What do you do with the very real experience of having once spoken in tongues?
Months ago a friend asked me if I had spoken in the language of angels before - in that other life - and what do I do with that now?
I did once speak in tongues. I did once tremble when a hovering presence broke the surface. I did once vision and prophetically dream and speak a thing before it happened. I did once pray in strange and guttural ways. I did once spin my fingers in the air and watch the nothingness ripple. I did once taste the air change, a heat spreading from my core, a divine knowing bellowing and echoing inside me. I did once experience something that has stuck to the fabric of memory and only now has somewhere to go in this new life.
Recently The Emerald Podcast did a two-part episode on Intuitives and I found myself listening again and again. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t put it down. I didn’t know what to do with what I was consuming, but I was very aware that a hungry part of me was eating its fill. And I am a woman who has learned to let every part of her eat when the belly of intuition growls. So I listened to those episodes until I was full. I likely will again.
I found an answer to the question my friend had asked me buried inside that first episode. I wasn’t looking for it, but then there I was sitting in sweet relationship with the part of me who had lived a mystical life inside the church. That part of me hummed while she leaned her forehead to mine, spoke in strange tongues and, for the first time in years, I let an old spiritual language wash my hair, oil the knots, hang heavy and clean down my back. We sat knee to knee, that young version of me and this 42-year-old version, and placed our hag stones together. Sea-smoothed rocks curving in just the right way, puzzle pieces. Belonging.
We bear our sand-carved doorways differently, she and I, but we are still the same. I was always her, she was always me. Spirit workers from ancient lineages and practices would tell you this internal communion is common.
The life of a seer, a witch, an oracle, an intuitive will - and should - take different roads over a full lifetime, but the ground we travel is always unalterable. As
Says in her book Take Back The Magic, everywhere we step on this earth we are traveling over our dead. The soil remembers us, has held our past decayed lives and the mycelial magic of regenerative living has caused us to sprout green into new lives again and again. The song is the same. The inner world is the same. The road curves and splits, rises and drops off edges. We swim, we fly, we lay on our backs, like Robin Wall Kimmerer says, in the boundary layer of the earth. But it is always still here - here in the world we are born to and return to - that makes us who we are. It is both mystical and mundane, the ongoing rise and fall of a world with lungs and breasts, a void-like womb, and ancient hands both gnarled and soft.Last year my mom told me that someone from our old church had asked her what, exactly, is my religion now. And she had answered, chin up, that I was now a Wiccan (this was a kind offer of acceptance on her part, as she is a practicing Episcopalian). She told me this in my kitchen while I packed cardboard boxes for our move and the air between us paused for a moment. ‘Mom, I’m not Wiccan,’ I finally said. A little laugh. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever used that word with you - where did that come from?’ ‘Oh,’ she puzzled, ‘I guess I thought all witches were Wiccans.’
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