Arrival

This is me, right now.

For ten months, in the Five Truths, my Fairy Tale truth has stayed constant. All spring it was, "I have been to the mountain. I've gotten my vision. I'm going home. I'm plodding along, on my smallish-horse, on an empty road." Gradually that became, "I have lost my horse. I am walking on the road. It is a grey day and the weeds grow up to the asphalt." I was a king returning to my kingdom. A grey shade in a grey cloak in the wind.

I got home to my kingdom in June, about the time Nanda Devi finished. I found it empty and grown-over. Silent. No people, but undeniably mine. I hadn't assembled my team or told anyone I was home. Instead, I sat on a log at the side of a field, holding Excalibur, exhausted. And there I sat. For months.

In the real world, I ran out of juice for doing everything, while in the Fairy world I sat on the log under pale skies. I didn't know if I would ever stand up. Four months went by.

The first glimmering of change was -- as I said recently -- realizing that sitting was, itself, a spritual passage.

Saturday, in a free-write, I wrote that I have the dark powers of Lightning, Rain, Earthquakes, Famine, and Lust. And with that, I felt a surge of energy. I'm ready to go make the kingdom.

I felt like Schwarzenegger arriving in Terminator 2, naked and flickering with lightning. Pure strength and clarity of purpose.

People talk about the wilderness period of the spirit. What they don't tell you is that, at the end, it really could go either way. To switch metaphors for a moment, I didn't know if I'd be Frodo, getting on the ship to the Grey Lands, or Pippin, settling back into the Shire to live.