Remembering, Part 2: Maybe Avalon

Yeats wrote "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."  As I headed out on a post-breakfast walk the morning after our late arrival at Crapnell B & B, my senses had never been more sharp, nor more alert to the magic surrounding me.  The narrow road might have been approaching a castle, only it was too wild for that...part broken pavement and part dirt; tall dense hedges grew on both sides.  Occasionally I met a tree.  And they all felt alive to me with their twisted, dancing branches; their humanoid trunks rising from the earth like giants, guarding the secrets beyond the hedges.  No, this road led to the heart of Fae.  

 

I smiled listening to the pebble-y stones crunch beneath my Hunter's.  One puddle pooled on the side of my magical road proved too irresistible so I jumped.  And splashed.  I maybe giggled once or twice.  Every step a discovery....

The tiny but brilliant purple flower with beads of dew.  

The pale yellow, almost white flowers with a sunny core ringed in red.

The heart in the hedge.

The dryad trying to break free from the tree, its bud-hand ready to bloom.

Out of breath from exertion and perhaps too much wonder in so little space a time, I turned around to take stock of just how far I had come.  The hill the road climbed and clung to didn't seem all that impressive really as I was climbing along with it.   But there It was.  I had no idea I was sleeping so close!  I marveled when it was re-created at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, but this...this was the REAL THING.  

Glastonbury Tor.  

Ritual.  Pilgrimage.  Home to fae folk.  Pulsing with the quest of King Arthur and his Knights to find the Holy Grail.  Its terraced slopes perhaps an ancient labyrinth.  And maybe....the ancient isle of Avalon, the wonder of all thin places....where living and dead, seen and unseen....meet.  

Magic.