Take the shamanic journey to the Enchanted Forest with this gentle guided day-dream. Experience the peace and stillness of your own deep soul and bring healing to the wounded parts of yourself.

Audio Production: David Johnson
Music : Evening Fall Harp
Illustration: Virginia Moore

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# I Believe in Fairies
Great Ormond Street hospital has raised millions of pounds for sick children since JM Barrie left the rights of his fairytale to the London hospital before his death in 1937. To add your support to Great Ormond Street Hospital’s extraordinary work please go to
www.gosh.org

 It’s that lovely time of year when many of us will re-visit childhood tales of wonder and make-believe and in so doing – avail ourselves of some basic truths – no matter how old we are! Belief in fairies is not something many will take literally – except for the very young and endearingly innocent and yet there is wisdom expressed in these tales from this mysterious realm including the unforgettable scene in Peter Pan - where Tinker Bell lays dying, her beautiful light fading rapidly after ingesting the poison that Captain Hook had intended for Peter. On discovering her limp body and realising what has happened Peter turns to the audience pleading for their help...

“She is going to die unless we do something, he implores us. Clap your hands! Clap your hands and say, “I believe in fairies! I believe in fairies! I do! I do!

Peter leads the cry, repeating the phrase over and over – and as he does so and by the power of what scientists like Rupert Sheldrake now call morphic - resonance or non-local consciousness or what once upon a time was simply known as magic – the cry ripples out across space and time so that very soon Wendy and the lost boys hear it on the Pirate Ship where they are being held captive and they boldly add their voices to the throng...

“I believe in fairies! I believe in fairies! I do! I do!

And their cry gathers force and travels yet further and further until eventually it breaks through the boundaries of Neverland itself and is heard far away in London, by Mrs Darling who sits by the open nursery window longing for her children to come home....and without knowing or even caring that it sounds so ridiculous – she adds her voice to rest ...

“I believe in fairies! she cries aloud. I believe in fairies! I do! I do!

And strengthened by her voice - the magic gathers momentum, like a prayer, crossing all known boundaries until finally – it breaks out even from the seeming confines of the story itself – to the seeming confines of the audience – to include us all, the readers alone in their bedrooms, the children sitting in the theatre at Christmas time – or later beside them as adults remembering and reliving the moment - and together and as one – young and old - everyday and story- book characters alike – the miracle of healing is performed.

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Goddesses for Earth Girls
GALADRIEL Lady of Lothlórien 

References
Lord of the Rings / The Silmirrillion / Letters
J.R.R. Tolkien
(Galadriel's Song of Eldamar) www.elvish.org Tolkien Gateway http://tolkiengateway.net/w/index.php
ELVISH SINGING Art Sound Licence from Evato

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It is a moment brim full of symbolism & significance: a moment long acknowledged and believed a spiritual truth as these gorgeous pre-renaissance paintings lovingly created by Fra Angelico show clearly but not one that was acknowledged by the church until 1954!

Whether we are religious or not, the moment has meaning for us all and most particularly for women, for it heralds the loosening of the grip of the great patriarchies and their long-time banishment from canon and creed of female deity. Remember Eve, and all the trouble she inadvertently stepped into to by eating the apple?

Well to cut a long an utterly fascinating story short - there’s a very real sense in which the Assumed Virgin is a far, far distant granddaughter of Eve being welcomed back to Paradise and regaining her lost divinity - for you see Eve was not just any girl, she was in her turn the granddaughter of countless classical and pre-classical goddesses from ancient times who over the centuries had gradually been stripped and dis - possessed of their power.

So you see 1954 was a momentous moment in time - and its why the 15th August really is worth celebrating. 

The symbolism is immeasurably important and perhaps, as the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung has suggested,
 
‘the most significant event of the twentieth century.’   

I have re-posted a video below from ASHANA who with her hauntingly beautiful voice and singing bowls has created the loveliest rendition of Ave Maria that I listen to often and which sooths my soul.   

Much love
Anne Maria Clarke
x x x

Reference:
Ann Baring & Jules Cashford : Myth of the Goddess
The Dormination & Assumption of the Virgin: Fra Angelico
Ashana: Ave Maria

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Sometime ago I had the pleasure of visiting the sublime palaces & gardens of the Alhambra in Granada, Southern Spain, where I now have family. My daughter’s partner, born & raised in the city spent the morning with us, introducing us to the wonder he loves & knows by heart & later, after returning home, I continued my explorations in order to create a presentation.
Yet somehow in the telling I overlooked what has always been for him a particularly cherished element of the story concerning the way in which this great fortress fell from Moorish hands. So, I want to take a moment to put things straight as it were & to tell this beautiful part of the story as it was meant to be told.

The legend tells that in order to preserve the wonders of the Alhambra, in order that they might not be destroyed in a final act of vengeance - as we so often see as the vanquished are driven from their previous strongholds - in order that ... and in the hope that even under different rule ... this great beauty might not be despoiled but instead might live on.... Boabdil, the final Sultan of Moorish Spain simply walked away…. and as he left this beloved city and its peoples’ he is reputed to have said to the incoming Spanish
royalty.

“These are the keys to paradise,”

He then lead his entourage high up over the Sierra Nevada mountains; and  from there he is said to have taken one last longing, lingering look behind, before turning on his heels & with tears streaming down his face, walked away - never to return.

It had been his hope that those of his faith that were left behind would be treated in the same way as Jews and Christians had under Islamic rule. The latter had endured certain restrictions of course, especially after the 1100’s but had enjoyed considerable freedoms and had been permitted to maintain their religious institutions.Yet these were the days of Spanish emboldenment, and the incoming royalty had very different ideas and an agenda that was to shake the soul of the city to its core.

It was the year 1492, the year Columbus and his men set sail for the New World. The Spanish were in conquering mood, with a sword in one hand and a bible in the other - emboldened after their triumphant re-possession of the Iberian Peninsula, after 800 years of Islamic rule - the crowning glory being the re-conquest of Granada and the taking of the exquisite Alhambra.
Ferdinand & Isabella, the catholic king and queen who then took up residence were ruthless in their crack down upon Muslims and Jews in the city. Any agreement the outgoing Sultan had brokered on behalf of his people was totally disregarded & abandoned. Instead, Granada, where once upon a time, Christians, Muslims & Jews lived and worked alongside one another now became the place where the merciless Spanish Inquisition set up its headquarters and where, under its auspices, thousands were forced to renounce their faiths and convert to Christianity or else be driven from the city.
The history, myths and legends surrounding the last Muslim ruler in Spain – whose surrender ended seven centuries of Islam at the heart of Western Europe – is the subject of a new book by Cambridge academic Elizabeth Drayson. The Moor’s Last Stand: The life of Boabdil, Muslim King of Granada.

According to her, Boabdil’s heroism, long repudiated by most historical commentators, is evident in his ability to recognise the futility of further resistance, and the choice he made in rejecting the further suffering, starvation and slaughter of his people. Instead, he bargained for the best terms of surrender possible, rejecting martyrdom and willingly sacrificing his reputation for the greater good.

“The loss of Granada is viewed by modern writers as a prelude to the repression of the Muslim world,” Drayson claims. “At a time when Europe is seeking a way of addressing issues of racial and religious intolerance, equality and freedom, we might look closely at the Spanish Muslim society of which Boabdil was the final heir, which successfully tackled some of these problems.

“Boabdil represents a last stand against religious intolerance, fanatical power, and cultural ignorance; his surrender of the city and kingdom of Granada symbolised the loss of the fertile cross-cultural creativity, renewal and coexistence born out of the Muslim conquest of Spain.”
 
The fall marked end of golden age of Islamic learning and refinement which had embodied and held sacred much of the wisdom of Classical Greece & Rome and in so doing, brought a level of civilisation to Europe commensurate with that of the Italian Renaissance.

Today, there are hardly any Jews or Muslims in Granada and the old town of Albayzin, where my new family live: yet the magnificent palaces of the Alhambra still stand proudly overlooking the city as if nothing has changed... and in the evenings as the sun sets over the mountains one can imagine the call to prayer echoing through the narrow, white clad streets, harmonising with the sweet chimes of church bells and the murmur of Jewish evening prayer.
 
Anne Maria Clarke
x x x

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TOLKIEN is an American biographical drama film directed by Dome Karukoski and written by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford. It is about the early life of English professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The film stars Nicholas Hoult, Lily Collins, Colm Meaney, and Derek Jacobi. Released in the UK on May 3, 2019 and in the USA on May 10, 2019.

For Tolkien lovers any celebration of his life & work is an eagerly awaited event. No one of course, is capable of telling the definitive story, for that is known only by those who have lived it. So we must not be overly critical of well-intentioned attempts to do so. Those who have reviewed the film so far have not been particularly impressed. This is the first film to be released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures under the recently acquired Fox Searchlight Pictures banner & one wonders if on some level sophisticated reviewers cannot quite bring themselves to endorse this first offering. The film has not been endorsed by the Tolkien family Estate either but neither was the Peter Jackson Trilogy of Lord of the Rings.

  Be all this as it may be, I personally found it lovely, even whilst being aware that Tolkien himself was always at pains to spell out that his work was not allegorical in any way. Faery is an altogether different realm he told us & as independent & remote from the everyday as it is possible to be.

He was absolutely clear that he was ' recording ' rather than ' inventing' his tales. The characters & themes were not concocted, nor were they mirrors of his personal experiences, transposed onto a mythological landscape.

It was his genuine humility that no doubt facilitated his entry into the realms of Faerie & his genius that enabled him to render it into literary form.

This being said - a writers personal experience of darkness, of falling into shadow as it were, of losing one's parents as a child, of coming so very close to death, & perhaps experiencing a kind of death of one's former self - which one imagines is the inner reality of war - is where the self can either built or destroyed & in this sense can facilitate the necessary empathy for understanding one's stories characters as they experience their own dark nights of the soul.

The film makers we are told were terribly hamstrung by their inability to reference scenes from previous films, their copyright being held by Warner Brothers, so their allusions to beloved scenes from the films in the interlacing of Tolkien's actual life with his stories were weaker than might have been & and perhaps a little clumsy in places. However if one knows the work from the books and is not fixated with the Peter Jackson rendering, one can fill in all the gaps quite adequately, as one clearly does when reading and sometimes what is not rendered visually can be more powerful, more intimate.

This is primarily a film about relationships, a period drama if you like about Tolkien's early life, the inspiration of his mother, his early friendship bonds, his love of antique languages and his relationship with Edith, who was to become his wife and lifelong companion.  And this tale it tells most beautifully.

To my mind Nicholas Hoult & Lily Collins are very well cast. There is a sincerity to Hoult's performance, so very reminiscent of what one imagines the great man might have been like in real life. The kind of man who for over twenty years pretended to be Father Christmas & sent letters to his children every year from the North Pole regaling them with painstakingly illustrated tales of polar bears and the like set against remote snowclad mountains & the spectacular Northern lights. This was a man who in a very real sense, like his character Frodo was capable of carrying the Ring & against all odds of vanity & hubris, in spite of his obvious genius and this was a man who wholeheartedly fell in love with his teenage sweetheart & remained so for the rest of his life.

Both orphans living in the same lodgings as teenagers, they shared an immediate intimacy and even though their relationship was forbidden by Tolkien's guardian, the two held fast to their feelings and married shortly after Tolkien graduated from Oxford. It was Edith who nursed him back to health when he returned with trench fever from WW1 & some say it was she who inspired the writing of Luthien, as she danced in a hemlock glade during his convalescence. A scene romantically recreated for the film. Those who know the story of Luthien & Beren that pulses at the heart of Tolkien's Silmarillion will understand the significance of allusion. Those who have studied the great man's life by heart as it were will know too, the significance of the allusion in his personal and married life.

There are numerous ways to tell a story. Some are simple & wholesome, for a mainstream audience, with a great dollop of quinessentially English beauty & romance, like a Merchant Ivory film might feature....yet sometimes this is just what is needed.

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This story was first set down in the 12th century … it was a special, brief time in ways that made it somehow uncharacteristic of its epoch. It was then that the Grail Legends emerged in Europe and when Eleanor of Aquitaine established her liberal court whilst her son was away at the crusades within which the ideals of Courtly Love came into being and where Troubadours and all manner of artists and artistic endeavour flourished.
It was such a time as this that the Sufi poet Farid Mun- deem Attar set down his inspirational tale – THE CONFERENCE of the BIRDS. 

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The path begins at our bleakest moment. If we are lucky we will hear the call and instead of collapsing we will set off in quest of the first chink of light and onward into the unknown, searching & gathering with each step we take.

It will not be easy. This is the quest of heros & heroines, the brave and courageous....the ones who have gone before and returned with their great stories so that we through contemplation, might be guided through our own dark night of soul.

In deepening our understanding our beloved tales might reveal themselves as the precious gifts they are - like Galadriel's Light given to Frodo as he sets forth from Lothlorien on his perilous quest.

"May it be a light for you in dark places, says she,
where all other lights have gone out."

J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings

x x x

Join us for an afternoon of exploration & contemplation.
14.00 - 18.00 pm
Everyone is Welcome
x x x

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