First Contact

It was a nudge of my shoulder. Or rather more like a scarf flying out as someone rushed past me. Barely perceptible but it got my attention. I was sitting quietly on the dunes of Cape Kiwanda, Oregon, listening as the distant surf heaved onto the shores before me. There was no one near me but I still had the sense that someone brushed by me.

It was the summer of 2010. My teenage son and his step brother were romping across the Cape. Neither my wife nor I felt the same urge to charge about and sat relaxed on the warm sands. In a natural setting like the Cape, I often sit and connect with the landscape, as I did then - sensing the earth and sand, the wind sculpted trees, the rolling ocean before me. I’m not a hardy outdoors person trekking through the wilderness or scaling mountain peaks. But I’ve felt at home on sandy shores and forest trails since I was a kid.

This nudge or whatever it was felt out of place. Hardly discernible yet it captured my attention. Did my thoughts flicker to a book I read some time before by John Matthews’, The Sidhe, Wisdom of the Celtic Otherworld. I can not recall, if it was then or sometime afterwards. But as I reflect back, I believe that this was my first contact with the “people” that John Matthews described as the Sidhe. The Celtic word Sidhe means People of Peace. (The English pronunciation is quite a bit different than the spelling. Sidhe is pronounced Shee.)

I call them “people”. As I’ve come to know them I think it’s an apt description. And I will talk more about them in other posts. But sitting there on the sand, I had no idea what this brief, barely noticeable touch was. The most notable aspect on the experience was that it stayed with me.

What preceded this nudge? I’ve considered that since. And I link this contact to a workshop, by David Spangler, I attended earlier that year. The workshop focused on Gaia. Gaia being a shorthand way of describing all the realms that make up our world - the physical sensible world and the supersensible or subtle realms, as David calls them. We humans, whether we acknowledge it or not, have one foot firmly planted in the physical world and the other in its subtle counterpart. They are not really separate but we’ve educated ourselves to explore one and ignore the other.

This workshop was a deep exploration of our personal connection to this subtle aspect of our world - Gaia. As I participated over the days, I felt myself energetically opening - my own connections to this subtle world deepening. The doubts I harbored about my ability to perceive and engage with the subtle realms of our world, lessened. I had clear unmistakable experiences with beings “on the other side”. I was experiencing myself as more whole, acknowledging a potential within me that went unappreciated for too many years.

I like to think that it was this shift in me that precipitated my contact with these “people” - the Sidhe. But I really do not know. Perhaps they were banging on my door long before. And I was finally awake enough to hear them. What I have learned is that they do want to re-establish a relationship with we physical “people”. And that they will be nudging more and more of us in the hopes that others will have a “first contact”.