Why is my site called The Jewelled Sky
How many of you have read the wonderful poem by Alfred Noyes – the Highwayman. Perhaps you studied it at school, as I did. From my first reading of this poem when I was fourteen years old I could picture the Highwayman riding across the moorland to meet his one true love … under the jewelled sky.
Later, when travelling through England, walking across those same purple moors and camping out in the eerie landscape that somehow befits tales of werewolves and other such beasties, I would lie on my back and watch the sky and sometimes I would catch a sound which had no natural reason for being in that place. “What was that noise?” And I would half expect to see the ghost of the Highwayman and his horse. I only hoped he had his head! Of course I never did see him … but I was always strangely aware of his presence.
There was a time in my late 20’s when I found myself entangled in a very messy relationship. You guessed it, the kind of relationship which involved the number ‘3’. I found a need to get away from it all and chose to do a ten day wilderness walk – just me and my pack alone with my dark brooding thoughts. During those ten days I met three other people (there is that number again) but one of those just happened to be a young Englishman who happened to have upon his person a slender volume of poems, one of which was The Highwayman. The young Englishman proved the right cure to rid me of my “messy relationship” problems in the way only sharing eight days in the wilderness together could do. And to this day I thank him and The Highwayman for that blessing. After the walk the Englishman and I went our separate ways but his parting gift to me was the little blue book of poems that I still have to this day.
There have been other pivotal times in my life when I have met the Highwayman – all in unusual circumstances. I began to think that the ghost of the Highwayman was somehow haunting me, for in my time of need he would come:
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts-a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle … under the jewelled sky
And so when it came time for me to pass on to others what I had learned myself in my travels around this big old world of ours, what better way to honour the one person who has kept me on my path … The Highwayman. And what better name for my astrology site than the jewelled sky upon which the collective stories of our ancestors have long been projected and which reminds us each and every night of our deep connection to the wisdom of those ancient myth tellers. All we need to do is remind ourselves to look up.