Gate: Ten of Swords
I entered the vision gate and found myself climbing a path up the side of a rocky mountain. It wound around the slopes at the mountain’s base and I strode purposefully forward down this path with a tall shepherd’s staff that appeared in my hand. A lamb appeared as well and trotted along behind me, keeping pace with me with no difficulty at all. After some time of silent travel had passed, my lamb and I halted in our climb.
I turned to my wooly companion. “I’ve never been to this particular mountain before, have you?” I said. “Maybe we should call a guide.” The lamb didn’t respond in words, just blinked her large, lashed eyes at me in acknowledgement.
As soon as my thought left my lips, an enormous elemental made out of the rock of the mountain rumbled out of the ground. To my eyes, he appeared to be bigger than the mountain itself, a titan of the earth made manifest in my experience. Our newly birthed guide scooped me and my lamb off the ground, managing to pick up a large patch of earth with us so that we didn’t slip between his mammoth fingers. Then, the elemental turned in the opposite direction from which I had been traveling and began to walk through the mountain range as easily as my lamb and I had been traversing its slopes.
It wasn’t long before the elemental placed me and my lamb before a still, sparkling lake high above and very far away from the place where we had begun our mountainous hike. “Thank you for helping us on our journey,” I called up to the giant as he disappeared back into the rocks of the mountain range. “I wonder if he was able to hear someone as small as us,” I said to my lamb. “I sure hope so. What time he saved us both.” In response, she ran to the lake to get a drink.
I quickly followed and as my lamb drank her fill of the clear and sparkling mountain waters, a pulsing energy in the form of a lotus flower made of water and light appeared above her innocent, wooly head. The flower’s petals opened and closed in rhythm like a living breath and shone with a sparkling light all of its own. The blossom acted as a hypnotic power upon my spirit and compelled me towards it, filling my vision until I could hardly see anything else but the flower. My lamb remained at the edge of the lake, completely unaware of the glowing flower shining above as she quenched her thirst.
Drawn ever forward by the lotus blossom, I found myself walking on air, traversing invisible step stones in the sky above the lake. “Look, Lamb!” I called back to my companion. “This flower makes you lighter than air!” She seemed far more interested in the waters of the lake than my antics so I continued forward, a step at a time, higher into the air towards the enormous flower. As I got closer, something moved invisibly in the air all around me, as if the air was stirred by many unseen wings.
Finally, I was close enough to the summoning energy to perceive a small throne existed within the heart of this magical flower and, on it, sat a majestic winged being. The moment I saw the spirit within the flower, my body began to shrink so that, instead of towering over this being, I quickly became the same size as him.
Though I had difficulty viewing the spirit beyond a basic outline made of light and energy, I was able to perceive his countenance. His face was strange to my human eyes, a mixture of a mortal man and stag, and his ears were also like a deer and pointed like an elfish prince. He didn’t have any horns on his head like a real stag but he wore a circlet of flowers, the same flower within which he sat, and his wings were diaphanous and windowed like a dragonfly. After a few more steps upon the air, I came before the throne and bowed my head in respect to this figure.
“Greetings to you, Great One and Spirit of the Mountain Lake Flower. My name is Heidi and I come from another world,” I said. “Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”
“You see before you, Paralda, King of the Fairies,” the spirit replied. “Who are you again? I’ve never had anyone approach my throne in your manner and I’ve had very many visitors to my mountain lake throughout time.”
“My name is Heidi and does my manner offend?” I said. “I hope not. It was your flower throne that caused me to float, I’m really not in the habit of walking on air. In fact, I might never have even found your flower if it hadn’t been for my thirsty lamb. She drank of the water from the lake and your majesty appeared above her.”
“Thirsty lamb?” said Paralda and he began to laugh, holding his sides in mirth. “You have to be one of the silliest people I have ever met.” The unseen presences in the air around us began to laugh as well, filling my ears with the ringing bells of fairy laughter.
“But it’s all true,” I said, confused as to what the king and his court thought was so funny. “What are fairies anyway?” I asked when Paralda’s laughter renewed itself at my comment. “I saw some in the Divine Mother’s realm as well as around the throne of the Horned King and Green Lady but they just look like sparkling balls of light to me who whisper secrets and deliver thoughts.”
“What are fairies?!” the king said. “I’ll tell you what they are, Heidi. We are the winds. We are the weather. We move the storms. Faster than thought, we live in each breath and chase the clouds.”
“Chase the clouds for what reason?” I said. “Seems to me that clouds come and go without issue and no fairy oversight is required.”
“Someone has to do it,” Paralda said. “Clouds are like your thirsty lamb. They have to be corralled, otherwise who knows what they’ll get up to.”
“If you and your people are the weather,” I said. “Why do you allow extremes to happen upon the face of the earth? Many have suffered because of not enough rain or too much rain or other regulatory problems. Do you delight in causing suffering?”
The smile fell from Paralda’s face and he gazed very seriously at me from beneath his flower crown. “You have no idea what calamities would have befallen the human race without our calming and ever-helpful presence in creation,” he said. “You may thank me now for our untold contributions to the greater good throughout time. I insist upon it if you would continue this audience. The fairies are not your enemies, Heidi, nor under the dominion of the shadow realm and I greatly resent the baseless accusation that we are.”
“My apologies, Great One, for the offense caused by my question and I do thank you for all the assistance I have or will ever receive from your people,” I said. “But I am not the only one who wonders why bad things happen in an almost arbitrary fashion in the waking world. When I was a child and into adulthood, my worst nightmares were about tornados and floods entering my community and devastating the lives of those I love. Humanity fears what they cannot control or easily understand so you see why I felt compelled to ask if you and yours had fallen into shadow.”
“You dreamed of the weather?” Paralda said. “Is this true?”
“They were nightmares more than dreams, and it is absolutely true,” I said. “I can hardly put into words the relief I felt upon waking and discovering that I only had a bad dream and my reality was not irrevocably changed by merciless winds and floodwaters.”
“You were given dreams to show you what might have happened if the fairies had not been diligent with our cloud shepherding,” the fairy king said. “You see now that I spoke the truth as well.”
“I never doubted you, Great One, it is the allowance of suffering in the waking world that I struggle to understand as I learn how all move through the dance of reality,” I said and paused for a moment in reflection. “Are you really the weather?” I asked at last. “It might help if you showed me somewhere you love so that I may understand more of your true nature. I have trouble with metaphors and prefer simple demonstrations of being.”
“I would not have you live or dream in fear of me and mine,” the fairy king said. “Because you shared a secret with me, one who dreams of weather, then I shall share with you some glimpses of my personal truth. Perhaps your dreams in the future will be of these moments and not haunting visions of disaster. There is enough suffering and misunderstandings between realms of existence without that.” Paralda rose from his throne upon his diaphanous wings, beckoning me as he did so, and I followed.
Paralda’s flight was very fast and sporadic like a butterfly while my flight was more like an eagle’s, smooth and predictable. With some difficulty, I managed to stay near him as he darted in a random fashion through the sky almost like a baby bird trying out new wings. “The King of the Fairies makes his own flight path,” I thought to myself. “This is definitely not one of the repeated patterns Wisdom and I observed in the Divine Mother’s Realm. I wonder where his patterns are kept safe by the fairies if not there.” If the king heard my internal chatter, he gave no sign and we continued on our way without further issue as I adopted my progress to his chaotic way of being.
As we cleared the mountainous regions of his ancestral home, Paralda led me to the skies over a dense rain forest and began to descend amidst the trees. The leaves and vegetation of that lush location seemed to wave in greeting as we went by, bowing and dancing in the presence of the fairy king. “Haven’t visited this part of the world for a little while,” Paralda said, waving regally back at the rain forest. “Nice to see they yet value my proximity and largesse.” I waved too because it seemed like the polite thing to do when flying about with a king of the fairies.
After many miles, we moved through a dense thicket of trees and vines into a clearing with an enormous waterfall. The river was incredibly wide at its peak and the water gushed over the falls in a torrent. The sound made normal speech impossible but I could still hear the fairy king’s voice in my mind and his happiness to be in the waterfall glade entered my heart, making me feel as if the king’s emotions were my own.
“I love this place!” he said. “It holds some of my earliest memories of existence. I first opened my eyes in this very spot.” The fairy king flew directly into the falls and the water parted around him as he moved in and out of the stream with ease and grace. Where the water hit the river below, it produced a spray of mist and rainbows formed in the droplets. Elementals appeared in the air and water, dancing in silence and joy at the visit of one of their favored monarchs.
“I might love this place too,” I thought as I watched Paralda flip in the air, completing a graceful dive down into the waterfall’s pool and then back up again. “How could I not.”
“Come on in, Heidi,” the fairy king said. “The water’s fine!” I went forward into the stream with confidence but the water did not part for me like it had for him and I was immediately drenched by the falls, pushed into the pool below as easily as a leaf down a fast moving stream. The king and observing elementals laughed as if it was one of the funniest things they had ever seen as they flitted around me in clouds of rainbow light.
I was uninjured, just dripping wet, and I found it amusing as well. I pushed my wet hair away from my eyes so that I could see clearly again. “You might need a warning sign for any more mortals you bring this way, Great One,” I said. “That first step is a doozy.” I moved to fly amongst the rainbows in the spray since the waterfall itself was too strong for me to stay in for any period of time. The light within the water droplets spread across my skin like watercolors as I danced in and out of the stream at the waterfall’s base, trying to mimic the graceful movements of the spirits of the air and fairies about me.
While in the spray, undines or spirits of the water slid about in the pool and frolicked while the fairy court and I flew above them. All at once, a few of the undines reached up and drew me down again into the pool at the base of the waterfall. Paralda and some of his folk followed us into the lake and enormous bubbles formed around them to protect their delicate wings from the water. As we went further down into the pool, the light from above began to fade. Soon, all was dark and still. The undines who had brought me to that place scattered in all directions and every bubble but the one containing the king returned to their natural element as well.
“For dancing in my waterfall and braving the nightmares about my people, I will show you my greatest treasure,” Paralda said. “The undines have concealed it for me here and it is a very big secret.” At his words, the water spirits appeared again in the lake beneath the falls, moving around us in concentric and hypnotic circles, creating a protective whirlpool around the king and I with their presence.
“I am surprised a king of the air, such as yourself, has such a close relationship with these spirits in the water,” I said. “However do you communicate with each other?”
“As thought and emotion travel hand in hand so it is with the spirits of the air and the spirits of the sea,” the fairy king replied. “Most people can’t tell the difference because both arise in the mind and the heart as well as other places not even discovered yet.”
“Not discovered yet?” I said. “Where else could thoughts and emotions come from if not the mind and heart?”
Paralda turned his face towards me in that shadowed place and his eyes shone from his face like two stars. “I don’t know, Heidi, maybe you should tell me,” he said. “Since you danced in my falls, we’re friends now so we don’t have to keep secrets from each other.”
“If you don’t know, then I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we’re all figuring this out together. I can say a spirit called Metatron took me to a realm of being in the timeless worlds outside of existence itself. I suspect a great many things come to us from these unexplored regions in the Inner Worlds including passing thoughts and emotions, but most if not all of us are consumed by the daily task of living and have no time or bandwidth to explore their arcane mysteries. From my journeys thus far, I have come to believe that at a most basic level of existence we are all the same, no matter how we express our energy or the elements that respond most easily to our presence. Therefore, thought and emotion are one as the fairies and undines are one even though they look like different beings and move in different elements.”
“Well spoken,” said the fairy king and made a sweeping gesture with his hand.
The swirling undines around us left the water as suddenly as they had appeared. In the absence of their all-concealing bubbles, I realized Paralda and I were standing on the ground, deep below the surface of the water. He made another complex motion with his hands and a bubble containing a treasure chest emerged from the waterfall pool’s silt.
“There are those who would like to control me and my people for their own purposes rather than allowing us to be unbound,” Paralda said. “Can you imagine what power a mortal would wield if he or she could control the winds? So, to protect ourselves, we have hidden some of our treasures with the undines where greedy or unscrupulous spirits will never find them.”
As he spoke, the king moved his fingers in an intricate pattern on the chest’s locking mechanism. I heard a fragment of music and a rainbow of light came from the lock beneath the fairy king’s hands. Then, it opened as silently as a well greased hinge. Paralda lifted a small item from the chest that literally boiled with potential forms and changed shape even as I looked at it. In the king’s hands on this particular day, it solidified into a silver spoon.
“If you allow me to do so, I will touch this spoon to your tongue, Heidi,” he said. “Afterwards, your thoughts will flow more easily from your mind to your lips and your inner truths will be given to you with ease from your heart. It is one of the talents and greatest treasures of my people as I said.”
“I would be honored to receive this gift from you,” I said and Paralda brought the spoon to my mouth. I put out my tongue, he touched it gently with the back of the spoon, and I was suddenly back on the side of the mountain where my vision had begun. I again had a shepherd’s staff in my hands and my lamb at my heels. After a moment of disorientation in my quick change from the hidden waterfall’s pool back to the land, I continued up the path on the mountain.
As the lamb and I started our search for the realm’s true nature again, I found myself humming a tune that I did not know and the air shimmered about me as if filled with Paralda’s fairies. Though I could not see them, I was able to observe their influence upon the path for rocks that could have potentially tripped me or my lamb were effortlessly whisked away and overgrown grasses parted themselves before we could get to them, closing themselves again when we passed as the invisible presences holding them for us moved on. “Thank you, fairies,” I said over and over again as one obstacle after another was removed, some even before I noticed them. “Please tell Paralda how much I appreciate you all.” My only answer was the quiet ringing of fairy laughter in my ears and a feeling of happiness and general well-being from the unseen host in my heart.
We continued on our way with no trouble at all until we reached a turn in the road and the path became overgrown with rose bushes. Though the fairies tried to part the rose bushes as they had the grasses on the lower slopes, they seemed to have some difficulty with the heartiness of the new plants as well as the thorns. “Don’t concern yourselves, friends, with this passage through the roses,” I said, when I noticed the fierce struggle taking place between the fairies and the flowers. “I will take us safely through the current obstacle. If someone must be pricked by the thorns, let it be me and not you.” I picked up my lamb, put her around my shoulders so she wouldn’t be injured either, and soldiered onwards.
Though I prepared myself for some nasty scratches from the rose bushes, to my happy surprise the thorns were only an illusion and I moved through them with no difficulty or pain like passing through shadows. My lamb was not heavy, however, so she remained safely ensconced atop my shoulders. “I wonder why the roses were real for the fairies but not for us,” I whispered to my lamb. She gave a single bleat which I interpreted as an expression of puzzlement like my own. After passing through a particularly tangled group of rose bushes, we were through the trouble and on to a different stage in our mountain journey.
A sharp turn in the path brought my lamb and I suddenly to the top of the mountain. Upon the peak, I beheld a giant diamond magically standing upright upon its shaped point, sparkling in the sun. “Look Lamb!” I said. “It is Lord Horus’ hidden treasure! How on earth did it get from below the earth to this mountain top? Let’s get a look at the vista from its heights.” I levitated myself into the air and sat with my lamb on top of the gem. Together, we enjoyed the view for a timeless moment, drinking in the cool mountain air as the sun began its descent towards the horizon.
Then, a hawk’s cry split the air as a giant bird flew down from the sky, landed on the diamond and transformed into the Egyptian god Horus. “You’re a tricky one to pin down in time, Heidi,” the god said as he seated himself next to me. “But you can’t escape me. I brought you here once upon a time if you recall.”
“I wasn’t trying to be tricky or escape your dominion, Lord Horus,” I said. “I was just trying to explore the Inner Realms. It has been quite an adventure thus far.”
“Tell me of your experiences since the last time I saw you,” the god said. “From what I’ve heard, you’ve been making quite a splash.”
“A splash?” I said. “Well, maybe in the fairy king’s waterfall, but other than that and a whirlpool moment with the undines, I’ve been keeping my feet remarkably dry.”
“I’m talking about more than simply today,” Horus said. “But it’s good you’re enjoying your exploration. My brethren and I will allow it to continue as long as you’re still having an enlightening time and staying safe amongst the shadows beneath the sun of existence. What have you learned from all of your journeying?”
“I have learned that I know almost nothing about the Inner Realms and many of the teachings I read about them were patently untrue,” I replied, patting my lamb’s head as I spoke. “Each step in this journey shows itself to be part of a much larger universal system that seems quite infinite in its space and lessons.” Horus nodded in agreement and understanding. “Another piece I’m struggling with is the symbolism of what I see. I generally come out of visions with no clue as to what it is I just experienced,” I said. “For example, what is my lamb in this vision meant to symbolize? I think she is a traveling companion but she’s not a guide or guardian like I am accustomed to so I assume she must stand for something else. What that might be, I have no idea.”
“That’s an easy one to answer. The lamb represents your inner self,” the god said. “You see your inner self as a child you have to protect and nourish but there is no need. She is an eternally young and curious part of yourself and she is much more capable than you have allowed yourself to imagine thus far.”
“I’ve been walking with myself?” I said. As I pondered the god’s words, I gazed at my lamb. With Horus’ revelation of her true nature moving through my mind and heart, the lamb turned into a human-shaped baby who grew and matured in a matter of seconds into the woman I am now. I raised my hand in a brief wave and so did she. It was like viewing a reflection in a mirror. When I moved, she moved. When I smiled, she smiled. My lamb and I turned and waved goodbye to Horus as he vanished from the diamond’s top in a brief burst of light and the sun sank below the distant horizon, bringing darkness and rest to the surprisingly energetic world upon the mountain’s peak.
As the stars began to shine in the firmament above, I turned my eyes from the skies, looked around the earth and realized that instead of sitting on top of the diamond, I was now inside of it and could see myself reflected almost infinitely in the starlight in all directions. “Every reflection is a fairy,” Wisdom whispered from my heart. “Each and every one.”
“That is a lot of fairies,” I said. “I hope they behave themselves when they wear my face.” My reflections started laughing without me as I waved to them once more and a few of them took the time to wave back. “I am absolutely serious,” I said. “Laugh all you want but please be kind. If you’re going to reflect me, I’d like you to embody the best attributes I bring to the dance of existence and not my worst.”
“They say they’ll try, Heidi,” Wisdom whispered. “Also, they want to know how you passed safely through the mountain roses. Apparently, some of their number weren’t able to navigate that particular passage and they all wanted to be here for this moment in time.”
“I really have no idea, Wisdom. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say they need to visit the Garden of Venus for some further self knowledge to walk the mountain path without fear or injury,” I said. “Come on, I’ll take you all there now. Sasha and her sisters will love you, I’m certain of it.”
There my vision ended.
The Light Congress 