I am indebted to Katryn Jehane Price who inspired this conversation.
Over a tiny perfect arched wooden bridge straight from a willow
pattern plate, I stroll seduced into the beckoning green glade
where spirits of gypsy's dance and play by her faery cottage.
Under wind chimes and prayer flags she takes me in through newly
glazed doors whose panes are her openness, whose latch is her secrecy.
She makes me breakfast, blending ingredients in pottery bowls with a
big wooden spoon while the cat with green eyes looks on. She's not
simply a chef. She's an alchemist. She's not just a fixer. She's a
healer. One brush of her fingertips and you're alive. One touch of her
lips and you're gone.
She's a goddess of transformation at whose feet I sit offering
distinctions I custom build for her in the moment with my words. Hot
strong coffee and french toast with blueberries are sacraments at her
altar. Sunbeams leap and split through prisms and quartz, painting
moving rainbows on her morning walls, framing her alluring smiles with
soft lightning. She can't tell me fast enough how her life is going.
Words spill from her generous mouth, lilting, babbling and tripping
like water meandering through a cool pebbly brook. She's as amazed by
the cosmic benevolence she represents as she is by the day to day
events in her own personal drama. She considers herself blessed. I
consider her smart - very smart.
Putting her hands on a musical instrument which looks as if it's not
made on this planet, she strums and sings in rich dulcet tones, the
warm honey and melted chocolate in her voice opening me to a new world
of music I haven't heard before where language as song transcends
physicality. I'm mesmerized by this beautiful Glinda. I'm entranced by
the spells she casts. I let tears come shamelessly as my fingers seek
something solid to anchor on with which to respond. They find a carved
wooden chest (and who knows what this angelic Pandora
keeps in it ...) on which they're now tapping out a bass line to the
cascades of golden notes she pulls from the strings which touches me as
closely as if she were combing my hair. Her acoustic balms calm me. The
savage beast is soothed.
Draped outside us and all over us like a woodland friar's robe, the
faery cottage has no sharp edges, no predictable shape. It's all
exciting nooks and places. Its wooden shingle walls are its bare,
pleasantly callused skin, its asymmetrical windows its eyes. A bent
chimney flue extends and juts from the roof as if this faery cottage is
pensively smoking a pipe like an Andean matriarch. I sense and respond
to its sylphan feminine energy which draws me to it with a gentle
magnetism I don't understand but I accept and allow. It makes me want
to draw back her covers and look on her nakedness. The faery cottage
seems to breathe - sighing sensually in the cool breeze. It's walls
seem to move ever so gently in response to my flat handed touch ... or
it is just my imagination?
In this place is cessation of all conflict. Here's where peace is a
tangible possibility. In this place is grace alive. Here's where living
the fabulous is simply a matter of choosing to. In this place is heaven
for the asking. Here's where we're each god in our universe ... and
there's only one universe.
In this place, spirit isn't merely spoken about. In this place, spirit
is the spoken word itself, served by happy laughter like Pocahontas,
carefully mentored by gentleness like Tigerlily. In this place, in the
environs of this faery cottage, is anything and everything for those
willing enough to allow their eyes to see what could be, and for those
daring enough to allow their spirits to become what's possible.