So old, so very long ago ....

The wood was vast and there was no sky overhead. The trees were immensely tall and very old, and belonged to the forest. They were separate trees and communicated as trees do, but they were also part of the pulse of the woodland. There was something intense about them, not human, very, very old, and the moisture on them and the tree mosses belonged to the forest. It would be perilous to interfere with them, yet it would be sacrilegious too. You couldn't help loving them because they were magic, but loving them because they were trees and because they belonged to the forest.
The light was darkened as it is in the greenwood and there were paths. But it was very quiet, and peaceful, and strangely menacing, and loveable. It wasn't the sort of place you'd want to be alone in. And it wasn't the sort of place you'd want to leave. It's the sort of place that, if a god had appeared with horns and cloven feet and the magic pipes, you wouldn't be too surprised.
And there was something alluring, and bewitching, and magic about it. The trees and everything growing in the greenwood was alive and it was aware, but it wasn't human awareness. It was the diffused mind of the woodland, as much one tree as another, and as much all of them, but not divided. A presence. Thinking. Brooding. Aware of the people in its midst. It was vast, but deep and quiet, immensely powerful, but passive. It was green thinks, and it belonged to all that grows in the greenwood, and all the plants that come from her womb. And green thinks are not like red thinks. They're old, and they were old when red thinks were young. Old memories, an aching sadness, and separation, but so long ago. But here in the greenwood, we were in the presence of green thinks, in its own land, on sacred ground, and the faerie mind was more powerful than the human, beckoning, but menacing, threatening, but loving. So old, so very long ago.....

TONY KELLY (circa 1970) from The Pagan Movement Archive

May and Midsummer

"Lady Smocks all silver-white / Do paint the meadows with delight" (Shakespeare)

A Pagan Movement Archive item from Tony Kelly:

Maytime is a time of brightening days, of flowers and insects and new green leaves. All life seems to be bursting out anew, birdsong is exuberant and we're abundantly aware of the fertility of it all. It's a feeling of joy in your soul which won't be gainsaid.

Yet, it can also be approached in a quantitative scientific way. Some years ago, when we were touring the whole land here every week and noting each new species of flower to appear, we were able, at the end of the year, to construct a graph showing week by week the number of new species of flower appearing for the first time that year. The graph was down at zero in Yule and for a month or two thereafter; the first flowers began to appear in their ones and twos, and gradually the pace increased. As the weeks went by, each new week brought a greater abundance of new species into bloom to add to those already in flower. After a time, these increments began to become smaller again. They still added to the flowers already in bloom, making them even more abundant, but the actual increases began to get smaller. When we drew the curve, the peak was in Midsummer, but the steepest slope was in Mid-May; it was in Mid-May that the Goddess was unfolding all her finery the fastest. And May in the modern Gregorian calendar is very close indeed to Mayday in the old Julian reckoning.

We did the same thing for the appearance of each new species of moth at our windows, and again we got a curve of the same kind, and again the steepest slope was in Mid-May (and we used a book to confirm the picture for the beetles). May is the month of acceleration as Midsummer is the season of abundance. In May the flowers, the moths and butterflies and the other insects and the green leaves are arriving fastest; in Midsummer they're most abundant.

Faery

From the Pagan Movement Archive

For as long as I can remember, and before ever I knew its meaning, the word 'pagan' has evoked feelings of longing, beauty, and half-memories in my soul, and before I knew where to find expression of my pagan longing or even the form of it, my heart ached for its strange elusive fascination - as formless as the scents of Midsummer, but as bewitching and alluring, and drawing always on and deeper.  The same is true of the word witch', a woman who brews in her cauldron such a brew as I later discovered was prepared for Afagddu, in her hope, her love and her sorrow, by Ceridwen, but it was the image that called to my soul because I knew, though not with my mind, that the image was only a little distorted, and the real was deep, dark, and old.  I came, by chance, to a reference to Pan and the Moon Goddess, and again there was that strange call, and I needed no more than those mere words to revive something in me and remind me of things I had known of the moon kith.  But it was always just over the hill, where the Sun was setting, or lost in the scents of the grass and clover, or strangely joined to the male fern that grew in our garden (and I didn't know then the fern lore of Faerie).  Now it doesn't need emphasis to say that a person in whose soul these things begin to stir again is going to feel lonely, as a Celt among Saxons, or as a fern in the dry lands of the east.  So perhaps I should admit, for it may be true, that I don't write for the earnest 'enquirer', but rather because of the pain and longing in my soul, in the hope that others of us would hear and together we would find the Moon Maiden.  It isn't the enquirer, however earnest, that I want to attract, but rather, the pagan who already knows the call of Faerie but needs help and companionship in tracing it to its source.