At the age of five, back in 1949, I was very ill with a fever and was ‘taken’ by the faerys into a beautiful country. A troop of shining folk came to meet me across the green, shining hills. They surrounded me, took me to a tented pavilion, and made me rest. After what seemed a long time, I chose to return to the material world, because I knew I had work to do. One of the shining men promised he would always be with me and that I could return to the Shining Country whenever I wished.

I had no religious training then, nor did I know about faerys, so I had no vocabulary to describe the experience. For many years I called them simply the Shining Folk; and the place they lived, the Shining Country.

My journeys into the Shining Realms continued for many years. I did not think this was unusual and was surprised to find out that no one else seemed to know anything about this place that was so real to me. When I was about eleven I read a book about Native Americans and found out what I did was called “shamanism”. The Indian guides I contacted Inworld told me I had to find a guide from my own tribe. I had no idea what that meant. Still, I continued to journey and to listen to something I called, ‘my little voice’. This little voice guided me through my whole life.

When I was about fifty, I was in the Dragonfly, (Ed. A metaphysical store) in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, and saw a book titled, Taliesin: Shamanism and the Bardic Mysteries in Britain and Ireland, by John Matthews. By this time I had studied history for years, specializing in the history of Britain and Ireland. When I read that title a bolt of lightning went through me. Every hair on my body stood on end, literally. My outer academic life and my inner spiritual life came together in that instant. I understood the Indian guide’s advice. I had found my own tribe, my own ancestral path into the Shining Realms. Within in days, I was face-to-face Inworld with my ancestor guide, Grandfather Merlin – not the Merlin of Camelot – and not at all surprised to find that he had been ‘my little voice’ all along. He was, in fact, the shining man who had been so kind to me when I was first taken as a child.