I was in my room, reading a book.

I turned a page.  The curved shadow of one candle-lit white surface fell over another and the action made a small sharp rustling noise in the silence.  Suddenly, a dizziness struck me, and I was acutely aware of the paper's thin dryness, rough against the skin of my fingers and seemingly conducting some powerful, disorienting energy from it to me.  I sat as if stunned for a moment, while the unbidden memory of my first Healing coursed through me, suffused with the light of a distant season.

It was a hot summer's day; one of those close, still afternoons when distant haze over the hills or across the plain might become thunder before the evening, and stone walls and outcrops of naked rock will give off small bursts of sweet, heated air when you walk close by.  My brother Allan and I had been playing daringly far away from our home at the farm, and daringly close to a main road.  We had been stalking rabbits in the fields and looking for birds' nests in the hedgerows, all without success.  I was five, he a couple of years older.

We found the fox lying in a just-cut field on the far side of the hedge from the road, where cars and trucks roared past in the sunlight.

The animal was small and still and there was dried blood round its nose and mouth.  Allan poked the fox's body with a stick and pronounced it long dead, but I looked and looked and looked at it and knew that it could still live, and so went forward and stooped and raised it up, gathering its stiffened form into my arms and burying my nose in its fur.

Allan made noises of disgust; everybody knew foxes were covered in fleas.

But I felt the flow of life, in me and in the animal.  A strange tension built in up me, like a blessed opposite of bottled-up anger, germinating, budding and blossoming then flowing out of me like a glowing beam of vitality and being.