An Encounter with the Equinox Stone
The Seasons Turn & the Next Season of KnotWork Storytelling Is Here
It’s been a full and beautiful week.
The fourth season of KnotWork Storytelling has begun.
It’s almost time for my online Autumn Writers’ Knot program to begin. (There’s still time to register!)
And we’re at the Equinox moment when, here in the north, summer bows her head to autumn.
By mid-afternoon on Friday, my head was both empty and full. And so, rather than trying to wring words from the barren space of my exhausted mind, I abandoned my desk and set off to visit the great boulder my kids had long ago christened Dragon Stone.
Shortly after I scrambled onto my perch on the great glacial rock, I recorded the video that’s below. It’s a quick reflection on the magic of this week, including the start of the podcast season and my continued work with the guides, gods, and ancestors.
I eventually set down the phone and began the real work - filling the journal with the contents of a mind caught in a cycle of too much and not quite enough.
It’s a beautiful and terrible thing, putting art into the world.
It’s a mind-opening and heartrending thing, inviting people to spend their money on your ability to help them make art.
I’ve done a great deal of both of those things this week. I’m a bit depleted by the illusive desire to “be seen” and the noise that deafens you in the hustle to be heard above the modern digital din.
And so, yes, the journaling was far from sublime.
But then… the magic asserted itself. My torrents of ego and scarcity washed back to the earth with an invisible rain of imbas, of sacred inspiration.
Tomorrow, my soul sister Laura Murphy and I will get on Zoom with to record what will be the second episode of the podcast season. You may know Laura as the Imbas poet, the woman who declared Is Mise Bríd, or the brilliant storyteller who brought us Bóinn Re-membered and Brigid: Rebirth of the Mother. This will be her third time on the show, and I am beyond excited to complete this trinity of tales.
Laura’s text messages, complete with the evocative, stunning art that will accompany the episode, arrived while I sat on that great granite throne.
We messaged back and forth, and she mentioned our past adventures, climbing another great stone monolith when she was in the Hudson Valley on the Summer Solstice. She also invoked the great stone at Uisneach, at the Sacred Center of Ireland.
That’s when I remembered….
The pen fell to the forest floor and the journal was forgotten. I was scrolling through my photos from last autumn when I captured images from my last memorable trip to the Dragon Stone.
And there on the screen was the map that highlighted Esopus, New York, and Uisneach in County Westmeath. And there was the fox who pranced by. And suddenly, it all flooded back: 364 days ago I had been on this stone processing the profound work I’d done with Jen Murphy of Celtic Embodiment (another KnotWork Storyteller who will return to tell a third story this season!) and author Sarah Richardson.
Last year, as I sat on this stone, a trinity of Autumnal spirits kept company with me. The Cailleach (the old woman, the sacred hag). The Bhean Ghlúine (the midwife). The Bhean Chaointe (the keener).
Here’s the video I made last year, for Equinox 2022:
Weaving It All Together. (Or not.)
This is one of those stories without a true climax. It’s more like a wonder tale. It’s something for the “you can’t make this shit up” files of synchronicity that we spiritually inclined folk love to fill.
And yet, for me, it is a story of echoing profundity, if I dare to remember it and ride the ripples into the next chapter of life. Or into the next Autumn Equinox.
Ultimately, in a moment of great scarcity, it was an answered prayer.
There is enough and more than enough. There is abundance and connection and layer upon layer of meaning that continue to play out in the unseen realm.
All it takes to know that is a bit of divine trust and what might feel like superhuman patience.
And now, the Dragon Stone becomes the Equinox Stone, and the mystery continues.
One Last Call to Write with Us
Below, you’ll find the video I shot when I didn’t think I had anything to write to you.
Before that, one final reminder that my online writing program, the Autumn Writers’ Knot: Journey with the Guides, Gods, and Ancestors begins on Sunday, September 24.
If your heart leaps at the mention of synchronicity, archetype, mythology, and writing as a spiritual practice, you belong in this group.
Oh, how we’d love to have you.