Some places are holy places.
On Wednesday—it might have been
Wednesday--we drove west from Stonehenge, following the sun. Mystics say there
are ley lines--spiritual energetic paths marked by sacred sites—that run
through Stonehenge and Glastonbury. One of these is called St. Michael’s Line,
which runs through Skellig Michael in Ireland, Mont St-Michel in France, all
the way to Mount Carmel in Israel. Glastonbury Tor is on this line, which
follows the path of the sunrise on May 8th—close to Beltane, the
ancient festival day that many cultures still celebrate as May Day.
We arrived in Glastonbury and
pulled into a car park on Silver Lane. The sun was on its way to setting as we
walked towards the Tor. Past the Chalice
Well, where they say Joseph of Arimathea dipped the Holy Grail into a
stream, past the holy thorn, where they say Joseph of Arimathea struck his
staff into the ground, and it grew into the Holy Thorn, a blessed
bush that flowers twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. We went through an old
wooden gate and stepped onto the Tor.
Some places are holy places.
Glastonbury Tor was once called
Ynis Witryn, the Isle of Glass, in an older tongue. Today the tower of the ancient church of Saint Michael stands at the top of the Tor. That church was built in 1323, but
was quarried for stone in the 1500s, leaving only the tower. Before that,
another Christian church was built atop the Tor in the 10th
or 11th century—but that one was destroyed in an earthquake in 1275.
Excavations in the past suggest there was a Celtic monastery on the Tor
sometime in the 600s or 700s.
And before that? Archaeological
exploration in the 1960s found artifacts suggesting a pre-monastery Roman
temple, and prehistoric flint artifacts from the Mesolithic era (9600-6000 BCE) suggesting something even earlier. The
human-built earthwork
terraces that shape the Tor date to the Neolithic, around 5000 BCE, the
same time that Stonehenge was built.
What was here, before the Roman armies brought Christianity to Britain? What might it have been? Who first
stood in that place and felt it to be sacred?
Some places are holy places.
According to earth scientists, in
the 500s the floodplain around the tor was
a lake, and the tor at its center an island. It is certain that this place
has been deemed holy for a millennium and more. Some speculate that when it was
an island, it was the Isle of Avalon.
My Mom and I stepped onto
Glastonbury Tor at twilight. Fairy time, the time that the Scots call the
gloaming. In a world that often insists we see things as this or that, good or evil, black or white,
friend or foe—it is good to be reminded that Nature plays by other rules. In the
gloaming, light and dark mingle in the air--the mingling is its defining
quality. At twilight everything has a quality of in-between-ness.
We climbed the Tor at twilight.
It’s a climb! It is a steep,
aerobic hike of 521 feet above the surrounding plain. My Mom stopped two thirds
of the way up, to sit on an old stone bench and look out over the wee
glittering town below. I kept going all the way to the top.
It is a very powerful place, is
Glastonbury Tor. Is it Avalon? I don’t know. Maybe! Does it matter? Maybe! Is
it holy? Yes.
Why would a new religion build
its churches on top of someone else’s holy places? There are many reasons, but
one is surely: it's effective. If you and everyone you know and all of their fathers
and grandmothers and great great aunties as far back as anyone can remember
have known a place to be holy…and now there’s a new building there, with new
guardians, and they say, this was how it always was, you just misunderstood it
before…well, if it is a holy place, and it is your holy place, chances are you’ll keep going there, even after
the building changes. And if the new guardians make new rules, over time, you
might just accept them. And you might even forget that there were ever other
rules.
This is how it is:
And this:
There is a scene in my play AVALON
that repeats three times, at beginning, middle, and end. It's the first
thing I wrote, before I knew much about what the play would be, and it
fell into my head almost fully formed. Because the scene is repeated, it
becomes something more than just the words the characters are saying. It
becomes something, maybe, like a prayer. Sitting at the top of Glastonbury Tor, that scene came into my mind.
[SCENE: A young woman with a bowl
of peaches. Warm from the sun, she peels and slices them and puts the pieces in
her mouth. The juice runs down her hands, arms, down her neck so she is sweet
and sticky in the sun. A man watches
from the edge of the clearing, behind a giant tree, just so. He is strange and
powerful, full of thoughts, comely and distant.
He comes closer. He is a wizard.
She sees him.]
YOUNG
WOMAN
Would
you like a peach?
WIZARD
I
know what it will cost me.
YOUNG
WOMAN
Only
the energy to take it from my hand and put it in your mouth
WIZARD
Only
the energy to slip the moon from the night sky and put it in your pocket
YOUNG
WOMAN
I
don’t know what that means. This is only a peach.
WIZARD
Ah,
no.
YOUNG
WOMAN
It
is.
WIZARD
Nothing
is ever only a peach.
YOUNG
WOMAN : [laughs. Eats a slice of peach.]
WIZARD: [watches
her do this]
YOUNG
WOMAN
Well,
if it seems to you too costly, I will do it for you.
[She stands, a slice of peach
dripping in her delicate fingers. She crosses to him, extends the peach towards
his lips. His lips part, so slightly. She pulls the peach back, struck by a new
thought]
YOUNG
WOMAN
What
will it cost me, if I feed you?
The peaches are in the scene because
of a typo. The day I started writing AVALON, I wrote myself a
first-day poem, a kind of pep talk about what the play would be. As I was writing, I
glanced back and saw that in a line where I meant to type “peace” I had typed “peach.”
I changed it to peace, but kept going:
The
Bard plucks music from the air
The
lovers twine and seek and struggle, and find those fair rare moments—here, in,
Ca-mel-lot—in which all the world is suspended in a summer dazzle of sunshine,
peace, fairness, kindness, happiness
Peaches
and apples,
The
glamor of the moon
The
dazzle of the sun
The moment I saw the word peach, I had
a vision of the scene that starts the play. Avalon means Isle of Apples, but
there can be peaches too.
[Images: Glastonbury Tor, sun side and night side]
In the Tower and on the Tor, I took photos. A young
woman and her mother offered to take some for me. The few folks there shared an interior smile, a feeling of good will, of
communion and solitude at once. It's a witchy place, in the best way. I sat in the tower, walked around it, stood in
the wind. The horizon glowed in colors that would have seemed impossible, had I not been seeing them with my
own eyes.
I stayed at the top of the Tor
while the last stragglers and their dogs wandered gently down. It is a place of
power, as my Dad would have called it. I sat in the doorway, quietly opening my own doors to the
open doors of the place. The first stars diamonded into the deepening
blue of the sky, stark and joyful. I was still sitting there when I saw a man come over the last
rise of the hill below me. As I saw him I had an immediate sense that it was
time to go. Mom was waiting down the hill and it was dark, almost.
I pulled on my coat and walked
out of the tower, heading for the steps. As I started down them, the man I had
seen was just getting to the top. With an Irish lilt he asked, “Are you from
Portland?”
“I am!” I said, running through
my head why a stranger at the top of Glastonbury Tor might guess such a
thing…and coming up with an answer. “Did you see my Mom down the hill?”
“I did,” he said. “She’s a
wonderful lady.”
“I know!” I said. He paused,
debating something with himself, then said, “I like…your energy. I don’t,
usually talk to folks like this.”
“I don't either," I said, then continued. "I’m Melody. It’s good
to meet you.”
“I’m Ricochet” he said.
“Ricochet?” I repeated, not sure I’d gotten it right, but also thinking, that’s
quite a name! “Rick O’Shea,” he said again, and I heard it properly that time. Later,
when my Mom and I compared notes, we realized we had both had the exact same
train of thought about his name. She had talked to him for some time, and
learned that he has traveled to sacred places across the globe—Mount Shasta,
Taos, many more. A traveler, a pilgrim, a seer.
Back on the Tor, Rick O’Shea
asked me, “So, what brings you here?”
I debated with myself—it’s a lot,
the writing of this play, the quest of it, the pilgrimage of this trip, the
holy sense of going into the roots of our human tree, in search of a true story
there…what is the level of explanation this new friend will want to hear?
“I’m writing a play called Avalon,”
I said. “It rises out of the stories of Arthur, Morgan LeFay, Merlin, and their companions...My Mom and I are making a sort of pilgrimage to places connected with
the legends.”
He nodded. We were silent for a moment, a couple of kindred spirits having a chance meeting at twilight in a
holy place, if you believe in chance.
“Do you, do email?” he asked, and
since I do we exchanged emails, there on the Tor—it’s the 21st
century, and the gods surely smile on the kind of tech that connects people
who’d otherwise go their separate ways—I think the gods must like that.
I said I should be heading back
down to my mother, adding, “I think you have the Tor to yourself.” Rick O’Shea
smiled and said, “She’s a wonderful woman. She was sitting there on the stone
and we had a good chat.” I laughed and said it had been such a treat to meet
him, and that I’d write to him. “Come see the play!” I said.
“Maybe!” he said. Another pause.
“Well. Good night. Enjoy…this wonderful
place,” I said.
“I will,” he said. After another pause, he added,
“Good luck with your…prayer.”
“Good luck with your…prayer.”
In the stillness, I thought, that’s
what this play is. A prayer.
“Thank you,” I said, and went down the hill.
Some places are holy places.
[Images: There and back again]
NEXT POST in Seeking Avalon: FOR OUR MOTHERS
AVALON will have its world premiere in August 2019, produced by Opera House Arts and staged in a site specific production at Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies on Deer Isle. All text and photos ©2019 Melody Bates.
AVALON will have its world premiere in August 2019, produced by Opera House Arts and staged in a site specific production at Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies on Deer Isle. All text and photos ©2019 Melody Bates.
