Finding yourself in Faerie is rarely like it is in the stories. Those stories get told and retold because they are exciting: being snared by the roots of a hawthorn tree, following a hare down a hole, getting captured by the wild hunt. Once in Faerie, it’s the same thing. There’s seldom a gilded court to distract you with their political infighting, no decadent palace to get lost in, no exquisite food to avoid.
But when you fall under the hill you will know it, because the life you had yesterday is gone. The trappings are there but everything is turned upside down or backwards as though looking at your life through a mirror.
You will know you are there because you will wake with a curse of forgetfulness that lasts a heartbeat or two before memory returns in a sinking rush reminding you of what is gone, sleep’s oblivion lost to you for another day while you try to keep hold of the broken pieces of your heart. But you need your hands for other things so the pieces fall and go scattering across the floor. You pick them up again and again all day long and wonder if it might not be better to leave them there.
You know you’ve wandered into the Faerie mound when your body feels a hundred times heavier even though you are one hundred times emptier inside. Or if you can still see every color you could before but somehow everything looks either grey and grimy or glaringly bright.
The heartless queen and careless prince will likely not fall in love with you, but they most certainly have stolen you away from the future you thought you were going to have. They whisper in your ear about all the mistakes you made, about what you’ve lost. This is how they keep you in the otherworld.
The way out is different for everyone.
I don’t pretend to have all the answer for how to escape the Faerie Mound. I only know what I have done before. I don’t know if it is the right thing. I don’t know that it will always work.
But with those caveats, I will tell you: I have to get out my spinning wheel and spin stories into gold thread. Then I must take that thread and weave a new path: one that will carry the weight of my empty self with its heavy heart out of the world under the hill. The path takes a long time to get right, so sometimes I have to make a lot of other things first, like, for example, a bit of writing about how my heart is broken again.
I have learned to wander in the otherworld to find the stories to spin into gold thread. It starts out aimless, as a distraction, but when I’m in the Faerie Mound, I am cracked open. As I scrape along, things I might have missed otherwise, snag in my bones like a ragged net dredging the bottom of the river. Sometimes I am lucky and I find something sacred and ancient. Clutching my bronze torc, or silver chalice, I listen to the lore they whisper, and with their stories to guide me, I find a new way to weave my way forward. I come stumbling, bruised, back above ground and into the light of day.
I’m writing you now from the otherworld. I don’t yet have my path out, but I have found an amphora of honey, and the traces of a hymn remembered only by the bees. It’s a song of abundance and abandon, things I’ve neglected as of late. I could have done without the twice-cracked heart I’m shuttling around, but now that I have found these new treasures I will not trade them back, even if I could.
Like all who enter Faerie, bestowed as I am right now with the gift of hindsight (fleet-footed deer-sight?), I have looked backward to see how to go forward. I found an ageless voice that has been calling to me for as long as I can remember only I couldn’t hear it until now. It’s whispering to me of mysteries and hidden joy. It’s telling me stories that will become my path. For the moment, I’m lingering in the enchantment of a silver lining–a most common bespellment in the Faerie Mound–but I’ll get to weaving my way out soon.
The Faerie Mound offers both lessons and enchantment, often bound up together, when we are able to look for them. The new moon is a good time to tease out their meaning, as much as possible, and chart a course forward. Should you have the capacity, and if you feel inclined: take an oracle deck or tarot deck and turn the cards face up. Choose a reading, or make one up, and look through the cards in the deck to find the cards that you feel belong in each space. Go by meanings you make up for the cards or use the traditional meanings, as you wish. Use the cards to create your own pathway, then spend the next moon cycle allowing that destiny you just made to unfold, even a tiny bit.