With the fairies

In the liminal state between sleep and awake, in the gray hour before dawn, I dress for a visit to Faerie. I give myself a splendid body, young and strong, the broad shoulders and narrow waist worthy of a Minoan bull dancer. I give myself a simple crown, a band of gold around the hairline with a glowing blue jewel suspended from it to hang over the third eye. I place a torque around the neck. I add a cape and kilt, and a wand, worn like a sword when not in use.
    Grand adventures unfold.
    When I go up to the lodge for breakfast, a woman from my workshop can't wait to tell me about something she saw in that pre-dawn hour."Robert! I saw you in a dream before dawn. You appeared in a small TV screen in the midst of my other dream. You were dressed as a fairy king, with a crown with a blue star and a wand."
     I guess the weave of dreaming between members of a community of dreamers glows brighter when you add a little fairy dust.
     This thought was confirmed in the first session of my workshop that morning. An older man new to my work returned from a group journey and reported to me, joyously, "I met a sylvan nymph! She led me on a path of adventure in Faerie realms."

Photo: Elven Oak in Kensington Gardens by RM

Into Manannan's realm

I sing of a voyage, and a voyager, sails furled in the dusk, yet ready to spread before a favoring wind.

---The black goose sails before, into the fire below the sunset rim of the world. The way leads to the sunken lands, and to the earth beneath the sea that land-bound men will never touch.

---Watch how the waters turn and swirl, opening a tunnel between the elements. Let yourself flow through the passage.

---You are entering the realm of Manannan mac Lir, most unknowable of the Old Ones, one who escapes definite and conventional forms. Your kinsman.

---You are at home here. You breathe where others drown. Sea-born, sea-girt, salt blood in your veins, coral sprouts from your marrow.You surge with the horses of the sea into a rare kingdom.

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Away, away come away my love

to fields of coral and pearl

Away, away come to me my love

to she who once was your girl

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I heard the siren song though I had long since turned my back on the sea and lived in a tamed country, in a gentle valley.

---She found me there, as surely as a kelpie finds a lone fisherman in a curragh on a lonely night with the whisky in him, or the fire of the stars.

---Something out of memory. But whose? The memory of the cell, a current in the blood? Something held in the mirror of dreams without bodily substance, yet alive in the silvered deep of the glass, in suspension between the middle world and the worlds that escape form?

---Do all such visitations come from the past, from those beneath the earth and sea? Or do they come from the same time, but a parallel world of being? Why not from the future?

---Questions, questions, while her lilting song echoes in my inner ear.

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Away away come away my love

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Set this down. Etch it on stone, mark it for memory:

-

There is one time, one art that encompasses all. Look through the hole in the stone. The Holy Man knows. See through his single eye the oneness of things. All created things, all that is past, or present, or to come, can be seen in this lens without a glass.


Photo (c) Wanda Easter Burch

Morning at the Elvin Oak

Kensington Gardens, London

Shhh. It's early enough for them not to be expecting visitors from the mortal world. If you step very lightly, and look sidelong, or between your legs, or just let your eyes slip a little out of focus, you may see them as they live and play, even without fairy dew on your eyelids.
    There is so much going on! There is romance in full bloom but - wait - there is something foxy here too, an alert that nothing is straightforward in this realm, at least not by human reckoning.
 

  There are beautiful young ladies with streaming hair, in flowing gowns of white and blue. They look like princesses who have been drawn to the magic of this elvin world.

    But - wait - they are behind bars and there are strange beings doing strange things around them.

Are they captive souls, lured here by fairy wiles, and replaced in their home world by changelings? Or are they souls that fled here, to this realm of magic, because the world where they were growing up was too cold and too cruel to bear? Or are they dream travelers?

 Perhaps that little dog could let me know the answer. Dogs have always been reliable guides, for me, in world-hopping.

But on second glance that may not be a dog and his owner may not be friendly.

I could ask the lords of the Elvin Oak, but they look haughty and are nearing the end of their long night revels.

    I don't think I'll ask the witch lady. She looks like she belongs behind bars.

    Stepping back, with ordinary focus, I read the explanation for the bars. It makes perfect sense, if you live outside the world of the Elvin Oak. On the inside, it looks like humans are the ones who are living behind bars they have created to protect themselves against a direct encounter with the old ones of Faerie.

Photos of the Elvin Oak in Kensington Gardens (c) Robert Moss

Tolkien's wager with Time

In one of his letters, J.R.R. Tolkien reports that he once made a bet with C.S. Lewis that led to a grand (but unfulfilled) literary project and what became a lifelong inquiry into the nature of time. The two great scholars and fantasy writers "tossed" to decide which of them would write a fantasy epic centered on adventures in space, and which would write a parallel epic devoted to adventures in time. Lewis got the assignment in space, and proceeded to produce the magnificent Space Trilogy of adult fantasy novels. Tolkien got the assignment in time, which he would certainly have chosen for himself, since he was always fascinated by the possibility of time travel and of slipping into the Other Time of Faerie, which he ruminates on in his important essay Of Fairy-Tales.

     Tolkien never produced his Time Trilogy. He did write some unfinished stories that center on time travel, the first of which is titled "The Lost Road." The finished works may be lacking, but it is fascinating to track where Tolkien's mind and imagination - and dreambody - traveled on this assignment. He became convinced that dreams and the practice of dreaming are the key to time travel. He was entirely correct in this. He found an exemplar in J.W.Dunne, the soldier-engineer-dreamer whose groundbreaking book An Experiment with Time remains hugely exciting, as a study of time travel through dreams that is grounded in first-hand experience.

    This note is merely to announce that I am currently tracking Tolkien's adventures in past time and Other Time. I'll post longer reports when I'm ready. Assuming that I have his blessing, since he has turned up in several of my lucid dreams, along with C.S.Lewis, with advice that I did not always follow right away...

The Shores of Faerie. Drawing by J.R.R.Tolkien (1915)