Who is Merlin?

This book is about the intimate lifelong relationship I've had with Merlin and what I've learned from him. I learned to know him as a little child and that knowing, we call it kenning in the old ways, has grown all my life. I now live in one of his places, a place where one of his stories has taken root, in the Welsh Marches on the borders of Wales and England. I see him here in many of his guises ... he's huge, ancient, wise and powerful, and also kindly, but he's a trickster, as all the best teachers are, so you do have to be on top of your game with him.

The book's title – The Once and Future Wizard – somewhat gives away who he is. The word once means before, past, as in 'once upon a time', and Merlin is from the past, the very ancient past. His essence goes back all the way in our human journey on Planet Earth and very likely he was around, as were the other powers we call gods, from the Earth's very beginning, maybe even before that. The word future means just that, the future, what is ahead of us, and Merlin is our future too, he holds the threads of all possible futures in his hands. The future means at least all the next several billion years, however-long, until the sun becomes a red giant and burns us all back to our component atoms again. Merlin will likely go on even beyond that, for the death of our sun is an end that enables another beginning. The atoms that come apart then will come together again somewhere else, into new forms of life, and so the cycle continues.

And at the centre, between past and future, stands Merlin.

Merlin is a liminal being. Liminal means a threshold, a place between past and future, between here and there, between one world and another ... and he is always standing at that threshold. He is that place. And that ever-changing but constant threshold is now, the here-and-now, and it's constantly in motion like the sea, never the same from one instant of time to the next.

The now is the only place that is real. Past and future are memories and dreams, they are not where we are, and those memories and dreams are like virtual reality games, great fun but not genuine or authentic to the life we're currently living. Now is the only place we are able to live, but most of us are rarely conscious there. So many of us live in the next moment, or the previous moment, remembering or dreaming, so we never really know the present. We're getting ready to go out for a lovely evening with friends and our mind is not on the getting ready but imagining how it will be when we get there, how our friends will like our new dress, the compliments we'll get on the new tie. Driving home after the evening, our mind is not fully on the drive but on remembering what went well and the lumpy bits that didn't go so good. We do not live in the here-and-now.

Merlin is about living in the here-and-now. He is that continuous and ever-changing threshold that is reality.

As the poet TS Eliot says in Quartet No 1: Burnt Norton, 'humankind cannot bear very much reality'. We're worse than cats at change and that's unfortunate as it's truly the only place we can live. We like to live in what we know, have known, how it always has been – which, of course, it hasn't. We want things to get back to normal. We are afraid of change. Standing at, let alone crossing, thresholds and so leaving the old behind to go to the new, going from the known to the unknown, is very difficult for us. But, unconsciously, we do it all the time. The trick is learning to be continuously and consciously aware that you stand in the middle of change all the time, whatever is going on. Trust me, or rather trust Merlin, it really does work!

Merlin is there for all of us. This incarnation, this time around, I've known him consciously for all my life, since I was a baby, and he's here all the time for me. I walk between worlds as we call it in the old ways of Britain, a phrase from one of our old awenyddion, seannachie as they call them in Scottish Gaelic. His name was Thomas of Erceldoune, but you may know him better as Thomas the Rhymer from the old song and his story is well worth reading although you will have to go to several sources to piece it together, there's my own version on my website.

Walking between worlds means having a foot in the everyday world at the same time as having the other foot in otherworld; I am here-and-there at the same time. No, I'm not nuts, if you saw me in the pub you'd just think I was an ordinary elderly woman – for I am! But I'm also an awenydd – it means spirit-keeper in the old Brythonic tongue – I live with otherworld as well as with this world, and Merlin taught me how to do this.

What I've learned is available to any and all of us, he will come to anyone who calls out to him that they want to learn, are ready to learn. But you have to mean it!

This work isn't a cute little weekend course that you can put away in its box on Sunday night and come back to 'normality'. It's your life, a lifetime commitment. That doesn't mean you have to become an ascetic, give up everyday life and your mobile phone, live a spartan and abstemious existence – no, far from it. Merlin needs those he works with to be deeply involved in everyday human life as well as learning as much as they can about the unseen worlds. He wants us to mingle and twine and integrate spirit and matter, not to dash unthinkingly and hedonistically between the weekend trip and the working week. To do that, to live either in the everyday or in spirit, is as much use to him as an ashtray on a motorbike!

Knowing Merlin

So how do we come to know Merlin for who he truly is?

To know him we have to put aside all the scripts we most of us have learned and grown up with, lived with all our lives; all those scripts we got from our parents and at school, from our friends, and from employers, bank managers, tax men and politicians. He really and truly isn't in them. They're about conformity, about making life comfortable amongst millions, billions, of other people, and Merlin most certainly is not about comfort. He's about stretching and growing, expanding the envelope, going beyond our limits, crossing frontiers, letting go and jumping off cliffs. He's about joy.

As I said before, letting go of what we know is hard for humans, we want things to be normal and we all resist like mad if somebody tells us things really are not as we believe them to be, and want them to be. But when, with Merlin's help, we start to get the hang of change and begin to walk the old ways, we climb out of this pattern of conformity. I come from a background with a lot less cultural conformity-baggage to drop, so letting go has always been less of a problem for me. I'm part of a group – larger than you might think – of folk who have been in the old ways from birth, and their families before them. For me and mine Merlin is a reality, he's really there and no...