ONCE UPON A TIME ©
by Tira Brandon-Evans
This I saw or dreamed it in a dream.
Grandfather Merlin awakens me before light.
"Come with me, we shall visit the ancestors."
But our journey is not through time and space; we journey along the bloodlines, through the blood of my mothers. Back and back, flowing through the blood of my mothers. Back before English, back before Gaelic, back before Proto-Celtic languages are spoken, we flow back and back, through the blood of my mothers.
This is like a red river flowing endlessly, eternally on. When we begin the river is wide, so wide I cannot see either shore. As we speed upstream, the river narrows. Ages and ages flash by on the shores. We travel east, towards the sunrise, towards the Dawn Times. Through the Alps, down into the valleys, into the East, into the Dawn. Hundreds of years pass in a heartbeat, then thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, tens of hundreds of thousands. We travel along the blood of my mothers into the lands we now call the Middle East. Then we speed along the bloodlines into the lands we now call Eastern Africa.
We come to a sandy beach and here we stop. We could go on along the bloodlines, back and back, but we stop here in Eastern Africa on this sandy beach because the thing the ancestors wish to show me happens here.
There are people on the beach. They live here on the beach. One of them is my Dawn Time Grandmother and one my Dawn Time Grandfather. They look very much as the people of today. They are much shorter and their faces are a bit flatter, and they have a bit more hair on their bodies than we do today. But if you dressed them in modern clothes, they could walk any street today without attracting undue attention.
They speak in a complicated but beautiful language of whistles, tongue clicks, sign language and body language. They dance to the rhythms of the waves on the beach, of the wing beats of the sea and shore birds. All of their lives is music and dance.
I learn these people call themselves "The People". They are members of a large, extended family–a clan. They use sharp sticks to dig for clams in the sand, they catch crabs in the shallows and on the shore, they weave baskets of grass and catch fish near the shore, they eat the roots of plants that grow in the sand, bamboo shoots, tropical fruits growing where the strand meets the forested land.
Sometimes great bear, sabre-toothed cats, giant hyena, and wolves hunt them. Sometimes the people see the predators first and join together to kill them.
The people own nothing. They wear grass skirts and capes and go barefooted through life. Sometimes they make things of animal skins, but not often for they seldom hunt animals. Sometimes one will string some pretty shells on grass strands for personal decoration but these humble ornaments soon are broken and forgotten.
The people have lived in this way forever. They are a part of all that is. To them everything is sacred and they are part of the sacred divine oneness of all things. Not separate, not at a distance, they live within the sacred divine singularity.
They have no words for me, mine, us, ours–everything is one thing.
Then, as I watch, a terrible thing happens. One of the people–I will not say a man or woman–takes a thing in their hand. A shiny white stone, a pretty shell–I can not tell what the thing is–but as their hand closes around that thing they say in their heart, "This I claim. This is mine. I remove this one thing from the sacred divine all. I make it mine."
And, with that act, all the world changes forever. Then time speeds up. I am travelling back to our time along the bloodlines of my mothers, ten generations pass. I see in each generation the descendants of that one who removed a thing from the diving oneness teaches his or her children to do this. Most of the children fail to learn this strange thing, but in every generation more and more do learn this. And they teach it to their children.
And I am speeding along the blood of my mothers, travelling into our time, and I see in every generation more and more things are removed from the sacred divine. A stone here, a shell there, a tree here, an animal there, more and more and more things are de-sacralized.
I come to a place where I see the sacred is made small; the sacred divine is assigned a place where it must dwell apart from the world the people are creating. Sometimes this place is a portable box, or a stone temple, or a grove of trees, or a church, or a mosque, always the people say, "You, Sacred Divine, stay here. We will take everything else to be ours, and you stay here–out of our way."
And I am speeding along the blood of my mothers. I arrive in our time and see that even the places we have given to the sacred divine are being made unholy. We turn these places into temples of greed; in our need to take all, we lose all that is sacred.
We must undo this spell. We must begin to return to the sacred that which we took into our hands to keep for ourselves only.
How do we do this? How do we re-sacralize the universe? One thing at a time. The universe was de-sacralized one thing at a time. We must begin to undo this now.
Take the first thing that comes into your hand and dedicate it again to the sacred divine oneness. There is nothing too small or too large, nothing too natural or too manufactured that it does not belong within the sacred divine singularity.
You and I together cannot make all sacred again in one generation. Hundreds and thousands of generations brought us here. It will take as long to unwind this sacrilege as it took to create it.
As I travel forward, along the blood of our mothers, I see in each generation the descendants of that one who returns a thing to the diving oneness teaches his or her children to do this. Most of the children fail to learn this strange thing, but in every generation more and more do learn this. And they teach it to their children.
And I am speeding along the blood of my mothers, travelling into the future, and I see in every generation more and more things are returned to the sacred divine. A stone here, a shell there, a tree here, an animal there, more and more and more things are re-sacralized.
I come to a place where I see the sacred is made whole again, the people no longer dwell apart from it but embrace it and are embraced within it. Always the people say, "O' Sacred Divine, stay here. We see everything is of you, and we dwell in you and you in us, all part of the sacred divine oneness of all things. Not separate, not at a distance, we live within the sacred divine singularity."
Do this when you remember. Do this and you re-member. Teach your children and their children. Remember. Re-member.
Tira Brandon-Evans is the Founder and Moderator of the Society of Celtic Shamans, editor of Earthsongs: Journal of the Society of Celtic Shamans, and is, herself, a Faery Shaman. Her books, The Green and Burning Tree: A Faery Shaman's Handbook, Portals of the Seasons: A Celtic Wheel of the Year, Through the Unremembered Gate: Journeys of Initiation, The Labyrinthine Way: Walking Ancient Paths in a Modern World, and Healing Waters, are all published by Elder Grove Press. She is presently writing a book about the Ogham. You may contact Tira by email at info@faeryshaman.org.
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