Thank you for visiting the Blog and Story section…
Here you’ll find spiritual fiction that I’m planning to add to and build into a book over time. There are also short bursts of story that came out in one amazing flow, and blogs about life, love, deep-rooted struggles, precious magical moments… and writing!
If you are interested in my fiction for children and teens, please visit my author website (I’ve written over sixty books - the most recent being a series about a mindfulness club, The Feeling Good Club. And if you’re a budding author, I may be able to help you unfold into your full potential both creatively and in terms of getting your work published and out there in the world! Check out author’s hour of power for more info!
Thanks for reading, and happy writing if you’re a scribbler like me! Love, Kelly xxx
A Collective of Oracles
A Collective of Oracles is a piece of spiritual fiction writing I’m creating at the moment. I’m sharing it piece by piece as it builds into a longer-form work. We follow Star, a young seeker on a quest to understand the true nature of her being, and experience Union with the divine. She meets mysterious teacher and guide Ishtar at the Chalice Well Gardens and her journey begins. This journey is drawn from a sequence of mystical ‘enlightening’ experiences that I was fortunate enough to have a couple of years ago, and I’m excited to be creating fiction with them. I also know that, like all story characters, Star and Ishtar have their own plans for their journey, so I’m excited to see where they take me too! The first episode is below, I hope you enjoy it…
One
Star sat on the low stone wall, breathing in the dappled sunlight. The woman who’d come to sit beside her was called Ishtar. They’d smiled at one another from across the gardens, met one another’s gaze and held it for a moment out of time. Then Ishtar had walked over, moving like warm honey, her red dress alive with the shifting shadows of leaves and branches. She’d sat down beside Star and breathed, ‘I’m Ishtar,’ like a prayer. ‘Hi, I’m Star,’ Star had said. It had been as simple as that. Some meetings are.
Ishtar turned to look directly at Star. Almost through her, it seemed. ‘Why have you come here?’ she asked. ‘What do you hope to find?’
Star hadn’t had to put it into words before. Of course, she’d wanted to see the beautiful gardens, and drink the sacred water, and feel the energy of the Chalice Well. Maybe meet an interesting person or two (and she’d certainly just met one in Ishtar). But that wasn’t why.
She tried to explain. ‘When I meditate, and get really present, I feel… It’s like a melody playing across my chest, through my heart space. I’m like a xylophone. There are different notes, and they create harmonies, and it’s bliss and joy and exquisite beauty and… well, I suppose I feel like if I could make, no, allow, I mean, those notes to all come together, there would be, it would be some kind of…’
She faltered, reaching for the word… Ishtar nodded encouragingly.
‘Grace? Unity. And I’d know myself. Be myself truly.’ She paused again, at the edge of what words could convey. ‘And the gift shop is amazing, obviously,’ she added, feeling self-conscious. She’d talked for longer than was usual, in a first meeting, with a stranger. But Ishtar’s gaze was steady, her focus open. And anyway, she didn’t feel like a stranger.
She didn’t feel like anyone. She felt like eternity itself, and all the time that Star had been talking, she’d been feeling the presence of Ishtar beside her. In the silence that followed, she could feel her even more intensely. Star looked up, into her eyes, and for a moment Ishtar looked not like a curvy, olive-skinned, middle-aged woman but like Grace itself, cloaked in stars. For a moment, she looked exactly like the grace Star sought within herself, in the merging vibrations of her heart melodies.
‘So, how about you? What brings you here?’
Ishtar simply smiled at this, and for a while the two women sat in glorious, unravelling silence. Star loved the fact that silence was the natural state behind the words that arose in Ishtar. And that stillness was the natural state behind her movement. When she moved, now to adjust the comb sweeping her dark hair from her face, Star could feel the presence of the stillness from which that movement arose. And when she spoke again, Star could feel the silence from which her words were formed.
‘It sounds like you wish to know the mysteries.’
Star shifted on the craggy stone wall on which they sat, as some deep current of energy rose within her. She wouldn’t have been able to put it like that herself, but once she heard it, she knew that that was exactly why she had come. ‘Yes,’ she said simply, trying to draw the word into being from some deep well of possibility, the way Ishtar did. But her own voice sounded flat and tinny to her ears after the other woman’s.
‘Then you will need to meet the Collective of Oracles,’ said Ishtar.
‘Yes,’ said Star again. She felt some richness in her voice now. Some depth. It was a heart ‘yes’, a soul ‘yes’. Mysteries. Oracles. Intriguing strangers who moved like water and spoke the way a cello speaks.
‘Carrots,’ said Ishtar.
‘Carrots?’ repeated Star.
Ishtar’s lips curved in amusement in a way that made Star long to lay down with her head on the other woman’s lap and have a luxurious nap. ‘Indeed. Carrots. It’s time to prepare lunch. Behind the retreat house there is a bountiful kitchen garden. Go and dig up some carrots for soup, then scrub them well in the kitchen.’
Star’s breath caught in her throat in surprise. ‘But, I can’t just go and-’
‘Say I sent you. There is always a lot to do and no one will mind.’
‘But-’
Ishtar smiled her amused smile again. Star knew she had been dismissed. Clearly, if she wanted Mysteries and Oracles, it started with carrots, and that was the end of it.
Stand Your Ground
Recently I learnt something deeply valuable from an incredibly powerful spiritual teacher. This beautiful cow.
The sun was back and the heath was beckoning after I’d dropped my children at school, so I took a short detour, parked up and headed out onto the common. My body paused at a crossroads and my brain caught up – I wasn’t being led to where I’d planned to walk. I questioned it, for a moment, felt into it again, but no, I was going on an unscheduled (by my mind anyway!) adventure.
I’d had a powerful experience of connection and unity in a field along the new route, and I just knew that’s where I was going, again. I strode down the rocky path, then under the dappled canopy of green, walked a turn in the track that I just love so much because it’s so sinuous and enticing, shared a greeting with a man wrestling two little dogs on spaghetti leads and a ringing phone, and soon I was there.
I stood facing east, felt with my feet and my energy exactly where I wanted to stand, and breathed deeply into the earth. I opened the four directions, called in my guides and sang a couple of songs on a loop, with my eyes closed. I felt profoundly present, alive, and, following a conversation with two magical women at a shamanic workshop the evening before, even more appreciative of the fact that I AM NATURE rather than I AM IN NATURE.
Maybe fifteen minutes after I opened it, eyes still shut, sun on my face, I closed the east gateway. Then I turned and as I closed the south, a feeling made me open my eyes – and there she was - standing very, very close to me.
Her friends were grazing nearby, but she was walking straight towards me, connecting deeply eye to eye. I didn’t even realise the cows were back on the heath this year, and now one was about a metre from me, walking up to me. Usually, if they’re there, they do their thing and you do yours, from a reasonable distance. Up so close they are huge, and heeeeaaaaavy - you can feel the weight of them – and their horns look like intimidating (well, they did to me, anyway!). She paused – I almost heard pistols-at-dawn banjo music on the breeze. Something magical was happening between us, between me and All-That-Is-in-cow-form, but it wasn’t in that Disney heroine way, where the bluebirds land on your shoulder and you all do a musical number. This was a challenge from my soul.
And I knew it. Here was my moment. I’d been integrating the masculine aspect of myself over the previous 18 months, and very strongly in the last few days before. I’d been allowing patterns of retreating and hiding from life ‘out there’ (which were very useful in the past but are no longer needed) to detox from my body-mind system. I’ve been learning natural horsemanship for the past few years too, and so I instinctively applied a bit of what I knew about holding my space when in danger of having your space run through or pushed on, or maybe even getting run over.
I didn’t know if the cow fancied running me over. But at that weight, with that clout and those horns, I didn’t want to find out. Up came the adrenaline and the fear, but I knew I had to stand my ground. I powerfully projected myself into the energetic space around me, claiming a circle. She tried to move into it. I clapped my hands and said ‘No’ firmly. I turned my hara, belly button, away, and stopped making eye contact, so it didn’t turn into a confrontation. The challenge was energetic, I knew. Working WITH, not pushing on each other’s energy to see who would win. That’s not the kind of discussion I wanted to get into with such a huge, heavy, pointy-horned being either.
I kept holding my space, standing my ground. She wasn’t yielding. Shit, I felt. I called strongly on a powerful presence I felt behind me and within me – horned itself, interestingly – and projected that power through my arm, making bull horns with my fingers to give my energy a point of direction. She wasn’t yielding. Shit, shit, shit. This was magic, energy, communication. Surely it had to work… But suddenly I was in doubt. What if, after a lifetime of evidence, MAGIC WASN’T REAL? And what if working energetically with horses is VERY NICE AND ALL THAT, but wasn’t going to help me here at all? Yikes! But I breathed deeper, dropped my focus lower in my body and held firm…
And then the miracle happened – she yielded. Her body turned, moving from exactly the meeting point of our energetic conversation, just like a horse’s would, and she walked a few paces away. Now I had completed the challenge given to me by All-That-Is, life, the quantum field, whatever you prefer to call it, I could leave. Now I had shifted the dynamic between us I could turn my back, well, my side, anyway, on the beautiful beasty and walk away.
Safely on the other side of some fencing I took in what had happened. Then I went back to where she was – and once I’d turned off my circle and changed my energy to inviting, she came right over to me.
So maybe she would have walked right up to me when I’d opened my eyes in the field – probably totally benignly, looking for a pat on the head… Maybe on another day the challenge would have been to allow that. Or to turn tail and see if I could outrun her. But on that day I knew, utterly, a hundred percent, that the challenge was to Stand My Ground. And as I walked back up the track, heart now settling, beaming, in wonder, still shaky, I knew I’d done just that – through an astonishing encounter with a magnificent being – as one expression of nature to another. So, why am I telling you about this? I wanted to share that life will bring you what you most need, to challenge you, to show you where you’ve grown, to take you further on your path, to allow you to deeply experience the shifts that are taking place within you. This is living Stepped In, with agency, empowerment and engagement. Sensitive, empathic mystics like me don’t need to go white water rafting or bungee jumping to find that edge – just give me a sunny day, a field and a massive great cow! If this resonates with you, and you’d would like to find out more about stepping in to your life and Standing Your Ground, come over to the Soulsparks facebook group. Happy soul adventuring! Kelly xx