Magic & Spellwork

I First Met You in Trance…

by Otter Bendeigid

I first met you in trance. You stepped from behind the Old-one, and I was dazzled by your calm golden presence. We lay awhile on the grass together, and your body and your energy calmed and invigorated me. I was like a parched land when the first drops of rain fall onto the scabbed earth, opening and softening it. I opened myself as the earth does, and you entered me. Entering my body and entering my within effortlessly. Why not? We are and are not the same. You are essence and I am this year's model of that essence.

The quality of your skin and the golden hair on your body called me, as also did your smell. There is something of cedarwood and rosemary about you, it tickles my nose and draws me in, as a shaded leafy copse in the forest will.

I rest in you and rise in you; passion is soaring and crashing like waves on a hot sunny beach at midday, cooling with twilight to distance and a soft susurration of sound that is as much within as it is without.

My flesh melted away as did all attachments with my human self and we floated clean and pure like two gulls riding the currents above the waves.

I realized that you also lived within the one I now lie with, perhaps you wait in all and everything. That is my hope and my suspicion. It would ease and delight me to have data, but intuition and feeling are far more relevant to my experience.

When our eyes met over the waves, there was a soundless crack of connection, of penetrating one into the other, and sliding back again. Like water held long in two cups, parted and then joined again in a silver bowl beneath the full moon.

The moon is radiance more penetrating and cooling than the bright sun and I think I have found you in both. The effortless joining of our commonality is breathtaking. For a moment, all stops within as the shining slide into each other begins again, then the warmth of duality creates the third. There is me, there is you and there is us.

We three walked on the soft, dewy grass of Beltane morning having sat up all night in ritual and trance and in the loving connection of the circle. I was seeing in shadows the glimmering and the sparkling of the new day, of the new season, of rejuvenation and of birth. I felt as much as saw the colors and the shapes, there were no straight lines, no edges anywhere. It was all texture and depth. One thing faded into another and became its origin and its descendant. The tiny diamonds of dew on the rich grass of Spring tingled on the bottoms of my skyclad feet, diamonds soft and cool and deep as any universe.

There it was — the laughter. After the long night's vigil, to walk upon the earth and the grass, to feel deeply the below and the above as one, to hear your laughter and feel my slowly swaying dance coming from and to the same place. The Ever place.

For twenty thousand years we have done this. We take breaks in Summerland, getting refocused and recharged, but we always come back to this place and this moment which is now and also forever.

We are the keepers and the watchers, the sentinels and the warriors who guard the Earth's bounty and fertility. Those we stand against are many, as they have been before, yet we know that we have patience and the strength to wait through the decay and death rattles of this tired Western Drama.

You and I will stand in tomorrow, holding hands and watching the strange and beautiful flowers that grow from the corpse of the West.