> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.david-de-gernier.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Call - URL: https://www.david-de-gernier.com/the-call/ - Published: 2026-05-24T12:45:37.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-15T18:59:44.000Z - Description: Monomyth - Author: David de Gernier - Tags: Writing, Newsletter, #Migrated-1791891281430, #Import 2026-10-13 11:35 Once more, in the small hours, it comes. Not simply a sound, but a disturbance that vibrates through my body as much as the ear. I lie half awake and know it is there before I fully understand it. Something has shifted. Something has reached me. It has been with me for years. It first came when I was thirty-three, and my life was frozen in a state of loss, of doubt. For nights at a stretch it calls, then disappears again for months, sometimes longer. There is no pattern I can follow, no way to predict it. Yet it always comes back. Haunting me. At first, I tried to track it down. I would get up, step outside, and follow the direction it seemed to pull me. But whenever I felt I was getting close, something in me resisted. A tension would build—part fear, part uncertainty—and I would stop. Turn back. Convince myself I had imagined it. Still, the sense of something unfinished lingered. Others have heard it too. I am certain of that. I have come across fragments—notes, sketches, treasure maps, but with no X marks the spot. I have heard conversations that trail off at the same point. Some people have tried to follow it further than I have. Not all of them return unchanged. Some that have returned seemed to be ‘’different’’ to me, visitors to this world, rather than inhabitants of it. Outsiders. For the past number of years, the sound seemed to come from the forest beyond the hedge around my garden. By day, the place is ordinary enough. Old trees, uneven ground, vegetable and herb patches, with a quiet sense of age. But at night it feels different. Not threatening exactly, but aware. As if it holds something just beyond reach, beyond the hedge. Watching me, calling me. The sound shifts each time I hear it. Sometimes low and distant, like a bell carried through rain. A fog horn heard from the deck of a fog bound ship. Sometimes irregular, like ropes striking a ships mast. Sometimes soft and close, almost like breath. It draws attention, but never quite resolves into anything fixed. But like the cry of an infant it tugs me by the heart-strings from sleep. One night, I decide to follow and find the source of the sound again. I go outside, cross through the gate in the hedge, past the familiar landmarks—the standing stone, the fallen oak, the ruined churchyard—and move into the misty valley beyond. The deeper I go, the more the atmosphere changes. The ground softens, the air thickens, and the shapes of the trees begin to feel less familiar. There is a moment where I almost turn back. But I don’t. Instead, I keep moving. Eventually, the atmosphere lifts. A clearing, a Nemeton, opens ahead, and early light begins to filter through the trees. In the centre of the clearing is a still pool, dark and reflective. Beside it stands an old hazel tree, its branches heavy and bending low over the pool. I step closer, and sit. A nut falls, dropping into the water. Ripples spread, then fade. When the surface stills again, I look down. Something changes. The reflection isn’t quite right. Or perhaps it is more accurate than before. The air sharpens, sound deepens, and everything feels more immediate. Not unreal—if anything, more real than usual. As if I have fallen through the surface of the pool. Of the world. Then I hear music. It comes from somewhere in the trees. Pipes, faint at first, then clearer. The sound moves through the space rather than across it. I can feel it as much as hear it. In the reflection on the pond surface, I see a figure standing behind me. I don’t turn immediately. There is no need. I already know something has been there all along. And in the dark mirror of the ponds reflection, I see him. Pan. Not as a myth, not as a story, but as presence. The horned one. The god of the wild, of terror and ecstasy, of nature unmediated. Half man, half goat— He stands behind me, yet also within me. He is the image of what has been repressed, exiled, feared—and therefore made monstrous. But now I see. He is not the enemy. He is the forgotten. He is the shadow and more than the shadow: He is a doorway to salvation, to knowledge and creativity. He is the spirit of the grove, the life that moves through root and branch, through flesh and dream alike. He is the pulse of the *anima mundi*—the soul of the world. The call was his. Or rather— it was mine, arising from that place where the individual meets the greater field of being. He speaks. ‘Hello,’ he says, with a strange gentleness. ‘I have been calling you for so long. Come. Sit beside me. There is much you have forgotten. There is much you must remember.’ And I understand at last. This was never a journey outward, but inwards. The forest watches. The pool waits. The music continues. And something in me, long exiled, comes home. And with that, the years of uncertainty settle into something clearer. It was never just a sound. It was a call. A call to action. Not from somewhere else, but from deep within myself. Something I had kept at a distance. Something older, less defined, but no less real. Something that had been waiting. I sit there for a while, not trying to explain it. Just listening. ———————————————————————————————————————————- The forest is alive, and something in it recognizes me. There is a quiet fire moving beneath everything, and it knows my shape. The call isn’t coming from outside—it’s rising from within me. What I have been avoiding has been waiting, patient and unchanged. The pool doesn’t reflect me—it reveals me. Step closer, and the distance I have kept begins to collapse. The wild presence I feared is part of my own unfinished self. Every path I have taken has been circling this moment. The tension, the pull, the unease—none of it is accidental. What feels like danger is often the edge of something real. If I enter fully, everything false will fall away. And what remains will feel strangely, unmistakably like home. *Io Pan, Io Pan, Pan, Pan.* [Subscribe now](https://www.david-de-gernier.com/)