Advice for seeing faeries

People often ask how I see faeries.

Like most things, seeing faeries (at least for me) is a good measure of faith and imagination. The imagination being the place where creative beings such as the faeries who paint the sunset or drop dew on the flowers live. Faith is believing your gut when it tries to convince the heart that these stories—this imagination—is something more than flight of fancy.

There are always signs when the faeries talk. Some people get the chills, some hear the voice in their head change in pitch or timbre. Sometimes the signs are more subtle—diary entries that mimic subsequent events, or dreams that come true. Sometimes the sign is as simple as a song on the radio at just the right moment, or a heart shaped rock in your path as you reminisce about a love that was lost. When these things happen we must believe that it’s the voice of an energy unseen—if not then we lose our opportunity to hear it full force.

I have been blessed to meet many wise souls who see or speak with faeries as regularly as I do… and thanks to them the faith in my own experience has grown. Faerie artist Brian Froud has been one of the most influential in this journey, and below I will share the words of friend and faerie artist Soso Erlenkamp who took the same life-changing masterclass with Brian and his wife Wendy two years ago in Belcastel France.

Soso suggests that those looking to contact faerie stay present, eliminate distractions, and go out into nature whenever possible.

“For me one essential way to get in contact with faerie, was to learn to be entirely in the here and now with open eyes, an open mind, and an open heart,” Soso said.

Soso continues with a note that she wrote some years ago. I find it a lovely meditation with some food for thought at the end:

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Sometimes in life we are lucky enough to find ourselves in a perfect moment. Often we do not recognize it until we're in the middle of it, even more often when the moment is gone.

photo by Kely Luzio-Cardona

It is like finding yourself in a beautiful fairy garden. The air is filled with the smell of fall, mild sun rays break through the leaves of old and dignified looking trees, gifting you the perfect mixture of sun and shadow, dark and light, warm and cool. The grass underneath your bare feet keeps you grounded. The sound of water whispering in a little creek nearby is almost like a lullaby. Looking around you, taking in the scenery, you do not know what to expect next but you are not bothered because you're not expecting anything in particular anyway. It is the moment of perfect tranquillity and serenity. Suddenly your attention gets drawn to a dragonfly hovering in front of you, just a short distance from your face.

And in one of these rare moments - perfect moments - the dragonfly somehow decides to take a rest on the palm of your hand. You hardly dare to breathe, so afraid are you to scare this strange, but beautiful creature away.

And then you have a choice: you can dwell on your thoughts and fears that you might scare the dragonfly away or you just can enjoy every breath of this fantastic moment, not wondering about what is going to happen next.

But one thing is for sure: when you try to catch the dragonfly it will be gone sooner than you can realize what precious gift you just chased away. For there is one rule every wanderer in the fairy world of perfect moments needs to know: do not try to catch the dragonfly, because it cannot be caught without loosing its magic...

But if you let it go, it might come back, somewhere, somehow, when you least expect it as another fairy moment of a perfect here and now. The question is: are you ready to let go?

Read more about faeries:
Faeries for Beltane
What Faeries think of Us
Advice for Seeing Faeries

Wednesday, April 29, 2015