Thinking about the process of awakening to the Genius Loci, the mythic landscape... especially if one comes from a lineage whose ancestors don’t carry the stories of that place in their bones in a way that the stories fill you up and when you breathe out your own breath is that story, too, and the place where your feet touch the earth is also the place where the old gods reside, and time stacks up until it is all NOW.
I didn’t grow up being told the mythic stories about this place, but maybe there are other ways of knowing. Several years ago I dreamt that my grandmother, but not a grandmother I knew from my waking life, was singing while sitting on the beach of the misty island in this photograph. The song filled me up and I knew it was important to remember. The dream carried me on, though, and gave me another piece of work, so by the time I awoke, I remembered her singing, but song had slipped away. So today, midsummer eve, I sang to her from across the bay, and the rain poured, and the hem of my dress swirled in the waves, and everything was beautiful, and there is so much work to be done. Wishing you safe passage through the mists, dear friends.
0 Comments
When I was 10 we started meeting, and a few months later moved to, a mysterious little white house which had a trap door in the living room, and a wide, gray, sandy beach almost as a front yard. Maybe the first time I walked on that wet, cold sand, we came upon a jellyfish, red like strawberry preserves, that had drifted ashore. I had never met a jellyfish, and this one was amazing to me... impossible... like fireworks. Looking at them didn’t make it any easier to see what they were all about...
I still feel that way about these incredible people who float in the sea. And I so rarely see them here. Today is my 111th day visiting the water. I was dragging my feet... no one wanted to come with me... I was trying to decide about going out to do something that had sounded really good at 6:30 this morning... and a thick fog was rolling in. But here I am. At what’s becoming one of the most important parts of my day. And so very glad. |
Sylvan ThorncraftPracticing mother, weedwife, animist, human, who's very thankful to live on the coastal plain of Southern Maine, in Wabanaki terretory, near a place called Owascoag. Archives
August 2020
Categories
All
|