Last summer was a summer of synchronicity for me. I can only convey a fraction of what happened. Just enough to give you a sense of the kind of progress that's possible when we make the effort to stay in harmony and place our trust in Spirit.

There are a few "pre-stories" to tell. First, the Spirits told me to make a pilgrimage to Callanish, a megalithic site on the Isle of Lewis, before the end of the summer. I journeyed to receive the structure of my book at Callanish in 1993, and the Spirits told me to return to give thanks.

Next, in the spring, when I taught at Esalen, a student told me that the Spirits said that I should "listen to the voice of the stones, especially green jade." I thought that perhaps it had something to do with my interest in Chinese martial arts. Later, a friend pointed out that her name means "the sound of green jade," so I should always listen to her! Of course, as it turned out, there was quite a bit more to it.

The final "pre-story" is that another student told me that the teacher Barry Brailsford was coming to speak in Edinburgh, and I should go.

The night of the talk, I found myself feeling very reluctant. As I made my excuses and thought fondly of curling up at home, I realised my resistance meant something important was afoot, and I had to go.

At the lecture, Barry began to tell his story. He had worked with the elders of certain Maori tribes in New Zealand. His experiences resulted in several books, including "Song of Waitaha," "Chronicles of the Stone," and "The Song of the Stone." The sacred greenstone or pounamu, a type of green jade, features prominently in their tradition. Here was one connection with the green jade that my student had spoken of.

According to his teachers, their ancestors, the Nation of Waitaha, came to New Zealand from many parts of the world. He said their name means "the People of Peace." Of course, my people, the Tuatha Dé, are also called the Áes Síd, the People of Peace, in the myths.

After his talk, it was hard to know where to begin. I started speaking to Barry and his wife, Cushla about the spiritual connections between our traditions after the talk. I started with the "People of Peace" connection and went on to my student's greenstone journey. He immediately gave me one of the pounamu his elders had sent with him to energetically reconnect branches of the people of peace with each other.

I felt very honoured, and as I was looking at the stone, a picture of Callanish on one of Barry's book covers caught my eye. I began to tell him of my connections to that place, and he said, "You know, we're going to Callanish tomorrow."

I was buzzing when I finally went back home that night. The Spirits told me to go and make prayers at dawn by a swan pond, take swan feathers for Barry, Cushla and the rest of the group, and offer to help spiritually "open the way" for them at Callanish. Then it was up to Barry's Spirits if I went or not. I did as the Spirits said. When I made the offer the next morning, Barry said he'd thought to invite me about four minutes before. On the way to Callanish I got the story of how they came to be going.

The Gathering of the Tribes

Just two weeks before, Susan, the initiator of the trip, had a dream about an archaeologist. Then she saw an ad for a talk Barry was giving, and the word archaeologist caught her eye. She asked the sponsor to fax a picture and there he was.

The Spirits said she had to take him to Callanish. She had been to Callanish five times, working in a spiritual capacity with a local investigator. She took three days to make prayers before Barry came, and then asked him to go with her to Callanish. He said he needed three days to make prayers and decide, and she knew it would happen.

Barry had been trying to fill the week on his tour between the Edinburgh talk and one in London, but hadn't been able to, so he had the time. Everything fell into place. There was a cancellation in a rental cottage for that week, so we had a place to stay right on the coast, there was room for me in the car because Susan had felt they should have two cars, and so on.

A week before the trip, Barry and Cushla were staying with a couple, John and Linda, in England. The Spirits told John that he had to do some work at Callanish as well, so he and Linda came. Then, of course, the night before they went, I joined the party.

We weren't strangers. It wasn't even that sense of having known each other in the past. There was literally no "getting to know you." It was as though we'd all known each other all our lives.

On Lewis

Callanish is a complex of sites. We first went to the one you most often see in postcards, with the huge rudder shaped central stone. As we stopped to pray on the way, I prayed in Old Irish, Barry in Maori, and Susan, the one who initiated the trip, prayed in a Pacific Northwest Native American language. It was the perfect enactment in physical reality of a vision I had there in 1993. In that vision, I saw peoples of all traditions coming together in unity.

After a while, everyone else left and I was there by myself for a few hours and I made my offerings to the stones, and the Spirits who'd inspired my book. I felt very complete after that, yet the whole week was full of powerful messages from the Spirits.

One of my favorites arose during a discussion I had on the beach with Manannán mac Lír, the Sea God, about some distractions that popped up mid-week. He began by saying, "Sanity is a choice." Certainly a point we can all stand to remember!

Finally, at the close, everything came full circle. We gathered at Callanish that last night and exchanged gifts. As many of you know, the title of my book is Over the Ninth Wave: an Illumination of Celtic Spiritual Tradition. The ninth "wave" of energy is enlightenment. Its colour is white light, the sum of all colours of light. In the ceremony, Barry handed me a white stone, symbolic of the bones of the ancestors, carved with a wave form. Here was the sign of completion, the ninth wave of illumination, made from the bones of the ancestors.

Ancient Mysteries

It's worth speaking for a moment about what all the synchronous connections between widespread traditions mean. Of course, there is the "ancient mysteries" school, that tends to attribute it all to diffusion from one physical source, a high culture existing in ancient times.

The problem is that theories proposing that one culture was the origin of all good things aren't just scientifically unsound, they're often racist, since the people of this great culture are generally thought of as white. The truth of the matter is that the Aztecs didn't need white people to come across the ocean and tell them how to build a pyramid — the archaeological record shows that they developed the technique themselves.

Common Ground

There are huge commonalties in human physiology, perception and emotion that can explain many connections between diverse traditions. Seclude someone in a totally dark cave or chamber for three days and it is likely something will happen, as has been demonstrated by people's visionary experiences over much shorter stays in sensory deprivation tanks. Many traditions use periods of seclusion in darkness for visionary purposes. Similarly, trance induction methods of drumming, chant and dance are similar world wide because there are physiological and other reasons why they work.

More broadly, different cultures develop similar ideas of symbolism because certain colours and images tend to effect people similarly, or have similar associations. For example, bird symbolism is very common in shamanic costumes, in part, because of the obvious associations between a person who engages in spiritual flight and birds.

However, as a shaman-priest, I'm also aware of angelic orders of beings who manifest to many people as winged or in bird form and act as intermediaries between the worlds. Who better for shamans to imitate and/or embody?

Of course, there's feedback between the function of spirits and how we may perceive them. We don't tend to see heavenly spirits as heavy, clumsy, etc. For example, it often happens that if two shamans are looking at a patient, they may each spiritually see different things in the patient's body. One may see a poisonous snake in their chest, another may see broken glass. However, each shaman is being shown that something needs to be removed from that part of the patient.

Comparing notes with shamans and teachers from other cultures has convinced me that many of us are journeying to some of the same places in the Otherworld. The links between the myths of our respective peoples shows that we are also inspired by some of the same spirits manifesting in slightly different ways.

Mythic Traditions

I've been finding my own way, gradually, of looking at myths of migration and origin respectfully while acknowledging what we can know of ancient history from other sources. I would never suggest that my ancestors, or anyone else's, weren't telling the truth, but we have to ask, what kind of truth?

In my own story above, and its continuation below, you can see how many different ways my student's message about the voice of the stones and the green jade have manifested. If I'd seized upon the first manifestation of the theme as the one and only truth about it, I would have missed an awful lot--and that was a one-sentence message from a student. You can imagine how many layers of meaning there are in these myths.

Another important factor to bear in mind when thinking about mythic truths is that shamanic cultures don't draw hard distinctions between Spirit and matter, this world and the other — and with good reason. Matter is the densest level of Spirit. What happens in the Otherworld is no less true — it is generally thought of as more true, but because the realities are a continuum, it's sometimes hard to tell which reality our ancestors were speaking of.

For example, the mythopoetic history of the Irish Book of Invasions says that the Tuatha Dé, who brought advanced spiritual practices to Ireland, originally lived in the "northern islands of the world." However, the word they used for north, tuas, can mean above, allowing the phrase to also be translated as the "islands above the world," meaning heaven.

Some of the Irish literati, the scribes and authors who filtered Irish oral tradition through their own creative lenses, say that they arrived in a dense cloud of mist, lighting down on a mountain, while others say they arrived in boats and burned them, hence the smoke or mist. We can see that the literati were aware of both physical and metaphysical realities, and the different kinds of truth contained in each. One of the Irish literati says that it seems likely to the wise that the Tuatha Dé "came from heaven, on account of their intelligence and for the excellence of their knowledge."

This writer seems aware that spiritual truth and wisdom come from the Otherworld, spiritual aspect of reality. Therefore, however the Tuatha Dé brought that wisdom to Ireland, its origin was the same — the Otherworld, and this is the point that really matters.

As one of my spirit teachers told me, it doesn't really matter whether the migrations described in the Book of Invasions are physical facts, spiritual truths, or a combination of both. The only ground solid enough to stand on is the ground of spirit from which all truth proceeds.

Spirit nourishes our beings with divine truth not bound by time and form, the same truth that inspired the myths and legends of our ancestors. Arguing about physical facts of migration may make us blind to the deeper spiritual truths these myths contain.

Of course, there is an ultimate myth of reunion, of the idea of one people dispersed from one source, destined to be reunited. That is the myth that speaks of God shattering into form, making the universe out of Him/Her/Itself. This myth says that we are God coming to know Himself, and our conscious recognition of our unity will bring a new golden age to birth.

Of course, truly, the golden age is already with us. The events of the summer and the events of its ending underscored the many ways in which conscious spiritual union allows us to experience it now. As the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas says, "The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out upon the earth and men see it not."

A New Year

The summer ended and the New Year began when I re-met David Trevarthen at a conference on Supernatural Helpers. Among countless other synchronicities was the fact that part of his family is from New Zealand and his house is full of greenstone jewelry made by his grandfather.

We found that our areas of expertise and work dovetailed so perfectly that we'll be teaching together at Glastonbury this summer. Although people had requested for years that I teach there, I didn't feel I had sufficient expertise in archaeology to do it justice. David is an archaeologist specialising in interpreting possible ritual and symbolic meanings of megalithic monuments. He sees his role as attempting to speak on behalf of the original builders of the stones, in short, acting as their voice. His last name may mean of the House of Arthur, making him natural co-faculty for a workshop at Glastonbury.
At Samhain midnight, the Celtic New Year, David proposed a toast: "Ladies and gentlemen, good friends and good neighbours, visible and invisible, a toast to the New Wyrd Order."

Appropriate after the events of the summer, since the word wyrd essentially means powerful, synchronistic processes and events flowing from Spirit to matter. Like English weird, the word comes from the name of the first Norn, one of the Norse weavers of destiny, Urdhr.

As it turned out, one of the fellows he had summoned to drink with us on the street was playing John Knox, the famous Scottish Protestant fire and brimstone preacher, in a performance that night. Commanding John Knox to drink to the New Wyrd Order at Samhain 2000 was just too perfect!

Synchronicity

So — what makes these kinds of synchronicities possible? We can all experience this kind of harmony with the world. God doesn't love shaman priests more than others, or work any harder for them. The only difference between them and anyone else isn't that God loves them more, it's that they've made the effort to draw themselves into union with the Sacred, so they can benefit more easily from God's love.

One way we do this is through daily spiritual practice. While it may seem routine and difficult at times, I know that it's a big part of what enables us to make the sort of breakthroughs that occurred for me this summer. It's part of what enables us not to simply make the odd leap of faith, but to live in the leap, find our wings, and soar.

The biggest obstacle for me this summer was coping with the sense of free fall acceleration before I found wings to suit the altitude! We feel an amazing sense of exhilaration when our will joins God's. Suddenly, the force of the universe propels us, and the sense of urgency, the desire to make up for "lost" time can be painfully intense

The thing to remember at these times is that the sensation means we're on track. The time was not lost that brought us to this place. Consciously dedicate the time you've spent, the joys and sufferings you've experienced, to the process of union with the Sacred, and move forward as the momentum carries you.