Returning to Avalon

What does it mean to step from one way of being into another? It rarely happens in straight lines. More often, it winds like a spiral or a labyrinth.

We meet ourselves again and again as we circle through familiar terrain, returning to the same thresholds with new eyes.

More than twenty years ago, I first journeyed to the small market town of Glastonbury. I fell in love with the place immediately: the trees, the waters and springs, the strange sense of possibility that seemed to live just beneath the surface of things. There were people here offering a different way of seeing the world, one rooted in mystery, relationship, and myth.

At the time, my day-to-day life was very different. I worked as a finance professional, quietly slipping away at weekends to undertake something called priestess training.

Fast forward two decades, and here I am living in this small market town, hosting a group of women from the Coralus network.

In the years between, I travelled to the other side of the world. I found meaning and purpose in planting trees and working alongside environmental organisations. That work became the language through which my spirituality could move more comfortably in the wider world.

Regeneration, ecology, systems change: these were ways to speak about what I knew deeply without having to name the deeper current beneath it.

And then, almost casually, I found myself saying to this group, many of them fellow finance Professionals: “I am a Priestess of Avalon.”

Even as the words left my mouth, part of me was startled by them. I was not speaking about work, or roles, or outcomes. Of course, I spoke about the Sacred Birth Centre and why we created it, but that felt different somehow, larger than me, part of a collective weaving.

No, this was something more personal and more ancient.

I was declaring myself a priestess of place. A woman of lineage. A woman in a relationship with the land. And it felt profoundly right. Not in a performative or superficial way, but in a way that settled deep into my bones. My people and I belong to this land, this once-island of Avalon.

I understand its portal places, its herbs and hedgerows, and the healing properties of its waters. I know the red spring that rises rich with iron from deep within the earth, and the white spring, calcium-rich and luminous from the limestone closer to the surface. I understand something of their medicine.

I am in relationship with the animals here, with the seen and unseen world, with the stories that still move beneath this landscape. And the revelation of that, because it truly felt revelatory, was life-changing.

I watched the women arrive, many of them carrying the pace and intensity of busy, purposeful lives. Gradually, I observed as the place began to work on them. They noticed the light moving through the trees. The softness here. The fullness of the land as we move toward Beltane, the season of fecundity and becoming. I noticed them soften, too.

Again and again, we broke into pairs, listening deeply to one another, tending the web between us. We rolled up our sleeves together in the tiny kitchen of our centre, washing dishes, clearing spaces, and preparing food. Ordinary acts, and yet somehow not ordinary at all.

Beyond the town, we gathered on the land surrounding the Airbnb Vicki had chosen with astonishing intuition. The Tor stood to our left. Bushy Combe opened before us, a place of ceremony and memory, and in the far distance lay Brean and the sea. The waters were close. We tasted them in the Red Spring and the White Spring. Some chose to immerse themselves in the cold waters, and I witnessed the healing that emerged through that encounter.

It struck me repeatedly that what we were doing together was not separate from the wider moment we are living through.

We are living, as Joanna Macy described it, in the time of the Great Turning. Systems are fraying and collapsing around us. Much of what we once assumed to be stable now feels uncertain. We continue to make plans for the future while simultaneously sensing how fragile those plans may be.

There is a strange cognitive dissonance in being alive at this moment in history. We learn from MJ about the “bus” and how nervous system regulation can assist us. I notice that many of the things that regulate our nervous systems are happening, here and now at our retreat. Perhaps what we were creating together is not simply retreat space, but a kind of living experiment. A remembering of older human rhythms and ways of being that modern life has largely stripped away.

Maybe this, too, is a form of magic.

I know that somewhere during those days, I crossed a threshold. I stepped fully into my place in Avalon, as a lived and declared relationship. I cannot speak for others’ experience. But I have a feeling some of them crossed thresholds, too.