Invitations
There are more things in heaven and earth…
The grove of eucalyptus trees seemed vast. It edged a seasonal creek near the subdivision my family had landed in after my father retired from the Air Force. The trees were a magnet for a 10-year-old kid experiencing the dislocation of being both a latch-key kid for the first time and attending public school where I made no friends. The wood, which seemed “lovely, dark and deep” but in reality was probably only a scant sketch of trees, was my haven.
Heidi, a mix of yellow lab and Great Dane, had been given to me for Christmas that year and was my only comrade. The dog accompanied me each afternoon on after-school explorations of mud and peeling bark and savory leaves.
That day I’d walked up the sticky center of the creek bed, which had mostly dried after a quick late-spring rain. I looked for elf-houses along the bank, hoping to find tiny people inhabiting the cracked clay earth. Heidi raced back and forth, avoiding the puddles and dragging fallen eucalyptus branches for me to fling for her pleasure. We meandered farther than we had before and when I finally crawled up the side of the creek bank, I found myself in a large circular clearing. The grass was tan-gray and within the clearing was another circle. It was dark and perhaps ten to twelve feet in diameter.
I stood with the toes of my filthy Keds just outside the clearing. For the first time I felt a strange invitation. It is difficult to describe. It was perfectly silent. It felt—eerie. It felt as if Something Big could happen, should I walk forward. It felt as if I was being watched by… Something. It felt neutral, neither good nor bad.
But the dog? Heidi rushed out from the trees behind me and stood to my left, barking and snarling. Every hair stood up on her gold body. She bounced up and down on stiff forelegs, and screamed fury at the circle. Startled, I stepped back and felt my own body hair stand up in hard gooseflesh. In an instant the feeling of otherness, that invitation to walk forward, vanished.
Heidi barked at me and backed up. Her thin tail curled flat to her belly. I followed her away from the clearing. I glanced over my shoulder but didn’t see anyone around. We went home. When I looked for that clearing again during future wood jaunts, I never found it.
I have had odd experiences throughout my life, unexplainable and easily tossed into my personal bin of “Katrina has a big imagination.” I keep these experiences largely private, because I have never wanted to be seen as the kind of flowy-purple-scarf-wearing, ungrounded and a little sanctimonious type of person I tend to dislike and mistrust, due to an innate whiff of self-servingness I often sense when reading/listening to/talking with such types of folk. (Okay, I can be judgy. But I do try not to be judgy. )
I don’t want to be seen as one of “them,” but I am called to the uncanny.
In her book, Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves can Save the Earth, Nancy Marie Brown writes beautifully of people who have the ability to see past the veil of what we call reality. On a long horseback ride past Hofsjökull (Icelandic for “temple glacier”) in the center of Iceland, Brown tells of experiencing what I have felt several times: a possibility, a chance, or invitation to step from one’s own timeline and place to inhabit “faerie time.”
To experience faerie is to experience the transformative magic of realities other than our own. Within faerie time comes potential chaos, time distortion, and inevitable change. Stories from all cultures—Japanese, Middle East, Polynesian, Indian, Chinese, Native American—tell of humans being spirited away. These travelers to otherworlds and othertimes spend what they think is an afternoon feasting or enjoying the company of otherworldy beings and when they return home find decades or centuries have passed.
Brown tells of feeling the eyes of Hofsjökull on her neck. She walks away from the visual stake of the wilderness hut where she is staying with other riders. She walks away from 100 horses grazing behind a temporary electric corral. She walks alone along a river, hoping to find a private place to bathe:
I hauled myself up the high grassy bank, startling geese and goslings, and saw nothing at all around me but river, mountains, ice, and sky—no hut, no horses, no signs of human life. As if I’d stepped through a door into another world, a door into Other Time. … Facing that door to Other Time in Iceland’s center, I backed away. The great glacier was half-cloaked in cloud. The wind had a bit of ice in it. Boots back on, I marched up a slight rise and spied the hut, not far off. My surge of relief surprised me…
In 2008 at a writing residency on Orcas Island in Washington State, I hiked in Moran State Park on a grizzling February afternoon. I was in love—with my writing and with a woman I’d met in my graduate writing program. I felt balanced and happy in a way I’d rarely experienced. The trees were again lovely, dark and deep, and I loved my body as I alternately ran and walked the steep and muddy trail through a thin and gray rain.
Then I was not on a trail. I stopped and looked around and could not see the trail. I took a few steps this way, and that. I had no idea when I left it—the path had vanished from underfoot. I noticed the complete silence. No sound of faraway boats on Puget Sound. No birds. No wind in the Douglas firs surrounding me. I felt the eerie again. And came the sense of invitation. I stood, breathing lightly. I finally clearly understood what was being offered: a chance to experience the other, the place beyond the place I comprehend as reality. Should I say yes, should I open my arms and accept the invitation, I knew, knew, I would become one of the vanished in my time. I would not be seen or heard of again. I would be lost.
I hesitated. Here it was, again. What would I find if I finally accepted the invitation? Would there be any guide on the other side? Or would I be lost in the otherwood forever, and die in that otherwhen?
I thought of my mom and how she would be devastated. I thought of the woman I loved and her pain and loss. I thought and felt my own timeline calling me and had a sense of the importance of the writing I would do in my future. I thought of how much I loved my life, at last.
“Thank you,” I said to… Something. “But I will stay. This time, I will stay.”
I turned from the expanse of valley in front of me and just behind and above was the path I could not see minutes earlier.
I’ve had invitations since then. I feel the subtle shift of eerie and breathless silence, and sense the suggestion that I might move from the known here to the unknown there and each time I have smiled and thought of what richness and magic is already present in this time and place for me. I always say, “Thank you.” I always hope the invitation will come again, and that someday I will be ready when it does.
Like perhaps what is offered in the dark eye of the gray mare who came to me exactly one year ago and who is my light and challenge and joy. Willa invites me again and again to become. Become what? I’m not sure, but in our as-yet unlived future I do know what happens with me and that horse is extraordinary. I know this because in the days before Willa came into my life, as I was considering buying my second first horse and was scared to death and questioning my choice, my 80-year-old self came to me in a vision.
“It is an incredible journey we have with her,” she told me.
And she smiled and her hair was pure white and her eyes were my gray-blue and so loving, and in that instant, staring out a glass door at a much-older version of Katrina standing amidst the lovely pine forest surrounding my home, I knew I had slipped time and place to reach back to myself in order for Something Big to happen.
So I accepted my own invitation. And everything changed.
That said, if you like the writing and want to support horses, you might want to join our Prodigious Pledger Herd. Every dollar you pledge will go directly in support of an organization that supports horses. We choose the organization in November and donate our hard-earned dollars in December of each year. You can check out my Substack About page for more information and to see a list of each year’s donations.
I love to hear from you, so feel free to give me a shout by clicking the “Message Katrina” button in the app or online. It might take some time, but I promise I will respond.
Thanks for being a Substack reader.
TO THE HORSE!