“What do you see when you tune into the land?” a friend of mine asks.

The answer is unexpected, at least at first. Standing in the field facing the north side of the house, like the giant he was fabled to be, is Paul Bunyan.

Strange, I think, but is it really? I type “Paul Bunyan” into the computer and key words stand out on the screen that, when combined with my personal relationship with masculine power/patriarchy, start to make a lot of sense. Was it a test? I wondered. Was this giant of a man who symbolized colonial power standing in my way, standing guard, or standing as witness?

Here I was, a white woman born in a colonized nation, on the cusp of “owning” a “property” to fulfill a long-held dream of rewilding not just the land, but the soul. It was here that I found a place to create a refuge not just for me, but anyone who felt a tug to come home to the land and find reconnection.

I close my eyes again and notice a definitive challenge to the giant man’s stature. He is so much taller than life. Feet firmly planted on the ground. Eyes staring down at this prospect.

“I want to write a love story with the land,” is what I told another friend some time ago as I tried to put my mission into one sentence of purpose. A feeling so visceral I couldn’t utter the words without tears flooding my vision.

You see, I understood this love story, at least in part. I have followed its narrative through the ley lines of England and parts of Ireland, reading its memories on each sacred (bone) stone I touch. My body has long ached for a reunion that is not just mine.

“I can’t feel it here,” I would confess to Sue. “It’s not the same.” And she would remind me of the fallacy of division, and that all land is a part of our shared mother. That there are no true lines of separation, only the circle of unity.

I have learned that life lands us where we are meant to be, even if we think we should be elsewhere. And sometimes what we resist most is the path we are meant to explore.

And why wouldn’t Paul Bunyan be standing at this place that seems to have chose me as much as I have chosen it? He faces a home and outbuildings built two hundred years ago out of felled trees on top of a rolling canvas of white snow. Here are your pages, he seems to be saying. What will you create?

To answer, I call in the dancing soul. I see her spreading the skirts of spring in pale green over winter’s etiolated white. She looks strikingly similar to the fairy queen of my books, Elena, who follows the paths of the stars to feed Earth’s veins with life. I am delighted, but not altogether surprised to see her. After all, below the peak of the small mountain where the house stands, there is a dragon who takes the form of a pond, wings tucked, head pointed towards the sky.

“Are you ready to play,” she asks me, “Are you ready to dance the light into the land?”