Weaving a Myth. Of Dreams, Play, and Poetry.

My Name is Andromeda…

 There was a diamond tree that stood deep in the woods behind our house. She was sentry and threshold to a place of innocence and wonder. A place of wild fern and twilight trillium. A place more powerful than a windstorm, or a heart break or the waters of forgetting.

My brother was a wizard then. With Merlin codes and poetry.  He had pajamas and a robe that was the whole cosmos and told the stories of the stars. Maybe it was the stars on his robe that whispered to him this way back into Enchantment.

 The only way into these other worlds was through the diamond tree. She was thin and grey and maybe not all had eyes to see. But from her roots to high branches, spiraling all over her bark, etched by some good magic were hundreds of diamonds. I’ve since researched why she was patterned thus and have learned that these shapes are formed when the young bark cannot stretch enough to accommodate the growing inner wood. The bark must crack to allow the tree to become what it’s meant to be—and where it cracks—diamond shapes form!  So, while an actual diamond is formed through a similar code of becoming-from exposure to staggering heat and crushing pressure miles beneath the surface of the earth, the diamond fissures are formed at the exact points where the old structure lets go and allows new life to expand to fullness.  To my grown-up self, this feels like astonishing symmetry. How can it be that the deep below mirrors the high above so perfectly? How is it that they somehow speak the same language?

 My brother and I didn’t need to know all this to feel the bigness and beauty of what was happening in the woods.  We were not trying to prove there was an organizing law of nature.  We were just playing our own vital role as a part of it.  We were just children, just playing, just holding  the codes that brought it all to life.  

 The diamonds felt like braille beneath my fingers telling me, teaching me. I knew who she was. She was loving protector and magical portal into the other dimensions that were waiting for us. The Faerie realms, celestial soundscapes, the worlds within worlds -were all accessed through Her. With her many eyes she felt like a dozen grandmothers sneaking us the forbidden candy or the secret key to the magic worlds inside us- to our own sacred geometry, our personal gnosis and the most fun we could ever have. No one had to teach us that everything was alive. We still heard the song and felt the soul of the world in it all.

 My name is Andromeda.

 Most of my memories from this point on are of my own solo discoveries. As though my brother brought me to the doorway for me to go it “alone” without a big brothers answers. To let me find my own.

 First stop beyond the diamond tree was Unicorn Valley.  My heart would swell like the tide for the moon every time I stepped through and beheld them. They stood so still at first,  as if they were yet living in the old tapestry with the lady.  Their horns spiraled upwards like ivory towers bathed in moonlight. Colors glowed and danced around them. And I felt something new. I felt safe. Safe and held in this gentle world. Sometimes I’d just lay in the leaves-the sun sifting through the lattice of spruce and pine and feel my unicorn softly nuzzle my face. That’s all I needed sometimes- just to be eternal in this rose-lit, moss covered, love realm.

Other times I felt a jubilant, wildness take over my being and I’d race and dance and spin through the woods. Just beyond the valley was a lake full of water nymphs. They had long auburn hair and pale, shining skin. They would greet me with giddy joy-their favorite little sister-and pull my feet and then all of me into the water.

The water... Crystalline, listening, laughing…pure love

We gazed at all the moving shapes and rainbow light that danced across her surface and within her depths. The Nymphs would sprinkle trails of the water  over me. The rivulets swirled into symbols and patterns of light that dissolved into my skin and lit me up like a Christmas tree or a little moon baby. Mesmerized by tenderness, I was being taught a love language of Sophia.

The Faeries were everywhere-every tree and flower and moss covered stone-gently rearranging my insides-guiding me deeper into things that are true and roomy and humorously alive.

 The birds were singing of it endlessly.

The wind blew it into my lungs.

 And then I felt her right beside me.

“Only love,” she said. “Only love. Everything else is a deception. A forgetting. A denial.”

 When she spoke I went into a little trance. It felt like the tones in her voice were reweaving my insides.

“What can I give to it all?” I asked her. “What can I give to all this love but all my love back? How can that matter?”

 She laughed and turned into an orb. She disappeared and reappeared. She sang as the stream and lit up the sky with fireflies and stars. She was the one in charge here. She was Mother and sister, best friend and teacher. She was the Queen of the Faeries and my own high self.

 I never called her by a name then. I knew her beyond that. She was inside the songs I made up, inside flowers and stones and bones. She was a mystery of sorrow and bliss-of thunderheads and daffodils, of blue birds and snails and of galaxies a million light years away.

 I spent whole summers with her and my other friends in the woods while my human friends were away at camp. I’d stay all day until my mother’s silvery voice called me home at twilight.

 But then, something began to happen. I held on longer than most maybe. I can hardly believe I did it.

 But I grew up.

 And even though there are warnings everywhere in all the good books about not forgetting. I forgot. And the door to these realms shut for me.

I had learned too much of humans and meanness and even horror. So, I turned my back. I forgot it all. The world darkened. The music in my head and in my dreams grew faint …and disappeared.

 But just before I entered my first real descent into the underworld- my own journey of becoming through the burning heat and pressure miles deep in darkness that would seem to last an eternity, I was able to ask a question. Or at least, I was able to lean into the longing to remember something true. Something that could possibly let me in from this cold place.

 And I was answered with a poem.

 I had never written a poem or anything other than journal entries and a few school essays. But a poem came and for a moment, lifted back the curtain to the magic realm I had known. It came in a voice that was both new and known and though I had never thought to ask for a name. It began with an introduction.

My name is Andromeda…”

To be continued…