The Yew Tree

Beneath cold glittering skies we waited for the first stirrings of life. Now that the full the glory of spring is upon us, it hardly seems possible that trees should be bare or earth iron-hard. Yet each miraculous leaf and flower comes from nothing. The trees draw sustenance from the earth to perform their annual dance of life. The quality of the light glancing off each leaf, mellows into dusk, that time between the worlds when the last rays of the sun illuminate each blade of grass, each bluebell, columbine and clematis blossom, and the scent of the flowers released by the day's warmth assails the nostrils with archaic scenes of innocence. This is the time when visions of other ways of being crowd upon the periphery of consciousness, and the soul cries out to the Mother of all life, and is received into the fulness of Her being, resting against the bosom of the earth. Terror and striving are forgotten in the twigs and feathers of the nest of the great brooding bird of space. She is the Lady of wood and field, citadel and port, whose trembling cry quivers upon the lips of every woman. It is She who was adored of old at the forgotten shrines where our ancestors offered all that they were, she who gives life and the quietude of death. She is the bird of spirit, whose outstretched wings enfold the world, she is the song and the singer, the lover and the beloved, the known and the knower. Her breath is the wind, her blood is the waters; her body is the rocks and the trees, her spirit is the raging fire and the quiet flame. To know Her is to become Her, to adore Her is to become Her lover, Her consort, the Horned One of the forest. He is the Lord of Death and Resurrection, wandering in the forests of night and the pastures of the sun. He is the ever green one, the companion, the friend. He is death in life and life in death, the place where the waters meet. He is known to few, but those who know him know their innermost depths and silences.

How the dusk hallows each leaf, each blade of grass, each flower, as the last rays of the sun make the light seem to come from within them, and the birds singing in the trees seems like the music of a half-remembered realm. Then the brooding presence of spirit impinges on the periphery of awareness, and the breeze carries voices from the ancient world of archetypes. It was under such conditions that I first became aware of the different qualities of silence, how the ambience of daylight was pervaded by the busy energies of thought, while the night was filled with dreams and fragments of possibility, not admitted by the materialist consensus reality, but able to drift through the cracks when sleep and forgetting opened the gates of the ego's fortress. I sat brooding over a candle, and such shapes came to me in the half-light. I could almost see the presences crowding around me, the spirits of air and the leafy ghosts from the endless forests of Prydain, wolfsheads and wild women. Their silent clamour pressed at the edge of awareness. It was after Beltane night and a waxing Moon, the energies of earth and sky meeting within me, as I became a part of the ancient forest, entering the hallowed glade where the waters well up from the earth and the light of the setting sun is broken up and dances among the nodding glimmering heads of grass, and life is destroyed and renewed in the endless cycle of fruit and seed and flower. This cycle is within us all, the pattern of love and the mystery of union, it is how we enter joyously into life and pass beyond death into the unity of all life. The silence of winter and the joyous clamour of spring are but two edges of the same knife, the blade that opens the fruit of life to reveal the seed of spirit within. How can we feel fully part of the joyous celebration of life without experiencing the annihilation of death? In this knowledge I am opened to bliss. My love for you has opened the door of life and I stand before the last threshold with the challenge of love on my lips, the cup of life filled with wine of oblivion, from the place where the two seas meet and the knowledge of the Beloved glimmers like a pearl in the darkness, dancing like a fool on the edge of the abyss. Only in the darkness hidden in the dazzling rays of the sun, or the glittering stars in the darkness of the last wilderness, only at the edge is it possible to know the fulness of life and the bliss of the singing silence of the unknown. When the citadel of the ego is besieged by the envoys of love, then I feel annihilated by the numinous, and the shining star-seed of the spirit burns within me as fierce joy.

Yvonne Aburrow, Beltane 1998