Saturday

This Killing Winter, Part One


I don’t know if I should be writing about this. There is more than one reason for my hesitation. The events of the last few months in my life are relevant to the topic of this blog, but they are so tangled up in personal minutiae that it may be too hard to unravel clearly, and the whole thing ends badly, if it can be said to end at all. It’ll take a few postings to work it out, but I guess I’ve got time now. The work of the winter season is over with, and I’m home again in Washington. There’s a certain amount of chaos at my house that I need to sort out – some thieves broke in and stole what they wanted while I was away – but at least the pressure is off me now, so far as I can tell. Now it’s time to rest for a moment and recover, and try and sort a few very difficult things out.

I guess it begins with the psychic Anya Briggs. Not that anything that’s happened is her fault; she just got me to thinking in certain ways. In particular, she got me to thinking about the elemental spirits that seem to be living around my home, and urged me, during a Skype session with her in the summer of 2012, to open a dialog with these critters, as there seemed to be one clamoring for my attention, making our own conversation difficult. I was game for it, and so began conversing with the faeries, not exactly believing nor disbelieving, since I couldn’t see them – at least, not directly – but willing to try, and to watch all the while for what might come of it. [For further details, see Faery Talk posting] The results were imaginative and playful, and opened me up to an imaginal realm of possibility; one not quite new entirely, but now differently and interestingly nuanced – peopled with new invisibles that may be my own creation, that may be objectively real, or that may be both or neither or all of the above and more. That there was a hint of darkness to this dialog surprised me, but it seemed not unreasonable that talk with an elemental spirit may carry with it also a measure of violence. Certainly not everything in the imaginal kingdom was light and ease and rainbows. In short, the fae seemed a bit capricious and difficult, if not outright vindictive sometimes. They had personality.

This is important.

For the remains of the summer and into that autumn, I continued to blunder through my conversations with the fae, and I couldn’t say what exactly it amounted to, but it seemed fun. I saw small things moving in the corners of my eyes, in fact almost all of the time, particularly in early evening, in the twilight hour. In my meditations, I tried to listen and to speak. There often seemed something fluttery and soft at the back of my mind, though I could never discount that I might be imagining it. But that wasn’t what mattered. The literalness of the thing was of no consequence. What I was addressing rendered the question of “real” or “unreal” at least a little bit irrelevant. The imaginal is what it is.

Soon enough, December grew close and it was time for me to leave for Utah, where I work in the winter and have for a while. If the faeries were tied to the land in Washington, then I would be leaving them; if they weren’t, they were welcome to come with me and continue the conversation. It seemed as if a little of both might be the case.

This is all to set the stage.

After the winter season was over, I’d planned a trip to New York City to visit some friends, and so set up a session in person with Anya, whom I’d never met face-to-face, except through Skype. In our session, she remarked about my sleep. I’ve long had troubles sleeping, but she told me that once I’d gotten back home again, back to the island, I’d sleep like a little baby. The sleep of the innocent. And it was true: in the two weeks I’d been back in Washington before coming to New York, I’d never slept better, except maybe for one night in Geneva, when traveling through Europe. This, she said, was because of these elementals, because I’d taken the trouble to acknowledge them. For this effort, they were helping me, and they were also helping to protect my home. I took this with my usual stance of both openness and skepticism, accepting while neither believing nor not, though I found this last assertion at least a bit surprising.

There was a lot more to the session, but I won’t go into that here. I flew back to Washington and settled into the summer. I worked a bit more in Utah, returned to Whidbey in the autumn, then left again for another Park City winter. It amounted to a lot of driving. Just before leaving this last time, I replaced my ailing Saturn with a used Jeep. When I left, it was with a sense of anxious foreboding. I put it down to the new car, not knowing what sort of problems it might have. As it turned out, there was a lot more to it than that. As it turned out, it may very well be that the fae are partial to their location. As it turned out, they may very well have been righteously pissed that I was leaving, again.