Wherein I See a Flame, Speak of Fate, and Find a Spark of an Idea

Woods In a Storm 
(original available for purchase)

I wasn’t feeling well that afternoon, and there was a damp chill to the air in the house.  The north wind had brought his bounty of frost tipped leaves and slowly melting flowers.  I carefully laid twigs in a crisscross on the logs laid in the fireplace.  I hoped to drive the cold and the damp back out into the cloud covered landscape, and watched the fire closely, guarding the tiny youthful flames.   The first flush of the light and heat rose up all bright yellow and sunny, only tinged with orange.  As I fed the flames twigs and paper it rose high and then died down again and again, each time drying out the wood a little more, creating a few more hot coals to keep the blaze alight.  As it began to truly catch and the heat was building to the point of no return, I saw that while the fire dwindled in light each time, it was not so with the heat of the flame.  As the paper was reduced to ash, the fire condensed on the logs and got hotter and darker, a blue flame surrounding the red-hot center of the fire.  I was reminded of chemistry lab long ago adjusting the Bunsen burner to create the blue flame of chemical transformation. My eye was caught by the dark vivid cobalt blue of that flame, the exact same color as the robes of the elf in myvision.

I was held in that moment where I sank into my internal reality while perceiving the external reality, trying to grasp the gestalt of what that color connection might mean.  I often am led by the world around me.  A hawk’s flight above me, a flash of color, or a word scrawled on the pavement can all be heavy with wisdom.  It’s all about perspective.

These things I see and perceive are but metaphors for reality.  It is a reality stranger than most, but I believe in the truth of it.  The thing I must remember is that my reality is always tinged by my perceptions, seen through the lens of my neurons.  The stories and preconceptions that make up my consciousness are the river that flows through my life, catching up flotsam and omens, cutting deep into the earth of my existence, carving channels with each choice and belief. 

When I sat in trance and sent my imagination outward I fared forth along the river.  I saw a troubling place in the flow of the river and I interpreted it as a story about a nature spirit in pain.  Is that the truth?  To quote Obi Wan Kenobi, “So what I told you was true…. From a certain point of view.”

Am I speaking with an elf with cobolt colored robes? Am I speaking to a piece of the cosmos that is the embodiment of the concentrated blue flame I saw in the fire?  Am I speaking to a story my mind is creating? Am I speaking to a blue dwarf star in a galaxy far far away? 

It’s a question I don’t think I can answer. 

Nor do I think I need to. It can be all those things. It can be something else.  To me the question that is important:  Is this useful?  Is this helpful either to me or to someone or something else?  I have had enough experiences in my life that I have finally given in to the thought that there is something to this stuff.  It may not be something that I completely understand, but this quest for knowledge, this journey into the inner (or outer) worlds is worth something.  Worth the time and the questions and the bizarre knowledge that the things I do are not scientific and do not fit into a standard world view.

So, back to the elf.

This summer, on the back hill, in the dark, I saw him for the first time.  He seemed fluid in his movement and dangerous in his gestures and expression.   He came from the wood and offered to teach me. I told him I had limited time for such teaching, and wasn’t sure he was the sort I wanted to work with anyway.  He seemed to take my honesty well, but mostly ignored it when he told me I would need to come visit on a regular basis.  He meant spirit work.  Faring forth.  Wasting my time navel gazing and then writing about the figments that live in my imagination.  I mentally shrugged and said in my mind, “I’ll give it a try. But no promises.  No bonds.  No oaths.  I’m busy with my life and life must come first.” 

He nodded and seemed pleased.  It occurs to me that his haughty looks and domineering attitude are a thin cover for desperation. I don’t know what makes him so desperate. 

The farm work is slowing down.  The trees are coming into their fall colors early this year and I too have been changing.  I am attempting to do weekly trancework again.  I have even decided to share that work in a public forum in the hope that my experiences might have some utility for others.  Apparently my pointy-eared friend was willing to be patient with me, because even though I had forgotten about our conversation, he clearly had not.  We have continued our negotiations: what will be required of me and what I want of him.  

He wants me to carve a sigil. “What kind?”, I asked, and he didn’t care. The process of creating the sigil and making it was what he wanted.  I had decided what I wanted.  Luck bringing magic.  The skill and knowledge of that tricky and indefinable word.  I have heard it said that the land is the luck and that the luck flows from the land.   I already do luck magic.  It’s something I’m asked for from time to time.  There are two main ways to effect the outcome of a probability.  One is to line yourself up with the waves of fate and ride them like a surfer, and the other is to alter the flow of the water itself.  In my own work I often use the fabric of reality metaphor. I see lines of fate and force in my mind’s eye.  I use my will to alter them, to create a sink hole, or bend a line.  Sometimes I have been known to create a totally different fabric and let it settle onto the world like a gentle tissue paper overlay.  I want to learn more, and like so many other things, it’s the spirit world that will teach me.

I have work yet to do in this endeavor for luckwork.  Luck is seen as an uncontrollable force, a force of nature, or god, or chaos.  She is a goddess in many lands, with many names.  Names such as  the Roman Fortuna Bona, the Lithuanian Laima who allots fate at birth and her sisters, Dalia and Giltinė, happiness and death. The Norns connect in this web as well. They are those who concern themselves with the bending and the placing of the lines of fate.  

Synchronicity seems to be another path my mind wants to tread.  Carl Jung defined it as “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events”  or the unlikely alignment of events into what appears to be an ordered and significant framework.  Then there’s the Norse ideas of Haminja and Maegen, a luck that is created by good deed and good word.  Those words relate to luck that can be handed down from one generation to the next.  My mind turns to the fairy rade for some reason, when the fey folk walk the land.  This seems to tie in with my work with the ley line and I wonder, is this synchronicity itself?  I can only hope that research weaves together with experience to create wisdom.  It is an adventure of the mind, walking off into the labyrinth, with only a thread of thought to guide me.

It appears a deal has been struck.