She changes everything she touches. She changes everything she touches,” sang my medicine teacher’s teacher, Twyla. It was the second of three times that I had ever met her. She had invited a select group of women to her property in rural New England. We were instructed to wear white and to arrive as the sun was setting. Women who must have been her apprentices had been there all day preparing the area where the fire would be lit at sundown.
The fire burned; it had begun as a geometric tall stack of logs built up in a circular tower. As that tower burned down lower and lower, Twyla sang, “She changes everything she touches. She changes,” and we all sang with her. We were singing of the Great Goddess.
This was in the early 2000s, and I had been on my medicine path for about five years. I had been working as a medical intuitive for about two years. As the fire burned down, Twyla began to rake. She transformed what was left into a carpet of glowing embers. And then we walked. We all walked across it. We stated our intentions for that All Saints’ Day, November 1, the day after Samhain. It was the day Twyla said the veils were the thinnest. I walked across the burning embers twice that night. I felt the Great Goddess within me and around me and all the women in every ember. We all felt our own versions of SHE who changes everything she touches. Twyla held the door open for us all that night in concert with the spirits of her land and the many elders who had come before her.
The first time I met Twyla was at her house. She had invited my medicine teacher, Levity, and me for a ceremony. Like the fire walk that followed months later, it was held at night. It was just the three of us that evening. We gathered in Twyla’s greenhouse. It was a magical place full of exotic plants and the light of the full moon. She had invited us over to do ceremony with the spirit of the night-blooming Cereus cactus in her greenhouse. Its bloom was very rare and infrequent, and this full moon would be the night. And indeed it was. There it sat in full bloom, and its aroma was intoxicating. That night, Twyla introduced the Great Goddess to me as SHE of clay and stars. The ceremony was beautiful and deep. As happens at times when we enter transcendent states, I do not remember it all. I have impressions of gentleness, femininity, receptivity, intoxicating scent, enchantment, beauty, and mystery. That night we felt the realm of the fae, or fairies, very close. We connected with the goddess Danu. She was representing the Divine Feminine. Danu adopted me that night.
I felt she was very connected to Twyla. In the medicine tradition passed down by my teacher, Levity, Twyla was like my grandmother. She spoke in her beautiful, ethereal voice as a representative of “she of clay and stars.” With my inner vision, I saw the interdimensions where Danu existed. I understood in an experiential manner what Twyla meant. The Great Goddess was made of clay and stars. She came from the stars, yet her body was the clay of the earth. She is heaven and earth incarnate. You can feel her within you because she is part of you. The Great Goddess can change everything she touches. She is fluid because she is everything all at once.