The Fairy Ring Under the Pine

I was helping my friend Bim for a time in the country of Denmark in a quaint little neighborhood bordering Roskilde Fjord. She had at the time a tall split level home, with a big yard. I was to do chores in the garden. In the flat above Bim’s place, tenants came and went, the last of which was a lady I will call Sherry who had a girl child with a hearing disability. They had the typical round trampoline out in the big yard. Some areas of the yard were rather undisturbed like the big brush pile and a mound the in furthermost corner opposite the roadway.

Bim became friends with Sherry and they had some garage sells on Saturdays – you know the usual kind of things ladies do to socialize.

Myself – basically a hermit after a long stint in the forest free from restriction and the systems that man has so eagerly brought to us all. For me they offer little, as my sense of reality is not normal, by any means. After so long in the forest, working with fire and ice. I sensed many ethereal beings.

It was nice to visit the civilized world and chat with Bim as time sped by.

At Bim’s place the roadway was buzzing with traffic more each day as big trucks hauled materials to the apartment blocks being built not far from there.
Each mourning around five or six a massive number of crows began to gather in the large Birch tree that bordered the neighbors house. A mass of blackbirds doing business detail in to a big tree close by in that early hour has its noisy moments.
The traffic each mourning becoming unbearable as folk migrated to work – the crows squawking and flocking about the big trees in the area, as if trying to assess the situation. I did not count the crows, but I suppose more than three hundred and twenty on some mornings. Always a few on guard in the highest and lowest look out points.
That big white birch was alive with the black mass of wiggling crows, darting in and out of the branches. Parts of the flock would leave the tree making a circle over the neighbors old brick house then alight back to their seemingly strategic positions. Sometimes trading off with the even bigger trees across the street. But the numbers of crows in those trees outside Bim’s kitchen window awed me.

It had began to enter my mind that those mystical birds were an omen that the road was about to be widened and made into more of a highway.

I watched those crows every day I was at Bim’s, surely they were trying to send a message, or they were simply witnessing the traffic and reporting the increase to a higher source in some other realm. It had become an ominous kind of situation. For the neighbors I suspected as well.

Until:
One day a man with a chainsaw came and the tree in the neighbors yard was cut, piece by piece until it was no more. I suppose it had gotten diseased like a lot of trees as of late do in fact. There now just a ring of dead bones and sawdust and a short stump. It took the birds some time to get used to the empty air where the tree once provided – but eventually the crows stopped coming back, sadly accepting their perches were no more. Of course soon they found other nearby locations to caw.
I had a strange feeling in my gut, I was angry and hurt the tree had been taken out.

Bim’s Little Garden
Then there was the garden, in back of the split level house, far from the road where I helped my friend Bim who had made fairy houses along the boarders, and among the plants. Bim had hundreds of various flowers and vegetables growing all around the big yard. I cut the paths through the tall grass so the fey could come and go, and know we were their friends.

Bim had back pain so we hung out in the back house always working in healing realms. In prayer, in frequency, and some- times even a bit of liquor to take the edge off. That little back house had become a magic land of shells, sticks, hanging rocks, and many hundreds of artistic miniatures made in concrete or whatever materials were available. That back house was a doorway to other sensitivities and burning of much sage.
In the garden I did the heavy lifting of flower pots, digging, and composting, while Bim was burning incense and lighting candles in the little fairy houses and around the yard. We knew the fey were about, though we seldom saw them, we felt their presence. It was a magic time for a while.

During the few years I helped with the garden there was a big pine just off the side of the house and to my joy a large fairy ring just under it. Oddly a bare flag pole there had a circle of stone that was roughly same size as the fairy ring. I always was perplexed that the two circles seemed to have some communication. Bim had once asked me to trim that pine, just a few lower branches to let light in her main evening sun room. One chore I never did get too.

When the upstairs lady Sherry one day suddenly had summoned a man with a chainsaw to come have the pine removed I was horrified!
The squirrels loved to play in that pine – a bit too close to the split level home, so it could be justified as: “safer in storm weather”. But for my sake no! I simply don’t cut down a tree for ever time I was hired to such a task bad luck always came! Agriculture had already taken most of the trees anyway. My poor heart was sick. What was it with these people cutting down trees? Where would the squirrels play now? Where would the raven’s do business?
I had been so entertained by their folly. Well so it was not my doing, not my sin. Although given many logs, I was careful not to handle them until it was clear to the elementals I had no part in any of this. Indeed… something had changed in those weeks that followed.

I had always felt and caught glimpses of the spirit beings in that yard, yes the fey, even things in the night sky – and in the quietest corner of the garden by the mound – if I held my eyes just right – a kind of glittering in the atmosphere. Some large entity had abode in that mound. But oddly, after the tree was fell;
the fairy ring no more appeared and the beings seemed to hide.

I suppose they had left the area or gone deep into the ground. Now just a four foot stump where once a magnificent conifer stood. And all that fall I waited for the ring to appear again, but no more fairy ring with its beautiful mushrooms.

When men cut trees it can make bad things happen, and just after the desecration of the pine Sherries daughter became very ill and was hospitalized for some weeks with a fever and the child had become lame and refused to speak. Dare say I wondered if the events were connected. Luckily the girl recovered after time and all seemed well with them the last I saw them. They moved away soon after that, leaving the round trampoline, by the bare flagpole with the stone circle – minus the fairy ring, and the pine.

Bim and I were always so careful not to make the fey angry and remain in good standing, with them. But the year after the conifer was taken, the garden did nothing, the ground had just died, I could feel its sadness and loss. All the fruits had worms and the squash all died of a nasty fungus. Even the tomatoes that had done beautifully the years before refused to yield.

Why had Sherry cut the tree down and then moved away shortly after?

I recall a short talk with her one day, about a month before she had cut down the tree. I was turning the compost in the garden, when she approached me with a stool for Bim, which I accepted. Oddly enough then I began ecstatically to tell her about the faeries and that you should never dance with them in the ring, nor accept food or drink from them. Because if one did, one would be trapped in a kind of timeless state, possibly never to return to this realm. I can only say her reaction was one of fear and amazement, she seemed to turn a bit pale and wide eyed. Although just a detail in this story. It may or may not have had bearing in the order of events.

I cannot prove that the removal of the conifer was why Sherries little girl got ill, or the garden refused to yield. Maybe its wrong of me to relate such an idea. Nor can I say absolutely the yard and garden had gone dead. But it was sure thought the once rough territory was becoming over ridden with traffic. -But mounds still undisturbed in the farmers fields, remind us that once upon a time, people knew the stars and nature in that area. Once the proud pagans wondered freely there.
The Norse folk were well aware of multiple kinds of beings that existed all about them, and they had much respect and took caution not to offend.
I do not know for sure what the beings are, there are multiple names for nature elementals who live between the physical realms and the dream realms. But I would never disturb their places.
When people disturb their places, these beings can get very malevolent, they are everywhere, and only through awareness and burning of sage, and fire ritual do we really get to know them. So is the mystery of the little folk here in Scandinavia.

rbw
April 16th, 2019