So let us begin then. 1

So let us begin then. 

I was born on a bitterly cold January evening with little fuss to my parents who had children to save their doomed marriage. Both of my parent are gifted magickally but either pretend not to use it, or don't bother. Nether of them are great parents, alright, they are terrible, as parents and pretty awful human beings. Much of my early childhood was me running naked outside eating berries from bushes, either to get away from their violent fights or their terrifying violence towards me.

My earliest memory is sitting watching sunlight through leaves. Now maybe this is why I found the faeries, or why they found me. I have never quite been able to get those early grass stained feet from in my soul. I grew and had a baby sister, which I was thrilled about until she became the worst parts of both my parents.

She wasn't even a playmate. For she was blind. Not blind in her physical eyes, she just didn't see the dragons, the faeries, the whole worlds around me that I could see. We moved all over the world, which still didn't save their marriage.

Our nomadic family blew into an ancient farm house in rural Wales. Then one night my father blew out. The whole house shook from the fight. I was a frightened mouse on the cold dark stair, watching him leave as my mother cried in relief.

The new man in my mother's life was better to her, and far far worse for me.

I loved the farm. The space, the ghosts and the faeries who danced and sang me into different worlds every day. The trees, and stones and animals around were my family.

I was five when the abuse started. A tiny slip of a girl with a short back and sides of a boy. I started to grow it when I hit school and the longer it grew, the more it curled, and the redder it got.

In the jumble of my memories it is hard for me to tell when everything blew up, and when I saw my first faery.

I remember staring at the checker tablecloth and hearing nothing but my heart beat as my sister, the only one who knew my dark secret, told my father at our biannual visits to London, that I had already seen a penis or as she put it, “one of those”.

Of course I also remember lying along a branch of a sycamore tree, being the tree, when a small person dressed in moss and mud with dragonfly wings jumped back startled that she had been seen. She was pale of skin with black eyes and hair that was full of mud and moss so it stood straight up from her head. She was as real as the tree I lay on.

Nether of these events was imagined but my mother would tell you I imagined it all. That I was crazy (something that terrified me for a long time).

While she never believed I had been abused (which allowed all kinds of other horrors into my life) she was always quite keen to take advantage of my magickal knowing, my portents, weather magick or even healing.

As the human world became crueller, I withdrew into the trees, the hay sheds and pig pens. I was too young to go to court (the days before video evidence) and I basically had to go back to my life even though a bomb had gone off in it. Except now everything was different. I lived in a house full of people who didn't speak to me if they could help it. Slowly, slowly my mother's bitter rage became cold hate. My sister, became my enemy, my home a battle ground. School was worse as parents told their children not to play with me. My faeries did their best. As I grew I would wrap myself in music, books meditation and magick.

The older I grew the less I wanted to do with my mother, the less she did, by eleven I even cooked most of my own meals. Other than balancing a cheque book I could have lived alone from the age of thirteen. I spent a lot of time as a teenager trying to figure out if I was mad. While I didn't see faeries every day, trees spoke to me, ghost too, and in certain places I could see history play it's self out all over again.

Knowing the “mad” people were locked away and poisoned made me certain I needed to figure out what was happening to me. What I was.

This changeling child, except not. I made a few friends and mostly got by pretending everything was fine. Except I was not fine as my explosive rage was testimony to. My step brother who was twenty years my senior tried to kiss me when I was thirteen and began a war of creepy stalking attention that persisted until I left forever at 19.

I was stronger than I looked and while I became popular at school most people never tried to pick fights with me. I was ambitious, determined, outspoken and smart. I had read more books on ancient beliefs and magick by this point than most people had read magazines. I meditated everyday. More as a way to lock-down that burning boiling dragon of rage and pain. The older I got if I wasn't meditating to quieten it, or exercising until exhausted enough to sleep, I was drinking. I could out drink most people I knew. Vodka usually.

I began healing people, guided by spirit and very little else after a strange conversation with my father at one of our biannual “watch your Dad get drunk and talk about things you are uncomfortable with and need to keep locked down”. He had always had a keen interest in alternative health and he just said, “I bet you're a healer Lu”. So I was. It didn't seem any stranger to me than anything else. I also at a house party got regressed and found I had access to a thousand new memories which was confusing but nothing worse than what I was living through. I did (and still do) wish that the first memory of a life wasn't usually dying. Not long after that I met a family of mediums and my training proper began.

Of course this could not continue. I managed to lock it all down quite well until a new friend from college mentioned she was abused and in behaviour totally unlike myself I broke down in great heaving sobs. She didn't say anything. She just wrapped her arms around me and said;

“I know. I know. I know.”