Find some trees and tell them a story
They're waiting for you
What a week.
I’ve been bowled over by the response to last week’s post (linked below). Dozens of you have emailed and messaged and approached me in person to say that you feel this strange, witchy, high priestess power too. That you feel invisible in this power too.
Then, on Saturday, just days after I’d given voice to the invisibility of my—our—witchy potency, I got to stand up in the forest, in front of a crowd of people, and speak aloud the story of Rhiannon. To speak the story of how the earthly kingdom of Dyfed brought the goddess Rhiannon to her knees.
This is a story for all the high priestesses, and I want to tell it to you. And I will, in the coming weeks. This week, I’m exhausted and navigating shifts that feel tectonic, so I’ll just say this:
For years now, I, like so many others, have been saying that even as the world we have known falls apart, something else is stirring. Other, older powers and ways of being are reawakening.
I’ve been saying that and gripping to it as though my life depended on it. But I’m not sure that I’ve really felt it, until this past week.
Telling a story to some trees might seem like nothing, in the face of the horrifying events unfolding in the world as we speak.
But so many of the world’s problems are rooted in severance from the vast energies that swirl before and beyond the material realm. First we became (quite naturally) fearful in these ridiculously fragile and needy bodies we inhabit, then we became fixated on security and safety, then we lost our rituals, then we lost contact with the imaginal and spiritual realms, then we began to treat the now-severed material realm as something we can invade and abuse and snatch with impunity in service of our own security, then we began to treat people and nonhuman people as flesh and resources and targets rather than incarnations of the sacred. And in the midst of all this, faith all too often stopped being a felt sense of belonging and of humility in the face of much larger and more potent mysteries, and became an instrument of power.
From where I sit, this seems to be the path that huge swathes of humanity have trodden. The path that has led us to the world we inhabit today.
Telling a story to some trees won’t change everything.
And it’s not a replacement for standing up for what’s right, especially as our governments stand derelict in their duty.
But even so, I would encourage you to find some trees and tell them a story. Make them an offering. You might find, like my friends and I did at the weekend, that something magical happens. Something I can’t quite put into words just yet. Something that is waiting to unfold for you too, because it’s at the beating heart of life in a world that is so much more than material.
x Ellie