Some weeks are so bad that it takes you awhile to get over them. The week Master and M’Lady were gone was like that.
They returned, as expected, the day after my last post. During the week since, I’ve been trying mentally to get back to normal, but without complete success.
It’s hard to explain, but things still feel weird.
The fact that I’ve been working with Horse spirit so strongly – or, should I say, the fact that he’s been working with me, as he’s been very determinedly making his way into my head – may have something to do with my mindset as well. That, along with the fact I’ve been looking into ponyplay much more during the last couple of weeks, and I’ve been communicating with other people interested in the same thing in the Denver area. Naturally, those two things go together.
Horse. He’s been trying to make himself my primary spirit guide since late summer of 2008, since I first started considering full-time slavery as a real lifestyle choice.
It began slowly, in SecondLife of all places (the online virtual world). Well, that provided the springboard. I needed to teleport somewhere quickly to avoid another person, and I randomly chose a pony ranch to visit. I was intrigued at what I saw there, and I soon became involved a bit in the online virtual pony community. There are entire ranches set up for it, with online pony girls (and boys) pretending to do dressage and racing and …
Yeah, that’s all just pretend. I know. But it created a connection in my mind between being a pony and being a slave (which was the path I was pursuing, at Raven spirit’s prompting).
Pony play appeals to me because it would allow me to bridge the gap (in a way) between my human and non-human animal natures. However, with the ability to actually have a fully animal body in SecondLife, the limitations of ponyplay soon became too much, and I went the next step – to becoming a horse in SecondLife.
That’s about when Horse spirit started contacting me.
For several months, I lived off-and-on as a horse in Secondlife, the property of a very loving married couple in a sim dedicated to the Tombstone, Arizona, of the Wild West days. They gave me a stall in their barn and everything. I attended stock shows and pulled a cart around the city. And I never talked. Ever. I was a horse, with the only means of communication being to occasionally snort or stomp my foot in annoyance or whinny happily or something.
It was about that time that I had my first direct encounter with Horse, without a doubt. I was coming out of a job interview and, as I approached my car, I was hit with an extremely strong mental “shift” into the mindset of a horse, along with an extremely strong feeling of being a horse in a human body. Everything about my human body felt wrong, and I sensed I could feel my equine limbs as if they were truly a part of me. The experience passed within a few minutes, but it left me a bit shaken – in a way I found pleasantly breathtaking.
By early fall of that year, I was wanting to be a horse in real life so much it hurt. I briefly worked near a horse farm and I would visit there during lunches, and I fell deeply in love (or was it lust?) with a wonderfully playful (and randy!) young stallion there. If I could have woken up one day as a mare in that pasture, destined to be bred with him and mother his foals, I would have in a heartbeat.
Regarding Secondlife, by the way, unfortunately, most people in the Tombstone sim didn’t really know how to handle roleplaying with a horse, so I was largely ignored, and slowly moved away from that role – but the seed was there in my mind, and it remained ready to sprout.
That time arrived in January after I encountered a woman who ran a sim based on Celtic Spain, circa 1241. We talked, and she said she needed a druidess in her tribe, and I took on the position, little knowing where it would lead me.
During the next two weeks, I would have a series of spiritual experiences prompted by the roleplaying in the sim that actually went far beyond what everybody else was doing there, so much that I was kicked out of the sim for being too “intense” and for not limiting myself to their style of roleplaying. They just wanted me to roleplay, but something very real happened to me, and they didn't want a part of it.
During that time, I felt the calling to become a druidess for real. I felt the first strings of a connection to Rhiannon, the Welsh Celtic horse goddess. And I encountered a spirit in the guise of a white horse – which I didn’t find out until quite a bit later happened to be the way that Rhiannon presented herself at times.
To quote something I told somebody at that time … “There is a white stallion who owns me. He told me his name. It means ‘moonlight.’ I hunt when I need to, but I often can live without it. I am a wolf at heart, and I'm used to being one. Living in a human body is strange for me. But Rhiannon has come to me, and she's starting to encourage me to see life through a horse's eyes ... and to consider living on a horse's diet. I do have memories of being a wolf in my lives before this one, though. I'm not sure why I'm human in this life. But I'm sure there's a reason for it.”
I sought the reality of my experiences soon afterward, and I began researching druidism. And I began taking walks around the area near my apartment. One day, in a grove of trees, a natural area set aside at a local park, I was hit by a very powerful presence that I knew without a doubt – because I recognized her – to be Rhiannon. She came as a woman and left as a white horse, and she told me she would only come to me in natural places, like the grove of trees. It was wonderful and beautiful. I have to admit something, which is I haven’t contacted her much since then. Why, I don’t know. Maybe I just feel I don’t need to, because she’s there for me and will call to me when I need to be with her. Whatever the answer, though it’s a question I feel I need to pursue soon.
I was able to find some very reliable sources on Druidic rituals, and one of them gave instructions on how to begin the path of a Druidess by connecting my spirit to a grove of trees. I didn’t realize just how powerful the ritual was until it was too late – not that I wish I hadn’t done it. By the end of it, after a long ceremony and meditation in which I communicated directly with each of the spirits in a group of cottonwood trees near my apartment, I allowed their souls to connect to mine and mine to theirs, and to bind my energies to their own and … I became a part of the grove. A sister to them. Part of their family. Truly, a tree. And that’s what I hadn’t expected, that my soul would literally be changed. That I would afterward be, in a very real way, a tree spirit. But if I had thought about it, that’s the only way I could become part of the grove.
Afterward, I did research to validate my experiences, and I found out that what happened to me was actually typical of somebody who crossed the barrier to becoming a druid. The legend of Merlin going into a tree upon his death is based on that, in that upon his leaving his human life, he became a tree in the next – or that’s my understanding of it. So closely linked are druids and trees spiritually that the word root for dryad, which means “female spirit,” is the same as for “druid,” with “dryas” meaning “female druid.”
So I’m a wolf. But I’m also a tree. A dryas. And while that’s impossible to explain, it makes perfect sense to me because, simply, I know it in my soul to be right in ways that words can’t define.
The grove wants me back someday, to live there as a tree. Before, the idea of being a tree would seem horrible. Now it fills me with peace and a sense of rightness. And I long to be there someday, at least for one of my future lives.
And I long to be a horse, as well.
But, with luck, I’ll be able to be a ponygirl at times soon. But I’m getting to that.
Well, I’ll get to that in my next post. This one’s already getting too long, and so it’s time to cut it off here and get it logged into place.
So, for now, just know that things are better now than they were in my last post, without a doubt. But I’m still a bit off-center mentally. Hopefully soon things will be fully back to normal.
*crosses her hooves for luck*
And, as always, la kajira!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
p.s. Here is one a quick summary of the most famous of the stories regarding Rhiannon, as I told it to a friend in SecondLife:
Rhiannon is a goddess who came to Earth and married a human male instead of the god she was arranged to wed. There is much to tell of her, but I'll mention a few things
The god she was arranged to wed was furious, as you may expect. But Rhiannon married the human, and after several years they had a beautiful infant son.
Well, being a mother can lead to tragedy, as Rhianon and her husband found out. The son was cared for by six handmaidens. One night they all fell asleep at the same time by accident. And when they awoke, the child was gone.
They were all afraid they would be blamed for the child's loss, so they took a small animal that had been killed, and they smeared its blood on Rhiannon's sleeping body, and placed the animal's bones by Rhiannon's side.
Rhiannon swore her innocence, but she was put to trial. Because she was the queen, she was spared death, but she was punished to serve as a horse for seven years. She had to wear a horse's collar and bridle and to stand at the gates of the city and give rides to the castle to anybody who asked. She did this for four years without complaint, and the people grew to love her and respect her dearly. One day, a man and a woman and a child approached the city, and Rhiannon offered to give them a ride. In response, the child held to Rhiannon a scrap of cloth, which Rhiannon had woven herself. She realized it was her son, and she hugged him dearly. What had happened is that Rhiannon's jealous former fiancee had kidnapped the child and left him to die in a field. The man, a farmer, had come to the field that night to help a horse give labor, and had seen the child lying nearby. The man and his wife adopted the child and raised him as their own.
After they had heard of Rhiannon's punishment, they realized who the child was, and came to the city to reunite him with his family. Rhiannon brought the child back to the palace, and all the people of the kingdom were remorseful for having judged Rhiannon so harshly. She was a loving and kind queen, and she forgave them all, and the kingdom was blessed by her rule and prospered for many years in happiness.
Rhiannon is now considered to be a Goddess strongly connected with horses, and those who connect with her often are guided to truly understand what the life of a horse is like, in mind and heart and spirit. She is also a Goddess who teaches love and compassion, and teaches forgiveness, and teaches following your heart no matter where it leads, and teaches perseverance during life's toughest trials.
And all of those things .... compassion, following your heart, and perseverance ... are all traits of a horse for the person who rides it ... if the horse and the rider share a bond of love.
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