For most of my life I've been playing with the faeries. Does this worry you? From time to time it has worried me. When I was a small child, I knew who I was talking to, but as I grew older, I let people convince me that these visions in my heart and voices in my mind were "mere imagination." I didn't stop playing with them, but I stopped believing in them. This was foolish of me on at least two counts.

First, there is nothing "mere" about the wonders of human imagination. According to my Otherworld friends, creativity and love are two of the three main things we are here for, and creativity springs from the imagination. (Responsibility, appropriately accepted and expressed is the third, in case you are wondering.) The second foolish thing was that it really wasn't my imagination after all.

It was the folk of the Otherworld.

I know a lot of them personally. Some of them have been around me for many years. I don't even remember when I first noticed them — they were just always there. Let me introduce you to a few of the ones I know best.

Lyset is tall and beautiful and wise. I see her most often in dreams or inner journeys or when I'm wandering that borderland between waking and sleeping. She has been like a mother, a teacher, and a guardian to me and has dealt with my stubborness and confusion with wry humor. She has taught me much of what I've learned about loving myself, primarily by loving me.

Himself, who has given me many names to call him by and then denied them all, towers above us all and carries his heavy crown of antlers proudly. He has guarded and protected me as long as I remember — sometimes in quite miraculous ways. He has also taught me most of the really helpful things I've learned about understanding male (not yang, but male) energy and how it connects with my female energy. A lover? Not exactly, but certainly a teacher of loving and of melding with male energy.

Miccon (pronounced mee'-kon, and also known as Conan Corr) is small and feisty, has a warped sense of humor, and asks acute questions that often make me think for months or even years before I can answer them. I most often "see" him as a whirling, swirling, scintillating green light, with flashes and whorls of other colors, but I know what he, too, would look like if he had a physical body. He has taught me, teased me when he thought I was too serious, and cheered me when I was down. He is the one who told me that, "Everything in the universe is serious — nothing is unimportant — but that is no reason to be solemn about any of it." I keep trying to bear that in mind.

Elspeth — I cannot think of Elspeth without smiling and feeling my heart expand and glow. Unconditional love is her gift to me. I have never "heard" her speak in words, but her gentle nudges of feelings — both sensations and emotions — guide and delight me in the natural world. It is she who calls my attention to the tiny mothan blossoms, to the miniature "faeryland" in the crevice where a boulder has split in two. It is she who fusses and calls me when a kitten is distressed and who lets me know if a plant needs something. She regards the whole world as her garden — and expects me to help her take care of it.

So, those are the Otherworld friends who have principally taught and guided and shared joys and sorrows with me through my life. But I can't not mention Suillean, who brought me faery medicine when I was deathly ill and who opened a door into memory for me that had long been barred fast. And there have been so many other helpful spirits — sometimes playful, sometimes mischievous, sometimes comforting, often profound — that I cannot possibly acknowledge them all here. Life is good, and in my personal life, they have played a very large part in helping to make it so.

Lyset is one of the prime movers behind the Faeries' Oracle, along with Brian's inspiration faery, Penelope. They made a formidible team on the Faeries Oracle. Lyset and others around here have other projects "floating" in the subtle realms that they and I hope to get to in due course.

This is a P.S. written in 2019. I just got around to looking up "lyset" on the internet, just to see if it means something special. It does! It means "The Light" — not just any light, but The Light. I knew that "lys" means light in Norwegian, and was not surprised to find Lys of the Shadows in the Faeries' Oracle, given what she does. But, somehow, I never realized who Lyset really was and how perfectly she is named for one of those who inspire us.

Copyright ©2001 and ©2019 by Jessica Macbeth. All rights reserved.

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Jessica Macbeth