This photograph was sent to me last week by the Dakini goddess pictured centre. She didn’t know I was writing this memoir, could not have known that the photo would arrive precisely at the point where the story and image coincide. Isn’t that beautiful? This process brushes with magic. Such is the way of digging and time travel. On the day it was taken I’m drifting arm in arm with my friend through the Harvest Fair, it’s Lamas 1994, already I divide the year into pagan eighths. I’m returned from India and losing my mind. I’m back from twenty-four hours in Tel Aviv. The note that my mother never opened is thrown away. For a while I’d sat at the table in the window of the green spare room in my mother’s tall, cold house and strung Indian beads into necklaces. One day I took them to a craft fair at Chelsea Town Hall. There I met a girl who gave me the address of her boyfriend who opened the door in a towel and invited me in, did tarot, said he was moving into a new place and I should come with. Which I did, leaving my mother’s green spare room for a small, warm house in West London. A stray, I didn’t ask if I could have a room, I just made camp in a hall off the kitchen and hoped they wouldn’t notice or mind; these strangers who became friends, became family. I bought a pink split screen camper that I saw parked on the street. My note left on the windscreen please can I buy this van coincided with one the owner had left on a Porsche the same day and so he said yes. My friend and I set off together on a summer of festivals, fly pitching our jewellery on the blankets we wore round our shoulders. As we drifted through the Harvest Fair arm in arm a woman shouted, “Too fucking serene,” and we laughed and that’s how we felt; on a cloud of things working our way, life slotting into place, the sun always shining. That night we took mushrooms, two hundred of us in a yurt on Lamas and the music played and the people sang and I leaned against a man who, in four years’ time, I would marry in a pagan wedding. But I hadn’t met him yet, only leaned against him as the yurt took off and two hundred people span in a mushroom universe. When the summer ended my friend and I parted, she to Mexico and I to Glastonbury where a man in a pottery with blonde pigtails waited.
Discussion about this post
No posts
Ghhhhaaaa
Reminds me a bit of “ shhhhh look at the sunrise “😂🤣that person has been banned forever ,,,, for me anyway