Following the Light You Can't Yet Reach

You're walking home late and you're off the main road and it's a sort of dark where you're putting your feet down carefully because you can't quite see where the ground goes.

And then out across the flat there's a light pale and low to the ground and moving a bit.

Somebody with a lantern you think.

Somebody else out late going the same way.

So you turn toward it because obviously you do because anybody would.

and you walk and the ground under your boots stops being a path and starts being wet grass then the grass gets taller and turns to reed then the reed gets sparse and the ground underneath goes soft and there's water coming in over the tops of your boots and the cold of it goes right up your legs and the light is exactly as far away as it was when you started That's the bit.

Not that it moved, not that it ran off.

It has been sitting out there the whole time at precisely the same distance.

Patient as anything, waiting for you to keep coming.

You have walked a good half mile into a bog at night and you're no nearer to it than you were in the road.

Our people had names for that light everywhere they went.

In the Highlands, they called it the Spunky.

And I've been thinking about it all week because I know a fair few women who have been walking toward one for years.

Hello and welcome to the Sage in the Sky podcast and the Light Over the Hill series.

It's good to have you.

If you've not been here before, this is a weekly thing where I take a piece of the old folklore of this country, set a bit of psychology next to it, pull one tarot card and give you something small to do with all of it.

As for the woman who can see the hill she needs to climb and hasn't started yet, And we've spent five weeks now talking about a light over a hill as though every light is worth walking toward.

So I want to spend this episode poking at that because it isn't true and I'd be doing you a disservice if I left it standing.

Some lights are worth crossing a moor for.

Some are gas coming off rotting ground and they'll take you out into water in the dark and they'll do it while looking exactly like the real thing.

Which makes this an awkward one for me.

I read cards for a living.

My whole working life sits in the idea that there's something in you worth listening to.

Something that knows more than your calendar does.

And I believe that.

I've watched it work in front of me too many times to talk myself out of it.

But I've also watched women follow something they were calling intuition straight into a bog.

Both of those are true at once and I've never found a way to say so on a graphic which is probably why nobody does.

So that's the episode.

Your intuition is real and it is yours and nobody needs to certify it and some of what turns up wearing its coat is fear or it's wanting and learning to tell the difference in the dark is about as useful a skill as a person can pick up.

So let me tell you where we're going.

The bog first and the spunky and the one tale that gives it away every single time.

Then I want to sort out three things we've jammed into one word because I think most of the confusion lives there.

Then the moon, which has been showing us all of this for a hundred years while everybody complained it was vague.

and at the end a few questions you can put to your own lights which is the part I'd keep if you only keep one thing.

So get a cup of something, this one's good.