Preface
As some of my readers know, I have been experimenting with readings on relationships with animals. In one of the first readings I did, the Beach card came up. The Beach is one of several cards which describes a "thin place" or a liminal space where two entities converge. In Celtic spirituality, such places are particularly magical or prone to "supernatural" happenings. As I considered this reading I realised that there are points in human-animal relations that have this powerful, liminal quality, and that both animals and humans may experience this. I am talking about something different than simply sharing love or affection, companionship and mutual support. I think these experiences draw their power from the essential differences between the human and the animal involved. While the opportunity for such moments may always be there, many of us don't experience them, or only rarely, although part of our attraction to animals may be that we recognise the potential for them at a deep level.

I once did a reading for someone who was constantly plagued by feelings of both anger and anxiety. This card was central to her reading. It turned out that her husband was somewhat verbally abusive, but what she found most hurtful was that he never took her seriously. No matter what she did or said, he'd consider it childish or silly. The Shetland Pony is a card of the misunderstood, of the one not taken seriously. Frequently the response is to avoid eye contact and just put up with things, or to find an outlet in rebellion.

This failure to understand, and to think we know best, carries over into impatience when we find that the other person has dug their heels in over "something silly". But we're all afraid of something silly! I know people who would rather jump out of a plane than give a speech in public and others who would prefer to have a tooth pulled than learn to use a computer. Just as we might see someone's refusal to do something as stubborn, when they are really afraid, so we may make the same misjudgement about ourselves. Then we come up with phrases like "It's just the way I am, " or "No way am I doing that, it's stupid!" because these positions feel less threatening than simply saying, "I'm scared. You'd have to be really patient with me for me to even try that."

This is the obvious and "top layer" meaning of the card. It's the one I would probably focus on when it comes up in someone's reading. However, I knew there was more to this card, and for days, I have caught glimpses of it and wrestled with it, but there were missing pieces. I hope that I have found, if not all the missing pieces, at least enough of them to show us the way...

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Some readers will recognise the Scottish/Irish Kelpie, or "water horse", in this description. (Forget the whole 2007 movie of the same title - just forget it. We're talking about someone's traditional beliefs here, not about Hollywood.) There are certainly parallels all over Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, where such creatures are sometimes called the nøk, or nyk, etc. Etymologists tell us that this may well be the origin of referring to the devil as "Auld Nick" as well as possibly relating to sea gods like the Celtic god Nechtan, and even Neptune (who created the horse, in some myths). Horses and water are frequently linked in both myth and folklore.  I've also noticed that if you remove the letter N from the names Nechtan and Neptune, it is possible to see the relationship of both words to early word roots denoting the horse including the Latin equos/equus, the Greek hippos, and the Gaulish epos. These roots gave us words like Epona, pony, and the Gaelic word for horse: each.

Back in Shetland, another common prank of the njuggle was to inhabit the space under mill wheels and stop the wheel when it took their fancy. Maybe they were jealous, as the tails of some njuggles were said to be like wheels, which they used to propel themselves through the water. Or maybe they simply wanted to halt the wheels of "progress" which would eventually drive them into a kind of extinction. In these cases, they could be scared away with fire, like so many of the things we once feared.

At the liminal point between land and water there is a field of energy which at once repels and attracts - where we fear and yet desire to enter the wildness of the water, to give up control of the wildness in us to a greater wildness. The Irish mystic writer,John Moriarty, talked in an interview, about this need for wildness ~

For some reason horses offer us a way to make this connection, but not by harnessing and forcing them into our control. Not by "knocking and shaping and re-shaping" them. It is only when we find a way to merge our wildness with theirs, or have the merger thrust upon us, that it actually does us any good. Still, this involves some danger. Swimming or putting a small boat out into wild water, riding a horse galloping out of control, both must be similar on the scale of dangerous things to do. There is always vulnerability in liminal experiences. The danger of getting stuck "in limbo", of not finding our way back...of somehow falling through the cracks of our own experience.

Modern people, I think, lack the liminal experiences which were once achieved through ritual, through feeling themselves a part of nature, through rites of passage and though belief in the supernatural. Yet these are things we long for. How and whether modern people manage to recover this part of life may just be the defining questions of our survival, and whether, if we survive, we thrive or we languish. Yet simply having a liminal experience may not be enough if we don't have points of reference for it. In "traditional" cultures, points of reference were marked by the rituals and prescriptions surrounding various life events, both the pivotal and the routine. They gave an assurance of success to the experience, if not a guarantee. Many folk beliefs, and their associated tales, offer advice as to how to avoid unwanted outcomes within liminal experiences or how to deal with them if they overtake us, and many heroic myths have grown up around dealing with such things.

Much has been written in the past twenty years about our spiritual connections with horses. Throughout human history they have been repeatedly raised as icons of something wild, free, powerful and supernatural. Perhaps only the sea, itself, shares a similar place in our deepest ideas of power and mystery. In northwest Europe, early peoples tended to gravitate to the coastline. Much of the land was boggy, steep or heavily wooded, making travel by sea much easier than by land, and the sea shore provided a bounty. The little primitive horses were probably only interesting as an occasional source of red meat. The sea was everything.

As populations grew and moved slowly inland, and farming and land travel became more important, so did the horse and its many uses. Yet most horses remained essentially wild animals, with many more being "owned" than were ever tamed, and this is still the case today with most of the mountain and moorland breeds of the British Isles, where many are still allowed to breed in semi-wild conditions and only some are tamed. As this shift was made, and men turned more toward the land and less toward the sea, perhaps the horse both replaced, and became mixed with the sea as the ultimate symbol of unknowable power and wildness. Spiritually, the horse led us back toward the water, and toward our wildness.

The small ponies of Shetland, a land hovering in its own liminal position between Scotland and Scandinavia, are the closest horses we have to the first horses to walk the earth. They are shaped to the earth, and not so much by the hand of man, as most animals we call domestic. As such, I think they are truly an ideal symbol of our longing  toward our own inner wildness and a guide into the waters of liminal experience.

Today, the njuggle is often thought of as a story for children. Which may be to say "Something thought to be childish is entirely misunderstood..."


More on the ideas in this post -
Liminality - This article contains more than you ever wanted to know about the concept of liminaltiy, which I didn't explain very thoroughly.

The John Moriarty interview link

Radio Essay on Britain's wild ponies
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If you enjoyed this post, you might also like The Beach, a series of posts exploring liminal space through myth, or Rambles with the Mari Lwyd, about horse traditions in British culture.

It was this chance description, in a booklet which accompanies his CD Sweeney's Dream, which originally informed my thinking about the Bridge card in my oracle deck. Not so long ago, bridges were popular meeting places, particularly on summer evenings - for trysts, for games, and because they were usually nice and flat, for dancing. It's easy to take bridges for granted, but they are important landmarks, making life much easier and linking communities.

Motherhood and birth may represent much more than the literal meanings, of course. Creativity, nurturing, etc. The other aspect is partly about "going with the flow", but more particularly letting everything else go with the flow. If you've ever meditated, you've probably heard advice like letting a river take unwanted thoughts away -"just let them go" we're told. Our metaphorical River can take away other things we don't need, too. It can clean away what we no longer need, making room for the new things we want to welcome. There is another little meaning to the word "cleansing" which is connected to motherhood, and is also worth looking at. Have you ever heard afterbirth called "cleansing" by country people? The first time I heard this, a light bulb went on in my head. Of course, we all know the dire medical effects of retained placenta, but what an interesting way of thinking of it! It's a reminder that hanging onto things that were once vital, but have now done their job, is not always in our best interests.

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I went to bed last night not really knowing how I would celebrate Lughnasadh, but I awoke this morning before sunrise with a feeling of urgency and a sense of what I would do. Looking at the clock I could see that I only had a few minutes until sun up, so I hopped out of bed and pulled on my work clothes, since they were handy. Instead of lighting my candle and filling my quaich as usual, I put them in my bag along with matches, and spring water. On my way through the house I picked up the notebook which contains the "What I Could Do" exercise I had written a few days ago, which tells of some of my skills, where I got them and who I've passed them on to. I cut a slice of the bread I baked yesterday evening, and stepped into the garden to pick a lovely red tomato. (And I forgot the incense, darn!)

I walked across the pastures toward my grove of cottonwood trees. We've recently had quite a bit of rain (after a very long drought) so I was noting the progress of different stands of grass, calculating how many months of grazing I think we'll get, relieved and thankful that things are finally green and growing! I had snatches of the traditional song "The Keeper" in my mind as I walked. "Sing ye well? Very well! Hey down, ho down derry-derry down! Among the leaves so green-o!" Except I sang "Among the grass so green-o".  Meanwhile a small bank of clouds in the northeast delayed the visible sunrise a little.

I offered a bit of the bread to the four directions, and then went around the grove offering a bit to each tree. I noted that across the ditch there is a little sapling in the neighbour's field. It looked like he had ploughed and planted around it. Nice! I finished by offering my tomato, and singing a few verses of John Barleycorn that I could remember. Then it was boots on, pack up my things and walk back to the house.

Sometimes, rituals like this feel very good. I would enjoy more community ritual, but keeping it personal and making it up as you go along also has its charms.

Blessed Lughnasadh!