Little Druid on the Prairie

I thought for this week that I’d provide a bit of trance journaling that I did after some work in my Mental Grove. This is not quite a full fledged trance journey, but does involve my closest ancestor spirit guide, and is a good example of one of the ways I use trance to try to help me with mundane world problems.

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Mentally and emotionally this was another hard week, but I did continue to practice Trance and even work a little magic. This time they were mostly separate, with the Trance being a working I was doing to go have a communication with a spirit ally (Ruby Olar, a deceased professor from college who I had a specially connection to in life and who has been a willing and eager spirit ally in death). I wanted to make sure I was making a decision to be true to myself, and so I set out to go to my Mental Grove and hopefully call to him and have a conversation with him.

My mental grove is as it always is – seasons don’t seem to have meaning here, which makes some sense, as the tree that I see in my grove is a massive Live Oak, with huge sprawling arms, like the Seven Sisters Oak or A&M’s Century Tree. The branches totally enclose the grove, setting it off from the rest of the otherworld, and so I find that I can truly relax there. After several years of practice, it has become my “home” in trance. There is a fire in a wide stone circle, firewood for tending it (neither of which ever seems to go out) and a spring that burbles up from the ground, over a round rock, and down over several rocky little pathways to the edge of the tree branches.

I did a progressive relaxation exercise to begin, and then called up the mists, and then allowed my mind to materialize into my Grove, where I found it peaceful and quiet. The light in my mental grove is often ambiguous, but this time it was clearly liminal – I believe dusk, by the way that my interactions went. I spoke to the grove, which has several inhabitants that come and go, including a large brown and white rabbit, a barred owl, a couple of different toads, and a stag. Tonight it was just the rabbit, who seems happy to be there most of the time. She and I said our greetings, and I settled myself down to the fire, and said to the grove “I would like to speak to Ruby Olar”.

Sometimes this works, and other times it doesn’t, but tonight it did work, and Ruby walked in through a small gap in the tree limbs, as spry and light on his feet as ever. A dancer and martial artist in life, I recognize Ruby as much by his face and his voice as I do by the way that he moves – a trait that stuck with him in the afterlife.

We had a long conversation, that I will not document here, but where he told me several times that I needed to “be in the moment” and that while I should be proud of being a “force of nature” to remember that nature is both still as a mountain and flows like the river. I don’t remember precisely what he told me in answer to my questions, but after a good few minutes of conversation we fell into a companionable silence. He ended the encounter by standing, and – like he did in life, and like he has always done in my grove – asking if I wanted a hug. I always accept (but he still always asks), and then he disappeared into the mists outside the grove.

I sat in the grove for awhile, made offerings of incense and whisky to the fire in thanks for my conversation with Ruby, and then allowed the grove to disappear into mists in my mind and brought myself back to my body, lying on my floor.

The journey took about 30 minutes total, and when I was done I felt both refreshed and tired. I had a cup of tea and some yogurt, and left the lamp burning on my altar long after I was done with my working.