You’ve seen them on the streets of America—in an urban environment?
W: Very much so!
B: Always. One of the ones that was odd, I can’t remember exactly where it was but it was on the East Coast. I was walking down the street and I felt there were leprechauns around. I thought, “That’s really stupid, why would there be leprechauns on the edge of America?” Then I saw a plaque on a pole standing there in this weird long, open space, and it said, “On this site were the fever sheds.” It’s when the Irish immigrants were coming in on boats, and they had yellow fever. They were put in the sheds to die, basically, to isolate them. They brought the leprechauns with them!
That’s interesting, isn’t it, because we know that faeries are connected to the land but clearly they are also connected to us ancestrally…
B: It does seem that people bring their faeries with them, because I had another experience around San Francisco which was again a leprechaun, but he was on the edge of a field and a wood and my conversations with him were always on the edge of the day, always the morning, sitting there with a cup of coffee and thinking about things. The actual physical place was a hundred yards away from where I was sitting, but there was a conversation that would happen with a leprechaun. It was distinctly a leprechaun, with all the accoutrements—the tricorn hat became quite important in his communications with me. It was just fascinating. But it was a leprechaun! Why? But you can’t question this stuff—you can try, but you just have to trust it. If you don’t get it, it’s you being stupid because there’ll be a moment where there’ll be some revelation and you’ll think, “Yes, of course! That’s what it was trying to say!”
Is it that the spirits travel with people, do you think, or is it that the spirits of that place choose familiar forms from our own subconscious, or based on the people they’ve had contact with, to communicate with us?
W: It could be either one…probably both…
B: Yes, absolutely both. The pure energy is unintelligible; you need form, you need some intelligible form.
W: That’s why we can portray things.
B: So either you can provide the form as the human aspect, or they provide the form. Sometimes the form is truly expressive of its nature, and sometimes its form is not an expression of its nature, it’s just a way of allowing you into the space so that you can understand its inner nature.
Like a mask?
B: Yes.
Do you have practices that maintain your connection with Faery?
W: We do leave offerings in the garden, yes. But I think that because of where we live, because that energy is just a constant here with us, we don’t have to be conscious of it all the time. We really do just live with it, and it’s a part of where we live. I think that if we moved, or if we were in another place for long enough, we’d have to be more aware of it and very consciously try to communicate. Whereas here, we don’t really…we share the space with them.
B: Generally everything we do is about Faery…it’s just continuous, so we don’t have to do things deliberately.
W: Although it’s interesting because when we do go out into the circle and do ritual, the energy is just amazing. We had a blessing ceremony that John and Caitlín (Matthews) did as part of a wedding, and since then the energy has been so much stronger and more focused.
B: They did a Faery blessing for the wedding, and I think that lots of people who were invited didn’t know what to expect, and everybody was amazed.
W: And I think a lot of people felt that they were restating their own vow at the same time, so it was like a collective blessing for everyone. It was wonderful.
B: Also, people tend to think faeries are “airy fairy,” and what was happening was a reconnection to the land itself—people felt they were connected to their own landscape. People just love that, they were moved by it.
Do you have particular beings that you work with or is it a variety of beings that come forward at different times?
W: For me they just come forward when they need to; I don’t have one that’s there to help all the time. There’s so many! They all want a turn, they want to come forward and push their way to the front.
B: I had one that came back with me, a few years ago, from America. It came and stayed a long time in the house. I promised to take it back if it ever wanted to go back, and it wanted to go back, so I took it back to where it had come from. So that had been very helpful. I’m not a person who constantly dwells on it or checks in. When I do check in occasionally, it’s always astonishing when these beings are there and imparting something, some help. So now I have another one! There always seems to be one special one, for a while anyway.
How do you find that you influence and support each other?
W: I think we’ve worked together in many ways since we’ve been together, which is over thirty years now—such a long time! But we’ve only just recently begun to collaborate on projects together to this extent. To write about Brian’s work I find fascinating because I hadn’t really done that before; I did it for the oracle deck and really enjoyed it. We have to be aware of each other’s egos when we’re working together, really, because we both have a tendency to be able to point out exactly what’s wrong with the other person’s work but if you say it in the wrong way we would just storm off into our studios and then later on go, “Oh, you were right, you were
