method related to Soul Retrieval that I offer to clients called "Faerie Doctoring" through which I have developed a rather close relationship with my 'Fae liaison' Alandria, who helps me in retrieving soul parts which, having dissociated from a person, sometimes get taken into the faerie realms in order to balance the energy between our world and theirs. Maybe it was my turn for a little Faery Doctoring? (You can read more on my work with Alandria here: (Alandria's Tree.)
With my pipe on my lap I journeyed to her tree home on the border between the lands of human and fae, and I reached out to Alandria to see if she were available. She greeted me with the usual hug then asked what brought me there at this time. I asked, as I have for numerous clients, if there were any of my soul parts still lingering in the Faery realms. She smiled and rolled her eyes as if to say, "Duh!"
She waved her small assistant, wearing a full suit of armor that looks like it was forged from a garbage can, off to retrieve the aforementioned soul part. As he gallops off on his tiny horse, I ask Alandria what she'd like in exchange. Anything passing between our two worlds requires an exchange, to maintain the energetic balance. She requested a song. She asked me to write her a song.
As we waited for her minion to return, initial lyrics began running through my mind...
"In the heart of the emerald city there lies a hidden forest
Where everyone's a tourist
Unless you are a fae..."
Our diminutive knight returns with a ball of light and hands it to my dryad friend. "Ready?" She asks.
I lightly return to my physical form on the beach, light my pipe, and take a big puff. I turn my pipe around with the stem pointing away from me, offering it to where I picture Alandria sitting in front of me. I exhale my breath of smoke as a prayer of thank you to her as Alandria blows my soul part into my pipe. I turn it back around and take another deep draft off my pipe, drawing the smoke and the errant soul part into my mouth. I pause a moment then blow that breath down at my heart chakra, sweeping it into my heart with my hand. Another puff, and this time I sweep the smoke up over my head into my crown chakra.
Every healing session is different and changes can be subtle, if felt at all, or they can grow and take root over a period of time. This one was instant. I saw and felt these energetic wings emerge from my back, out of the rear-facing place of my heart chakra. They stretched out, further than the reach of my arms, taking the shape of great dragonfly wings.
As I admired the various prisms dancing through the gossamer filaments, I had to stop. Was that a raindrop? Yep. There's another one. I look up at the sky directly overhead - a blue sky sporting scattered white clouds. Where are those raindrops coming from?! It wasn't steady nor enough to wet the stones or sand around me. Just enough of a sprinkling to leave everything polka dotted. A sprinkling... like a benediction... or a baptism! This was the threshold of a rebirth. A reawakening and re-membering of the fae parts within me.
As the sprinkles gradually started tapering off I looked up to see the sun still shining from across the river in front of me and realized somewhere behind me there must be a rainbow.
...a rainbow behind me... ...like the prisms in my wings... my new wings are the rainbow!
I lingered at the river for quite some time after that, processing and integrating what had happened, and even on returning home I found myself a little lightheaded and unable to carry on with normal plans - plans that now included writing a song for my faery friend.
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