New Stone Song
New Stone Song
I awake from a dream of bright sun and a spiral dragon leaping out of Gerhwynn’s Mound. It is still dark and the mists have awakened as dawn approaches through the Gateway of Arddwyn. My bed is a mass of scotch moss covering a small ledge several feet up a lichen covered stone cliff. It is barely big enough for me to stretch out comfortably my full 6’10” height.
Comfort is not important to me now. I sleep here to dream the stones. The stones have always hummed their ancient crystalline dirge to me through all of my lifetimes that I can remember. The stones vibrate a language that sings of things only a Stone Dreamer can make sense of. It is the Dreamers holy charge to relate their deep earth chant to those who need to hear it.
Tonight and for many nights now, the stones have been singing about change. A deep energy has shifted within the Mother and prodded the dragons of the lands into a new arc of activity. They agitate within the confines of their earthen caves until they burst forth, spilling their powerful energies into the soft world of Things. The flesh and organs of animals, humans included, cannot help but absorb the dragon as it writhes along the channels once known to the Masters of Old. Unable to contain such energies, a body un trained in the arts can only turn it outward again once it has been ingested. Such heat turned outward inflicts upon certain power inspired personalities the unrelenting urge to gather armies and travel forth to conquer weaker nations. The Dragons, in their unbalanced glory, rattle the nerves of the weak and evoke fear in the insecure, making them feel as if all is lost and each moment the end. They can drive one to take and hoard instead of giving and sharing, if left to rampage freely.
I drop onto the heath knowing my own part to play in achieving balance of the land will require all my skill and knowledge. In these colorless moments before the dawn, I hesitate, wondering if I am prepared to do what is necessary. The thought passes with a smile, sending the dragon on to more susceptible fields for feeding. I turn my face to the sliver of Mother Moon and sense the changes agitating the dragons awake has a haunting potential to swallow the world in disconnected violence.
I crouch in the heather smelling of pungent sweetness, dusty flowers brush against my nose and face as I inhale deeply its powdery essence. My 42 year old hands burrow deep into the soil and time becomes a distant concept. Here is my cathedral. Here is my church where I worship all the elements and listen to their voices. Tonight they tell me change is upon the Land.
I sing ancient words of stone magic to connect with the crystalline minerals sifting through my hands. They sing back and relay images of the New Stone required for anchoring the unbalanced energies in a vivid and monumental geometry. The strong visions come in a morphing cascade of haunting stone song, in which I become the conduit stones for balancing the change. The humming chant resonates through my bones, sending information into the ground and back up again for me to process in my human way.
After some time, I know what is required, the essence of which is revealed to me in a staccato burst of images and unusual feelings. I sense a visceral tug, gently at first, then with increasing vigor, pulling my consciousness back from the stone swirling circles.
I awake sprawled on the old stone alter located there at the center of the previous Stone Dreamer’s circle of ancient anchoring stones. The stones are six to seven foot tall standing upright, worthy in their time but no longer tuned to balance to land. They are gray in this musty dawn, looming from the night mists like hulking warriors guarding something precious. I gather my will and walk the path I have trodden many moons articlebefore, communing with each stone as I ask for guidance. These stones each release to me a particular piece of the over arching puzzle, weaving an energetic tapestry descriptive of, and culminating in, the patterns of ultimate Earthic balance.
I withdraw from the ancient circle as the sun reaches Medwyn’s Gate, directly overhead. As I step through the trilithon stones, my layered prayer chant reflects a deep commitment to completing my duty toward the health of the land. I am now open to receiving visions as to the location of the New Stone.
Harvest light of the Father Sun warms the enveloping vegetated sheath that protects our Mother’s bones, and I soak in His gifts. I retrieve my staff of Yew and a nettle fiber bag for storing edibles during my journey, gratefully certain my path will unfold before me as I set forth, but not a moment sooner. I have no concept as to the direction I will travel, only that it is bursting with otherworldly significance, and a justifiably persistent thrum of magical beckoning.
Ready now, I close my eyes and the way forward is an open channel of calmness. If I turn one way or the other away from this channel and step forward from it’s all encompassing peacefulness, I immediately feel the dread and discomfiture of certain failure. An otherworldly anxiety hovers like a choking oil smoke, which clogs my thoughts, and smells of an old and deep death, wafting up from the bowels of a rat infested cave. By unconsciously spending any time wandering down this foul way, I ensure a deepening sense of dread, the effects of which bind my joints and strikes fear into my soul. To my most obvious benefit, I only require the faintest hint of this stale suffering to steer my way clearly toward my ultimate ambition.
The trees through which I walk are alive with the cadenced song of wood. Each type of tree and woody plant expresses life in a long slow mantra of water, sunlight and ground up plant and stone dust. What we know of as nutrients flow in a magical slurry of extremely minute interactions seldom seen with the physical eye. One has only to take a moment and smell the bark of a great Oak to receive the speech of trees. In this state of communion, one comes to understand and be a witness to the dramatic adventure encompassing the magnificent growth of trees. The membrane between leaf and air is a particularly exciting zone of magical activity with sunlight fueling the exchange of important life elements.
Even I, Stone Dreamer known as Teulimach, can feel this exchange when I close my eyes and open my inner sight to the subtle energies existing beyond the visual senses. It is a riot of activity and color into which I drop, I am as a seed head drifting slowly on a breeze into the lip like structures of the leaves surface. In I go and down I go, into the life factories that create continuous growth ever outward toward the light. I drift into structures looking like the homes people in cities live in, row upon row of little rooms connected together by vibrating walls, undulating colors rippling as I pass by, unnoticed by the teeming activity necessary for growing bark and stems, leaves and flowers, fruits and nuts. All of which convey the purpose of growth in rhythmic spanuiles. I witness this and more as if I were a tiny gnat flying about a castle construction site. From the leaves I flow into the tiny twigs and float down through the branches into the trunk which is a widely spaced mansion of tiny rooms lined up as far as the eye can see. Stacked layer upon layer they are a sea of pulsing opalescent cubicles exchanging pieces of water and rock, air and sun. Each small room talks to the one next in line as wave upon wave of vibratory energy is passed in shivering pulses up and down the ranks, speaking to each other in an ancient arboreal language. The building blocks of life are shunted off at the appropriate moment up and down the trunk, unknown signals triggering their direction, speed and quantity.
I am moving still downward through the tree, I continue to float in this effervescent grid matrix, down through the branching cities of the trunk’s hierarchal structures. I flow like water in reverse, observing with drunken eyes shapes of old oak growth filtering past me. Long vertical lines of stacked modules resembling colorful octopus with infinitely interconnecting tendrils press into my vision, laughing as they lead me into their gyrating maws where my dreams come to life on the surface of a bubble.
Now smells harass my senses as I drift within the tree’s body, binding me to their ebullience and rolling me like a twig down a waterfall into the root zone. Here, I am introduced to a magician scented with some exotic spice and to a master gardener smelling like old wet leaves and honey. They don’t quite appear in full body, but remain a distant apparition whispering to me secrets of the oak. Secrets, which lead me tittering through the tangle of gnarly roots until I am stopped with the suddenness of hitting a stone wall. I watch the slick end of a writhing octopus tendril turn into the glowing white hair sized follicle of a root tip, sparkling with electrical signals and interacting in a most un-seemly manner with the microbial soil community deep under ground. At the end of the slick thin root hair worlds of riotous trading occurs, like the ocean making contact with the land, and at it a vibrant port city bringing the goods of life to and fro.
Colors slide up and down the edges of the writhing tendrils in green bands which flow like steady rivers. The green bands change their colors at regular intervals from green to blue to violet to red, orange, yellow then finally white. I am aware my time within the oak is coming to an end, my audience with the magical mysteries floating towards an immediate fruition. As I withdraw my observer perspective, the intervals of changing color and rolling spheres increase like the hyper active patter of the moths wings at a candle, until the tendril itself takes on the movement and color shifts creating a alchemical phase gate, through which I walk under my own power, returned to my body and senses once again in the world of things.
I drift out of the oak scented cathedral and move through the forest in a mist buoyed trance, a daze full of conversation with plants and elementals. Sun and wind generate a magnetic resonance, which I hear as voices telling me grand stories of what is and what will be. The voices fuse into a single Bardic poem, a cacophony of divergent voices merging into a magnificent fugue, harmonizing with unprecedented clarity. They spring forward to tell the tale. What they say is not in worldly words but rather instead, hints of images that pluck at the edges of feeling and burrow up from the subconscious like a lost memory.
This conversation continues as I travel along deer and boar paths until I enter a clearing filled with late summer yellow buttercups, watercress, and sedge grasses whispering their contribution to the fugue. I come back to this material reality like a genteel dandelion seed drifting in on a breeze. It is late in the day, only moments away from the Sunset Gateway. I feel the hunger one receives as a gift upon returning from the embrace of the plant journey. I open my hemp bag and snack heartily upon some dried berries and nuts I had gathered days ago in preparation for my expedition.
As I sit amidst the floating seeds and dust of the new day, I sense the keening vibration of another human in the area, a pulse wafting through the Pattern like a memory from childhood. It is male, and familiar. So comes Conchubahar, son of Thoren from the northern mountains. I send Conchubahar a welcome thought and keep my eyes closed while ensconced in this harmonic state of connection. I am tuned in to the Pattern and happy beyond memory, knowing my purpose, and happily awaiting the unfolding of destiny. More humans enter the glade as the sun travels through the cycle called a day; men, women, magicians, priestesses, wise wombyen, and warriors. My supporting cabal has found their way to our meeting place as prescribed by the guiding principles of our guild, following their own internal guidance. Figures emerge from the forest spaced evenly about the edge of the clearing. Counting subconsciously there are 19. They will hold the patterns of oscillating life in balance for my Balbec Nantrac, my journey into the Dragon Flow.
The Dragon Flow is raw nature’s power, sinuous rivulets of divergent energy forming spontaneously within the Pattern to create huge rivers of hot, creative potential through the Land. To merge with them I must tread a knife’s edge of intense energetic balance. Stewarded by great teachers over my lifetime, and recently activated powers induced through hours of meditation and practice at the edges of the Dragon’s Flow, this is the first time I have entertained the mergance with the mystical harmonics of Earth’s power grid.. I am jubilant, because though one misstep would cause my current bodily and mental death, I know without a doubt, my path is stable and clear. Defined by total immersion in the truth of the moment and in touch with the Patterns, I reach out to embrace the sound of the New Stone, the Ridge of crystalline harmonics that will swing the Dragon’s power toward harmony and away from chaos. I feel it as a hint at first, a distant spark against a constant shower of bubbling white noise.
Soon, a night or a lifetime passes as I tune myself more deeply to it’s song, the New Stone’s voice calls across the land like a clarion call for all to hear, a pulsing cry singing the song of returned balance. I hear this song and open my eyes toward the new dawn, the bones of the earth directing me to erect this new voice, and bring peace to the fields and the forests once again.
