Begin in stillness, and quiet, and darkness. Find your center, and align yourself with earth and sky. As you stare at the darkness behind your eyes, feel and see as mist swirls up from the ground, obscuring everything around you. After a moment, it begins to part, and you can see a path beneath your feet, and grass on either side. Continue forward as the mist evaporates, until you find yourself on a dirt path through a grassy field, in front of a large doorway made of two large standing stones covered by a lintel stone. The path continues through the doorway, but on the other side you see not a grassy field in the daylight, but a forest at night. As you look at it, feeling a cool breeze coming out through the doorway, a crow flies over your head and then ducks under the lintel and disappears through the door, cawing at your to follow. Circle the doorway to look at it from the side or the rear if you like, but when you are ready, come back to the side where you can see the forest, and go through.
Once you are through, give your eyes a moment to adjust, and use your other senses to observe your surroundings. You might notice that it's colder here, and that your steps crunch through dry leaves. What other sounds can you hear, as you continue down the path? What can you smell? And now that your eyes have adjusted to the dim light, what can you see?
The path ends at a wide circular clearing with a clear pool of water, rimmed in ice, in the center of a circle of oak trees. Some of the trees are a size you might once have thought of as "large" and others are so enormous you find yourself wondering if it might take five or even six tall adults holding hands to encircle them. As your eyes move up the trunk of the one across the clearing from you, you can see that they are taller than most of the trees you've seen, as well, but their great canopies part, leaving a circle of stars in the sky. And such stars! You can see the Milky Way to your left, at the edge, but the rest of these stars are more dense, more numerous, than you are used to seeing.
Quietly, from somewhere nearby, Na Morrigna emerge. "The star stories are no longer remembered, but they must be learned again." one sister says. You look towards her, but she directs your gaze back up. "There, these stars make the great silver tree, with the three golden apples." And there in the sky, you see lines connect the stars, to draw a great tree, and three bright stars become apples nestled in its branches.
"There are others." says another sister, as the lines fade. "The scald crow, look -" and again, lines form. Two Vs, one large for the wings, one smaller for the tail. A crow further to the right of the tree, and flying towards the Milky Way.
"And the cauldron," says the third sister, as the lines fade again. "It rises in the east, upright and full, and then pours out all its blessings upon the land, and sets in the west, inverted and empty, ready to be filled again beneath the earth." You look up, but not lines form; it seems this constellation is not currently in this patch of sky.
"Give what you brought into the water, to remember this place" they say together, and you find that you are holding an apple. Not a golden one, but a normal apple, like you might buy for a snack. You step forward towards the pool of water, and you notice the ice again, and how very clear and very deep it looks, with a small rippling current in the middle, like the water is constantly both bubbling up and draining down. You toss in the apple, and watch as it gets caught in what had been an invisible current, sucking it down and then through a hole somewhere on the left side, vanishing from your sight. It is the pool of an underground river, perhaps, bubbling up here as it makes its way through the stone below.
Na Morrigna leave as silently as they came, and when you next turn to look, what you see behind you instead is the doorway again. This time, a warm breeze blows through it, reminding you how very cold it is where you are. When you are? For you know somehow that this is Ireland, and yet it seems too cold for the time of year; there is frost and ice everywhere around you. And how long has it been since human eyes saw this many trees of such size in the same forest? This journey has given you more questions than answers.
With one back glance up to the stars, you turn to go back to where you came from, down the path filled with crunchy leaves and back to the door. Once again, a crow flies over your head as you approach the doorway, and calls to you as it flies through, and back into the daylight. You follow, stepping back onto the dirt path, and as you continue on, the mist returns, swirling up around you until it obscures everything but the way back to your body.
