I am in a clearing, and it is familiar, and I ma standing under a tree who loves me. Unafraid, comfortable, I walk down the path, toward the stone-lined pool I know is there. I remove from my pockets and throw into the pool the things I will not need for this journey: keys, and handfuls and handfuls of change, for this journey will have nothing to do with possessions. I look in the water and see by my reflection that I am a woman.
I rise and head back the way I came, past the tree who loves me. I head into a piney wood and it is cool and dark.
I am comfortable in the wood, for it is familiar, and the cool air feels good on my breasts and thighs. I am naked, and enjoying the feel of the soft pine needles on my bare feet.
I enter the round garden and sit on a bench and ask Grandfather to open His wings, and my wings open, and they are butterfly wings of the purest, most vibrant blue, and by this I know my power is in my voice tonight.
I look around the garden, and see that in the center is a fountain centered on a frolicking Pan. Roses have overgrown it, and a yellow one [color of friendship] opens before my eyes. In the water are moonstones, and I take one. It glows, and I put it in the spirit bag around my neck.
At one corner of the garden is a fountain like an ugly face vomiting water into a trough. The interior of the trough is turquoise blue, and there are fish in it.
As I head out of the garden, I notice it is laid out in a pentacle, and this makes me happy, even though the orientation is wrong.
I am now clothed in diaphanous blue silks.
I leave the garden, heading deeper into the wood, looking for the shrineof the Lady. Something tells me to look back and to the right, and I see a flash of white. Is it a deer? A woman's dress?
As I run after it, I know it to be a horse, and more, a Unicorn. I follow, running faster than any mortal has a right to, until I notice my pace has become a four-beat, and I have transformed, and am myself a white Unicorn, chasing this Other, who is not the Lady, but a stallion.
I notice he is wearing a harness and use my horn to free him. Instantly we both transform, I back to human female, and he into a green-clad man with a beard, rather like Errol Flynn as Robin Hood.
"But, I am here to find the Lady," I protest.
"Lady, I am here to find you," he replies. We kiss, and make love, and almost before he is done my belly swells and I am full pregnant. The man is gone. I give birth to a boy-child who grows rapidly and leaves in search of a girl. I mourn his loss, and suddenly at my side is an Old Man with a white beard.
Now I am a Crone, and I am in the Moon, and in a sparrow, and in myself, and the Moon and myself are like two ends of a string, with the sparrow flying, tethered, between us.
The sparrow dies, and falls, and I feel it as myself, but I am not sad, for I know it was his time. I bend to my task, which is cutting flowers. Some are fresh buds and some are wilted and old, and where I have cut them, strange new plants vigorously grow in their place.
A voice says, "You are all of these, Maiden, Mother, Crone, Puck, Green Man and Claus. All this is within you. You are the seed and the field. You can plant and you can harvest. You musn't forget that both are your job."
And I find myself back at the base of the tree who loves me, and then find my way back home.
January 17, 1998
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