Intuition
Dear friend,
The day that the fairies first showed up in our back garden, was a Saturday. I was four years old and the garden was still an unexplored universe for me. I caught a glimpse of something moving at speed behind the tall leaves of the plants in the flower bed under the hawthorn hedge furthest from the house
Then another and another.
In the far back corner where the garden converged into a wedge of green, I saw them. One with a ten gallon hat and red shirt riding on a tiny brown horse, was the leader of small band of fairy cowboys.
When they saw me watching they took off through an archway in the hedge made by the local wildlife who roamed our patch of earth.
I didn’t tell anyone about the little people, although I can still see them in my mind clear enough. How does a kid get that information across to the adults?
That evening as soon as tea was over I went back to the archway hoping they would return.
I came back every day.
Left offerings of plastic cowboy figures and little bits of orange peel. Don’t ask me why it was orange. Maybe some early buddhist leanings.
I’d whisper into the hedge, calling them.
But they never came back.
One time a girl on the other side of the hedge whispered back and for a moment my heart leapt and then I realised she was playing and maybe mocking me.
My hatchling ego forming at a cracking pace.
It’s one of my earliest memories of feeling disappointed or let down.
A little ginger kid earnestly calling the cowboy fairies forth from the hedgerow.
I’m glad that’s still in me.
Seeing things.
Intuiting.
‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
For a while I bought into a kind of materialistic reductionism.
As was taught us in school.
Our teachers preparing us to take up our places in the production of steel.
It got lodged in my head.
The material world.
Became real.
Until Nana passed out from it and I could still intuit her presence.
And the adults suddenly stopped knowing all of the answers.
Something inside stirred and stretched and set out on the path.
Up the mountain, through the forest along the winding river banks and water falls.
We’re all on our path of self discovery.
Intuitively we know it.
There’s more to life that our senses can perceive or we can grasp with our imagination.
There are worlds beyond the reach of our senses and thoughts.
In inner stillness it emerges.
An atom of bliss.
Like the scent of burnt myrrh as you walk by the cathedral.
As the summer comes to a close.
Once more.
How many summers?
Following our noses.
On our way home.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey