The way to Folleterre was scenic, light and full of promise. The approach greeted by a meandering stream carving out picturesque spaces for habitation and country-folk recreation in the humble valley place of Folleterre’s home. Pines postured green and tall in peaceful and watchful communion with other brothers and sisters of bark and leaf. The sun held the whole scene in a warmth you felt on the breath, in the chest. The pull up the mountain was a calling – a silken leash gently tugging on the fluttering hearts of a thousand butterflies in the stomach.
I can’t give you many words for my first glimpse of our Faerie haven. I jostled with the tension of a superficial desire to have my expectations fulfilled and the heartfelt attempt to breathe in the first moment of being there. To grasp it authentically, untainted by my prior lust for and dreams of Folleterre.
Nevertheless I had arrived – I was here now. Follettere held me whilst I gained some composure. The environment so strange yet so perfectly familiar. Faerie intention and detail etched into the most inconspicuous places. The pinecone tinsel up the shit tower, the wisps of an absent-minded doodle in the sand of a faerie-claimed beach and crochet-flowers adorning the branches of random trees down the way to the prairie.
And holding I would need. The bosom of Follettere took some nesting. The first task being unpacking my other-world baggage, inspecting the contents with care and sharing some of them round for knowing reflection in heart circle. Then, either making adjustments, scrapping entirely or re-crafting them with a new found, or better honed, loving faerie-artisanship. Of course there are a few bits wedged in the cognitive crevices of a worn luggage, undetectable to naked-faerie eye – but a gathering is a tonic for perspective. There will be other times for these, of that I’m sure.
The appropriate camp caveat of “you better WERQ” accompanied my initiation to Folleterre – a cyclical process of processing and learning and bonding and sharing. But what sweet soulful bounty and harvest did the perseverance yield – akin to bursting out, wild and running, from the dank and thorny thickets of a strange forest into a boundless meadow of wild flower harmony. Each murmur of summer life so present, so disarming.
And then the connections. Thrilling and physical, enriching and penetrative – a reaching out beyond the pre-conceived and anxious, without grasping, to merge with the welcome of another faerie soul. Faerie souls that taught me the boundless nature of love. It’s transcendental quality – the simple, divine antidote to the unfathomable, to the dark.
Anchored in the tired conceptions of how to love and how to be loved, a new way of being with one another in perfect sharing became the new horizon. A personal metamorphosis still unfolding. A flaking off of a tired rusty hue, stripped back by perfect flows of clarity – the buoyancy of the soul unshackled, and rising.
I re-enter the other place consolidated, holding onto perfect realisations, trying all the time with your love and support, to make them permanent manifestations.
Odanata x
