Sevenfold Silence

(last of the camping stories. for the rest, check the beltaine 2008 tag.)

Late at night on that camping trip it got very cold--not unbearably so, but to the point where sleeping wasn't really practical. I'd been sharing a tent with my unicorn friend for warmth, but eventually mammalian body warmth wasn't saving us. We hopped out of the tent, shivering, and headed over with blankets and coats for the campfire.

It was somewhere around 3 or 3:30am at the time, and there were still a handful of people up at the time, including a guy who accidentally self-initiated into Reiki I--he'd been doing it all his life without ever knowing what it was. (Open-Source Reiki people, take note!) When my friend and I settled in next to the fire shivering and bitching moderately, he set to work generating obscene quantities of heat from his hands and trying to step up our metabolisms a little so we'll quit shivering. Fireside reiki, in other words.

So he finishes up on my friend, and gets to me. And my carefully- and unwittingly-constructed psychic shielding, put up over the course of a long and checkered personal history, rejects it and sends it back.

He keeps on trying, and I guess it keeps on coming back to him. I don't control it--it just does. He's shaking and starting to freak out, and literally takes a few steps back. This is weird, he says, over and over again, as he starts to talk to me about it. It occurred to me that he was reacting to what I perceive to be my fey current, but I trust his judgment on this matter.

We talked for maybe half an hour amidst further periodic experimentation, about trauma, involuntary shielding, and how to start letting the shields down when you don't even know how they got there in the first place. He brought up some good points, some of which I'd considered before (get rid of the psychological/emotional issues, and you get rid of the cause for such shielding, and accordingly the shielding starts to go away), but it's good to have outside input/confirmation on this. He knows, too, he said, that reiki can be used to heal emotional/psychic wounds. But he doesn't feel competent enough to do that yet.

I am actually set to receive a reiki attunement and the corresponding training, in October. I hope I'll at least be able to drop the shielding by then. Not only will the attunement take better, I think, but I think it'll be healthy for me just in general. Not to mention that I think it'll make my 'kin side brighter, as it were.

(further camping stories under the beltaine 2008 trip tag)

I made mention in the first camping story post to a walking stick, I think, but I didn't go into it--long story short, I went into the woods, got a branch to balance with so I wouldn't fall as I was going up and down the slopes, and ended up feeling compelled to work it over the course of my stay. I attribute that primarily to the land wights, not anything internal. Here, take this, make use of it, play with it--it's from us.

While I was doing that I felt like all of a sudden I understood the whole cold iron thing, which is one of those things I don't twig to (!) instinctively. (Admittedly, though, I was understanding it in relationship to the supernatural world in general, not in relationship to myself and my own 'kinness.) When I brought it back to camp and started messing with the branch, I was offered knives, over and over again, to work the wood. And I turned them down again and again, increasingly pettishly, increasingly repulsed. Knives weren't right. Not my knives, not anybody else's knives. Knives were hard and unyielding and cold, and with this it was between me--my own flesh and blood--and the stick I was working. I'd peel off the bark with my fingernails, heat it over the fire, but metal was cold and unnatural and wrong and I'd have none of it. This was from the forest, and damn it, it'd stay that way.

(That said, I did hand off the staff the next morning to a friend who professed interest--apparently she loved what I'd done with very literally my bare hands. I don't have need for a staff but I wasn't about to work it and cast it off into the forest--it was a gift, after all. I don't know what she'll do to it, how she'll treat it, if she'll carve off the rest of the bark or add crystals or anything. Nor do I really care--working the staff on my own, with my own personal power, was what was important.)

(further camping stories under the beltaine 2008 trip tag)

While I was out camping that weekend one of my friends officially came out to me as otherkin. So much for faedar. Since I met her a few months ago I'd been more focusing on how she reminded me of someone I knew than on any otherworldliness. The Silver Elves, though, like to say that if you reach out 'kin come--so maybe that's it? Synchronicity in the extreme. (And what's this blog, if not a way of reaching out?)

I'd been very excited for a long time about the prospect of meeting another 'kin, and imagined lengthy chats on origin stories, lots of energy games, and just a whole lot of chatter about it. Instead what I got was a very nice reserved chat, not metaphysics and ontology--we shared symptoms and Awakening stories and that was all. We might as well have been talking about sports teams.

I wouldn't call it anticlimactic per se. The whole feeling of you too, huh? that's cool. wasn't what I expected but I found it very pleasant and relaxed. It's very nice to feel like it's just a normal thing and not a big deal.

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.