Malcolm Potter was desperate enough to finally make the pilgrimage. He once thought it was all silly nonsense, but things had gone too far. The monster in the White House had made an incredible mess over the past two years, rolling back environmental protections so that his rich buddies could clear cut and strip mine, even in national parks, chipping away at abortion rights, healthcare, protections for all marginalized populations across the board, and having a religious fanatic as his Vice President. The nation was spinning out of control.
He had been a staunch atheist for most of his five decades of life, and couldn’t understand why religions were still tolerated since they were one of the major causes of war, oppression, persecution, and colonialism. Yet, even though his last hope was firmly grounded in superstition and belief in the occult, it was still a hope. Only…
These adventures with the Silent Eye School are nothing short of extraordinary. This one is in September. I do wish I could make them all. Do read ahead and see about joining them for the weekend:
The blood: the Life that flows through us, taken in as breath, fresh each second, flowing out to be renewed in the world of nature; natural, given.
The stone: the fixed structures we rely on to ensure persistence of that life-force made flesh. The riddle, the contradiction – the mystery… beginning with that most profound and persistent structure: the body…
There is no more beautiful a coastline in which to explore the mystery of our being than Northumberland. The beaches are wonderful, the climate is usually mild late into the Autumn. The mellowness of September will be perfect.
This former Kingdom in its own right is rich in history; ancient and modern. Yet, it remains unvisited by most. Look on a map and you’ll see how it’s lovely hills and coast form a separate realm between England and Scotland.
( Image above: Northumberland – an ancient Kingdom between England and…
The question is are we strengthened or divided in time spent in togetherness. Nations that are close in proximity hardly are together like people who may live together seemingly close knitted but hardly feel united in spirit.
The picture above intrigues me…
Entwined hands in a show of unity
Three different shades of skin
Starkly different in tones and hues
Blood beneath it all is the colour red
Alive in this now and together
They seem bonded by life
Yet this show of togetherness is a far cry
And belies the truth and reeks of racial struggles of times bygone.
The Labyrinth, now available on Amazon in print and Kindle.
It seems fitting that I am sitting looking out on Lake Merrymeeting while I write this post announcing the release of my newest book, The Labyrinth, Book 1 in the Warriors of Light series. Lake Merrymeeting holds a special place in my heart, as does the man who introduced it to me. I met the man when he was still a boy. We were both seventeen and spending six weeks of our summer at St. Paul’s School Advanced Studies Program (ASP). I was studying biology, and he, ecology, but our eyes were drawn together at a dorm meetup on the night of July 4th 1991. We were married eight years later on July 17th, the same day in July, many years later, I hit the release button for The Labyrinth.
Dave & Alethea. Circa 1991. Photo Credit: Arthur Kehas
Dave and I had our first date at St. Paul’s library four days after our we were introduced to each other by a mutual friend. While he reviewed my biology homework, I reviewed his English essay about his favorite place, Merrymeeting Lake. “Maybe you can go there with me someday,” he smiled shyly. Anything seemed possible that evening, but I never imagined I would be writing my own story one day inspired by this beautiful lake in New Hampshire.
Mystic Lake, aka Merrymeeting Lake, with the author’s fictional renditions. Map Design: Danielle English
I was thinking about the day I met Dave at the ice cream social when I wrote this passage:
When Dell’s eyes made their way to the front of the line, they stopped at a tall boy her age wearing a navy-blue baseball cap that covered most of his hair and shaded his forehead. He was paying for his cone, and as he turned away from the window Dell watched him lick his green ice cream, then lift his eyes to meet hers.
“What are you looking at?”
Her mother’s words broke the energy that held her gaze to the boy’s. In those few seconds, Dell had forgotten everything but the color of his eyes. They were like the flaming sun in a cloudless sky. They were like nothing she had ever seen before. (The Labyrinth, Chapter 2)
The shop that inspired the place in the book.
Dell was waiting in line at “The Bubble” when her eyes met those of the mysterious boy. A place inspired by an actual ice cream shop with a similar name in downtown Wolfeboro. It is popular with my children and many other summer residents. As the “oldest summer resort in America,” the town of Wolfeboro is rich with history. And that name seemed to want to be used, unchanged in the pages of my book… perhaps, in part, because of the character Lupe who likes to roam the hills around the lake in the body of a wolf…
A bit of a cynic, Lupe believes most people are driven by greed and a lust to be better than everyone else. He prefers the realm of night, when most people are asleep. In some ways he’s a sharp contrast to Dell, who is quite comfortable in the daytime and loves the water.
Is it Lupe Dell sees at The Bubble, or is it Shesha, who is quiet, mysterious. and brooding? Shesha lives on the north side of the lake, but doesn’t meet Dell until a magical labyrinth appears in a grove beside Mystic Lake.
or is it Ari who catches Dell’s gaze? Ari, who is best friends with a girl named Sula, who likes to read in the embrace of evergreens and prefers books over most people.
Each of the three boys has eyes that seem to see beyond the surface, but then again, so do the three girls…
Aponi is exceptionally beautiful, but she doesn’t seem to notice how she stands out. Instead, her focus is her mother, whose life is in danger. Aponi has known since she was a small child how intricately linked her mother’s body is to Earth’s, but she didn’t know she’d soon meet five friends destined, like her, to save them both…
These are the six warriors of light whose stories come together in a broken maze they follow in their dreams. It is a fictional fantasy, but also a metaphysical guide intended to help children of all ages embrace their gifts and a greater understanding of Life.
To order your copy of The Labyrinth in print or Kindle, please click here.
My friend rawgod had an idea for this week’s ‘good people’ post that I am pondering, but simply have not had time to pull it together yet, so perhaps next week. No, I won’t give you a hint, for then you’ll pester me. But what I do have for you today are some kids who are taking more than their share of responsibility for the wildlife on our planet. These four have been hailed as ‘eco-heroes’ by the Sierra Club and I think you’ll see why.
Desmond Sieburth, nicknamed Dessi, lives in Pasadena, California. Sieburth, a young bird conservationist, explains, “I got into birding when I was eight years old, after making a bird feeder.” Sieburth’s frequent birding expeditions soon led him to the unfortunate truth that populations of many types of birds are declining, thanks to factors including deforestation. So, he decided to help. To start, he made…
This weekend saw the monthly meeting of the Silent Eye in the north of England… a time when we reconnect, share and explore ideas and discuss plans for the four workshops we run every year. Work is already well under way for Lord of the Deep, the April workshop, which will explore the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories known to man, but our next workshop is a far less formal affair.
These informal workshops are held at various places across the country, making them as accessible as we can to anyone who would like to come along and meet us, see what we do, and visit a variety of historic or ancient sites in the process.
Readers who have followed our adventures at previous workshops, such as the recent Giant and the Sun weekend in Dorset, will know that we manage to see and experience a…
I am climbing the walls of an old church. There is only the outer fortification of stone, smoothed into mortared slabs. Each slab is chiseled with symbols, hieroglyphics of an ancient language my cells remember, but my mind has forgotten how to read. My hands grasp the hollowed frames of windows, climbing through the inside through levels until I know I have reached the 3rd floor. Here my hands let go of their grasp and I find I am hovering weightlessly. My body prone, I look down to the depths below. And then I begin to turn, like a clock. My body the hands of the hours going backward.
I had this dream about a week ago, and it has lingered with me since then. It has been more than a month since my return from England. My third trip there in as many years. I go to this land to turn back time.
After we descended from Brentor, and I paid my respects to the guardian stone, Sue graciously offered to take us along in her car to the next site, and Larissa and I accepted without negotiation. I was more than happy to take a break from driving on the wrong left side of the road down the winding narrow lanes of rural England, and I knew Larissa shared my fear that there was a good chance we would get lost following Sue who drives with the skill and ease of a professional racecar driver.
I drove down this lane and many like it.
So to The Hurlers we went, with Stuart navigating using a traditional paper map as Sue manipulated the stickshift gears on her race compact car. Larissa and I were impressed, to say the least, and kept breathing large sighs of relief that we were not in the front seats and could enjoy the views that flew passed by. And, we never got lost. Well, that is until we got there and I started to wander…
A ewe leads the way to The Hurlers
To be honest, I rather wanted to get lost, but at that critical moment the brain won over the longings of the heart, and I turned around. But, I am getting ahead of myself…
It’s difficult to describe just how vast and complex the landscape of Dartmoor is, which covers 368 square miles of moorland filled with the evidence of ancient civilizations. Pure heaven for someone like me.
The Hurlers is the remains of three large stone circles in the wild moorland landscape of Dartmoor, which just happens to be aligned with the star cluster Orion and sits on the Michael ley line. To say it is a place of magic is an understatement. I knew I was home before I stepped out of the car.
The Hurlers are larger than they appear, and are perfectly aligned with the stars…
As tends to happen in these ancient lands, my feet began to move as though driven by some deep cellular memory, responding to the forces of the land. Find the seer’s stone, the command kept entering my conscious mind as it whirled with the energies of the land.
The seer’s stone sits in the center of the Hurlers
The land was damp from rain, and a puddle had formed within the well around the central stone. I could not comfortably sit here, as I had at Bratha’s stone in the Peak last April, so my visit within the circle was brief. After paying my respects, I walked the perimeter stones in two of the circle, while my eye caught upon the portal stones, briefly. I will return after, I promised myself.
Portal through time.
I could not ignore the intense pull to the land beyond. The hill with the balanced stones of giants felt like a magnet drawing me ever-closer to its energy. The land, as I have learned, beyond stone circles is filled with secrets of the past. Stones litter these ancient landscapes and each has a story to tell. There were too many to linger beside here, and my feet did not want to go slowly.
One can imagine a gathering place here, where the stones do the talking.
The vegetation of the landscape of these sites is always worth noting. How it grows along the ancient tracts…when it is interrupted, swirled or corse…
An uneven landscape that seems to have been modeled by deliberate hands.
There are many ditches around the Hurlers, as well as deep circular depressions. As Sue noted, it could be from mining the lands for ore, or for some other, perhaps ritualistic reason. There is the sensation of falling inward to another realm near some of them, and the grass often swirls in imposing tufts which speak of disruption.
Several depressions threaten to tumble the unsteady.
My feet, though, kept racing toward the hill beyond, where the Cheesewring sits like a giant stone bird. Was I following the Michael line to some sort of apex of energy? It felt like a force beyond logical reason. Yet, I stopped at the edge of the stone settlement, just where the land starts to dip before it climbs. I looked at the imposing hill just beyond with longing, before I turned around. I was far, quite far, from the other three I had come with and logic told me it would not be fair to follow my heart into the mist. And so the climb would have to wait for some other day, perhaps in the future.
I got tantalizingly close before I turned away.
Something told me, though, that if I had stood long enough between those to standing stones, I would have gotten there sooner.
“The ley lines, lad. The ley lines. The lines of light in Earth. Some call them dragon lines. They haven’t been right for quite a long time now. Clogged by darkness. Broken by greed. I’m a mess. But then again, that’s nothing unusual these days. The entire planet is filled with broken lines and clogged pores, you might say. But you’re here to help fix that. So much work to be done. You best get started.” — Albion speaking to Ari, Book 2: Warriors of Light
“When we saw the cover of your book, we knew you had to be here,” Sue confided after I arrived for the June 2018 Silent Eye School of Consciousness workshop. The hexagram started appearing to me before I enrolled with the school and even before I met Sue through the wonderful world of blogging. Sue, though, has been my primary human guide as I navigate this sacred symbol and others.
From the cover of my new book, The Labyrinth. Book 1 of the Warriors of Light series
The mystical hexagram seems to defy time and language, appearing throughout history and prehistory on Earth, as well as in the alignment of heavenly bodies. As above, so below. It unites the male and female aspects of ourselves and the “world” at large. Six years ago, I realized this symbol was asking to take form upon the pages of the book I had begun to write. Appearing in a grove of oaks, it looked like a maze of broken light. As I wrote, allowing myself to be led by the unseen force of the higher consciousness, I came to realize that lines of energy exist in the Earth and within us as the life force energy that is the “Light of Life” itself.
Ancient symbols predating religion appeared throughout the churches we visited during the June workshop.
And so it was no surprise that I was drawn to the workshop before I even knew why. The hexagram, leading the way. There was the hexagon around the Cerne Abbas giant, which aligned with the stars above. Orion mapping the inner and outer-landscape at each site we visited. Seven churches forming a star with an inner point of light. And, dragon lines running through it all, guiding present and long forgotten footeps.
“In the middle of the hexagon is the source of the golden light, but there are a million paths to get there. I don’t know how to explain it exactly. It’s like a spider’s web. There are smaller lines of light, like veins on a leaf, which fill the large star we share, all leading to the center.” — Sula, The Labyrinth, Book 1: Warriors of Light
I’m not sure I’ll ever be wholly or holy comfortable in a church. Although I admire their outer beauty, there is a rigidness to their structures that constricts my cells. An old church sits atop Brentor in England. Dedicated to St. Michael, it resides along his ley line. Inside the church, which still feels very solid and powerful in form, there is a stained glass window of the saint who is often seen in other churches slaying a dragon. Not so here.
St. Michael above Brentor
Instead, the dragon lies dormant below him. The mound of earth itself, having erupted with its fire energy thousands of years before. It is no wonder I was not comfortable within these fortified walls. Although the saint here looks a bit wild and paganish with his feathered attire, his visage is fierce as he looks down upon the land with his sword poised for striking. His skirt wears the eyes of the peacock. Is there a bold defiance in this image inside a church that has laid claim to the land?
Stuart and Sue explore the top of Brentor. Sue blends into the fortification, while Stuart gazes into the landscape.
The gargoyles here do not appear on the roof of the stone building, but in the guardian stone itself, which sits, placed by Nature one presumes, at the base of the hill.
There is not just one face in this Guardian Stone filled with protective gargoyles.
I like this stone, as I do most stones that feel like there is a living presence within them. They often feel like friends, and when approached with trust and an open heart, they have much to share. Eyes are often drawn to them without always knowing why.
The restless dragon mound of Brentor
The jagged rock of the guardian stone mirrors the tor it guards. Born of fire and earth, it is a hybrid of forces that feel unbalanced. I cannot help but think of Glastonbury Tor, so different from Brentor with its elegant conical shape, which to me feels very feminine, yet powerfully in control and aligned with the sacred heart. I do not recall seeing a guardian stone when I was there two years ago. Just ewes with their spring lambs dotting the landscape with the energy of rebirth and the promise of a resurrected heart filled with Christ-consciousness for those who wish to ascend its summits.
My daughter poised for flight atop Glastonbury Tor, filled with exhilaration.
Brentor, in contrast, seems to represent a struggle of forces. As though the the battle between Earth and Man has yet to be won. Its church is largely intact, and dominates its summit, unlike the solitary tower that remains rather elegantly atop Glastonbury. Beautiful and non-threatening. Yet, is there really a victory to be won here?
Despite the masculine feel of Brentor, it is guarded by Hathor’s animal.
The giant that lies under St. Michael’s church at Brentor may be latent at present, but history has taught us that we cannot conquer forces that are greater than ourselves, because these forces also reside within us, unbalanced. When we disrupt the energies in Earth, as we are doing now, She responds to our unease. When will we learn?
A sacred stream runs through the body of the land below Brentor.
Water, like fire, runs through the veins of Earth. Nearby the base of Brentor, there is a small stone enclosure that appears to mark a sacred stream. Unlike Glastonbury, this one is mostly hidden, and there is no urging of tourists to gather. Yet, there it is filled with hope, carrying the blood of life through the land.
© Sue Vincent 
( Image above: Northumberland – an ancient Kingdom between England and…
When Dell’s eyes made their way to the front of the line, they stopped at a tall boy her age wearing a navy-blue baseball cap that covered most of his hair and shaded his forehead. He was paying for his cone, and as he turned away from the window Dell watched him lick his green ice cream, then lift his eyes to meet hers.
or is it Ari who catches Dell’s gaze? Ari, who is best friends with a girl named Sula, who likes to read in the embrace of evergreens and prefers books over most people.
Desmond Sieburth, nicknamed Dessi, lives in Pasadena, California. Sieburth, a young bird conservationist, explains, “I got into birding when I was eight years old, after making a bird feeder.” Sieburth’s frequent birding expeditions soon led him to the unfortunate truth that populations of many types of birds are declining, thanks to factors including deforestation. So, he decided to help. To start, he made…
“The ley lines, lad. The ley lines. The lines of light in Earth. Some call them dragon lines. They haven’t been right for quite a long time now. Clogged by darkness. Broken by greed. I’m a mess. But then again, that’s nothing unusual these days. The entire planet is filled with broken lines and clogged pores, you might say. But you’re here to help fix that. So much work to be done. You best get started.” — Albion speaking to Ari, Book 2: Warriors of Light
“In the middle of the hexagon is the source of the golden light, but there are a million paths to get there. I don’t know how to explain it exactly. It’s like a spider’s web. There are smaller lines of light, like veins on a leaf, which fill the large star we share, all leading to the center.” — Sula, The Labyrinth, Book 1: Warriors of Light 
The Light Behind the Story 