The beginning of a story that began in another time
Looking down at the earth below me I see myself, but this is another time and I am not the same as I am now. My hair is long and matted. Dressed in roughly woven cloth, I appear to be about 25 years old. Whether by choice or by decree, something tells me I am an outcast in this place. The time is long ago. It is a cold part of the world, up north near the Arctic Circle.
Nothing distinguishes the landscape except for its pristine beauty. I am the only two-legged inhabitant. My house sits on a plain near an ultramarine-blue river. A mountain range runs parallel to it. There are glaciers on the peaks but its early spring and the water’s rushing hard from the snow- melt.
How I came to be here and how long this has been my home I cannot tell – but I have lived here long enough to feel as though I am no longer human. Close to the elements and imbued with those frequencies, I have become such a totally natural creature it seems as if I am no different than the stones that line the riverbed, or the flowers that grow near it.
On this day I am skirting the perimeter of my home. Half in the ground, it is built of stones and moss and earth. The roof slopes down close to the foundation. There are no windows, just a door made of driftwood and tree bark. The ground underneath my feet is soft. It’s been a long winter and I am outside enjoying the sunlight and looking for leeks.
I belong to this place. I know nothing else. And in knowing it I have turned into a sorceress without even understanding what that means. My magic flows out from me the same way the river flows. It is who I am. And in being myself I have learned how to heal and transmute anything.
In the distance I see a figure coming through the mountain pass. Something in me wakes up. It is him again, the God-man who comes every time the seasons change. The last time he appeared the snows fell so deep he stayed with me until spring. Three moons have passed and he’s come out of the mountain again.
I know nothing of this man except who he is when he’s with me. I don’t know about his life in the village on the other side of the mountain, nor do I know what brings him here. To me he is an apparition that comes to life and becomes part of my world in cycles, like the moon, until he disappears again. As the only other human I ever see, this man is God to me. Watching him and seeing him in the distance I am beside myself. It will be dusk before he gets here.
The vision moves to a scene that must have taken place several years after the one described above. I am down near the water’s edge, lying on my belly, crying into the river. It has been one whole year since the man came. The wind tells me he is dead. Alone in the place where the two of us came to life, my grief goes to the verge of lunacy. With nothing but the elements to keep me sane, in time, I find my reason for living in the world that was there before he entered it.
For 700 years this grief remains locked in my cellular memory. None of it is remembered at the conscious level but all of it is there, waiting to be stirred. Lifetimes pass. It is now 1998. On this particular day I am meditating. In a process that is meant to introduce me to my male aspect, out of the deepest corner of my right lung a tall thin man with a long gray beard emerges from a red mist. Wearing brown leather breeches and a homespun shirt he comes toward me with his right arm outstretched. The staff in his left hand steadies him as he moves over the cobbled path.
He hands me a small leather pouch. No words are exchanged but through some other form of communication he tells me this is his gift to me. Inside the bag are 24 stones, etched with runes. Looking into his eyes, I recognize this man, but my memory isn’t quite ready to place him. The overriding sense is that he is an aspect of myself, one that I am reuniting with after a long period of separation.
That vision, which seemed so much like a fantasy, turned out to be an annunciation of sorts. Within a year the man who walked out of my lung actually walked into my life. He reentered my world on a day when I happened to be sitting in a room with a group of people, waiting for the man who had found a way to heal the earth to deliver a lecture on his research. When the door opened and the speaker started moving toward the podium, it was then that my mind, jarred by memories from an older time, got the first whiff of an inkling that this was the God-man I had known so long ago and never thought I’d see again.
Out of all the people in the room, I was the one who was to have an audience with this man. Arranged months before in a series of phone calls, the meeting would confirm whether or not we would work together. On the surface that’s what was going on. Underneath it all we were there to pick up where we left off.
To be continued……..
Cal Garrison
is a practicing astrologer with 40 years of experience. An author of five books to her credit, Cal is well known for her affiliation with the late Slim Spurling. A single mother with three grown daughters, Cal lives happily in the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. She can be reached at cal.garrison@gmail.com