Beginning the Path - Part 2 - Mazed

Part 1

My new path was confusing.

The Elders were good to me. They could tell that something different had happened to me than to any of he other visitors, and while the young First Nation participants went to join a discussion circle and the visitors went to join a seminar, I ended up sitting at a desk in the back office of the community center, shuddering like a new-born colt as I stared into a cup of black coffee.

The kind Elder who had tended me in the last moments of my journey had gone, but in her place was a younger man who lived in the city. We talked about my experience, explored it as best we could, but he had no context to work with and I was completely unprepared for the strike of lightning. When he was sure I wasn't just having a trip and was safe to go home he let me go. He gave me his number and offered to talk again, but I could tell he wasn't sure what he thought he'd be able to do for me. I did call a few times, but he was right. 

I needed other guides.

Beginning the Path - Part 1 - The Path

It was 1989, and I was a student.

I was confirmed Anglican, enrolled in the Anglican college at Uni, but I had long been curious about the old gods.

At that point it had mainly been a matter of reading – Wales has its fair share of myths and storied locales, and I’d inherited a deep interest in such things from my grandfather.  I’d read kids versions of the Mabinogi, I’d gone to see stone circles and wells and valleys with reputations.

But it was all academic, you know?

Then we moved away, emigrating to Canada, and I found myself stuck far from home in the prairies.  Interest didn’t wane, exactly, but it was a harder thing to follow.  And anyway there was church, which I went to mainly for the politics of it, and the locals were sometimes terrifyingly evangelical so it didn’t do to say too much about such things.

When I went to Uni, and everything changed.