Homesick

It is Lammas, the festival of the Great Mother, the life-bringer who holds us in Her wisdom and unconditional – but my no means always soft and gentle – love, and who showers us with Her horn of cornucopia, the horn of plenty.

It is also the time of the Goddess Conference in Glastonbury. My first conference was in 2006, the last Mother conference, and what a life-changing experience! I wish with all my heart that I could be there now, sharing, dancing, listening, talking, and loving. Meeting friends, sisters and brothers, speaking of the things I sorely miss: Avalon, the Mother, Goddess, spirit.

This September, it will be five years since my dedication as a Sister of Avalon. I haven't been back in Glastonbury since. Not in body, at least. And it seems I won't have the chance to go back for yet more time.

I'm homesick. I long to walk the land again, to lie under the apple tree at Chalice Hill and feel the earth breathing underneath, to wander the labyrinthine windings up the Tor and feel the wind whipping my hair and clothes, to taste the waters of the red and white springs…

I long to let my heartroot connect to the earthroot, in that special connection that exists nowhere else. Avalon is a place of the heart, a place co-existing in parallel to this dimension, but there are places where the veil is thinner, and Glastonbury is one of them. The connection to something greater, to something beyond me, and the wholeness that I feel in nature is so much stronger there.

It is the place my soul calls home, insofar as I have a home.

It is, as Sally Pullinger so beautifully put it, "the source and the return". (Words I heard in my heart while travelling across Britain that August six years ago, only to later hear and sing during that year's Lammas ceremony and read in Kathy Jones' book, Priestess of Avalon, Priestess of the Goddess. The kind of synchronicities that abound in my experiences of Goddess and Avalon, and which thus ring deeply true to me.)

And I miss my Avalon family. How I miss them! I miss talking to my soul sisters, I miss the deep, instinctive understanding and the unintrusive listening, I miss being held in the presence of my sister and brother priestesses.

I feel quite a bit like Bilbo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring:

I’m old, Gandalf. I know I don’t look it, but I’m beginning to feel it in my heart. I feel…thin. Sort of stretched, like…butter scraped over too much bread.

I've been away for too long. I feel like I'm losing touch with my Self, like my life force is running low. Lower than ever before, and yet at times stronger than ever. I don't know where and how to recharge my life's battery. Loving is no longer enough to replenish it.

I miss Avalon, even though it is right here in my heart. But I miss it so much that it makes my heart ache.