§7

‘In the summer of 1999 I was working on an enormous archaeological excavation at the future site of terminal five of Heathrow Airport, just to the west of London. There was about seventy of us and we had seven day accommodation a few miles further west at the magnificent/monstrous gothic Victorian pile that is Royal Holloway College. It was wonderful there; it had its own wooded parkland with all sorts of huge, gorgeous mature trees, with tiers of ornamental ponds overhanging with giant gunnera plants and inhabited by huge carp. And best of all it had the Bunny Field (on the far left of the photograph, the upper and smaller of the two green open spaces). This was where we spent every waking hour we could when we weren’t working. We called it the Bunny Field because the bunnies would be all over it grazing whenever you got there and would scarper, but if you sat quietly they’d all come out again and you’d be surrounded by rabbits. It was lovely. Me and my friend *** particularly hung out there all the time, playing frisbee for hours on end. It was an idyll 🙂 Most people went home at weekends, but I was living there seven days a week, and I got reeeally into the Bunny Field. So, I decided that I would stay up all night/for as long as I could one Friday and just be there. So I did. It was amazing; full moon, creaking trees, moonlit pools, strange atmospheres, tiny hooves drumming past me in the darkness (logic tells me it was ‘only’ a muntjac, but of course it was a faun, to tell the poetic truth. More on the faun later.) Anyway, I had a brief nap back in my room (five-minute’s walk away) around 3 am, then awoke totally energised at dead on 4 am and went straight back out. Right, so it’s about 7 am the next morning, it’s mid-July, the sun’s up and already hot, the sky is a cloudless blue and I am in a place of bliss. I’m sitting there in the middle of the slightly sloping field peacefully watching a rabbit, a magpie, and a green woodpecker who are all feeding on the grass slightly down the gradual slope in front of me. I remember that, just before I started watching the animals, I’d been looking at the auras around the trees across the field (I particularly remember a huge copper beech), watching great streams of wispy chi tapering off and up from their crowns. I’d fairly recently learned how to see auras around plants, and I guess I’d got myself into quite a clairvoyant and aware state. Anyway, I’m watching the birds and the bunny, not thinking of anything, when a big shadow coming in from the right zooms over me VERY fast! I whipped about looking for a source. There were no birds in the sky, no trees close enough to harbour any that might’ve been. I turned back round to settle down again and looked to my right and saw about fifty yards away zooming down the field a grey shadow about six feet long, like an amorphous cloud, flying low over the field, and REALLY fast. As I turned my head to face front, another zipped past across in front of me, about the same distance away. And that was my encounter. My first instinct wasn’t to think of anything Other as an explanation. I watched birds fly over and looked at their shadows – and it struck me at that moment as I watched birds fly over that the shadows I saw were actually grey rather than black. Mainly though, pigeons and magpies and ring-neck parakeets and jackdaw weren’t nearly fast enough, or indeed big enough to explain them. In dealings with the unexpected Other, a stamp of authenticity I’ve come to trust is the gradual realisation of the truth of the matter, after all rational avenues have been explored. So wow, I thought, I’ve just seen some sort of elemental! FUCKING AMAZING!!! I was elated! Because they were in the air, and so very swift, I decided that they were Sylphs. That moment changed my life – I got well into learning more about them, and the experience affected me in several profound and wonderful ways. But there’s more. About a year later I was newly settled in the beautiful mediaeval city of Winchester, living with friends and fellow diggers. One friend was getting married and wondered about a pagan handfasting. I said I’d look into it for him, so I phoned up the British Pagan Federation and arranged to meet with a priestess in my vicinity to discuss the matter further. I was invited to come along to one of the local pagan group’s monthly moots in a pub in ***, not far from Winchester. I duly went along, and had my chat with the priestess which was all well and good (though nothing came of the handfasting idea in the end), and afterwards I got a pint and joined some others at a table. One guy introduced himself as *** and one way or another asked me what I was into in the pagan thing. So I told him my story. Now, I specifically remember not telling him where I was when it happened, cos I didn’t want to get bogged down with unnecessary detail. All I began with was ‘I was in a field…’ I could’ve been anywhere in the world. When I’d finished he said ‘You weren’t anywhere near Runnymede (where the Magna Carta was signed) were you?’ I’d been about a mile as the crow flies from Runnymede. My mouth fell open. ‘Were you at Royal Holloway College?’ he asked! Then he pulled aside his jacket and he had a Royal Holloway polo shirt on. He told me that nature spirit experiences were common in that area, and he told me of the faun that lived in the arboretum, and he told me of how the sylphs gather around the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede. That was a memorable evening 🙂 But it’s still not quite the end. A few months later a wise friend gave me Geoffrey Hodson’s Faeries at Work and Play for my birthday. Hodson was a clairvoyant in the 1920s, who spent the summer of 1922 riding around the Lake District with his wife and dog in their motorbike and sidecar visiting various places of natural beauty. He would then clairvoyantly observe the etheric life around him and describe it to his wife, who would write it down. The book was the result. I remember straight away flipping through to the sylph chapter, but his description did not tally at all with what I saw. He describes them thus: ‘At first sight they appear to be winged, with a pair of magnificent white pinions attached to their body from the top of the shoulders reaching down to their feet. The faces of these creatures of the air are like strangely beautiful but fierce human females, strong, vital, and controlled in spite of their apparent reckless abandon. I was rather crestfallen, but I carried on reading till I came to another chapter written at Lake Thirlmere, this time describing lake spirits: ‘I cannot make out any distinct shape; they take and lose many different forms, with great rapidity: there is a general suggestion of wing-like formation and occasionally the likeness of a human face or head. Again this appearance is lost, and they appear like wisps of white cloud. The swiftness of movement, and the rapidity with which they change their appearance, make it difficult to study them with any degree of accuracy. Their movement is not unlike that of swallows flying over the surface of a river. Their colouring is chiefly white, deepening to dove-grey.’ As I read this, I immediately recalled the conversations we’d had sitting in the Bunny Field, wondering whether it might’ve once have been a small ornamental boating lake, our musings fuelled by the presence on one side of the field of a flight of shallow wide, grand, balustraded stone/marble steps, such as one might launch some small boat or canoe from, that descended and disappeared into the turf. To sum it all up, I think I saw lake spirits that day, still perhaps tied to their element of a lake that had physically gone, but etherically remained; dove-grey (that was the exact colour!) spirits, or the shadows of spirits or something I don’t quite know what. I didn’t see faces, only amorphous, cloudlike wisps, but I saw them that day, and lastly, and most significantly for me; they saw me first, and flew over me and drew my attention to them. They wanted me to see them! :D.’ ‘Nature-connected. Beyond that shrug.’