My Time with the Elementals of the Scottish Borders

When I was a little kid, in the 80’s and 90’s, I spent a lot of time alone.

I was an only child. And I was, what I called “eccentric”, but what my classmates just called weird.

Both of my parents had grown up in Scotland but met in Ohio in the early 70’s. I showed up 10 years later. We’d spend every summer, and sometimes winter break too, with both sets of grandparents in Scotland. My grandfather was the gardener for Duns Castle in the Scottish borders, and he and my gran lived in a little cabin built just for them on the castle grounds. It was about a mile outside of the very small town of Duns, with no other children in sight. So I spent every summer, all summer, outside, alone, and unsupervised.

(Remember, it was the 80s. This was the decade when you were sent out to play in the morning and no one thought about you again until dinner time.)

To my parents and grandparents, it looked like I was just outside getting dirty and making mischief. And they were completely correct. I once filled an empty honey jar with teeny frogs from the lake and brought them inside and let them loose in the living room, (to my gran’s great horror).

But I wasn’t really alone. Until I was about 10, I spent most of my time outside with fairies, the elementals of the Scottish Borders.

We were in and around the woods, the cow fields, the lake filled with frogs and swans, even the coal shed, and of course, my grandpa’s abundant flower and vegetable garden. I made them meals and homes and clothes.

But something else was happening too. I was learning.

Not through language, but through experience, mediumship, and most importantly, play. The elementals taught me about water, about earth, about air, about fire. How water sinks into and saturates soil, and how it saturates a cell in my body too. How the earth holds the water, how water holds a bird, and how feathers repel water. How air holds a bird in the sky, how air carries water, and how I too am held. I learned of combustion, of mixing elements to create reactions, and of the combustion happening within me. I experienced the magic that happens when air moves through leaves, through flowers, through long blades of grass, through my wild hair, and through the cilia of my lungs . While my grandpa smoked out the bees so he could collect their honey, I learned about fire, about the movement it creates. It wasn’t me alone with my grandpa. There was a gathering of us out there, but only a few of us were consciously aware of this.

In these relationships, play was created so I truly felt the energy of those elements move through me. I learned about how each felt and how my body responded. In these lessons, led by the elementals, I learned about my relationship to the earth, how my body is very much of the earth, and I learned about my place here on this planet.

As I write this, I realize it’s no wonder the kids in my school thought I was weird. I was literally, as my father likes to say, “off with the fairies” for most of my younger years.

As I grew into adolescence and began to assert control on my surroundings and over relationships, my games with the elementals faded into the periphery. Experiences like this cannot happen in a true, deep way unless control is relinquished. Although I remained sensitive to the energies around me, I never had that same experience of deeply feeling the elements until a few years into my studies under the tutelage of William Pacholski and Ryan Fukuda. I could never experience this kind of relationship to elementals, and their lessons I learned about the elements until I learned to let go of control.

My grandparents’ cottage is now a vacation rental, the garden and coal shed are gone, and the castle has become a popular wedding and production venue. I don’t think my experience in a vacation rental would ever be the same as it was when the place was ours. But, the relationship has been fulfilled, the mockups served and received. The growth continues, however, and every now and then, I notice a presence in the deep forest of Oregon, and wonder…