My great-great-grandmother was born ninety-nine years before me. She was known throughout the isles as a great healer. Men came down from the highest mountains and up from the singing-sand beaches of the mainland to seek her wisdom. She refused to sleep inside her roundhouse, preferring the stars as her blanket. The stories of her told around the hearth are the tales of a wild woman with something in her older than even the stone circle she danced around. But as wise as she was, she was also feared. “Women are always feared for their knowledge,” my grandmother told me.
This wild-wise woman, my grandmother’s grandmother, was called Ailsa too. She died before I was born, her namesake, but she speaks to me through the whistle of wind in the trees, the chatter of the birds deep in the forest, and the practical wisdom my grandmother has raised me with. Like Enheduanna from the first civilization, she was the original astronomer priestess of our island. Our family were Druids before they were called Druids: me, my uncle Jord, and our first ancestor on this island, my seven times great-grandfather Ailef, who moved here carrying the stones that would become the great stone circle on the moor where I stand now. Our descendants would eventually call themselves Druids, a name meaning “knower of the oak.”
We walk barefoot, even in winter, to feel the story of the earth unfolding. It’s how we tell the future—through connectedness to the earth, not divination of the heavens. This is important to remember. Often, when our eyes believe they see magic, what we actually behold are the simple laws of nature, malleable in the hands of those who share the wisdom of the earth that is available to all. As a Druid, I can wield fire, heal the sick, predict the weather and the tides, and change the future, all without breaking the laws of nature. I am a vessel for wisdom, but there are things I’ve seen that even I couldn’t explain at first: solid rock melted, time stopped, and the true power of the standing stones.
And now, as I go about my daily routine—walking to the oak grove to pray, meeting with the other Druids for council at the stone circle, hanging fish in the smokehouse, tending the barley my father planted, and grinding grain and herbs—I feel a deeper purpose in the mundane because I can feel that the earth is preparing to change again, the way it did three hundred years ago when Ailef brought the stones here. There is another Great Shift afoot, and there will continue to be shifts in the earth’s energy as long as time exists. It has always been the way. Long ago, this land beneath our feet was covered by ice and uninhabitable to us. The same land we live on, which flourishes now with thick forests and groves, will one day be cut away. These isles will be treeless, with rolling green hills shorn for the animals that graze them, and eventually, one day, not so far off, the ice will come back to them. It’s hard to imagine, but all things are circular in nature. That’s why the stones take that shape. You see, one doesn’t need to be a time traveler to see the future. Foreknowledge simply requires a different perspective.
When you enter into the Druidic Order, there is a rite-of-passage ceremony on one of the main festival days: Yule, the winter solstice; Ostara, the spring equinox; Midsummer, the summer solstice; or Mabon, the autumnal equinox. Because I was born on the summer solstice, it happened on my seventeenth birthday, the first after I bled and developed my own moon cycles that initiated me into womanhood. We all gather for the main festival days, so everyone on our island and the surrounding islands was there to bear witness to my initiation into the order. And often, on the cross quarter days, those days that fall directly in between the main festival days, we travel to nearby stone circles on other islands to bear witness to their ceremonies. This occurs on Imbolc, between the winter solstice and spring equinox; Beltane, between the spring equinox and summer solstice; Lughnasadh, between the summer solstice and autumnal equinox; and Samhain, between the autumnal equinox and Yule, the winter solstice. If you are chosen to become the head Druid one day after you have proven yourself to the order, then you have another ceremony in which you have to die to your old self and be born again on one of these cross-quarter festivals.
It is told that when my ancestor Ailef became the head Druid after the stones were erected, he disappeared into the stones as a man and came back something more. My great-great-grandmother Ailsa drowned and came back to life. Ray, the head Druid before me, lived on the snowy mountain peaks alone for seven moons and froze into a block of ice before he came back to tell the tale.
Logically, I told myself this ceremony occurred so there was not great competition over who would become head Druid. People in the village weren’t lining up to die because there was truly no magic in this reincarnation, only sheer will. Death stalked us enough in this time and often found us, so no one chased it down. Only one person in each generation would be willing to sacrifice themselves to be reborn; one courageous leader would emerge. Both of my parents left this world as smoke, and I had no interest in following them any time soon, or in being the head Druid, but the ancestors had different plans. In fact, the time between my entering the Druidic Order and becoming the head Druid was the shortest on record, and this is the chronicle of those seven hundred days.