Magic Moments

[KiheBard at aol.com]

Having now done that one function from which I will never
be permitted to escape (keeping Burke-Burke honest), I should 
render my own tale of a mystical moment in the Society. This 
one is long enough, and catches the spirit of all the others,
that I will let a single incident stand for the wider range...

Like so many others, I experienced such a moment at my very
first camping event.  Those of us who were in attendance 
from what would become Moonschadowe had but recently 
encountered the SCA, and were woefully ill-prepared for the 
weekend insofar as costume and gear were concerned.  

But we were there.  We saw the clash of armed men & women
on the field, experienced the pageantry at first-hand, and were
not left too hungry or too tired to enjoy the evening as well.

The evening: spring in northern Ansteorra, still a Principality by some
few days or weeks. Temperatures cool enough to make the fire
one companion and I ended up near welcome. Enough isolation that
the only sounds were those of a large camp and the wind in the 
leaves of the trees. 

And the sharing of tale and song, poem & raw instrumental music.

I knew then that I had found what I needed, what I wanted, what I 
must be.  Took a few years to work out the details and the "right"
terminology, but I KNEW that night what it meant to be a bard.

I've been one ever since, and expanded upon that moment's 
feeling to an extent I would not otherwise have thought right or 
possible.

Amra M'Chib Bakerian,
who became al-Sayyid Amr ibn Majid al-Bakri al-Amra
currently a resident in the Barony of the Steppes, Ansteorra
forever in my heart a part of a small shire called Moonshadow