Sevenfold Silence

This last weekend (which is not actually this last weekend, because I keep a pretty substantial post-buffer) I went camping in the woods with a bunch of pagan friends. By day it was very warm and pleasant, and the woods were green and very inviting. Well, they usually are, but I also usually don't have time to run off and explore.

But given the choice between lazy campfire conversation and woods, I naturally (!) chose woods, and wandered off. I got given a lot of the usual warnings about poison ivy, which is really, I think, just a variant on "don't go into the woods, they're dangerous/fairies live there/you might get eaten by wolves/you might get lost". Which is really all just a variant on "don't go into the woods; you might not come out the same." And of course I didn't come out the same.

I don't really consider myself the nature-y type. I enjoy woods and soil and plants and trees and birds and mushrooms and flowers and moss and all sorts of things, and I'm not afraid of wandering off or getting lost or getting wet or anything like that. But camping is never anything my family ever really did, a garden's one of those things I think a lot about putting together but never do, and I'm very fond of heat and A/C and indoor plumbing and a roof over my head and all those pleasantries.

So I guess I'm surprised by the fact that I took to it so well. Originally I was just planning on heading out into the woods to find the landwights and make offerings (and I did both easily, thankyouverymuch). I wasn't planning on coming back for more. And more. And more. And I wasn't expecting to settle down with my back to the trees, and try to think up or remember names for all these plants I didn't know, and to think of how at home, and relaxed, and inexplicably lucky I felt, that I had the time and ability to sit down and enjoy the forest, and feel that weird creepy kinship with it--unsettling and simultaneously settling.

Before this weekend I'd never really felt elven, but something about wandering through the forest with a walking stick and investigating things, and just settling in and relaxing there, made me feel that way. The skeptic in me is loud right now--elves don't usually have wings and especially not feathered ones, three generations back your family were foresters so maybe that's what you're feeling, and who doesn't enjoy the woods on a nice day? Who knows? Wouldn't it be nice if there were a nice friendly list of symptoms to consult, or if somebody could just look at me and tell me already?

Damn it, I don't need more doubt. Maybe I'll have another look at the sidhe--they seem somewhere between elves and fae, on the big Venn diagram of feyness.