She Is

There is a real world; 

there is a magical world, too. 

Sometimes we forget the magical one, 

struggling too hard 

in the painful, dirty, bloody real one.  

But the magic is here, and 

She is here, too, 

Our Nightmare Mistress, Life in Death.

www.hannahboeving.com
artist

Sometimes she reaches down and touches,
Be still and sense 

just the slightest grace.  

The gold of autumn against blue sky, 

spring green -- poignant, aching. 

                           Heavy languid summer,                          
leaves, bliss in whisper of air.

White frozen lake of winter, 
crystal glitter bubbles riming the edge
so the fallen fool can contemplate 
the looking glass, gazing into glacier.

In each season 

She whispers a syllable in the ear, 

sprouts a mushroom, 

sings a bird ,

offers a single, starburst wildflower, 

tosses a stone from nowhere 

to ripple the pond.  

That's a

life worth living.  

The ghosts I've seen 

near bodies dancing,
 heart's pumping blood spilled
on sandy shores.

I've blessed you, chorusing cicada, 

geese exulting through a torn sky.

Moonlight, starlight, 
wind and rain and stinging snow. 

I've seen the Aten,

 clamoring hands reaching 

from below the horizon,

my eyes 

swimming in seawater,
heard souls at the gate 

of that incandescent chantry...

Juliet Waldron

See all my historical novels @

http://julietwaldron.com/books.htm

A Visit to the Fey

I was recently privileged to join in a procession of the Fey--behind no less a personage than the Queen of Fairies, as a part of her entourage. This doesn't happen to a human very often, and certainly not often to elder humans. 

Old people remind the Queen of decay and death, things she does not allow within her realm, her realm which is eternal--ever-green--as they say. She and her subjects do not age; they are forever young and fair. Therefore, to sing to her and walk beside her people was a great honor for this old woman, definitely a bucket list item.

(Not to say I've never danced with the Fey. I, in the days of my youth--back in the now legendary and generally misunderstood sixties, back when I was young and fair, I participated in her rites--rites which raise energy, and all that naturally follows after, those encounters in the dark scented forest, where all celebrants channeled Venus and Mars. Never mind, it's all back of me now.)

Bay Laurel

The Fairy Queen is a lover of high fashion, of flashing sequined quirks, tinkling bells, supple bare flesh, bejeweled dresses woven with spider's web. She even loves kinky boots, so her devotees wore them too.

Her entourage was more than ready to indulge her every whim, and upon this high magical occasion, they certainly pulled it off. I wore the best dress I had, long sleeves, flowing in mauve, in blue and green. A generous member of Her court gilded my cheek with a star. I braided my long white hair and carried a wand taken from the Holy Laurel. At first I held an inspirational leaf between my lips, like the Delphic Priestess.

  The Queen of Elphame, by Fuseli

Oh, how these fairies shone as they walked, fairy lights and fairy dust around them, making music with their sweet voices, a procession through twilight, following the glorious Queen and her tasty Year King! Beguiled, I followed after. When they began to sing, I took the laurel leaf from between my lips, lifted my laurel wand and had the pleasure of joining my still true voice with theirs.

And what did we sing in our ecstasy--again and again in an endless spiral--but one of the songs which captivate mortals and carry them into a realm that is fickle, cruel, and totally enthralling, a song which the fairies will sing even as the silver flash of a sacrificial knife pierces their own cool fairy hearts:

We shall be free

We shall be free

To sing 

And dance 

And make love--

Won't you come with me?

~~ Walker

AVEBURY

Solstice Song

 

 

 

 

 

The place of dreams,

Of ancestors and bones,

Of chalk and flint,

Of long-lost ceremonies and

The sacred hares’ circle dance.

Beneath Grandmother’s silvered rays,

We breathe magic

Charms of frost.

~Juliet Waldron

 

 

 

 

BLACK MAGIC - An excerpt

 

(Published by surprise--but here it is while I run around like crazy, playing internet catch-up!)

 

           Goran turned and found himself standing on a high rock shelf above a hollow filled with thorns. He saw the eyes, gazing out at him. Glowing bright living eyes, like green fire! He’d only thought of the Great Boar, the eyes in the thicket down in the oak woods—and suddenly, he was there.

            I thought you might be here.

            And so I am, Great One.

            What is it about that particular rock, Held, that you like so much?

            Wanting to make some sort of an answer, Goran gazed down at his feet and then rather wished he hadn’t. It was shocking to see what they had become, legs ending in the talons of a bird of prey. The rock below was ordinary granite, dotted with a few white flecks of marble.

 

            As he did so, a little puzzled, a buzzing rush of energy blasted into his feet.

            Ah! This rock is an excellent place, full of power!

 

                                

~ Juliet Waldron ~

 

 

 

 

Buy the Book:  (I could really use a review...)

 

http://amzn.com/B00P9TW046

 

 

http://www.bookswelove.net/julietwaldron.php

 

 

Rabbits Don't Lay Eggs

 

I’ve always wanted to come to the bottom of this particularly odd imagery which goes hand in hand with Easter. When I was little, back in the early fifties, I received an Easter basket, usually complete with a fluffy toy bunny. We had festive posters on the school room walls of cheerful rabbits carrying baskets of colored eggs.  Bunnies=Easter—that was simply how it was. Nothing to do with the awe-full Christian story of agony and resurrection, of course, but running in inexplicable tandem.

As I grew older, I became fascinated with mythology and with history. Following those tracks back to the  long ago place where they merge, I came upon a Saxon goddess named Eostre, whose arrival brought spring to the isles. Like others of her regenerative earth goddess kind, flowers sprang up where she walked.  Eggs are laid in spring, and so perhaps, I thought, the basket is actually a nest, containing eggs, and the eggs and new born rabbits and all the other creatures who begin their life cycles at this time have simply become conflated into a mash-up of imagery.

This satisfied me for a very long time, until this year, in fact, when, with input from British scholars, Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm, I think I’ve finally come to the bottom of the rabbit with the eggs conundrum.  Long ago, in England, before the Romans came, there were only “hares,” decidedly not the same animal as the smaller, “silly rabbit.” They were larger, wily relatives of the white Arctic Hare, thriving in the extensive, grazing-created grasslands of the Neolithic.  Hares do not sleep in burrows, but in “forms,” made by their neatly tucked up bodies in the long grass.  

A British bird, the lapwing, shares this habitat. She lays her eggs on the ground, like the American whippoorwill. She even does a similar “my wing is broken” routine to lead predators away from her eggs/chicks. Sometimes the lapwing makes use of a hare’s abandoned “form” for her eggs—and presto!

Ancient people saw the forms, sometimes containing the pretty speckled eggs of the lapwing, and a magical image was born. To put a cap on it, at least from any long-ago islander's point of view, both these animals belonged the earth goddess, Eostre, the sweet lady who brought fertility and flowers, so welcome after winter’s dead time.

It never ceases to amaze, what a very long time a good story can last.

--Juliet Waldron

 * From The Druid Animal Oracle

 http://www.amazon.com/Druid-Animal-Oracle-Philip-Carr-Gomm/dp/0671503006/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332938208&sr=1-1

http://www.julietwaldron.com

 Image from:  celticawitch.wordpress.com

 

Why Crone Henge?

Well, here we are, ladies--gray ladies, ladies with time travel privileges, about to add our nickel to the blogosphere.

Why Crone Henge? Well, most of us are Crones, exhausted by life, but not entirely--and we have a few things we'd like to say. After all, per Jimi Hendrix, we've been experienced, aged like single malt in a old sherry cask. The "henge" part is a bit trickey, as it comes from the Anglo-Saxon word hangen, or the gallow's tree, but it also vaguely carries a sense of something handmade, an object, sometimes made of earth or stone. In this case our henge is made of words. But I shouldn't run from the literal "gallows," either, for it was on just such an instrument that Odin did his best work.

We Crones want to talk about things we know--we, after all, ARE THE WOMEN, the ones who were there, the ones who have traveled from the middle of the last century and remember life before the computer, the cell phone, and the internet--before mandatory car seats and long before kids had no bedtimes. We've got pictures of our own human past to transmit.

We are all writers, and most of us have a strong interest in history, not just for the sake of names and dates and story-telling, but for the way history can help us understand our present, and how it might even give us a glimpse into our grandchildren's future. We'll ponder questions like "what is progress?" and further try to figure out if "progress" is what we imagine it to be, or if "progress" is just one of those jive words. Perhaps "change" is a better way to describe Crone Henge's driver. Change is the only constant in life, and we Crones have rung through plenty.

So, we'll be telling stories, sharing poetry or pictures, essays or prose, whatever seems appropriate. We'll discuss what is formally called "material history." How did folks actually live--for instance--in a medieval village--or, in an almost equally alien setting, in rural Pennsylvania during the 1920s?

What did those people know and what did they believe? This is the past which informs (and infects) our present in various ways, and is therefore worth talking about.

We'll also be telling tales which revolve around The Mysteries: magic, UFOs, crop circles, the theory of Atlantis, shapeshifters, vampires, the transmigration of souls, reincarnation and time travel. Our aim here is to break the boundaries of the dominant paradigm. We shall track down the creepy things that go bump in the night and drag them out from under our beds. Such phenomena are a bona fide piece of the puzzle of human experience and history, from the earliest civilizations to our "modern" today. Crones are traditionally experts in this lore. It just plain comes with the territory when the yard adjacent to yours is the cemetary.

So, Ladies: Onward, into the Fog!

--Juliet Waldron

www.julietwaldron.com