Wreathed in mist and roses, the Mother greets those who visit the sacred spring of St Non. The little shrine to the Virgin was erected in 1951 when the Passionist Fathers restored and rededicated the spring, as if to leave those who walk the cliff-top path in no doubt of the deity from whom the healing waters flow. Me, I was having grave doubts about such a claim of allegiance.

The legend tells that St Non gave birth to her son, St David, in the field beside the spring. St Non was the daughter of a noble house who had been ravaged and left with child. The healing waters of the spring began to flow when the babe was born, bathed in light, while a thunderstorm of biblical proportions raged around the mother and child, protecting them from harm. I have to wonder what a pregnant noble lady was doing…

POSTCARD #218: New Delhi: Jiab sent me this pic of the cow in Gujarat. There’s always something that ‘clicks’ inside me when I see the cow in the city traffic in India. The aloof separateness of the Gods. Something about the bovine ‘mother’, sacred cow that all Hindus are conscious of.

There’s also  a memory of something from my home on the farm in the North of Scotland when I was a kid. I remember long nights and short days, aunties and grannies wearing comfortable wooly cardigans, porridge in a cracked bowl, coal and wood fires, cows in the fields, a black-and-white collie dog – and it’s this that I notice about the rural/urban Indian cities, cows sitting on the pavement, goats nibbling and chickens pecking around, the sound of a cockerel in the distance. It’s the farmyard scene where I was brought up that followed me here!

There’s a…

For once, I wished I wasn’t driving. I wanted to stop every few minutes and get the camera out… the whole area is very beautiful, but the road between Nevern and our next stop in the Gwaun Valley exceptionally so. We were rdiving in a convoy though and it was fairly obvious that, had we stopped, we would be hopelessly lost. The narrow roads winding over hill, down dale and through the trees was not a place for loitering…and anyway, our guide had promised us cider.

We had been told to expect an unusual pub and that was  a fair description in this day and age when even the old inns are being taken over by chains, decorated in bright colours and given a modern twist. Bessie’s, officially know and the Dyffryn  Arms, looks more like a home than a public house. Owned by the same family since 1840, Bessie…

Source: Independent.co.uk David Keys August 5, 2016 The mysterious origins of the British archaeological site most often associated with the legend of King Arthur have just become even more mysteri…

Source: Dark Ages Royal Palace Discovered In Cornwall – In Area Closely Linked To The Legend Of King Arthur

In previous years, the Silent Eye has released a workbook after the annual April workshop. In Song of the Troubadour and Land of the Exiles, we published the script of the five-act psycho-drama that forms the basis of these events with contributions from some of our companions who shared their personal impressions and stories.

The aim was to show exactly what happens on a ritual workshop weekend for those with no experience of such events and to give some insight into the Silent Eye.

Rather than continue publishing scripts in their pure format, we have sought innovative ways of presenting the inner ideas behind the stories we have woven as the central theme of a spiritual teaching workshop. Last year, the script for River of the Sun was turned into a serialised, fictional adventure and shared on Steve’s personal blog. It will eventually be released as a standalone novel that…

This was one of the magical moments at our family wedding on Saturday…

I was looking forward to Nevern Church… another one of those, like Kilpeck, that we would visit ‘one day’…and were visiting at last. To think that we had seen so much since Kilpeck, just three days before, seems incredible. But that’s the way these trips seem to work… time takes time off to stretch for a while, leaving us space to play. The trouble with some of these places, though, is that you come across them in researching other places…and forget what it is that you actually wanted to see. All I could recall was that Nevern was home to the Bleeding Yew and was, in fact renowned for its avenue of ancient yew trees, some of them over 700 years old.  Just like Kilpeck, though, we found far more than we imagined.

The Bleeding Yew is not an uncommon gardening phenomenon, but few have a place in legend…