Episode art by Sarah Rose, indigo milkcap mushroom latest, ink and stained water pooling in the wound of a sweetgum tree root.

At the Equinox, the blood root are blooming, big brown bats are chittering in the sky overhead at dusk. Red maples, winged elm and spicebush are blossoming. The red shouldered hawks are mating in the trees overhead while we search for shed whitetail antlers. 

Our woods have been feeling increasingly busy and sentient. Noticing the intelligence of the landscape seems to call to it, and it responds in ways that feel deliberate and almost human. 

The woods seem to reflect our desires back to us. 

Our urban creek coughs up spearpoints from Archaic Indians hunting deer in this place 9,000 years ago. A dark faced entity that seems to watch us through both an owl and a deer, follows Sarah through the woods. We struggle to get otters on our trail cameras, then lay an otter sigil on one and now there are otters on our cameras every night. We’re noticing hollow mounds in the woods we’ve never seen before, and counting the strange glitches on cameras or in the corners of our eyes. 

If you spend time in the woods, you know what it feels like when the forest is watching you. 

This episode is about fairies. You might imagine Disney’s tinker bell from Peter Pan. But I’d read, in JM Barrie’s book, she’s an actual tinker who fixes pots and kettles, her voice is the sound of bells and only those who understand fairy language can hear her. Her demeanor varies wildly, from kind to vindictive, and she can only hold a single emotional capacity at a time. In JM Barrie’s play, she is represented by a quick-moving light created with a mirror.

And a lot of this started to sound familiar. Sarah and my experience in our woods is starting to take on a quality of a conversation with something on the other side of a mirror. Different cultures have varying names and traditions around these beings, like us but not quite. Maybe from an underworld or another time. Maybe they’re in the trees themselves like the dryads, or under the stones like the Cherokee’s nunnehi.

I bring them up because Joshua Cutchin, in his work The Ecology of Souls, has a section addressing the overlaps between fairy lore, UFOs and the Dead (check this episode of What Magic is This for an excellent overview).

In the book, Cutchin mentions the Nunnehi as fairy-equivalent beings of the Eastern Cherokee, with some fascinating stories, including ones where they emerge from Cowee Mound in Franklin North Carolina, the site of Season 2, Episode 2 to help the locals.

Sarah and I had been mulling the idea of Faeries for a while, the idea of spirits of a place, the sentient face of all the ancient human and more than human dead, how it might coalesce to be conversant. 

But we hadn’t put the label on it until our next guest Jason pointed it out to us. So in this episode, we talk to our friend Jason, an artist and chaos magician, about his experience with fairies and compare notes with him on what he sees in our very busy forest.