The Light of the World

Chapter Nine of Cosmic Heart, a spiritual memoir

Cosmic Heart is a spiritual memoir. You can learn more and read the previous chapters here. Thank you for subscribing and reading - I’m grateful to be writing this book here with you as my reader!

The house I grew up in was bordered by land – a cattle farm, a hillside that sloped down to a log cabin where my cousin lived, a grove of cedar trees, a creek that fed into a pond.

In our backyard, we had a wooden picnic table next to a large tree. I spent many hours in that backyard, lying in the grass staring at the sky, climbing the wooden fence to get to the grapevine swing, and draping blankets across the picnic table to make a fort, which would have been better designed for the summer heat had I used a sheet instead. And I sat at the foot of the tree. I leaned against it, I pressed my hands on its bark. I talked to it and it spoke to me. We didn’t use words, but feelings. It was an energy exchange.

Once, at my friend’s house, I discovered two books in her collection, Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet’s Gnomes and Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s Faeries. I was enthralled. I consumed the pages. I dove into them, my heart pounding. I wanted to live in those books. When I looked at the illustrations, my whole body lit up. This, I understood, was fiction. But it was also, I understood, a window into a reality. There was a world inside this world. I felt it. I believed it existed.

After seeing these books, I began to fill acorn caps with water and gather items from the yard to leave at the base of the tree as offerings. I ducked down, made myself as small as possible, as close to the ground as I could get, and whispered, hello, hello, hello.

I was twelve when we moved from the country into town. In town, we still had a yard and trees, of course, and we still went to my grandparent’s farm, but my attention turned from attempting to communicate with faeries to walking to the corner store to buy orange push-ups and the latest issue of Tiger Beat magazine.

I continued, throughout my teens and twenties, to be drawn to faerie and gnome imagery. As an adult, I came back around to conversations with trees and plants and a more complex understanding of nature spirit, which I had never stopped believing in, while I also became aware of the complexities and cultural appropriation involved in such a belief.

Often romanticized in Western pop culture, the fae are part of deep, living traditions across worldwide cultures and cosmologies. They are not whimsical cartoon characters, but entities that have been honored, feared, and revered through ritual, folklore, and spiritual practice.

Among white people in the U.S., there’s a tendency to flatten these stories into aesthetic or escapist fantasies, detached from their cultural roots and spiritual depth. As a self-proclaimed spiritual explorer, I wanted to hold space for how ancestral memory might call me toward faerie communion while remaining respectful of what wasn’t mine to claim or discuss. I didn’t want to feed the notion of faeries as cute little tropes (even though I did and still do have a Tinkerbell sticker on my car) and didn’t want to meddle in that which did not belong to me.

It was Easter 2013 when I went back to church. As I began to root myself in the structure and sacred rhythm of the liturgies, seasons, and traditions of the Episcopal Church, I found myself navigating a delicate and confusing shift. For years, my spiritual life had been a sort of wild garden: intuitive, dreamy, woven from personal ritual and the quiet teachings of other spiritual nomads, but also the elements, the phases of the moon, and daily divination.

Entering the life of The Church felt like stepping into an ancient stone fortress—a place where mystery lived, for certain, but also where form mattered. I had to learn how to be a part of this structure, this system, without losing my way of knowing. I wondered who I was in this place and where I was to be placed inside of it. Just as I was beginning to settle into this new way of belonging, I was invited to a faerie retreat.

It happened that two of my closest online friends were planning this retreat at the same time I was going to be in England with my mother, as she and I had begun spending a few weeks every summer in the UK. I was thrilled by the opportunity to see my dear friends in person, to be with them in the flesh, and I was also nervous.

I took the train from Oxford to Bangor. A friend collected me from the train station and we drove on a winding road at the foot of Snowdon Mountain until we reached the magic of Cae Mabon, an eco-retreat centre in the green heart of North Wales.

I was instantly enchanted. The landscape shimmered with the otherworldly beauty of stone pathways, mossy trees, and a deep stillness that was very much alive. The structures, tucked into the hills, resembled hobbit houses, earthy and magical with their sloping grass roofs. I was overwhelmed —I couldn’t stop crying — and even more so, standing with these two people I felt I had loved forever.

There was an immediate soul recognition, a sense of coming home. And yet, beneath the joy and wonder, I carried a churning anxiety. I was a newly reaffirmed Episcopalian, and I worried that my presence might be perceived as out of step with the energy of the retreat. I didn’t want to offend or be misunderstood. I was learning how to carry both, I suppose: Christianity and the cosmos, the liturgy and the wild, letting them find space together inside me.

As we opened sacred space by calling in the four directions, I was asked to invoke the spirits of the East. At that moment, I felt the through-line between these two paths: the breath of Spirit moving through both the untamed and the ordered, the personal and the collective. It was not a departure from wildness, but an integration. I was learning to be with reverence on both paths and create the path that was mine to walk.

On our first day of the retreat, I went alone into the woods. I could feel the energy of the trees, their personalities. I was aware, for instance, of a grove of tall birch that did not want me to approach. I was captivated, overwhelmed by the intense and layered green beauty around me, the energetic vibration of the place. I walked slowly, studying bark and tiny leaves - the curl of fiddleheads, the soft bright moss, tiny blossoms. I walked with waves of love and gratitude and sorrow pulsing through my body and I began to hear it.

It sounded like small soprano voices braided together. It was audible harmonic singing emanating from the trees. I was stunned. I stood and listened, then I walked and listened. It was unmistakable. There was no one else nearby, no electricity, no radio. I heard faerie voices singing - elementals. Nature spirit. I heard it with my physical ears, the most beautiful, ethereal sound I’d ever heard.

That night, after fireside stories in the roundhouse, I was walking alone up the hill in the dark toward my dwelling for the night. I carried a small lantern, but it was no match to the deep dark un-electrified night. I felt someone approaching behind me, so I turned around, but no one was there. I continued, slightly unnerved. Suddenly someone or something blew on the back of my neck. It was a hard puff of air. I whipped around, but there was no one there.

“No,” I said, firmly, and I heard laughter.

I knew it was an elemental entity, not dangerous or malevolent, but also not benevolent. A third, uncategorizable thing, that which some may call a trickster. I was in the domain of nature and it was exhilirating.

I honestly don’t remember if it was on that trip or another when one of my friends came to visit me and my mother in Oxford and we took her to see The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt.

The painting depicts Christ standing in a dark, lush garden at night, gently holding a lantern in his left hand and knocking on a closed wooden door, the human heart, with his right. The door is weathered and covered with vines and thorns. There is no handle on the outside of the door; it can only be opened from within, emphasizing the idea of free will in the act of spiritual awakening.

Jesus is portrayed wearing a long, glowing robe and a crown of thorns interwoven with a crown of gold. His expression is serene and tender, if a little tired, and the lantern he holds gives off a warm golden light, creating a striking contrast with the darkness of the garden. The light symbolizes his presence, his guidance, and a gentle invitation to inner transformation.

Hunt created three versions of the painting, the most well-known today hangs in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, but the original hangs quietly in the side chapel of Keble College, Oxford, where it glows with quiet intensity.

Seeing this painting in person, in that dimly lit chapel space, is a moving experience. The garden is tangled and alive, a threshold between wildness and grace. It echoes the landscapes of mythology—liminal, overgrown—yet here stands the Christ as the light, not banishing the wild, but entering into it. In that way, the painting was a bridge reminding me that my spiritual path didn’t require choosing between wild nature spirits and structured faith. Instead, there was room for both within the wonder of the unseen world. In the natural places, in the mystery and the dark, the light shone.

The painting itself is small and kept unlit for preservation. When you want to see it, you press a button to briefly illuminate the scene. That moment—of choosing to bring the light, is part of its power and its meaning.

“All of my life,” my friend said, standing beside me, “when I’ve seen that image on postcards, I had no idea it was Jesus Christ. I thought it was a faerie king.”

Ever since I’ve thought of Jesus as a faerie king. A being of light in the wild garden, calling us not to leave the mystery behind, but to meet it—with reverence, with imagination, and with love.

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Notes:

You can see an image of The Light of the World here and explore Cae Mabon here.

You can read about the book Gnomes. And Faeries.

You can read previous chapters of Cosmic Heart here.