Nell Grey's Blog - Posts Tagged "nell-grey"

It's funny how often these things happen. I'd picked up The Cave by José Saramago and begun to read, and although it almost fell from my hand during the first two or three pages, after a while the style became easier and the characters began to come alive - a dog called Found provided the turning point. It's a slow book though, and may take me some time to finish.

I hadn't yet started re-editing Three Magic Women for Kindle, and had completely forgotten the way I'd written the first person narrative, so imagine my amazement to find that I'd not only given Una a strange way of speaking, but a similar Stream of Consciousness style with speech separated by capital letters rather than speech marks.

Again, that odd sense of reading the work of another author, but so far I've found very little to change. I think the style works well for Una's voice and seems to become invisible after a page or two.

It'll be good to have The Golden Web and Three Magic Women between the same virtual covers, and I'm looking forward to designing a new one when I've finished editing and formatting for Kindle.

Sometimes the strange and mysterious workings of Stunning Synchronicity, Dame Fortune, the Fates, and Gods and Goddesses known and unknown come together and something happens. I shouldn't be surprised after all these years, but today I'm blown away.

I'm not a true collector of tarot decks, as I only seek out those whose artwork attracts me. For a long time time now I've been drawn to The Greenwood Tarot: Pre-Celtic Shamanism of the Mythic Forest and the mystical artwork of Chesca Potter, but it's long out of print and I've never held out much hope of finding one. Seeing it mentioned here on Goodreads brought it wistfully to mind again, but it seemed as far out of reach as ever.

But...

As my husband was going out of the front door this morning for his weekly tour of the car boot sale, I called out to him to look out for a Greenwood for me.

A few hours later he came back and handed me ('Oh, by the way, I bought you these...') a bag containing a few well-used tarots. This is not an uncommon event, and I love these surprises. I could see the Druid Animal Oracle at the top, but I already have one of those, and laughed quietly to myself at the thought that it would take some sort of magic to find a Greenwood at the bottom of the bag.

Under the large oracle set I found a Goddess Tarot and the Arthurian, both slightly battered, but complete.

And below these, right at the bottom of the bag was a precious Greenwood, sans box, well-used and loved but all present and correct and attached to its book by a black ribbon...!

I cried.

So, in celebration I've posted the magical Queen of Wands card from the Greenwood Tarot and a poem I wrote years ago about an encounter with a hare.

Hill of the Magic Hare

I came across it unawares,
Still, dark sides a footfall away,
Flattened in the summer grasses.
At first I believed it dead
And walked past, face averted.
But something about the form,
Like, yet unlike a rabbit
Took me back to gaze into
A yellow eye, wild yet wise,
Before she took flight.

And afterwards I imagined life
In all the dead things I chanced upon.
Things of flesh, and bone and shell.

Nell Grey

(first published in Obsessed with Pipework)