Offerings to the Wellspring

I’ve been treading a tricky path these past five years, since starting this blog, trying to reconcile my frequent impulse to withdraw, with the need to share my thoughts and creations publicly. 

As someone who lives with chronic illness as a companion, I have to conserve my energy and protect myself from stress as much as possible, and I haven’t been doing that very well for a long time. Being constantly connected to the internet is the main cause of the problem, and I freely admit that though I am critical of technology, and frequently wish it gone, I am just as susceptible to it as most people. It’s addictive and distracting, for all the connection and creativity it also provides. 

So I’m straddling these opposing needs: to be present and to retreat; to be somebody and to be nobody … And retreat and anonymity are much stronger needs right now.

In order to gift you offerings from my creative wellspring, I need to devote offerings back to it, so I have made the long-overdue decision to withdraw from social media and blogging for the remainder of this year, so I can feed the source that feeds me. 

I hope this lengthy pause will grant me the breathing space to, first and foremost, rest deeply and focus on my health. I also expect it will enable me to open up more fully to creative/spiritual practice, and make some much-needed changes in my life.

My art will still be available from Redbubble, and I will also be contactable via email … though I may be a little slower to reply than usual.

Until 2022, farewell!

Wise Words: Emily Knows

(Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest, selected and with an introduction by Thomas H. Johnson, Back Bay Books: New York, 1964, p. 258)

The Pledge of Summers to Come

The red leaves take the green leaves’ place, and the landscape yields. We go to sleep with the peach in our hands and wake with the stone, but the stone is the pledge of summers to come. 

~Emily Dickinson (from a letter to the Rev. J. L. Jenkins and Mrs Jenkins, 187–) 

Finding the Hag Energy: When Madness is Good Sense

In the wake of recent events I wanted to share a few of the pieces I have read, written by wise women, that have helped to ameliorate my feelings of fear and dejection about what is now happening in our world. Things were bad enough already, but now the way forward is going to be even harder for women, for refugees, for indigenous peoples and other minorities, and for those of us who truly care about the Earth.

Yet, horrible as this state of affairs is, it may well be just what we need to stimulate real change and transformation. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new era, and we—the artists, dreamers and wild ones, the humble folk in humble houses—are the people who will make it come about.

For women in particular, we need to face our fears and tap into the energy that comes from our anger (an emotion that is usually, often wrongly, characterised as negative, and that we therefore tend to suppress), and let out the hag, the witch, the madwoman. For it is from the deep, dark and potent place of our anger—the place that knows this is wrong, and says enough is enough!—that the alchemical fires of transformation will originate.

As Emily Dickinson wrote: 

Much Madness is divinest Sense –

To a discerning Eye –

Much Sense – the starkest Madness –

We must learn to see with a discerning eye. That the ‘Sense’ that we are often presented with—that production is more important than people, that economic growth is more important than a living Earth—from businessmen, politicians and the like, is utter madness; while what they see as our ‘Madness’—our love of what is wild and natural and filled with life’s poetry, our kindness for people and living beings—is in fact good sense, and utterly right.

We must find the hags within us, wake the witches, let our goodly anger rise so that we can make things right. We must grow in confidence, ready our voices, write our stories, make our art, shout our protests. Because enough is enough. 

Here is much inspiration:

and so in the darkness we fight on by Sarah Elwell 

The Wild Woman in Irish Myth and Re-membering Women’s Stories by Sharon Blackie

This Fear is Old by Lucy H. Pearce

Alice Walker Tells Readers: Don’t Despair

Meeting the Times by Deena Metzger

And lastly, this stunning tale of drought and immigration in California, and a mythic renewing of the world: 

The Last Harvest of the World by Sylvia Linsteadt

Spring is a Happiness So Beautiful

All is not well with the world, nor with me, but there is still beauty to be found; and because of it, I can almost say that I am happy.

Native irises

Crimson rosellas

Sulphur-crested cockatoos

Sleeping wood ducks

Spring is a happiness so beautiful, so unique, so unexpected, that I don’t know what to do with my heart. I dare not take it, I dare not leave it—what do you advise?

~ Emily Dickinson (from a letter to her cousins, 1874)