Dragons, Faes, Ancestors, What the Empire Cannot Kill

I am going to tell you a very personal story from the Jungle of Peru and the hills of Glastonbury, and then bring you into the realm of mystical beings (whom I call “the old neighbors”), why they are coming back, and why I believe in this time of the Great Turning it is time to bring them more closely into our path, our sacred work, and our life. To survive the Empire, because there are many things the Empire cannot kill (Did I say Dragons? Fairies? Elementals? Spirit of place?).

Let’s dive in…

It was a long night of prayer in the Peruvian jungle, more than two or three decades ago, when the red dragon came for me.

I had walked out of a New York life that was the success everyone wanted. CEO, founder, entrepreneur of the year, Silicon Valley VC funded company, the titles you tell strangers at parties so they will stop asking who you are and somehow knew who you were (they did not know). I had raised millions of dollars, none of them ever ending up on my bank account. I had a calendar that managed me instead of the other way round. And then one morning my body refused. Refused to keep doing it. The exhaustion was not the kind that sleep could meet, it was deeper, at the marrow, something that had been waiting a long, long, LONG, time. Maybe from the end of my childhood. Maybe from before. So on a hunch I would later understand as a summons (though I did not understand that reality yet), I bought a ticket to sit for a month with elders in the Peruvian jungle.

By the third week I did not know who I was anymore. The ceremonies had stripped me. The dieta too. And the long walks alone in the dense humid green with thousands of sand flies did the rest. Something you cannot really understand from the outside, being taken apart on purpose.

And on a long night of prayer, with no warning, nor anything from me calling Her, she arrived.

A great red dragon, close enough that I could feel her heat. Terrifying. And loving somehow, in the same breath, though, at the time, I did not know how those two words could both be true.

She told me, without words, in something my body understood immediately (though I am still not sure, twenty years on, how to describe it), that she wanted to show me the world from her side of it, her perspective.

She entered me. Or I entered her. I have never been sure which.

And here there was a medieval village in front of us. I felt myself as her, fierce, throwing fire, the heat of fury rising through what used to be my human chest. And I remember thinking, in some part of me still watching, that the rage was familiar somehow. Then everything shifted. And at her feet, in the same instant, I saw the eggs. Her future babies. I understood, suddenly, in my bones and not in any other place, that what I had been calling a beast was a mother defending what she loved with everything she had.

My body became so hot the people around me moved away in the circle. In the morning they told me, one after another, that they had seen me as a dragon during that long stretch of the night. The shaman saw it. Everyone in the circle saw it. Whatever was happening was happening to all of us at once, though I am the one who has spent the years since trying to figure out what it meant.

She has come back through the years. She has come at ceremonies. She has come on hard nights when something old needed to die in me. And she came again in a forest near Glastonbury, twenty years later, when my teacher Jeremy RJ White (a gifted shaman of Norse tradition whom both my wife and I apprenticeship with) stopped on the path one afternoon and told me, simply, Now you have to go find the dragon egg.

I walked for hours. Alone. Following crows and feathers laid on the trail like crumbs, the feeling of being led. And I came, eventually, to a stone the exact shape and size of an egg. Three to four feet long. Waiting in the moss. As if it had been waiting for a very long time. Maybe it had.

And the Dragons are still coming. Just this week, walking through Noyers with The Wolf Den my wife (a medieval village twenty minutes from the farm, one of those places tourists put on a list, cobblestones and half-timbered houses and the Serein river bending around it), I sat down in the square with a diabolo grenadine, my childhood drink, red syrup and cheap lemonade that tastes like being seven years old in my grandmother’s garden (bliss).

I looked up, and there she was. Carved into the stone corner of an old house across the square. A dragon. Small. Weathered by six centuries of rain. Her wings still tight against the wall, waiting. I laughed quietly. I was still working out some sections of the essay in my head. And she was already there, on the wall of a village in Burgundy, six centuries old. Already answering.

I am telling you this because we are about to talk about beings, mystical beings. The old neighbors of this world, the dragons, the fae, the elementals, the genius loci, the spirits of place. And I want you to know I am speaking from a life lived in their company, not from theory. From inside the thing, whatever the thing is. (I still do not have the right word for it, and I am not sure the right word exists in English, which is part of the whole problem, but let me try anyway.)

And we need to talk about them now.

The old villages, the Elders, knew that humans cannot live alone in a world of objects. They knew it the way you know hunger. And the placed this wisdom in stories, myth and cosmologies so we will never forget.

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They knew that without the more-than-human neighbors (the spirits of well and Oak and crossroad and storm), something in us starves. And then loneliness gets in. Then something meaner, violence, addiction, whatever the century calls it. And after long enough, we let the machines tell us who we are, because nothing else is left in the room.

Empire says: there is nothing out there but matter.

The old ones said: matter is the visible edge of something far older, for more mysterious, and you are not alone, you have never been alone, and if you would stop talking long enough to listen, you would learn the names of who is standing right next to you.

The more the world becomes mechanical, the more we need the beings the machine cannot “make.”

So let me try to introduce you. Or reintroduce you. Properly this time. Or as properly as I can from the kitchen at La Ferme du Cerf Bleu, coffee in hand, dog at my feet, Juliette playing on the rug, Rose making some kind of weird tea, and the morning heat slowly rising on the land.

What follows is my ridiculous attempt to give a shape to it. Where the West lost these beings, and what we are still paying for that loss. The taxonomy the elders held, or some of it, Dragons and the Hidden Folk and the Standing People, the Bee-folk and the Plant Teachers, the Ancestors and the spirit of place. The science finally circling back to what the elders never left. Why Empire needed these beings dead, and what that has to do with the screen you are reading this on. And three doorways, small ones, the kind a friend would offer at the kitchen table, for beginning to live in conversation with the more-than-human again.

And because reading is one thing and beginning is another, I put together a companion field guide for this essay. A Field Guide to the Old Neighbors. It is attached to this post as a downloadable PDF. Forty-three pages of the beings laid out more slowly, with real practices for each, the three doorways expanded into actual offerings, and a threshold ceremony you can walk yourself through.

Most of what is shared below I have lived. Some of it cost me dearly. I would still do all of it again.