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Yet another well-timed piece of knowledge has fallen our way: a class in Working with the Power of Place presented by Orion Foxwood at the Chesapeake Pagan Community’s Summer Gathering at Ramblewood this past weekend.  In the course of this talk, Lord Orion provided a series of steps to initiating communication with a land spirit.  The results were amazingly powerful and something I hope to incorporate into our work with Will.  After some practice with the techniques here at Faerewood, I’ll take a trip up to Wilmington and give it a try there.  Stay tuned.

Keepers held our Lammas ritual at the Brandywine Creek State Park today. The day was beautiful — hot but breezy — a break from the killer heat of the previous week. The ritual was dedicated to Lugh and Tailitu — Tailitu being the Celtic land spirit who sacrificed herself to provide for the people of old by clearing a forest for planting, dying of exhaustion after her labors. Before the ritual, I spoke about how land spirits used to be seen as real personalities (like Tailitu) who were engaged with and honored in the same way as the gods, ancestors and other discarnate beings. The land spirits are still with us but we generally forget about them. Tailitu’s plea to the humans before she departed was that they not forget her. With this ritual — as well as the one of the previous Lammas, Keepers of the Holly Chalice vow to remember not only her but her kindred. Kindred like Will.

During the ritual, I invited Will to be present. He acquiesced but didn’t seem to want to get directly involved, hanging off to the side at the north of the circle (Nanette said afterward that she felt the presence of someone outside the circle, beyond the north gate). The energetic focus of the ritual was a pitcher of water set on our central (“picnic blanket”) altar. Janice and I, aspecting Tailitu and Lugh, poured the charged water into four chalices at each of the quarters. At the close of the circle, Jim poured the water as a libation to the land.

When the ritual was over, Will told me that while he didn’t understand exactly what we were doing, he could feel our intent in the water poured onto his ground. He said that intent is the bridge that spans between our world and his. Very interesting.

After several weeks of inactivity (due to the stronger pull of other duties), the Wilmington Project got a shot in the arm this past week. I’d been vowing to “learn something about dowsing or find someone who knows how or . . .” Given the lack of resolution of this thought, imagine my relief to discover that the universe was taking action on this for me. Behold! — at the Pagan Spirit Gathering in Ohio that we’d long been planning to attend, there would be a class on Dowsing and Geomancy.

At the gathering (this past week), I marked my schedule carefully to make sure that no volunteer duties, etc. would interfere with the class time. As the time approached, word went around that a major storm with 60 MPH winds and big hail was headed our way. Ugrh. We battened down the camp as best we could and I set off for “The Yurt” where the class was to be held. (the storm never materialized, BTW. I suspect strong weather magick 😉

Kathleen and Breighton Dawe (see: [url]http://www.stonecirclealternatives.com[/url]) were the presenters for the class. Their enthusiasm for the subject was abundantly clear and, even the most jaded or skeptical among the attendees was caught up in their excitement by the end of the hour and a half. As you might imagine, there was far more material to be covered than the time permitted but the upshot is that I now have first-hand experience of dowsing (the little rods moved “by themselves” as I walked over the buried water pipe and I said “Holy EXPLETIVE!!”).

In addition to speaking about and demonstrating dowsing at a place where you are physically present, the Dawes spoke about map dowsing, the technique I was hoping to use to find most of the ley lines in Wilmington. In aid of this, I have purchased four copies of the folding map of the city and suggest that we distribute these to whomever wants to try their hand at finding the lines (it involves using a pendulum over the map — more to follow). After doing so, we’ll compare results and see where they converge and diverge from one another. When we’re confident that we’ve found at least one “real” line by the map dowsing technique, I’ll organize a trip to check it out in the field.

 

In chatting with Mark last night, the idea surfaced to perhaps cast a triangle of stillness at the ley-line center juncture point we’re going to try to find and see what messages or effect we get. Potentially burying crystals in the same area was mentioned. Will run it by Ivo, of course, before we do anything.  Would like to learn ways to strengthen our shields from unsavory entities first also.

Michael Smith poured a Wiccan-protocol sweat lodge at Seelie Court today. In the fifth (Spirit) round, I went within and invited Charm into the lodge as I have done many times before. In my earlier contacts with her in the late ’90s, she had extended a kind of protection to me to help ward off the “baddies” on the subtle planes. Once my work with her was completed, she told me that I no longer needed that protection. Today, however, she said,

“You’re going to be needing some help again. There are guys out there that want to twist what you’re doing or thwart it altogether. I’m going to put you under the umbrella again — you and any of your group who need it while you work with Will.”

Will and I met at the spot on the bank of the Brandywine where the group had taken shelter under the shade of some trees.  I wanted to re-iterate our purpose to him one-on-one and answer any remaining qualms he might have about these Earth-plane beings muscling in on his turf.  He was more open than he had been earlier and we spoke for a while about what kinds of things we could do to help him (i.e., redirect energy with crystals, perform rituals, etc.)  Without saying anything, he provided me with a flash of an image of rutilated quartz.  I understood that the filaments of rutile in the crystal could be seen as a microcosmic representation of ley lines and that by orienting the crystal in the proper way, we could strengthen the lines and, to a degree, bend them in new directions so as to make new “circuits” around disrupted points.

Returned to the same astral spot on the river bank and called out to Will.  He walked up to me and we greeted with the tentative familiarity of new friends.  After some conversation, he pointed out the spot in the river that I had earlier identified as the possible focus of several ley lines (Ivo has subsequently informed me that it is further down stream near the Baynard Blvd. bridge).  At his suggestion, I placed myself in the path of the nearest line and had the amazing experience of becoming the ley line.  My consciousness was stretched miles in length and to nearly a single point in thickness.  I could sense the places where the line was strong (in the vicinity of the park) and places where it faltered, then took up strength again.

A group of us met in Brandywine Park near the zoo in Wilmington. The weather could not have been better — warm and sunny with gentle breezes. We found a spot on the lawn between the zoo and the river and made our first contact with a being whom we’ll refer to as “Will”, the genius loci of the greater Wilmington area.

Continue reading “The First Step”