It's 7 pm, the office heating system has been off for a while, and whenever I stay this long to combat the paper overflow and to do lists, I remember reading about a telegraph operator stubbornly sticking to her post during the 1899 Johnstown flood as the water roared through... I know images you see and things you read about in childhood stick to you, but seriously? I read very odd things as a child!!!

Greetings from Elfstone Chestnut Pussycat, While the humans are busy fussing over my big brother Acorn and giving him treats and pets (and hauling him back and forth in that box thing... I can smell vet!!), I am plotting about what to do to get them to remember sweet innocent starving moi. Appearances can be deceptive you know. So I'm well...rather stout.... but I haven't eaten people food in THIRTY WHOLE SECONDS... Oh, the cruelty... On the other hand I just can't grab their attention if that means they'll haul ME to the vet. Oh no. Quick, think clouded mind thoughts at the humans: You will not take Elfstone to the vet. There is no vet. You will feed me and fuss over me and go nowhere with me except into the kitchen. Human One can stop being vegetarian, too, by the way. That Will Not Do. No bacon for me in months....and Human Two gives more treats to Acorn ...that chicken, for example... she must have given Acorn an entire extra sliver! And while I'm at it Human Two really needs to be home more.. She's gone all the time! I have no clue what "supporting you in the lifestyle to which you are accustomed" is all about. I did get a mental image from her addled brain when she got home the other night. It involved a flood of paper everywhere in a cold room. So much paper you couldn't see what it was set on, let alone seeing to the bottom of it... Humans have no idea that we can see their thoughts. We just don't always understand what the fuss is all about; humans are such limited creatures! It's dark now. I must think at Human Two and pull her homewards... Love and purrs, Elfstone Chestnut Pussycat On the Prowl

Three roads

I got to thinking when a Facebook friend posted something about Glastonbury today. (Thinking on a weekend? A Dangerous Prospect, no?) And finally I think I have something to say on this blog, which has been struggling for lack of nurture and direction.

My Other Half of twenty years, who hails from England, and I went to England for my first ever adventure there last year. I had always felt there was something mythical about it, something otherworldly, and not having had the opportunity to travel there before made that feeling more intense. I recall thinking toward England, or possibly the mystical/magical part of England which exists partially in real time and space and partially...not. I was in "approach" mode in the lead up to the trip. Similar to approaching a throne, or a judge. Respectfully asking permission to enter in my thoughts.

Of course, even my thick-headed idealism is tempered with reality, so it wasn't all stars in my eyes. In fact, I was somewhat startled to find that when we headed for Glastonbury, a sacred place I had heard many things about years before, I was battening down to focus on the physical. It was beautiful; warm and sunny (we were told they hadn't had real summer for years and it was in the mid 80s F) and warm enough that it threw a lot of cool-weather Brits into a state of confusion.

The first day we were there, we sat in the outdoor part of a downtown restaurant, looking around, feeling the hardness of the chairs and listening to the clink of glasses and the conversation, looking up at blue sky and around at bricks and weathered windowpanes and aging side doors, and enjoying the flowers and trees in planters and along walls. To my surprise, one of the waitresses turned out to be from close to my hometown, and had also lived in the U.S. state I live in now. It got me thinking about how many people wind up going to places such as Glastonbury. It is a place for pilgrims, a magical place, with divine energy infused through it. So, why was I barricading? I who am in love with the divine energy which flows through places like this? It seemed to be a reaction that kicked in automatically, without my being able to first grasp why.

My home state and hometown proved to be the key. It is one of the oldest places in the United States, tri-cultural and in an intensely magical land, although its climate is completely different from Glastonbury's. Divine energy lives in and all around it. It is arid, high desert, surrounded by mountains which enthrone the Goddess. "The Land of Enchantment", they call it. Its wildlife, apple orchards and concentrated rainstorms are made more precious by the precarious hold they exert in the desert. Sky is everywhere. A deep Catholic spirituality infuses everything,even the mundane, or Protestant, or New Age, with even deeper Native spirituality as an underpinning. It may have been this energy, oddly enough, that opened me to the land of enchantment that is England. I have not yet been to Ireland but I have felt similar longings for it dating from Back Then.

But I knew fear there, back "home", an intense predatory and dark energy manifesting itself in all-too-routine ways: stalkers, criminals, users, and "ordinary" people. It's one big reason I don't call it home any more. Looking back, it could have been stirred up by all the energy of Light surrounding the place, if it is true that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. (Why would this principle of physics not apply to the spiritual?)

Being what some would call an "oversensitive" and socially inept teenager opened me to both aspects. I crossed a magical threshold with the energy of adolescence before I could figure out what it was. And in the mix, Tolkien happened along with my already entrenched habit of reading everything myth-and-folkore I could get my paws on, while I struggled with grownup debates over good and evil and their neverending battles. And there in a battered paperback, now falling apart but still with me, was Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories". Voila! Tolkien, a Catholic with pervasive Christian themes in his work in a Pagan environment, suddenly flings aside the dark/light polarity by citing the Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer as an alternative. He talks of the Road to Heaven, the Road to Hell....and the Road to Faerie. And it's pretty obvious what he is drawn to.

Anyway, back at the Glastonbury restaurant, I blurted out "this place vibes like home." And I remembered a visit by The Intrepid Other Half, a sensitive herself, where she got blasted by that creepy energy because it was lurking there and she hadn't seen it coming. So I became aware that this could be why I was partially shut down. It could have been that part of my higher self moving to protect me till I became more aware.

There have been some high profile or otherwise widely discussed strange events over the past year or so at Glastonbury which would make anyone pause. From the political to the criminal, from vandalism to theft to unexplained or illogical human choices, the shadow is showing.

Maybe the third road is the way through ....

Hello from the iPhone!

I have emerged from my silence long enough to figure out how to load Blogger onto my iPhone. This is great: now I can decide not to post via an additional gadget!  Ah, the virtues of chosen silence. This mind you is not a comment on anyone else's choice to blog.  I just don 't want to clutter the cyberastral with inane drivel...