Those of you who read Faezine regularly will remember that just over a year ago The Faerie Ring of the Book which was my Faerie Ring group split up. Bara and Petr, my dear friends originally from the Czech Republic, left Orkney to resume their travels around the world. I am happy to report that they are still boldly travelling and are at the moment in India. Their departure from Orkney closed a significant point in my life and so I thought the prospect of working magically together with others, for the foreseeable future anyway. Being a single mum now and having several writing projects to complete, I did not seek out others to work magically with to fill the gap in my life that Bara and Petr had left. My time was already crammed full of commitments. I am not the most disciplined person in the world when it comes to motivating myself to work solitary, but I managed in the year that followed to observe the faerie sabbats, experience the Aurora Borealis (the Orcadians call them The Merry Dancers) and cast several spells on my own.
Then came Spring and with it the daisies pushing themselves up all over the place, in grassy places and then all of a sudden… in someone’s life very near to me; my neighbour in fact. I happened to be babysitting at my neighbour’s house and one of their teenage daughter’s was telling me how interested in Wicca she was becoming. She was so interested in fact that she told me that she was going to sign up for a Wicca correspondence course. I asked her if this was going to cost her money and she replied that it was. ‘Oh my goodness!’ was my reply. ‘Why don’t I teach you instead – for free?’ This suggestion was greeted with more than mild enthusiasm, along with another teenage not a million miles away from me and who happened to be good friends with the former. Both girls loved faeries and wanted their magical training to include them too. The deal was done. I now had two teenage apprentices. True to form, the faeries made their presence known in the most magical ways.
This suddenly began to feel very inspiring. I knew that I was entering a new phase in my life and also a new writing chapter; as I was being drawn more and more to write material for children and teenagers rather than the exclusively adult readership I had written plays for and my first three books. The two girls were also very excited and it seemed so were the faeries.
Daisies began popping up in their lives in the most unexpected places and the two girls were swapping notes every day about where the daisies had popped up this time. They both said that the daisies just jumped out at them and I explained that it was the faeries’ way of trying to get noticed. It seems that daisies are a universal image found in many cultures and a wide range of media. They made themselves known in advertising, website banners, food and detergent packaging, book covers, greetings cards, embroidered and printed on clothes, paintings, bed linen, mobile phone wallpapers and every other thing imaginable, just when you least expected it – a daisy. It was lovely to watch the two girls discover their connection with faeries and nature, it reminded me so much when I realised that magic was everywhere and in everything in my late teens. That was what the faeries wanted them to know; that they are everywhere, threading their way through our lives like a daisy-chain, but not always there at first glance. They are there to be happened upon. They are in the second glance. They are where you need to look deeper. At this point excitement was reaching fever point and my neighbour’s daughter was starting to get very vexed about what it all meant. I suggested she write down her question, address it to the faeries and put it under her pillow. Usually once you have done an act like this the faeries will provide you with an answer fairly swiftly.
A couple of weeks later on a Spring evening when the girls were together around my house they both began to scour every book in my bookshelves. ‘Here it is!’ came a shriek of delight. ‘Daisies mean; innocence, loyal love, simplicity and ‘I’ll never tell.’
I shared my thoughts with them at how befitting it was that they, being teenagers, had been given the symbol of the daisy for their magical beginnings. The symbol of innocence and simplicity pertained to their age, loyal love; their friendship, ‘I’ll never tell;’ magic and those involved in magic together do not give away their secrets. Incidentally; the fact that I write about our Faerie Ring and also that I have written in books and articles about my own magical experiences with the faeries does not give away their secrets. I am always aware that I tell what is going to helpful to others by sharing my experience, but not enough to break the bond of trust between myself and the fey. There are many experiences and secrets for which I will never tell a living soul and will be kept until I go to my grave between the faeries and myself. This also applies to the girls, as I have changed their names in my writing and also the name of the location of where we live and practise our magic as no one needs to know that, but ourselves.
They both looked at me with wide-eyes. I can’t remember now who said it, but someone said; ‘That’s it; we should be a Faerie Ring, a magical group!’ With that came a realisation, and it was a realisation and not just some whim or idea, because it was like the penny had dropped for all of us. We had all finally realised what the faeries had been asking us to do over the last intense weeks. Of course now it felt so obvious and we wondered how we hadn’t put it all together before then. However, that is the way the fey work. They plant a seed of a message in our lives and we are the ones who must water it and tend to it with our curiosity and enthusiasm; only then will we be able to de-code their message to us. As always, the fey had sent a simple message, but we complicated it. That is always the way. The answer in life is always staring at us in the face, but we can’t always see it straight away. It takes a magical journey for us, sometimes ending in realisation and an epiphany, to realise the true and clear meaning. Magic is always about transformation and is the most common way we are given fey messages. There would be no point in handing to us on a plate, what would we learn from that?
What ensued were enormous dollops of giggling and silliness. We had suddenly become sky high on faerie energy. I recall a fair amount of dancing about the living room, squeals of ideas bouncing off the walls in every direction and an overwhelming feeling that we were not alone…
Our new group was promptly named; The Daisy Faerie Ring, not even we were stupid enough to miss that fey sent message. Then the girls chose magical names, my neighbours’ daughter bagged Daisy, as she was the one who had experienced the ‘daisy’ phenomena first of all. I was already Nixie, from my coven days and the third amongst us chose Alcina, short for Fata Alcina, one of Morgan le Fay’s faerie sisters.
As the girls were sleeping over that night, we did not go to bed until very late. When I finally retired to bed, my head was still buzzing and the girls were giggling until the small hours.
