Sacred Ground
I got some good stuff for Xmas, but one gift from Naamah overshadowed them all, and pretty much every other gift I have ever received. She posted pictures of it here: naamah-darling.livejournal.com/482779.html and you can go look at it on the link, but it won't mean much of anything to you.
As I have mentioned, my longest-running character (in my whole life, actually - I tend to have a short attention span for characters) has been a 20 year-old witch with the unlikely name of Cinder Elvenwild. I've been playing her for something like five or six years now, and I have yet to get bored with her. We take breaks and do other things, but we always come back to Cinder - or rather, we come back to Miracle Island.
Miracle Island is her home, a mythical place in the San Juans off the west coast of Washington state. It sits right about where Orcas Island really is. The one town on Miracle Island is Greyhaven, which was conceived as a kind of Eureka Springs of the West. It's a little community with a lot of artsy shops devoted to the tourist trade, with a history going back to the 1800s so it has a lot of cool old architecture. Cinder and her husband inherited a bookstore there and moved in the summer of 2150 to this little corner of the world.
It's hard to describe, but it's a place I love enormously. The idea of this little town with brick sidewalks and old-style lamp-posts snug on its island, streets lined with antique and curio shops, art studios and places to buy cool t-shirts. And there's Pandora's Books, with its living gargoyle pets and the big window out front. The shelves of old books and the back room filled with herbs and essential oils and incense. North Star Hill with its stone circle is the highest point of the island, where Cinder and her friends once battled the Wild Hunt. On the west coast is the beached old ship that her best friend Miranda (the mermaid) and her husband Ronan (the selkie) have fixed up into their home.
And ten minutes across the water is Wraithport, our mythical Seattle (where Bellingham really stands) with it's fog-shrouded deco architecture and dark history. Cinder spends a lot of time in Wraithport, with her good friends Thorn the vampire and Kane, the alpha of the fearsome werewolf pack, the Blood Oath.
But Miracle Island is home. And like a lot of creative people, our invented world feels more like home than the real one. I imagine every imaginative, alienated person who was once an imaginative, alienated kid will know what that feels like. The yearning for a home that does not, in fact, exist.
Except when I opened that package of earth on Xmas morning, it was like it did exist, it was so close I could feel it, smell it. It was like she gave me a piece of our dream country, and the feeling that maybe, somehow, someday; it might be possible to go there. When I look at those jars of earth on my shelf, it feels like you can get there from here, if you just want it enough. It was like she gave me a piece of my heart, though not in a literal sense, because that would be gross. So Naamah wins Xmas forever, because she gave me dirt, and I sat there on the floor with tears in my eyes unable to even speak, like I am right now. Because I look at it and I think maybe there's a way. Maybe someday I'll get there, maybe we all will. Because there has to be a way to get where we really want to be. There has to be a way home.
As I have mentioned, my longest-running character (in my whole life, actually - I tend to have a short attention span for characters) has been a 20 year-old witch with the unlikely name of Cinder Elvenwild. I've been playing her for something like five or six years now, and I have yet to get bored with her. We take breaks and do other things, but we always come back to Cinder - or rather, we come back to Miracle Island.
Miracle Island is her home, a mythical place in the San Juans off the west coast of Washington state. It sits right about where Orcas Island really is. The one town on Miracle Island is Greyhaven, which was conceived as a kind of Eureka Springs of the West. It's a little community with a lot of artsy shops devoted to the tourist trade, with a history going back to the 1800s so it has a lot of cool old architecture. Cinder and her husband inherited a bookstore there and moved in the summer of 2150 to this little corner of the world.
It's hard to describe, but it's a place I love enormously. The idea of this little town with brick sidewalks and old-style lamp-posts snug on its island, streets lined with antique and curio shops, art studios and places to buy cool t-shirts. And there's Pandora's Books, with its living gargoyle pets and the big window out front. The shelves of old books and the back room filled with herbs and essential oils and incense. North Star Hill with its stone circle is the highest point of the island, where Cinder and her friends once battled the Wild Hunt. On the west coast is the beached old ship that her best friend Miranda (the mermaid) and her husband Ronan (the selkie) have fixed up into their home.
And ten minutes across the water is Wraithport, our mythical Seattle (where Bellingham really stands) with it's fog-shrouded deco architecture and dark history. Cinder spends a lot of time in Wraithport, with her good friends Thorn the vampire and Kane, the alpha of the fearsome werewolf pack, the Blood Oath.
But Miracle Island is home. And like a lot of creative people, our invented world feels more like home than the real one. I imagine every imaginative, alienated person who was once an imaginative, alienated kid will know what that feels like. The yearning for a home that does not, in fact, exist.
Except when I opened that package of earth on Xmas morning, it was like it did exist, it was so close I could feel it, smell it. It was like she gave me a piece of our dream country, and the feeling that maybe, somehow, someday; it might be possible to go there. When I look at those jars of earth on my shelf, it feels like you can get there from here, if you just want it enough. It was like she gave me a piece of my heart, though not in a literal sense, because that would be gross. So Naamah wins Xmas forever, because she gave me dirt, and I sat there on the floor with tears in my eyes unable to even speak, like I am right now. Because I look at it and I think maybe there's a way. Maybe someday I'll get there, maybe we all will. Because there has to be a way to get where we really want to be. There has to be a way home.