Wild Stone Heart, by Sharon Butala

book review

by Tracy Marshall

“Open your mind to the fascinating and magnetic presence of a `field’ - not only a field of dreams, but also one of realities, past and present, that reveal themselves over time.” ~ Sharon Butala

Chosen at random in a second hand bookshop, Wild Stone Heart by Sharon Butala is a wonderful story of a “psychic archeologist’s” explorations in a field on the prairies of Saskatchewan. (The author, however, does not use the term ‘psychic archeology’, a phrase coined later by Kenneth McSween.) Butala questions her sanity throughout the book, or more correctly, worries that others may doubt her sanity. She hears the ‘voiceless voice’ and dreams of ‘the field’, makes numerous discoveries, experiences unusual phenomena, and translates them according to official histories which never quite ‘fit’ with her experiences. Largely disappointed with the opinions of mainstream archeologists, she is left puzzled by conventional explanations, but remains deeply touched by the magic of the location. She leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions.

In chapter one, The Field:

“One day as I was walking an area of small, low hills, I found a white quartz sphere about the size of a billiard ball that looked to me to have been chipped by a human hand into its spherical shape. […] I suppose because it had been my habit not to take things away from the field, I left the quartz shapes where I found them. But I kept thinking of them, and away from them and the field they seemed to me even more remarkable. Inevitably, I eventually went back to find them again. I remembered exactly where they’d been —the precise hill, the correct side of the hill, the place on the hill where I’d picked them up.
I searched that small area for a couple of hours […] without finding them. They simply were not there […]
One day, a week or more after the original find, searching the original location, I found two stone artifacts that might once have been, more or less, a white stone sphere and a white stone stick. They were hardly identifiable, chipped and misshapen with growths, discoloured by contact with the earth and plants, and overgrown with lichen, a far cry from the pristine white sphere and ball I remember holding in my hands. Perhaps these two dubious objects I was holding now were indeed the same ones, but a thousand or two thousand years after their fashioning. I could not decide what to make of them, and finally, deeply perplexed, I set them back where I’d found them…”

A most interesting experience! Elias¹ has an unusual explanation on erosion:

“Objects created within energy into physical form may only be focused upon and retaining their focus temporarily, only as long as your concentration holds them to their form. Your scientists view ruins, as archeologists seek the past, and they explain the disappearance of parts of artifacts by expressing that they have been eroded. Time has created their disappearance. This is incorrect. You have created their disappearance, by allowing your concentration to relax. You do not continue with your concentrated energy focused upon certain elements that you have created within your world; therefore parts of them disappear.
“Your curiosity, and your desire to be always creating, creates new elements within your world, and this is how new things appear […]. The reason [any element that you have created already] remains is that there are essences continuing to concentrate their focus, to keep the focus present.”

In chapter three, Visions, Butala expresses her doubts and feelings of being misunderstood about her experiences while being unable to ignore or discard these.

“And in the meantime, since nobody understood my experiences and was questioning, pushing, and criticizing me, making me conclude that I was simply insane or that none of it had ever happened, I left these questions hanging, and walked on.”

Impressions, and the validity of the information offered within the communication, is also clarified by Elias:

“An impression is a communication to yourself. It may not necessarily appear initially to be rational or logical, and it may also appear within your rational thought process to be an expression of imagination. But what you do not recognize within your beliefs is that imagination is also a communication and quite real. What you may imagine in some expression of consciousness is.
“Therefore, as you generate an impression that may translate into a feeling or an image or a thought, […] as bizarre as it may seem to you objectively, you are offering yourself information.”

Butala continues: “I no longer knew at what point the reality of the field… might shade off into the realm of what we call myth […]
I had a glimpse that this had to do with something more than story, and I wanted to know what that was — and I wanted to know why the story mattered so much that I was being totally caught up in it.”

Story, myth, imagination… Apparently all of the realm of chimeras, and yet, according to Elias, myths do have a reality and a more profound importance than we usually surmise:

“You view myths as fantasy and imagination. We have discussed imagination at length previously, as it is reality, but you do not believe this! […]
I have expressed to you, every manifestation within this Regional Area 1 of consciousness is a mirror image of known realities.
In this, within Regional Area 2, you have created myths; ideas, creations, thoughts, emotions, landscapes, sceneries of events, of objects, of reality. These are what your physical reality stems from.
Within your consciousness and your intellect, you do continue, to some extent, to incorporate your original myths, although you distort them; therefore creating a loss of reality with them, and also a lack of power within these myths.”

In chapter four, The Wild, Sharon Butala experiences a powerful vision in a dream, tied in her explorations:

“…I had a dream I was about to enter the field. I was entering the field from the southeast corner with some trepidation composed at least partly of fear and also of a tremulous, hesitant awe, as if something might happen — I did not know what. Suddenly, I saw far ahead of me in the centre of the basin, which is the centre of the field, a low, rectangular platform made of unpainted, weathered wood. I stopped, and as I watched, a man-like creature — heavy-set, powerfully built, wearing a shirt and pants with sleeves and legs torn off at the elbows and knees revealing his tremendously muscular calves and forearms, with hair longish and unkempt - strode, half-bent, out of the wild grasses, leapt onto the platform, and stalked to its centre. A voice said loudly “He is Lord of the Wild”.
I woke, amazed. I thought it a wonderful concept, the revelation from somewhere deep inside me.”

The author then examines the meaning of the word ‘wild’ and concludes:
“Ah, I thought, perhaps this is all we mean by ‘wild’ - alien, unknowable. But then, why do we yearn for it so much?”

In the prologue, Hauntings, Butala expresses more about the powerful attraction of the wild and of the invisible ties that echoed in her and makes her realise more of their reality:

“…I would be awakened for no apparent reason and lying there, I would have the powerful sensation of someone being in the room with us, or several someones, even though I could see well enough in the gloom to know no one corporeal was. Or perhaps I understood on some as-yet-undiscovered psychic level that no one physical was there, that some new sense I hadn’t even believed in had for some reason opened up. I remember that on being wakened this way once, I heard a sudden rapid whispering around all the walls and I felt the whole house shiver - yes, that is the only word I can think of for it - and then a moment later, as happens all the time on the Prairies, a sudden, powerful wind came sweeping from down the valley and began to roar around the house, rattling windows as if trying to climb in…”

Of this fascinating account, one of the most valuable gems of wisdom that only first-hand experience can provide is found in the epilogue, The Gift, where Butala says:

“What do you want of that field? that ‘voiceless voice’, after years of silence, asked in my head… I thought of all the field had taught me, most of it recorded in this book; how most of it no one would believe, or how they would classify me as crazy or a liar or both… I thought of how, for safety’s sake, to end my book I might say that I had written a myth, although every word of it was true, as all myths are true… I found now that I could only say that I knew what I knew and that the great lesson of my nearly sixty years has been that no matter what the price, I would no longer refuse or deny my own experience.”

I WOULD NO LONGER REFUSE
OR DENY MY OWN EXPERIENCE

Invitation to delve deeper into our own fields, this book is also a reminder that one does not need a particularly special or significant location for a ‘Psychic Archeology’ exploration.

Wherever you happen to be has countless stories to tell, if you listen… And trust what you hear.

(Wild Stone Heart is available at Amazon)

Note ¹ The Elias material is held in copyright by Mary Ennis