Frank MacEowen - The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers, and Seekers

Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers, and Seekers

Copyright 2002 by Frank MacEowen

Front cover design by Mary Ann Casler
Text design and typography by Tona Pearce Myers

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, or transmitted in any form, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace the ownership of all copyrighted material included in this book. Any errors that may have occurred are inadvertent and will be corrected, provided notification is sent to the publisher.

Grateful acknowledgment is given to the following authors for permission to reprint excerpts from the following:

The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks 1995 by Coleman Barks. Used by permission of HarperSanFrancisco.

My Fathers God Beneath the Waves: A Poem to Heal All Men by Jathan Gurr 2002 Jathan Gurr, published for the first time in The Mist-Filled Path.

The Underworld Initiation, by R. J. Stewart 1990 by R. J. Stewart, published by Mercury Publishing; used with permission.

The Old Traditions in Where Many Rivers Meet by David Whyte 1990 by David Whyte. Reprinted with permission of Many Rivers Press, Langley, Wash..

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data MacEowen, Frank Henderson,

The mist-filled path : Celtic wisdom for exiles, wanderers, and seekers / by Frank Henderson MacEowen ; foreword by Tom Cowan.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 1-57731-211-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. CeltsReligionMiscellanea. 2. Spiritual lifeMiscellanea. I. Title.

BL900 .M444 2002

299'.16dc21

First Printing April 2002

ISBN-10: 1-57731-211-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-57731-211-6

Printed in Canada on acid-free, partially recycled paper

Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6

D ruids, poets, and storytellers shared a major responsibility in traditional Celtic communities: they reminded the Celtic people who they were. In former ages when wisdom stories and sacred histories were not written on the fragile page, where, it was feared, the tales would fade with the ink or be torn to pieces and lost forever, these keepers of memory orally passed on the wisdom of their people from generation to generation. Every people needs teachers who can tell them where they came from and what they are doing here. Or what they should be doing here if they hope to preserve the spiritual values and traditions of their culture and pass them on to their children. Without such teachers a people dies.

The Mist-Filled Path is a book by and about such a teacher, a modern Celt, the initiatory crises that led him to discover who he is, and his impassioned call to the rest of us to find the old paths once again, walk them, and discover the mystic beauties of the many worlds we live in. Frank MacEowen reminds us who we are. Or who we could be.

Frank really does love the mist. One summer he was a guest at my home in New Yorks Hudson River Valley, a damp, forested region, especially compared to the arid high plains of Colorado where he was living. One morning I found him sprawled on my porch at dawn, a walking stick across his lap, beads of perspiration running down his face, his boots and pant legs soaked in the morning dew and covered with burrs and sticktights. I asked where he had been. With the apples and the deer, he answered. And I knew he had risen early to watch the sunrise from the orchard on top of the hill behind my house. The burrs and sticktights were a kind of red badge of courage, his wet boots and cuffs a fleeting keepsake from hillwalking in the morning mist. He looked weirdly contented.

There are reasons to love the mist. As you will discover in the pages that follow, the mist is a threshold state in Celtic spirituality. It is sacred. We might even think of mist as a sacrament in the old Catholic sense of that term: an outward sign of an interior state of grace. As Frank explains it, mist consciousness is druid consciousness, saint consciousness, shaman consciousness, and Christ consciousness. It is the awareness and perspective of a person standing at the threshold of sacred experience, even as you are now poised on that same threshold, with this beautifully written guide to accompany you in your wayfaring.

My own travels with Frank have opened doors and gateways into those invisible realms of our longing where we catch grail-like glimpses of the goodness for which we yearn. Longing too is a holy state for those not afraid, as Frank puts it, to surrender themselves to the great pull that lures us into life, to places we have not yet dreamed of, places where the Great Shaper of Life longs to shape us. Frank MacEowen has felt this lure and followed it and now invites us to lean into that Divine Power so that we might discover its presence and then honor and celebrate it in the simple events of our day.

Once hiking through the Catskill Mountains we paused at an old stone well, an ancient spring lined with Catskill bluestone by settlers in the nineteenth century. It was the kind of thin place where the mysteries of the Otherworld call out to be recognized and honored. So we made some prayers to whatever salmon, trout, or skull might dwell in the invisible depths of the waters. As we left, Frank reverently placed a reddish oak leaf on the bluestone at the head of the well, then a smaller yellow leaf on that; last, and meticulously, he set a green, gemlike pebble from the trail on top of the two leaves a tender, heartfelt, and gentle offering to the Mother of the Waters who is the lifeblood of these mountains. Frank does things like that.