Faery Talk

I didn’t want to talk about the faery.

In fact, I keep thinking to shut this whole thing down, this blog, to stop writing it. It’s a crisis I go through each week, since I’ve now exhausted the raw material of my journals and just don’t have that many stories left. Now I resent the straightjacket of a weekly schedule of postings that I’ve put myself to, and inevitably, I will have to stop, or at least retool the thing to serve a different purpose, and one that I don’t hate. Not that I exactly hate this now, but the problem is that I can’t make stuff up. Or, okay, I can make stuff up. I call it fiction; but that’s not what the purpose of this format is, and that’s not what I’m doing here. This is a sort of serialized memoir in which certain significant moments of my life are highlighted by an otherworldly quality of event or thought, and though it is in part a literary exercise and thought experiment, the point of writing about this stuff is not to convince anybody of anything – not about my character, nor my veracity, nor the objective reality of things I’ve experienced – but neither is it to distort nor embellish, nor to try to impress anyone, but to describe in the most effective way I can what has really happened, or sometimes what I think has happened, or what I think about what I think has happened, or maybe the way I feel about what I think about the things I think have, you know, happened, etc… and, but… the reasons I have for this are entirely selfish, and that is what holds me to it; not some sense of duty (though I feel there is a purpose) but what I get directly from the process of doing it.

And so I was ready to give it up, except that I do have at least a couple of stories left. One is ongoing, the other in my recent past. I’ll start with the ongoing one, even though I don’t know what to make of it.

I really didn’t want to talk about the faery, because I’m not exactly convinced that it’s there – it’s really more of a thought experiment, as in, what if it were there, and how to proceed, as in, with maybe trying to carry on a conversation with it, with her, to see what happens? What would I say? More importantly, what would she say? I’m still not so sure I want to talk about it, and I wouldn’t yet – not yet – except for something that makes me think it might be appropriate: I’d decided the other morning, sitting down to a cup of coffee, to go looking back through Mike Clelland’s Hidden Experience blog, since there is a lot of it that I’ve not read. Not having any purpose or plan to it, I clicked on the tag for psychic Anya Briggs, having some acquaintance with her, and found the story from March 10 of this year, “Can You Find the Fairy?” It blew my mind – for reasons that I hope to make clear. After reading the article and deciding it was time to articulate some of this experiment, I left the coffee shop where I’d been working, and stopped along the way home at the local grocery store to pick up a few things. An impulse buy put the amount for my purchase at $12.34 – which readers of H.E. will recognize as a synchronistic signifier of particular import to Clelland, indicating a need to take especial notice. I felt – as I did, oddly enough, when first contacting Anya – as if I’d strayed out of my own story and into his narrative instead. But then I do have boundary issues. It seemed, in any event, time to take notice.

Now it was Anya who got me all onto this faery thing in the first place, when in a recent session with her over Skype, we’d had a perfectly clear signal all throughout the hour-plus conversation until, toward the end, little pixilated swooshes started appearing suddenly, moving in quick diagonals across the screen from my end. Anya got excited, picking up that it was an elemental spirit that lived around my home, impatiently trying to make contact, and that she, Anya, had been seeing a lot of these beings recently. Since this very selective interference seemed to happen with an uncanny sense of purpose, and I’d also been seeing similar things out of the corners of my eyes for some time previously, I was prepared to take Anya’s advice, by way of saying hello, to set out some sort of offering for the spirit, a small cup of water, into which I floated the head of a flower…

The article on Hidden Experience concerns Mike’s friend’s hastily shot photograph, in which a perfectly clear and pixie-like woman’s disembodied head floats almost concealed behind the branch of a tree in dense foliage.

I’d been asking the spirit to show me what she looks like. I guess asking a shape-shifter what it looks like is just walking straight into it; but since this seems a retroactive sort of joke, unhinged from any sequence of normal chronology… it just makes the joke that much more funny. Anya did tell me that they have a very different relationship to time than human people.

It was only the night before this, in my regular meditation, that I’d invited the spirit in for a talk – “talk” being in this case very loosely defined – and had (though not for the first time at all) a very vivid sense of presence, something like a thick, cold wind approach me from behind, an electric crawling sensation inside of my skull, at the back of my skull, and this very much like the sense of a presence I’d had over a decade ago, when I’d experimented for a time with channeling and connected to something identifying itself as IMHOTEP (and yeah, it spoke in caps) – and though this presence now was similar, it was also different. I get the feeling now as I write about it: it has a cool, blue character to it, and is uniquely feminine, which is a hard thing to describe adequately, because it has nothing to do with sex, but is very much more abstract than that. The IMHOTEP character was ruddy red, big and cloudlike, and masculine, and though it’s been a long while since I’ve tried to contact that, the impression remains vivid.

I made it a regular part of my day, setting out the cup of water, getting a new flower for it when the old one wilted, tossing out the little bugs and specks of dirt that accumulated in the cup from birds coming to drink from it. For more than a month, the small ceramic cup remained as an ongoing offering. When I had to recently prepare the house for fumigation (beetles in the wood were eating it to the ground) with a silent apology, I took the cup in from its post on the back deck, beside the tree where the faery seems to keep herself. When later I went outside again, at the exact moment I stepped out the door, a sparrow smashed itself against the window and died right at my feet. It was as if the faery were saying, “Hey! We were having a conversation here… ” after I’d rudely hung up the phone. I watched the small bird’s wings pump slowly in and out as it gradually resigned itself to not living anymore, black eyes staring dazedly nowhere. I’ve since put the cup back out.

And I noticed, when looking again at the receipt from the grocery store, that my impulse buy had been rung up mistakenly by the friendly cashier. An out-dated pastry item, marked down on the box, she’d keyed in at full price. It was an accident that put my total into the realm of significance.