"Spring drew on ... and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps." ―Charlotte Bronte

In the fall of 2019, I joined a group traveling to Ireland with Søren Hauge and Jeremy Berg on a quest to deepen our relationship with the Sidhe. In an earlier post, I wrote about my meeting with the Sidhe on Ben Bulben (see “Abide in Joy”). Here I’d like to describe my interaction with the standing stones at the Beltany Stone Circle in Donegal. We spent an afternoon at the circle, sitting high on a hill overlooking gently rolling meadows and farm land stretching to the horizon. It was a sunny breezy day, the blue sky heaped with white cumulus clouds. I’d never seen so many stones in a standing-stone circle—64 in all, they say, though I did not count them. Some are a foot or two high while others tower above us, maybe 7 to 9 feet tall. I stripped off coat and backpack, set them aside and began to walk the circle, touching into each stone that caught my attention.

Peter Berry described his experience at this circle elsewhere on this web site (see “Bright Visions: Faerie Beings in Irish Song, Poetry and Story”). He felt “energy flowing through the stone circle,” through him and further out, into the surrounding land and the world. I’m sure all of us tuned into that flow moving through the entire circle. I also felt energy flow inside each stone. Frequently when I touch a standing stone, I feel movement within, a paradoxical movement considering it’s inside a presumably immobile rock. Laying my hands on a stone and attuning to its presence can hook me in to a kinetic sensation of energy flowing across intricate circuits deep within. Sometimes I feel myself moving with the rock. It’s a disorienting feeling, as though the rock begins to lean or slant into a different angle than it initially held when I first touched it, carrying me with it.

But the movement within the stones of the Beltany circle was particularly remarkable. The kinetic flow across circuits or the odd sensation of leaning that I might find in other rocks was amplified in these. Instead of just leaning, these rocks pulled me into a rhythmic sway. Swinging to and fro, in swirling patterns, I realized with a giddy delight that the stones were dancing. And I felt they were partaking in the creation of the music to which they danced.

The sensation was stronger with the larger stones. Each stone’s dance was unique, a slightly different curling, swaying flow than that of their neighbors. The dancing motion made me think of the cards in the Sidhe deck, As described in the deck’s manual, half of the cards are standing stones and represent a fixed element. The other half are the “fluid element forming a ring of moving qualities as if faeries were dancing around the stone circle.” These outer rings are called the Dancers and represent the invisible world of the Sidhe.” While the fixed element of the stones “represent the earthly point of contact with the realms of Faerie.” Wow. I realized the Beltany stones had plugged me directly into the story of the Stones and Dancers.