Find yourself, free yourself!

Welcome to the April/May issue of the Cygnus Review which, as you will see, is 8 pages bigger than usual, and contains more full-length features for you to read and be inspired by. We hope you will enjoy it.As I write this, a strong westerly wind is blowing. How wonderful that feels! How awakening! And how sweetly it revives our sense of connection with nature and the All.Much of the time, we modern humans can become so accustomed to feeling numbed and disconnected that we hardly notice it any more. One of the reasons for this, I feel, is the lifestyle we have created for ourselves – staying inside buildings instead of being out in the open air, and being dragged along by a tide of false imperatives that we believe are real – imperatives that cause us to live out of touch with nature and its rhythms, and to treat the earth and its myriad life-forms in a disrespectful way. But I think our sense of disconnectedness has a deeper cause, too.

Do you believe in fairies?
There are many people who say that our apparently insatiable desire to smother everything in concrete and chemicals has driven away the nature spirits and elementals who would normally have supported and taken care of plant and animal life – including ourselves. Now wait a minute, before you stop reading! I know that many of you are very familiar with the idea of communing with invisible beings, and enjoy their help with all kinds of activities from gardening to protecting your home; but others of you are probably thinking ‘Oh no, not Ann and Geoff as well, away with the fairies!’ So, may we ask that you suspend your disbelief for a moment, and just cast your mind back to when you were a child, and probably did believe in fairies, or at least Father Christmas? And remember how natural those beliefs felt to you at the time? And how much support you derived from them?

Could it be that you weren’t so deluded after all? And that your ‘truth’ at the time was in a sense truer than some of the beliefs held by your adult self? Could that be why we modern humans can often feel so grey, so ‘motherless’, as it were? Because the fun-loving, childlike, spontaneous, beautiful creativity and nurturing support we subconsciously know we should feel coming to us from the elemental kingdom is absent, withdrawn or very much diminished?

But on windy days, it seems to me, all that changes. At the same time as the wind blows away all our mental and emotional cobwebs, it seems to carry – even into the most sterile places – such irrepressibly playful beings; yes – I would say – real beings whose presence you can sense, creatures with consciousness and the ability to create; beings you can feel are capable of cleansing all but the stoniest of hearts and filling us with a renewed sense of expansion and freedom.

Children are, I think, spontaneously aware of this, and that’s why they always get so excited on windy days. Birds love it as well, and if you watch their flying antics you can’t help thinking that they, too, are infected by the spirits of fun blown in by the wind. And don’t you just love how the trees whisper and dance as the wind stirs their branches? To me, that delicious mingled feeling of cosiness and cleanliness, fun and freedom, almost as if one could fly, is not just the product of my mind and imagination. It really is inspired by genuine, conscious beings, who just happen not to be visible to most people.

Thanking the beings
And these beings have so much to give! All we need to do is Acknowledge, Appreciate, Ask and Accept! If you don’t believe me, read The Findhorn Garden Story [181009, £9.99], which tells you how, with the help of elemental beings, the most wonderful plants, flowers, trees and organic vegetables were grown to enormous sizes on windswept and barren sand dunes in the far north east of Scotland.

So, next time you’re out for a walk, doing some gardening, sitting down to a meal, lighting the fire or even a candle, try remembering and thanking the beings. Try remembering them on your way to work, too, and in the barren places. Try sensing them. Just playfully. With affection. Just as you did when you were a child. Remember the four ‘A’s (Acknowledge, Appreciate, Ask and Accept), and see where they take you.

To our mind, it can only bring more light into the world…. and into your life, too.

Ann, Geoff and the Cygnus Team