Van tales 3: A witch and a wizard
My time at the Deep Adaptation place in Kent was wrapping up. As the late February snow began to thaw, we were needing fewer logs to heat our shed and snowdrops and bluebells began to interrupt the blanket of white in One Yew Wood. I’d received the dates for my stay with ‘the Lady Eleanor’ – it would be for half a moon and I would be arriving for the Beltane festival she runs on her land each year. Very powerful timing.
So I had a couple of months to wait and I was getting restless. The sky brightened and I took my cue to begin actually driving my van rather than just living in it. I could take my time along the route and stopped off at an activist camp near Stonehenge for a couple of days. I felt very called to Totnes, and as I arrived into Devon, I felt the welcoming energy from that land that I would come to recognise from it on more than one occasion.
I found a great parkup on a hill overlooking the town, easily walkable to a great little coworking space. It must have been one of the best locations in all of Devon really, and I spent a glorious few weeks there with the daffodils, watching the sunset and the moon rise over the valley. I got to know a bunch of people there, all very connected and active socially, and attended some parties, cacao ceremonies and what not.
I was also working pretty hard. I’d very randomly landed a job writing and recording guided meditations for an app called ‘Yours’ that was trying to be in the Calm/Headspace category. Since Kent, I was actually earning some money with this. But it was a challenge finding a spot quiet enough to record meditations with no background noise, often being parked up next to busy roads or in fields with cows and things. It was a deep process and I was doing my own inner work as well as I wrote over a hundred of these, focussing on challenging emotional dynamics and how to support yourself through them. Then, Beltane was approaching and it was time to make my way to Wales.
The place is completely off-grid. You have to store your phone across the field from its borders not to have the signal interfering. And the air is thick with old world magick. Staying here brings you into deep alignment with Underworld energies, the Goddess, the Earth, and the rhythms of the moon. Alone in a little domed cob house with no distractions, no electricity, and only whatever you can cook on the fire, you slip into an altered state and your circadian rhythm shifts nocturnal. Eleanor would stop by for a few minutes a day to check in but not much else. Occasionally we’d all sit together by a bonfire in the evenings or get together to paste the new cob house together with straw and cow dung.
I could feel my system yield to the deep feminine energies, and my psychic senses open up. I had various journeys to other realms and experiences that left me wondering, did that really just happen? Walking in the woods there was to wander in a liminal space. I really loved it and was running through my mind how I could convince her to let me stay long term. It felt like an almost desperate clinging toward wanting something stable. And of course, the magick. Then, towards the last day, she said it was time to show me something. She guided me deep into the woods to a particular secret spot and called on her ally.
‘Merlin, may I introduce you to Natalie’. And with that she walked away. I sat, a little intimidated. I wasn’t yet so used to talking with spirits. The leaves rustled through the silence. A squirrel started chirping at me vehemently. I don’t know what he was trying to say. I waited. Then I heard a couple of things. ‘This is your place too. You will always be welcome here. But you’re not meant to stay here now’. Also, ‘the power is in your hands’. I looked at my hands, not feeling like they had much power. And that was it. I awkwardly thanked him and left.
As the days completed I started to receive downloads about my next task. I had realised that a bunch of sacred sites in Scotland were in the shape of a five pointed star. I would be going around the whole of Scotland in the van, including some of the Islands, and visiting these sites. But first, I had to go to Cornwall.
