I received a lovely card from a friend recently, enclosed was a picture that I found very dear and memorable of my two friends at a birthday party for one of their sons. While I do love the portrait inside, the card itself had an enchanting and entrancing image from a hot springs located in Yellowstone Park.
This pool is named the Morning Glory Pool. The pooling waters of the spring, and it's dark watery entrance, looked at once to me like images I have imagined while doing visionary work. I scanned the image from the card and changed it slightly, adding the pattern framing the pool and adding also the lock and key contained in the deepest, darkest portions of the entrance that beckon the way below.
Folklore is rife with entrances such as these, doorways to other realms that are contained within hollow hills, deep wells ringed by stones and wild roses, damp caves that wend their way deep into the ground, spiraling beneath the earth in labyrinthine patterns.
These doorways lead to the low country, to the warm country, to the land of Elphame, to the dark recesses where dwell the faerie folk, the dead and guardian spirits who would prevent your entryway or freely allow your admission provided you are deemed worthy.
If you do acquire the skills to pass these guardians and make your way to what lies beneath do you know just where to tread? Have you the charts to navigate your way among the many routes and paths? Will you follow signposts left by others who have made this trek? Here be more than dragons friends.
Will your wisdom bring you to the looms that weave both night and day, designing fate as the fabric that we are all spun from? Do you possess the key that will unlock the door that bars you from the Weaving Goddess of those threads? Will you be a member of the convocation that has humbly received her blessings?
And finally, will your sojourn leave you unscathed? Shall you bear the scars of your quest? And what shall you leave behind, what will you return with...?
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"Some sepulcher, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone—
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within. "
-- Edgar Allen Poe, The Sleeper
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