With the Feathered Seer workshop just a few days away, I thought I would share a glimpse into the origins of the story around which we will be building the weekend…

I had met her before, thinking her a dream of the landscape, born of the mists and the magic. Imagination. Fantasy. Perhaps she is. Perhaps I delude myself with my listening. Perhaps my tears fall for a will-o-the-wisp. Who can say?

Do I believe in ghosts? The dead have better things to do with their lives than linger here in longing, clinging to a world they cannot touch and wishes they cannot hold.

Do we call them back with our desire? Are we children tugging at their apron strings as they move forwards through the layers of existence, passing through otherworlds we try to glimpse in our fear and curiosity, in our inability to let them lie?

The Old Ones honoured their dead, giving them a place of peace by the hearthfire or laying them in the womb of earth to be reborn to a new life. On one day a year the ancestors were invited in, and those who lived became those who were gone. Why grieve when there is no goodbye, only a farewell?

Our sterile deaths, hidden behind closed doors and commercially sanitised, do not permit us such familiarity.

I saw her death in all its raw beauty; saw her bones cleaned to white and marked with love.

Yet there are tales of those who return, those whose Work is unfinished and who wait, outside of time, for completion…

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