Being a Pagan blogger creates (for me at least) a certain amount of desire to come back with a good story. I was hoping to write about the lunar eclipse this morning. I sat out on a barrow above the Severn, I watched the sun set (as much as the clouds would allow) and I couldn’t even see the moon, much less any part of the eclipse. Today I do not get to write a blog about how beautiful and meaningful I found the night sky on Friday.
I also find this is often the way of it when I go somewhere more as a tourist than not. If I’m going somewhere once, or not very often, even if I feel like it’s pilgrimage, I’m always going to be mostly a tourist. It is daft to expect that I can rock up to a sacred site and have an off the peg, personal, meaningful experience. It’s especially suspect if we think our experience as a tourist gives us more authority than someone who has lived near and worked with a site for a long time.
Landscapes reward relationship. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a famous historical monument there, or not. Landscapes reward people taking the time to get to know them. They reveal themselves slowly, over time. I think we need to be suspicious of anyone, and most especially ourselves, walking into an unfamiliar place and getting a big, dramatic revelation. Especially when the main impact of the revelation is to make the person having it look shiny and important.
When you’re working with intuition, and looking for magic, you have to be alert to what could be ego and imagination. You have to be alert to what you’re taking into a space and how that might colour your experience. I think we also need to be alert to the ways in which talking about what we experience can create a form of spiritual inflation. If you’ve read a lot of woo-woo stories about other people’s amazing and dramatic spiritual encounters, will you feel comfortable saying that nothing happened to you? Or that a very small thing happened to you?
Coming down off the hill on Friday, I turned at the right point to see the moon, low over the hill and briefly free from cloud. Even so, the moon was partially obscured. What showed was large, low and yellowish. The eclipse had long passed. Off to the right, there was a planet and my little party was not sure whether this was Venus or Jupiter. Not knowing felt perfectly comfortable. I’m glad we saw the moon, and I wish we’d seen the eclipse in all its drama and beauty. But at the same time, the land desperately needed those clouds and the days of rain that followed. I watched the clouds coming up from the south and knew they were bringing much needed rain, and was glad to see them.
There is a power in showing up. There are things that happen when you keep showing up to places, open hearted and not expecting too much. There’s a process, and it leads to small wonders and a greater overall sense of the numinous. It doesn’t always lead to good stories or even to things that are easily put into words. There’s a lot to be said for being a person in relationship with the land and I think it’s better for us than focusing too much on stories that put us centre stage.
July 30th, 2018 at 11:05 am
Reblogged this on Blue Dragon Journal.
July 30th, 2018 at 11:52 am
A big load of truth in what you have written. Thank you.
July 31st, 2018 at 4:34 am
[…] {$excerpt:n} And very little happened […]
July 31st, 2018 at 5:38 pm
My story was equally undramatic too. I went to my local sacred site, Castle Hill, and couldn’t see a thing for clouds. I enjoyed getting rained on though and the much-needed torrents that followed a couple of days afterwards.
July 31st, 2018 at 7:18 pm
Since it was so cloudy I didn’t even try to see the special moon, but was looking forward to the much needed rain, as rare this summer as the moon event.
August 2nd, 2018 at 9:29 pm
I also missed the eclipse, not only because it wasn’t visible in my part of the world, but even if it had been visible it was cloudy here. I found what you said about showing up repeatedly intriguing. I seem to move around too much to form much of a connection anywhere. I think I’ll try harder to make as much of a connection as I can.