Last year, I went through an initiation.
Looking back with fresh eyes, I see that it was a combination of all of my personal kryptonites, rolled into a few short months.
The bureaucracy of house-buying, planning permissions, paper-pushing patriarchy, coupled by a very expensive, very stressful ticking clock. (well, I never promised fairy tales… this IS my underworld).
All this, with the heavy, daily, debilitating nausea that comes in the months of early pregnancy.
I lost a child. For a morning, which felt like forever (we found him, yet all were traumatised, deeply). The rawness of that fear spikes again sometimes.
I lost the baby.
Yet in those months, the Spirits held me. And through the womb-wrenching pain, and heart-hurting wrongness, I learnt to sit in the quiet with the Dark Goddess.
The sacred practices of the Lyceum, the European lineage of honeybee-guided healers to which I belong, kept me tethered. And they still do.
Doing the Spiritual work for close to a decade, I know how the layers just keep on stripping back.
This initiation was not my first, and it won’t be my last.
I know how it feels, and I know how to *not* get lost in the story…
Fast Forward to today…
… And I live in the honeyed hills of rural Herefordshire in the South West of England, with my partner of over a decade, and three little boys who believe, as fiercely as I do, in the realness of magic. Through experience, not hope alone.
My life is a lemniscatic dance, between motherhood and autonomy, between roots and flight, between the here and now, and the beyond places. As a Sagittarius Sun, and an ancestry peppered with traveling folk, journeying between the worlds is my life blood.
There are a thousand synchronicities that make up the pathway of each of us, and likely we’ll never really know what they were…
Yet, here are just a few of mine…
- I am the offspring of a Polish Mathematician and the granddaughter of a gypsy.
- My childhood was spent in the beautiful, rolling rurality of a tiny hamlet in Wiltshire, in the South West of the UK.
- My dad kept bees and I spent every summer sneaking too close to the hives and emerging with bees tangled in my hair and in between my toes (ouch!)
- I am a painter. I studied hard, and learned to paint in oils in my twenties, making vast alabaster canvases that describes mysteries I am only now coming to understand…
- It was an ex-vicar we had staying for a month while he ran the local pantomime, who pushed me into asking the big questions (well, I used to get into conversations with him about God and faith and religion and realised then that I needed a better way to articulate our differences…)
- The first “spiritual” book I read was Bringers of the Dawn, by Barbara Marciniak (I am aaaall about disclosure, baby!)
- The first spiritual training I took, was with an an apprentice of Drunvalo Melchizedek, in the Abbey House in Glastonbury, on my 31st birthday.
- My first blog, was catalysed by a diagnosis of Postnatal Depression. The doctors gave me medication, but I was thoroughly suspicious and knew it wasn’t the answer. So began a personal exploration into the cycles of woman, nature, and the Moon. This is when I began to write and to share. The blog quickly became popular, and taught me a lot about consistency, personal boundaries, and the art of exchange.
- The Lyceum found me. (I think that’s how it is with us all…) It is everything I knew was true as a little girl: The consciousness of nature. The bees. The utter magic. And the Spirits…
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