Lost and found
So where to now? I’ve circled around all the eight pagan festivals back to Samhain, which I marked in multiple ways this year. I birthed a deerskin drum from scratch last month which as a result I feel very connected with - and promptly lost its precious beater the other day! It was made from cherry-wood with hare-skin wrapped around it. I feel foolish and careless and bereft - I think it might have dropped from my makeshift bag whilst carrying miscellaneous things to a feast gathering round the fire with my local shamanic friends. Maybe someone found it and will return it to me, let’s see what happens. Cutting and stretching the drum-skin across its its beautiful ashwood base ring was an incredible experience, all the while thinking of the road-kill deer who had worn it proudly during its life. Now it was ‘becoming part of another body’ as the drum-making teacher evocatively put it; a sounding body which would resonate rhythmically, hopefully bringing as much joy and inspiration as the sound of the hooves of the living animal in the forest once did. I took the drum on a recent retreat and played it under trees, then stayed overnight in a hut at the edge of Alfoxden woods enroute home - which literally shook with the bellowing of several rutting stags all night! This felt very auspicious if also quite scary - one displayed itself proudly to me at sunrise, looking like a living image of a Constable painting or something - astonishing. Anyway, my drum then had its first communal Samhain ceremony outing on Thursday evening, when however its drumstick got lost through my carelessness … may it return safely please.
The next day, I took a friend for a walk to Chun Quoit - a place I love and she really wanted to experience - without first scouting out the novel route to it I wanted to try out as I usually would. We got hopelessly lost in random fields. I got stressed because she gets stressed about such situations, and we ended up in an unfortunate cycle for a spell, making ourselves and each other feel worse rather than better as we trudged through wet and muddy fields, doing a fair bit of trespassing along the way. All was remedied with a coffee and good, honest conversation afterwards; but again I felt I could have easily prevented the whole thing by taking more time and care over the planning of that outing. Having said that though, we had our peak moments: communing with the giant mushroom-shaped quoit once we reached it, and later unexpectedly stumbling across a beautiful willow walking-labyrinth, planted by Lisa, the inspiring owner of this farm: https://higherkeigwin.com/about-us/. This would not have happened without getting lost! However, my friend made it clear that she much preferred a straightforward, permitted path leading to the place she wanted to go to and back again, which I must keep in mind for next time (:
Then last night I took part in an all night gong-bath from which I still feel quite drowsy and somewhat strange. Five women took turns in playing an array of eight enormous elemental gongs while 15 of us lay wrapped in blankets on the floor of an old beautiful barn immersed in the sound, with a crackling wood-fire keeping us warm. To me it felt like the whole thing became like a huge breathing being over the course of the night - either in the deep ocean, like swimming with a whale, or up in space with the stars - I later found out that one of the gongs was indeed called a ‘planetary gong’. It felt amazing to just surrender to the sound, with images and even a visceral feel at times of floating through the ocean and / or space, like a half-waking dream. I did properly fall asleep for a while in the midst of it all and promptly had a hilarious dream of my german friend coming crashing into the proceedings starting to loudly talk to everyone in german, not noticing or realising that we were all in a meditative silence - she seemed unstoppable and I burst out laughing in the dream - maybe that was my own irreverent side coming through? It was funny in that context that stepping out into the field with my cup of breakfast chai in the morning I was immediately greeted by an exuberant puppy excitedly laying a stick at my feet, so there was no chance of any more meditative musing - though I did take a few evocative pictures of the rooks in the filigree leafless trees, during moments when the puppy ran for the stick.
I left the photos of my grandparents I had taken to each of these events behind too - we had been asked to bring a memento of an ancestor. Those images are irreplaceable mementos to me, yet I just forgot about them at the end - luckily for me, my friends noticed and will return the photos to me! So there is clearly some pattern at work here of not taking proper care, not paying deep enough attention - still rushing through things, though I no longer have to do that, I have plenty of time and space now; maybe part of my mind still hasn’t caught up with that change? Anyway, I wrote and burnt an intention that morning in our closing circle, to let go of my impatient rushing (often towards the next thing, something specific I want or expect) and resulting carelessness. I really want to practice slowing down and paying proper attention to what I’m doing more consciously over this next month to see whether it has an effect. So in answer to that typical-of-me question at the start of this post: stop - stay right where you are and deepen and expand that field of awareness ‘inside, outside, all around’, as indigenous cultures would put it - that’s where the real treasures and are to be found, when you’re least expecting them.
