Little Green Things: A Poem

Little green things 

heed the call 

that Death eats Life 

and Life sprouts 

from Death 

in a spiral dance 

of joy and sorrow –

for a long cold winter 

will always become 

a bright spring

This little poem has been adapted from something I wrote a number of years ago, but I thought it apt to share on this last official day of winter.

This winter has not seemed particularly long, though there have been some cold days. What it has lacked is rain. Though spring shoots and blooms regardless, and for this I am grateful. Growth and transformation is on its way, with or without the rain. Let’s welcome it.

Wise Words: Taking All Green Into Her Heart

(‘When Earth Becomes an “It”’, by Cherokee/Appalachian poet Marilou Awiakta, found in Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, 1993, p. 47) 

Serpent Green

I greatly underestimated the time it would take to get my studio into working order. I had hoped to be in there by now, writing and making art, but instead we are only just getting to the stage of painting colour on the walls. However, I thought I would tell you about the colour I chose—a warm green, called Serpent—for it means something to me. Not only do I hope that it will provide a calm space to work in, I also hope that it will be conducive to creativity itself, as green is the colour of growth. There is, in fact, an etymological relationship between the words green, grow and grass.

The name of the colour is also significant, for I’ve been preoccupied with the idea of snakes for some time: their earth-bound sensuousness; their ability to shed their skins—a symbol of regeneration; their connection with healing. 

Snake Goddess figurine, early Cretan Neolithic, c. 6500–5500 BCE (Source: Wikimedia, by Zde)

I wrote a story last year that featured Snake, the shedding of skins, and the healing of a rift between self and land. I wrote ‘Furies’, a poem alluding to the mythological Furies or Erinyes, snake-haired and winged ‘monsters’ of ancient Greece. And I read Sylvia Linsteadt’s powerful novella, The Dark Country (which I wrote about here)—a story of the return of the chthonic powers of the earth in the form of a great white serpent.

Sylvia’s writing has been a particular influence on me; as is her Witchlines Study Guild, which I am currently taking part in—most especially because I am learning more about the closely related Neolithic Bird and Snake Goddesses. Fascinatingly, elements of these goddesses can still be seen, albeit in diminished form, in later goddesses, monsters and witches. All of this is providing much food for thought, and inspiration for potential artworks. That’s why I am glad that this serpentine influence is going to be an integral part of my studio space.

Minoan Snake Goddess figurine, c. 1600 BCE, Heraklion Archaeological Museum
(Source: Wikimedia, by Jebulon)

This is also a good opportunity for me to tell you about Sylvia’s recent book, Our Lady of the Dark Country (2017). As I wrote last year, Sylvia’s novella, The Dark Country, was only available as part of limited print runs. However, it has now been published in this collection of short stories and poetry, through which a serpentine, feminine and earthy wisdom runs. As Sylvia writes in the introduction:

Women and men of heart, Earth’s snakes are speaking. It is time we listen for the truth they tell us through the centers of ourselves. Women and men of heart, we make a spiral round this planet. It is time to tell the old stories that have damaged us differently. To go beneath what we’ve been told and into the dark country, into the Earth, where the other side of those stories is hidden, the truth that was carried all along in the roots of the trees despite thousands of years of war. (p. xiv)

If you are not familiar with Sylvia’s writing, this is, perhaps, a very good place to start. You can read the full introduction on her blog, The Gleewoman’s Notes. (The cover art is Deer Madonna, by Rima Staines.)

Meanwhile, I will be thinking of Snake, in all her many forms, and of the snaking roots of wisdom that stem from the Neolithic, and how these things might manifest in my life and work.

A Room Of My Own

Late last year a large green building appeared in our front yard. This is to be my very own studio! After years of working in a very small and cluttered space, I will now have the opportunity to move my creative life and materials into this purpose-built room.

Although the building is now complete, there is still much work to do to complete the inside. I’ve been looking at paint swatches, trying to find a warm, earthy green that is just right for inducing calmness as well as creativity. It will also take some time to find all the furnishings I need—the most important thing being a generously-sized desk, or two (though a bookshelf comes a very close second).

Perhaps the most important thing about this space is that I intend for it to remain Internet-free. Though the Net is an invaluable tool, it can also be an incredibly harmful distraction. I’ve experienced it as such over the past year, and I want to distance myself from it as much as I can from now on, while still using it for essential things, of course (blogging, research, and communication). In this I am inspired by Joseph Campbell:

This is an absolute necessity for anybody today: you must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually wonderful will happen. ~ From ‘Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers)’

My studio will become, I hope, my creative sanctuary, where I will get much work done (both writing and art), but also much dreaming, and feeling into the dark and fertile places within. After the rather terrible time I had last year, it is time for a new start, a new focus, and this room is where that will take place.

Watch this space. Exciting things are afoot!

Self: Silence Speaks

Silence speaks through the sheerness of the heart that opens softly to spill a jewel of light. 

This is all I have to give. It is enough. For if I listen to the gem-light, the fire, there is speech. 

Sap drips and flows forth like lifeblood, and a lifeline of oviriditas*—the green heart of things. 

An opening. Through the doorway and into the tree, wood-scented and umber light …

Self: Silence Speaks, May 2017, felt tip pen and acrylic on card

* … ‘Oviriditas’ meaning greenness or verdure—a term coined by Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth century German mystic, to name “the greening power of the universe”. (Glenys Livingstone, PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, iUniverse: Lincoln, NE, 2005, p. 62)

Note: the word should in fact be viriditas, dropping the ‘o’; I don’t know why my source says oviriditas, whether this is deliberate, or an error, but it is what I was thinking of at the time I wrote the above piece (13 July 2017).

A Poem: Tree Woman

I think it will become obvious, if you keep reading my blog, or have looked at my art on Redbubble, that I have something of an obsession with trees … and increasingly birds too, but let’s not get sidetracked …

I haven’t written much poetry, but occasionally an idea or image demands to be written in that form, and I can only obey.

This poem was, on the whole, inspired by the Jeanette Winterson quote below. However, as I noted beside the first draft in my notebook, I was also thinking of a sad little Japanese folktale called ‘Willow’, about a man who marries a woman who is the spirit of a much-loved willow tree (found in Collected Folk Tales (2011) by Alan Garner).  

Tree Woman

‘There are plenty of legends about women turning into trees but are there any about trees turning into women?’

~ Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

I saw a woman in a tree.

There was something 

in the curving form of the trunk,

the grace of the branches,

the head-held-high canopy.

She had weeping willow leaf hair—

sunlit green—

welcoming arms,

and a blush of lichen 

on her cheeks.

She cast an elegant, 

if hairy, shadow,

with lush limbs 

reaching out to me,

beckoning me 

to worship below her

(as if at an altar),

and to climb, 

to reach as she does

towards the encircling sky, 

wrapped around the Earth’s orb.

I went to sit in her shade,

to gaze up and admire her beauty

and the way she attracted—

with looks alone—

birds and butterflies and breezes.

What if I could have such beauty, 

such bearing?

Could I turn green?

Could I offer my flowers 

to passing bees?

Such generosity!

If I sit here for long enough 

perhaps I will become 

a small patch of moss,

growing at her feet.

I will grasp her and 

she will embrace me,

two lovers of the green, 

growing together,

held close 

in verdant sisterhood.

A euphoric union 

in the sun and shade,

wind and rain.

White Tree II, 2005

A Story: The Solitary Woman

From time to time I may share some pieces of creative writing with you, and here is my first small offering. 

This story is particularly special to me for being the very first one that I wrote, a little over two years ago, therefore marking the beginning of my journey as a writer. Indeed, writing it is what helped me to believe that I could actually be a writer. After all, to have the technical ability to write is one thing; to be able to write creatively, to grow stories from the fertile ground of the imagination, is quite another. 

At first I did not believe I would be able to write fiction, for creating stories had never been one of my strengths or talents. And, to be honest, the basic structure of a story—the plot itself—is still something that I struggle with. Places and characters come to me far more easily. Yet, a dear friend (they know who they are) encouraged me to write, to perhaps initially write a story about myself and where I wanted my life to go. At the time, I resisted. I did not feel that I could write imaginatively about my future. Though, without my fully realising, a character had already been evolving within me for some time—a woman somewhat like me and totally unlike me—a woman who I aspire to be more like. Inspired in part by the Wild Woman archetype, and by all the stories of witches and healers I have ever read, she suddenly came to life. 

Strangely, I knew that I wanted to use the words ‘ramshackle’ and ‘hodgepodge’, and from those humble beginnings the story grew in the course of one magic afternoon. 

It seems that what I needed was someone else to believe in me before I could believe in myself. And I needed to give myself permission to write, to sit down and allow myself to begin placing word after word, until another world appeared on the page. 

Now, here I am—a writer. Still learning the craft, but a writer nonetheless. 

And here she is, the healer–herbalist–witch, the edge-dwelling woman of the forest, wild-hearted and wise beyond knowing. 

The Solitary Woman*

She lived in the woods in an old, ramshackle hut made of stone and timber, wattle and daub, topped with a mossy green roof. Some people said that she built the hut with her own strong arms and hands, her sharp axe and sturdy hammer. Others said that the hut had always been there, as if it grew up out of the earth, fully formed, a strange wood and clay and stone creature, warmed into life by a fiery hearth heart. Whatever the truth was, there was something magical about this hut and the women who lived in it. 

She liked to be alone, though she never was, not really. She was friends with the trees and animals, the toadstools and birds, even the ants that walked in a line across her windowsill. It was human company that she avoided. Yet, when some poor, lost and half-starved soul did manage to stumble into the clearing in the woods where she lived, they were always treated hospitably enough, offered hearty food, a warm seat by the fire, and a comfortable place to sleep. Providing the weather was favourable, they would be sent on their way the following morning, their bodies rested and their bellies full, with fail-safe directions back to their mislaid path. Still, though she was kind to her human visitors, she was always happiest when they were gone and her forest glade was quiet once more, filled with the peaceful hum of nonhuman life.

Yet some people in the nearby village were suspicious of the wood-woman, and they wanted to spy on her, to prove that she was a witch, and wicked too, but curiously, anyone who went into the woods with that intention never found her. It was as if her hut was so well camouflaged that it was invisible, as was she, her clothing a hodgepodge of greens and browns that made her blend in with her surroundings. Or it could be that her hut uprooted itself and trundled off to some new location, deeper in the forest, and harder to find. Some dark place that even the most courageous villager would be loathe to enter into, for fear of wolves and other wild creatures. Perhaps even the forest itself hid her, the trees protecting her home, blocking paths, and tripping unwelcome intruders. But even more curiously, when people were desperately in need of help—for the gash in the woodsman's foot, a woman’s difficult labour, or a child's broken bone—the woman's hut could always be found, quickly and with ease, as if it was situated right on the edge of the forest, the smoke from its chimney curling above the trees and clearly visible from the village, its scent blown in on the wind. She would then come, with her satchel of herbs and potions, utensils and restoratives, to stitch up and bandage the wound, deliver the baby, or set the bone right again, before disappearing back into the shadow of the trees. 

Of those who had seen her up close, none could agree on her age or appearance. Some said that she was old and wizened, small and stooped and quite definitely ugly. Others thought that she had not seen many summers at all, and was tall and strikingly handsome. Yet others thought she was of middling age, neither old nor young, and entirely unremarkable in appearance. And was her hair winter white or autumnal auburn, chestnut brown or sunlight golden? But, despite the contradictions, everyone wholeheartedly agreed that her green eyes always seemed to be laughing, even if her lips were not, and her voice, when she did break her silence, was lilting and rich. 

However, in spite of her obvious strangeness and the inquisitiveness of the villagers, in the general commotion of illness or injury, the woman’s presence was often largely unnoticed. She simply went about her healing work, quietly and methodically, doing whatever was necessary—staunching, stitching, bandaging, massaging, reassuring, easing pain. It was only when her patient was cured, on the mend, or had peacefully breathed their last, and she was gone once more, that her warm-hearted and motherly, yet uncanny presence, was acknowledged and missed, and the earthy smell of herbs, woodsmoke and soil that accompanied her would fade away. The villagers would then feel a peculiar dull ache, a yearning for something they knew not what—her patients most of all. And this yearning would pull them towards the forest, towards the dark, green, wild place outside the confines of the village, with its fenced yards and homely cottages, clucking hens and bleating sheep. Something called to them from the shadows under the trees, something ancient and untamed and mysterious. But after a few days, or a few weeks, most people would forget this yearning and get on with their lives. They always forgot.

Once in a blue moon, though, there would be someone who wouldn’t—or simply couldn’t—forget, who would feel the yearning so strongly that they would abandon their home and walk straight into the woods without looking back. And after the villagers had called and searched and eventually lost all hope of their safe return, sometimes that person would walk out of the forest, months later, smelling of leaf mould and vegetation, their clothes tattered and patched with squares of green and brown, but looking none the worse for their long absence. They would, however, have a strange kind of laughter in their eyes, now newly flecked with green.

*This story has previously been published on the Blue Mountains Library blog, Writers in the Mist, along with a number of short stories by other members of my writers’ group. Do click on the link and have a read of their stories too. We are a talented bunch.