Messages Written in Cloud
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion
This pilot is guiding me
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea
Percy Bysshe Shelley,
“The Cloud”
The ancient Celtic practice of taking guidance from nature is called rhamanta and relies on our surrender to chance and destiny. In its simplest form, it means holding a question in mind and walking out into fields and forests with a desire only to be led by the whispers of spirit. The flight of birds across a valley, the play of sunlight on leaves, or even a gust of wind might then become significant and provide the answers we are looking for, since, as Adam had explained it, “nature is the visible face of spirit: a way of connecting with intelligent forces who know far more than we do.”
It is not always as easy as it sounds, however, because we have been taught to use logic, not spirit, to gain knowledge from the world. The rational mind will usually try, therefore—and often with some success—to dismiss the signs we are given as irrelevant or nonsensical.
That is why the practice is combined with others to quieten a mind that can sometimes be an enemy and not an ally to this work. Foremost among these is a walk of attention, which is really a moving meditation and involves deep, slow breathing, slow steps, and allowing the eyes to go slightly out of focus as you walk. It is better to keep the eyes on the ground and the awareness in the belly, in fact, as if you are being pulled across the land by some invisible force that connects to your solar plexus, so you do not feel as if you are guiding yourself at all. This combination of actions produces an almost trancelike state, where the deeper stirrings of spirit can be more clearly perceived.
Adam had taught that it is best to look for three signs—or, rather, allow these signs to find us—so we can check the information each provides against the others and then assemble all three creatively to reveal a final answer.
My slow walk now took me to a bank of grass on which three small trees were growing and where I could lie down, my back against the soft bank in the shelter of their branches, to gaze into the sky. I held the position for several minutes, deepening into the silence around me and attuning myself to the rhythms of the world.
A few wisps of cloud drifted in an otherwise serene and cloudless sky, and the branches of the trees creaked softly as they moved in a breeze so slight it was almost not there. I grew more relaxed, hypnotized by the gentleness of the day, and at first didn’t notice anything remarkable in the sky above me.
As I watched more closely, though, a single larger cloud drifted into view, framed by the branches of the trees as if they were cupped hands holding it delicately, almost in prayer. It had an odd shape, more rounded at the top, with a thin, trailing wisp at its base like the stem of a glass or goblet, or perhaps a rose. It shifted its shape as I watched it, finally reassembling itself and becoming more mounded and hill-like before it dissolved into the blue that surrounded it and vanished.
In the play of tree and sky, I considered that two omens had been revealed: the chalice or hill-like cloud and the prayerful branches that held it. I wasn’t consciously seeking a third, but as I sat up, I happened to look across the meadow, and my eyes momentarily came to rest on a gateway that led into the field.
For some reason it held my attention, although it felt less significant as a sign than the others. But then I remembered Adam’s words in the journal I had read: “I am standing in a meadow near a tall and odd-shaped hill which has a castle or a church at its top—really, it is a gateway, I think.”
Perhaps that was the significance of the gate: to confirm that the hill in Adam’s vision really was a doorway or a portal of some kind and that, in order to find him, it was a gateway that I should be looking for.
The final stage in Adam’s teachings of how to receive signs from nature was to put all three symbols together and create one singular piece of information from them, like a story which flowed from you.
My question, of course, had concerned Adam’s whereabouts and how he could be found. Really, I was looking for some significant landmark, or guidance about a first step I could take on my journey towards his discovery. Putting these three signs together and arriving at the “story”of what I had been shown, it didn’t seem to amount to very much; really, it was a single phrase:
There is a gateway that leads to a chalice and a hill. Adam will be found by passing through it.
I had made the pieces fit, but, in truth, it didn’t feel as if the information I had gathered was very useful or even very new, since Adam had already written in his journal about hills and gates.
For me, perhaps the least useful of the signs was the gate. It raised as many questions as it answered: If it was a real gate, where was it? Where did it lead? And, most importantly, how could it be found? After all, there must be a million gates in a million fields throughout Britain, many of them, no doubt, on hills like this one where I now sat, so I still had no real sense of where to look or how to begin. My question—Where has Adam gone?—remained unanswered.
“That is because you are not a Welshman—unfortunately for you,” said Cad when I joined him again in the kitchen and related what I had seen. “If you knew your Welsh history, you would now know exactly where to look, and you would realize that the most important of all the signs you were given was the gateway itself!”
“Why?” I asked. “What is significant about a gate in a field?”
“It is not the gate but the symbol that is important,” he replied. “Pa gur yv y porthaur? ‘What man is the gatekeeper?’ Do you know the answer to that question?”
I must have looked completely blank, and so, smiling to himself, he continued: “Pa gur yv y porthaur?—What man is the gatekeeper?—is a poem in the Black Book of Camarthen—Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin—the earliest surviving manuscript entirely written in Welsh.
“The name of the book comes from its association with the Priory of Good Saint John in Camarthen and, to state the obvious, because it is bound in black. It was written in ad 1250, and among other things it tells the stories of Arth and Myrddin—better known to you, I imagine, as King Arthur and Merlin.[1]
“The poem is a dialog between Arthur and the gatekeeper of a fortress he wishes to enter, in which Arthur—Penteyrnedd yr Ynys hon, the overlord of Wales—recounts the deeds of he and his men.
“The point is this: that to pass through the gateway—or to the next stage of life, if you will—there must be a recapitulation or confession—the telling of a life, as Adam put it in his journal—and there must be worth in what we have so far achieved. If not, we shall not pass but be turned away to make atonements before we can try again.
“So now you have your three symbols: the chalice-hill, the praying hands of the tree, and the gateway through which Arthur passed … do you know now where Adam may be found?”
An answer began to form itself for me, but before I could speak, Cad grew impatient. “It should be obvious to you,” he said. “Adam wrote that he wishes to be a pilgrim—and where do you suppose a Welshman would make a pilgrimage to? Karnack … Delphi … Jerusalem? Of course not! He would look only to one place: Annwn … Avalon … the holy Isle of Apples …”
“Glastonbury,” I said.
“Precisely!” said Cad. “Glastonbury indeed! The resting place of Arthur and one of the stations of the Grail, or sacred chalice. A place interwoven with the long history of the Welsh, and the only place on Earth besides Wales that a true Welshman might pilgrimage to!”
I felt like a poor student who was being told off by his teacher, but then Cad softened. “Don’t feel bad that you didn’t work it out or find the answer quick enough,” he said. “It might have taken me longer too, but I had a little help … Adam told me where he was going!”
“So you knew all along?” I exclaimed.
“Well, yes, I did,” said Cad, “but I wanted to see what you knew and how well Adam had taught you. You didn’t do badly, as it happens, when you were out in the fields.”
I felt a little uncomfortable hearing that I had been tested when I didn’t even know a test had been set—and by someone I didn’t know that well, either, but I reminded myself that although Adam’s style was different from Cad’s, he probably would have done the same: encouraged me to find answers for myself from a world teeming with information.
Anyway, I thought to myself, I wouldn’t have to put up with Cad’s tests any longer, because now that I knew where Adam had gone, I could take my leave whenever I wished, and—if I wished—make a journey of my own to Glastonbury in search of him.
I realized in that moment, however, that although I hadn’t consciously decided to take such a journey, wishing had nothing really to do with it, because my soul had already chosen a path of adventure. The mystery of Adam was too thick and the words in his journal too intriguing and resonant of my own quest for direction for me to ignore the signs I had been given and turn my back on Glastonbury.
“There are many times when a pilgrimage may be useful to settle the mind and restore the soul,” Adam had written, “but certainly there are two: when a man is first starting out and needs to know his path, and when he is nearing the end of it and needs to recollect his deeds.”
I was starting out in life and needed to know my path—it was what had brought me back to Hereford in the first place, and then to Wales and to Cad—but was I ready to make a pilgrimage?
A single word from Cad snapped me out of my reverie. “We leave in the morning,” he said.
“We?”
“Yes,” he said, “I’m coming with you … at least part of the way.”
My thoughts went back to the events of the morning, which now seemed such a long time ago. The dying dog, my sense of its life and death entwined with that of the sheep, each of them led by a force greater than themselves that they had overlooked in their relationship to each other, for weren’t they both really controlled by the shepherd, even though they thought themselves to be free?
I glanced at Cad, who had turned away from me to make tea. Which of us was the dog and which the sheep, I wondered, because I had no doubt that in this field, Adam was shepherd to us both.
A passage from the Bible went through my mind:
You were like sheep going astray
But now you have returned to the
Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.
1 Peter 2:25
It was true. I had been going astray—or, at least, I was not clear in my path. Now I had a destination, although little idea where, outside of physical geography, my journey would take me next.
[1] The Welsh word arth (or art) means “bear,” and ur means “man.” Putting them together produces art-ur, or “bear-man,” a reference to the courage and power in battle of the great warrior who was later to become known as Arthur. The character of Merlin (Myrddin), meanwhile, first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) in ad 1136 and is an amalgam of two legendary figures: Myddrin Wyllt (Merlinus Caledonensis), a prophet, sage, and madman, and Aurelius Ambrosius, a war leader. From these sources, Geoffrey produced the character he called Merlin Ambrosius, who was born of a mortal woman but sired by an incubus, from whom he inherited his magical powers. In fact, “The Merlin,” according to some, is not a character at all (composite or otherwise) but a title, or rank, given to Celtic wizards of great ability.