“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. ” Khalil Gibran 
How do we know if we’ve made the right choices in our lives when so much of life seems to be a balancing act of letting go, holding on, moving forward or stepping back? The signs aren’t always easy to read nor the synchronicity easy to accept or understand. We just need to be quietly attentive to our inner voice to discover what is truly right for us. 
A friend of mine recently traveled to Glastonbury, England, the site of the oldest church in Britain, St. Michael’s, where Joseph of Arimathea was said to bring the Holy Grail and King Arthur is purported to be buried. I remember reading Marion Zimmer-Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon and Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Crossing to Avalon when they came out over 20 years ago. The Mists of Avalon is a fictional story about King Arthur told from a woman’s point of view and Crossing to Avalon is a memoir of Bolen’s mid life pilgrimmage to sacred feminine sites in Europe. One of the sites on her pilgrimage route was Glastonbury Tor, a curiously conspicuous hill in southwest England, surrounded by a labyrinth, encircled by water and thought to be mythical Avalon. 
Avalon, also known as the Isle of Apples, is associated with Mother Earth. In Celtic lore, the sacred apple tree is guarded by the serpent. Labyrinthine spirals, coiled serpents and dragons represent the the goddess. Goddess worship existed all over the world until Christianity built churches upon what they considered pagan sites. St. Michael was not only an archangel, he was portrayed as treading on a serpent, a symbol of the goddess. The building of churches or cathedrals in honor of Mary on sacred feminine sites was meant as an act of sacrilege, an ironic counterpoint. Serpents and dragons were meant to be feared, goddesses and women devalued and controlled, repercussions still being felt in my lifetime as violence against women worldwide has reached epidemic proportions. 
I pulled my dog-earred copy of Crossing to Avalon from my bookshelf and decided to read it again. Some history not pertinent to me then, jumped off the pages now. The more I read the more I realized I had entered into a mythological realm of my own. As a child I was fascinated by the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, my preference instead of the popular Tolkien books. After reading the Arthurian tales I became fascinated by the Celts and Druid priests who revered the holiness of oak trees. Coincidently, I have a majestic, holy, old oak tree on my French property. My first husband’s familial roots hail from Galway. Not only is there a valley in the Pyrenees called the Val d’Aran (Aran is my last name) – a 2 hour drive from where I live now, there are also the Aran Islands in Galway Bay, situated off the west coast of Ireland, rich in Celtic history. The village where I do most of my shopping is called Eauze, formerly the Roman town of Elusa. Eleusis was the name of a Greek village and the Eleusinian Mysteries were secret ceremonies of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and fertility. Just down the road from my house is a biodynamic winery that uses the Demeter method of growing their grapes, planting and harvesting by the cycles of the moon and equinoxes. And finally, Bolen writes about the the Venus figurines, unearthed over 20, 000 years ago, the most famous – the Venus of Willendorf. I laughed to myself remembering that I’d visited 2 sites in my area and subsequently wrote articles about them, where the prehistoric Venus of Lespuges and the Venus of Brassempouy were discovered. 
My moving to the part of the world, to this little corner of southwest France, now seems like a more than a coincidence. After a long time of lingering self doubt, I’m paying attention to the signs and listening to my inner voice. I’m familiar with the mystical stories, but now I have entered them in reality. Sometimes truth can, indeed, be stranger than fiction.
