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My friend has been duly delivered to the coach station and I am home, having a coffee before tackling all the housework, going to my son’s and packing a bag for morning.

Tomorrow I am in hospital for surgery to try and get some answers, and hopefully a solution,  to the problems that have been bothering me for some time. It would be nice to think the surgeons can sort things out.

I need to fix the fence too, blown down in Friday’s winds. So far Ani has not investigated too closely, but as Stuart is no longer here for her to play ball with, jump on, cuddle and generally monopolise, I am a little concerned she may see the possibilities and I am not going to be up to chasing madam through the village fields if she escapes.

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There is a lot to do, the ‘ordinary’ life has to take precedence today, yet my mind is buzzing  with ideas and images of the weekend’s adventure in the green and gold of the landscape. On the table lies a tiny bit of glory. It looks like a small clump of feathers, but in reality it was a gift from the morning, unexpectedly glowing with iridescent rainbow colours.

In many ways this typifies the past few days, where simple appearances, ancient places and mellowed stone have opened their hearts and shown unexpected joys and wonder within. They had always been there, but it needs the heart to see them as well as the eyes.

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Red kite feathers found at ‘Kim’s Castle’ and later eaten by Ani!

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It is so easy to get bogged down in the necessities of the mundane, allowing rote, worry and habit to fog that inner vision so that the innate sacredness of life and the world through which we walk is forgotten. This weekend was a clean wind blowing through and reminding me of the sanctity of even the smallest of things.

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Walking in sunlight, on hills dotted with wild orchids and cowslips, fragrant with wild thyme and oregano, where the grass is starred with the pure white petals of wild strawberries, it is easy to remember that our ancestors knew the earth as the body of a goddess and saw all things as holding divinity within. A sacred spring, the healing waters sparkling in the dappled gold as they have done for centuries, perhaps millennia, washes away the scales from the eyes and reminds me of the continuous thread of life of which each of us is a fine, silken strand, needful in the pattern of the greater tapestry of existence.

To hear the kites cry overhead, above the hills in the morning and again over my home as I prepare to address necessity once more, reminds me that there is no difference between those days outside of time where we let the land carry us on wings of imagination and the times where duty and need call us back into the humdrum routine. The world does not lose its sparkle, nor life its sanctity. We forget to see it, our attention called back to the little things that make up our days, not realising, perhaps, that even in this we are part of a greater life and that joy and beauty await only our awareness of them beneath the simplicity of appearances.

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The image which became the cover for the first edition of The Initiate.

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The latest edition…

THE INITIATE

Book One of the Triad of Albion

Stuart France & Sue Vincent

The Initiate is the story of a journey beyond the realms of our accustomed normality.

It is a true story told in a fictional manner. In just such a way did the Bards of old hide in the legends and deeds of folk heroes, those deeper truths for those ‘with eyes to see and ears to hear’.

Don and Wen, two founding members of a new Esoteric School, meet to explore an ancient sacred site, as a prelude to the School’s opening event. The new School is to be based upon a nine-fold system and operate under the aegis of the Horus Hawk.

The trip does not unfold as planned.

Instead, Don and Wen, guided by the birds, find themselves embarking upon a journey that will lead them through a maze of spiritual symbolism, to magical mysteries and the shadowy figure of the Ninth Knight.

As the veils thin and waver, time shifts and the present is peopled with shadowy figures of the past, weaving their tales through a quest for understanding and opening wide the doors of perception…

Available via Amazon worldwide.

Paperback UK     Kindle UK    Paperback Amazon.com    Kindle Amazon.com