The Great Green Goddess of Britain Rises again!

I think this time among Avalon and Avebury is, indeed, putting me into some kind of alternate reality.  I have a feeling leaving Glastonbury is going to be traumatic!  I'll never be able to look a Walmart in it's parking lot eye again. I spent yesterday with my old mentor, the dowser and earth energies teacher Sig Lonegren, and his wife Karen, who is a healer.  Today I went with a group to walk through a crop circle near Avebury........more on that later.**(see it below)**

I had to post this article about the Green Goddess of Northumberland, kindly provided by Robur D'Amor.  

Robur has two fascinating blogs (http://roburdamour.blogspot.com/) - thanks once again, Robur!

From a slag heap to a green goddess: How an aristocrat is turning a wasteland into the largest human sculpture ever made

By Robert Hardman

Last updated at 8:29 AM on 16th June 2011

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004063/How-Charles-Jencks-turning-wasteland-Northumberlandia.html#ixzz1TtF9j3Ok

*** Visited today:  Windmill Hill, July 26..... in a vast field of golden wheat.

Waters of the World Ceremony

"We welcome you to Avalon

Thank you for bringing the Waters of your lands.

Together we'll make a great medicine of love."

The Goddess Conference here at Glastonbury ended yesterday with some beautiful rituals, and I find myself feeling at a loss to write it all, but I'll try.  Having done week long ritual cycles in the past, as well as leading a few around the work of the mask, I've experienced the kind of "group mind" or entrainment that happens when one works together in sacred space and "mythic mind".  That sounds pretty lame and academic - forgive me.

Imagine gathering the first day in groups of people who come from different parts of the world - in my case, from the "west".   We have all brought water from our homes, and speaking of this, we pour our water into a vessel, which later will become added to a vessel for all participants. As an opening ceremony, each group approaches the Priestesses of Avalon in a barge, "rowing" to share our waters to the magic isle.  This water will be joined with rituals at the "holy wells of Avalon", the Chalice Well and the White Spring.  Later small vials of this charged, healing, universal "water of the well, water of the world" are given to each of us to carry back, and we will all make a procession with our banners through the streets of Glastonbury to the river (which once was a great lake, the legendary home of the Lady of the Lake) to pour some of this water into the flowing waters.

Quite a wonderful sight, to see so many blue clad, singing women and men gathered waist high in the stream, with our vessels of water, and a woven mermaid!  Then a sharing of fruit, to remind all that the Goddess gives to us the fruits of the Earth, always, to share, and to receive.

The closing ceremony included a "give away" where all present exchanged gifts.  And I leave with my heart open, and my vials of water to share with other waters, and to remember.

You know, I honestly feel rather speechless - moved, changed by this experience, the ceremony, the people, the place.   The work is about the Goddess, and it is collective, and a field opens that is also deeply personal and transformative.  A "mystery".  One sees with mythic eyes, with archetypal vision, and waking life becomes a revelation.  For example,  at the river yesterday, I picked a branch of elderberries, finding them beautiful, and wanting to add them to the "fruits" being shared, but decided it wasn't a good idea.  I wasn't even sure they were edible.  Some seeing me with them in my hand told me that they were very magical, connected to the Crone and the Goddesses of the underworld.  That's why they were called "elderberry".  She also said they made medicine from them, and Elderberry wine.

I carried those darkly beautiful berries all the way back, thinking as I returned (wet) from the river, and pouring our waters into the worlds waters thus, about my soon to be 62nd birthday.  I'll be eligible for early retirement now.  I'm entering old age, and I don't know what it means - it's this cycle of my life now.  Sometimes, to be honest, I feel very sad and lonely in the midst of it all.  Elderberries, bearing elderberries from the river...............  Crone medicine.

When I got to the cafe at the Assembly Hall, gathering for the closing rituals, the cook was saying to someone "Oh, someone left a nice bottle of elderberry wine here last night.  Potent stuff.  "(!) 

I was amazed. since I was standing there with the same berries in my hand - so I asked her if I could try it!

And so I sat, waiting for the "gifting ceremony", with a nice glass of (like she said, potent stuff!) elderberry wine in my hand, feeling awed, and as if, on top if it all, I had some very magical "medicine" that had just been gifted to me, even before the "gifting ceremony" had begun.  Elderberry wine.  Healing tonic....... gifts of the crone goddess, potency.


It works that way. The huge generosity of world, and when people come together in love and ritual.........when we forgive, love, and join the waters.........

At the closing, white veils were drawn, the "mists of Avalon", and we left for homelands, bearing our vials of love, and "holy-wholly" water. From the Well of the Lady, the Well of becoming...........

Speechless.

Lammas blessings to all.

The Chalice Well

  

Here is one of the most mythic places of Glastonbury, the Chalice Well and Garden.   There are actually two sacred springs, the Red Spring and the White Spring, both of which figured in the ritual cycle of the Goddess Conference.  The energy at these wells is so amazing!  They are, like the Tor, at the heart of the mysteries of Glastonbury, of  this place at the center of the legendary Avalon.  

People have been coming here on pilgrimage for a very long time - the great ruined Cathedral and Abbey of Glastonbury and the Tor bear evidence of it's roots as a pilgrimage center that go back to the middle ages, and it is clear that that the Church was built on much earlier pagan sites.  Many feel that the Springs, which have never failed in recorded history, were at the heart of the sanctity of Glastonbury.  

The wonderful energy of the Well!  I sat by the famous Vesica Piscis symbol of the Well Cover and meditated, and had a vision of the Tree of Life, very vivid.  I later went to the healing pool where you can take off your shoes and sit in the waters.  There was a young pilgrim I noticed who, I felt, had entirely the right idea about how to enjoy sacred waters.

The Chalice Garden is amazing as well - you can really feel the presence of the Devas and the Fey Folk there......such color and vitality! 

Here  below are the "Apples of Avalon" in the Chalice Gardens........just beyond it is possible to see the hill of the Tor, and people walking up it.

Truly, these flowing springs are every bit the "Lady of Avalon".  And the flowers!

And here is the Tor, high atop a  long hill that is no small task to climb, along with the mystical and ubiquitous sheep.  

 

This photo was rather surprising, which I took inside the interior of the Tor - since the Lady of Avalon is associated with violet, and the color is virtually everywhere in Glastonbury, I was surprised to find it showing up in this photo.

Glastonbury Goddess Conference begins

"The island of apples which men call “The Fortunate Isle” (Insula Pomorum quae Fortunata uocatur) gets its name from the fact that it produces all things of itself; the fields there have no need of the ploughs of the farmers and all cultivation is lacking except what nature provides. Of its own accord it produces grain and grapes, and apple trees grow in its woods from the close-clipped grass. The ground of its own accord produces everything instead of merely grass, and people live there a hundred years or more. There nine sisters rule by a pleasing set of laws those who come to them from our country." 

Geoffrey of Monmouth

  I stopped at the Roman Baths en route to Glastonbury, and saw the above...........felt like saying "Here I come!".  I brought with me my gift to the Temple, a mask based on the "Lady of Avalon".  It is primarily violet, based on the image I was sent, and included a rainbow, and apples.

"Avalon" meant the "Apple Isle", and I thought of so many wonderful legends of the apples of the Goddesses.  And, of course, Marian Zimmer Bradley's famous book "The Mists of Avalon".

The mask was presented to them yesterday, and I invited them to add to it as seems right, jewels or ribbons.   I love the thought that when I'm gone, the mask will remain, evolving story through the women who may chose to use it.

So walking to my B&B a few days after arriving, I felt naturally drawn to a bough of apples hanging over a wall, and went to help myself to a few of them..  Right where I reached for an apple was a little niche in the wall - and someone had left a polished amethyst there, with a wire on it so it could be worn on a cord!

I'll take that as a blessing, and find a cord for the stone!

Photo by Tony Howell (www.tonyhowell.co.uk)

Avebury Notes

“The ancient Greeks spoke of the "genus loci," or spirit of a place. They sited a shrine to honor the Earth Goddess Gaia in Delphi in Greece because the unique personality or spirit of that place was divined to be especially suited to Gaia residing there. Understanding the forces that drew the early Greeks to reach that decision may well be a concept that is at the very root of developing sustainable human societies and creating programs that maximize the unique values of each destination.” 

James  Swan

Going to Avebury was a process, because it represented an intention, long nurtured, of making a personal pilgrimage to this ancient sacred landscape.  So it could be said that the intention preceded me, one of Spider Woman’s threads, across the Atlantic.  Going to a Pilgrimage, even if only half realized, I venture to suggest there are stages of opening, of preparation, necessary.  Entering “mythic mind and space” is part of entering sacred space of any kind – it’s entering that dimension wherein the mind is prepared for the possibility that here the land speaks, the oracle resides, the fey are, and the ancestral spirits listen.

 

 Among the Lakota, preparation for any kind of spiritual activity, and many communal activities that involve consensus as well, must include cleansing activities – a fast, and a sweat lodge, for example.  This “purification” is found throughout virtually all spiritual traditions.   So following this logic, I’m not surprised I became sick almost as soon as I got off the plane, with three days of fever.  It certainly served to detox me from the stress and negative, fearful atmospheres I’ve been dealing with for months now.  It was with an exhausted body and an open mind I got off the bus at the village of Avesbury, and immediately walked, delighted, across the street and between two great stones that seemed for the entire world like a bright doorway to me.  I later learned that they’ve been dubbed the “Adam & Eve” stones, presumably because they represent polarities of male and female to some group that works with them.

You don't have to be long at Avesbury, or the area in general, to realize it is a pilgrimage point and magnet for many people, among them spiritual seekers, crop circle researchers, druids and witches, and a lot of others who have many different ideas of what is going on, some of it fascinating, some pretty fanciful.  So I tried to keep myself open to my own experience, without superimposing projections on the landscape.

There is brightness there, it emanates from the land.  Local dowsers tell me it’s a “time vortex”, and hence that explains the continual conversation of so many magnificent crop circles that have occurred near Avebury, or Silbury Hill.   Quite a few studies of electromagnetic anomalies, brain waves, and other phenomena have been done in the area, and within crop circles that have occurred in the area as well. (There was a crop circle that occurred the morning I visited, July 18th, although I did not see it – it was closer to Silbury Hill, about a mile away.)

I proceeded to the stone the pair seemed to frame, and sat at its base, warmed by the stone’s presence.  I was becoming euphoric, and sheep wandering throughout with their soothing cries, and their curious-cautious eyes were good companions, a counter-point to the solemnity of the stones.

Then up the side of the great circular “henge”, attracted by wildflowers on its crest, and the naïve hope of seeing, in the fields below and beyond, a crop circle, or maybe Silbury Hill (wrong direction).  But what I looked on were just corn fields.  Rather fancifully, I felt I had, in some way, entered the “Gate”, and could now walk the Circle that is Avebury.

When we used to cast a circle in Reclaiming, we closed with "And now we are between the worlds, and what happens between the worlds can change the world."  Between the worlds is another order of being, an imaginal order that we enclosed by casting a circle, which we entered through a “doorway”, leaving behind the mundane world.  I think places of potency, Avebury, were enclosures and temples for “places between the worlds”, points of heightened earth energies, marked reverently by their stone monuments and avenues, places where celebrants could attune.  Places to contact the ancestors, the devas, places to heal, communicate, conceive, receive an oracle,  retrieve a soul, pray for rain or celebrate an auspicious day between the moon and the stars and the wheel of the year.  This was where the Great Mother spoke and the gods made their play.

Photo by www.adlag.com

I found that they are also ripe with synchronicity – that’s what places of heightened energy do, they “connect” and weave.  I had put on my Spider Woman necklace that morning, a Navajo piece that shows Grandmother Spider Woman weaving.  As soon as I  came off the Henge, I went into a little shop, where I  got into conversation with an elderly local, who told me he had seen a fabulous crop circle with his own eyes, and pulled out a polaroid of  the famous “Spider Web Circle” (of 1994),  proudly informing me that he had taken the photo himself.  He told me  it was “just over there, on the other side of the Henge.”  Just over by the fields and vista I had been  attracted to!


Circles within Circles……………

Avebury only has a hundred or so of its original 600 plus stones.  Most of these have been broken down and used by farmers to build houses and barns – the church has not been kind to the stones either, with various ministers admonishing their congregation to pull down  the “devil tracks” .

I found myself, walking that wide circle,  ecstatic, my heart chakra open, feeling “turned on” with that visceral deep eros of nature, of Gaia.  The following day, I was “stoned", spaced out, open.  I didn’t much want to return to “human time”, and I’m convinced if I had been able to sleep there, the dreams would have been vivid.   Avebury affected me in subtle ways, an effect that continues.

Sometimes language bears in its fossil rock
things once commonly known, now information
available to us only as tourists
as here poke through the earth
through the welter of houses from the last thousand years
through country roads, prim churches, blowzy pubs,
through male and female stones, the huge breast
called Silbury Hill, vast and cumbersome
works of a people whose will slumbers
in the stone circles, rows, wordless
as the thoughts of the sheep that graze.


Yet that will is potent, not with the dumb ferocity
and shapeliness of mountains, not with the bodily
eloquence of frightened or curious sheep.
Here are erected runes of language partly designed
to be read by clouds or goddesses, left for us
too carefully wrought to be ignored.
Sometimes with my hands on the warm/cold stone
I almost think I hear it in my bones.


Marge Piercy

English Gardens.....

 "Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping 
than you can understand."

....Yeats

I find so many fey  personae,  among the amazing English  gardens.....this little fairy was in Lacock.

And an angel, presiding over a public garden in Bath.

I think I understand the English delight in gardens, and also their pursuit of the illusive sunbeam.

And, as I passed through the Roman Baths on my way to get the bus to Glastonbury (and next week's Goddess Conference)..........how about this for a "Sign"? 

Greetings from the Angel Hotel

 

 

I came back from Avebury yesterday, and find myself quite speechless, to be honest.  I need to write a poem, or a long article, if anything, so I'm not going to try, yet.  Suffice to say I feel quite "stoned".....such potent energies there.  I want to write about my experience in a way that does it justice later.

I landed in Wiltshire a week ago, sick as soon as I got off the plane in spite of my "Airborne" immune pills (airplane air is lethel), got on a train to Bath, found a B&B in a town on route called Chippenham (along the famous Avon, where graceful swans actually float), slept for 3 days straight, woke up to talk to my delightful landlady, Mrs. Barrows, and her chickens (shown observing her at her kitchen window), and Mrs. Avebury, a fellow lodger, who was sitting at the table pursuing her geneology project and eating eggs.  So, although I was too ill to get to Avebury yet, I rather magically found myself in the company of "Avebury" and "Barrows" ("barrow" is the term for the many ancient prehistoric graves, also near Silbury) in the flesh......I doubt I would have been surprised if a Mr. Stonehenge had walked in for tea. (Honest, I'm not making this up!  The Cosmic Punster is alive and well in Wiltshire.)

  So  here I sit having a coffee, several days later, at the Angel Hotel.  Not too far from the River Avon.

I figure, outside of my day among the Stones, nothing could be better.