May morning
May. 1st, 2004 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootClubbing last night and visit to fabbo chums this evening. I hope to persuade my love to go walking in Alderley Edge today.
This is a fierce May morning, fresh and clean, the air roaring, the grass moving. Everything feels very new.
It's the kind of feeling I would expect from the Spring equinox, not the green gateway into summer I try to associate with Beltane.
Much as I love pagan May, the idea of Horned Lord and Triple Goddess making love in the woods, much as I love booze and phalluses and maypoles and parties and hiding from morris dancing (or watching it in an attempt to kid myself that it's interesting) it's not what I come back to at this time. And because I am about to indulge myself, and most people will be bored by what I am about to write, I will employ charity and the cut:
For me this time is always about the gates to lost realms.
When I was a child, I knew that you could go and never come back. I lived in a small town called Devizes through which ran the Kennet and Avon canal. The canal was a truly English postcard scene, bullrushes and butterflies and otters and a far away blue yonder that really did look very blue. I lived with the conviction that if you went far enough towards that blue along the canal, or did the right thing at the right time, you would find yourself walking through the Shire easy as you please.
Before I read Tolkein I read Yeats and thousands of fairy stories, of the sidhe, and of human travellers in the lost lands, Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, even of stoic Mr Kirk (Robert not James T) and I just wanted to go. Why would you ever come back?
It wasn't just Middle-earth. At varying times my personal mappa mundi included Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, Westernesse, Ys, Fairyland, other planets (come to think of it, James T is just as appropriate as Robert) other dimensions, lands un-named, Shamballa, Asgard, the Far Away Tree, Where The Wild Things Are, Narnia and Moomintroll valley.
Quite an itinery. And I still want to do it. But now that I am all grown up, I suspect that going to the unknown realms may actually mean losing my faculties and becoming a baglady forever encamped at the bottom of Glastonbury tor, harrasing young policemen with tales of rectal probing by aliens, and eventually dying of an overdose of fly agaric.
Beltane 2000, I went to a sacred site (well, sacred to me) and somehow found the presence of the People of the Wind without the aid of herbal or alcoholic stimulants. It wasn't the only time, but what made this important was that my companion, equally unimpaired by anything other than a shared overactive imagination saw/felt them too. He would find it easier to describe than I, indeed, even now I feel myself seized by that shyness I created this LJ to overcome. Oh well. You have served me so well in other ways LJ, I will forgive you failing me in this.
Four years on I remember them, wind blowing across the fields, hawthorn petals all over the doorstep.
Today feels very real.
This is a fierce May morning, fresh and clean, the air roaring, the grass moving. Everything feels very new.
It's the kind of feeling I would expect from the Spring equinox, not the green gateway into summer I try to associate with Beltane.
Much as I love pagan May, the idea of Horned Lord and Triple Goddess making love in the woods, much as I love booze and phalluses and maypoles and parties and hiding from morris dancing (or watching it in an attempt to kid myself that it's interesting) it's not what I come back to at this time. And because I am about to indulge myself, and most people will be bored by what I am about to write, I will employ charity and the cut:
For me this time is always about the gates to lost realms.
When I was a child, I knew that you could go and never come back. I lived in a small town called Devizes through which ran the Kennet and Avon canal. The canal was a truly English postcard scene, bullrushes and butterflies and otters and a far away blue yonder that really did look very blue. I lived with the conviction that if you went far enough towards that blue along the canal, or did the right thing at the right time, you would find yourself walking through the Shire easy as you please.
Before I read Tolkein I read Yeats and thousands of fairy stories, of the sidhe, and of human travellers in the lost lands, Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, even of stoic Mr Kirk (Robert not James T) and I just wanted to go. Why would you ever come back?
It wasn't just Middle-earth. At varying times my personal mappa mundi included Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, Westernesse, Ys, Fairyland, other planets (come to think of it, James T is just as appropriate as Robert) other dimensions, lands un-named, Shamballa, Asgard, the Far Away Tree, Where The Wild Things Are, Narnia and Moomintroll valley.
Quite an itinery. And I still want to do it. But now that I am all grown up, I suspect that going to the unknown realms may actually mean losing my faculties and becoming a baglady forever encamped at the bottom of Glastonbury tor, harrasing young policemen with tales of rectal probing by aliens, and eventually dying of an overdose of fly agaric.
Beltane 2000, I went to a sacred site (well, sacred to me) and somehow found the presence of the People of the Wind without the aid of herbal or alcoholic stimulants. It wasn't the only time, but what made this important was that my companion, equally unimpaired by anything other than a shared overactive imagination saw/felt them too. He would find it easier to describe than I, indeed, even now I feel myself seized by that shyness I created this LJ to overcome. Oh well. You have served me so well in other ways LJ, I will forgive you failing me in this.
Four years on I remember them, wind blowing across the fields, hawthorn petals all over the doorstep.
Today feels very real.
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