The Fisherman & the Cormorant

I don’t know if I will ever return to writing fiction, but I have decided to share the two stories that I had published in anthologies a few years back, and therefore had not shared here.  

This is the first, written in 2016. It’s an upside-down reimagining of the tale of the Wild Swans, and a story of Samhain.

I’ll share the second story on the spring equinox.

The Fisherman & the Cormorant

It was better this way. To have supple wings instead of arms, and dark as night feathers covering my skin. To be able to dive deep down into the brownish-blue below, to fly amongst water weeds and catch fish in my bill. 

He didn’t know when he flung his curse that I would thank him for changing me. He had wanted me, the old leer-eyed lech; and wanted to grow his own power by stealing from mine. When I refused him, showed him that my womanly wisdom was so much more than his, he feared me, as men so often fear women. Now, blinded by sour jealousy, by bitter contempt, he wanted nothing but revenge.

He struck me with his wand carved with magic symbols, and bellowed hateful spell-words, and at first I was horrified and in terrible pain. My body shrank and narrowed and my neck stretched out long and lithe; I grew clumsy webbed feet and a clacking bill; and my hands, perhaps the one thing I do miss, were no longer able to touch or hold, as they stretched out and fledged and I became winged. 

Changing is always a difficult undertaking. We avoid it more often than we embrace it. But I had no choice in the matter. Frightened, and still in some agony, I did all I could do at the time: I flew away. 

It was in my flight that I looked down at the earth below me, and I suppose you could say I gained a new perspective on my predicament. It didn’t take me long, no more than a wingbeat or two, to accept my new body, for I could fly!—and don’t we all dream of that? In flight I was free, free as no human could ever be. So I flew away from the vengeful he-witch who had turned me, and I wholeheartedly adopted my new form.

After some time in the air, when I knew I was safe, I smelt cold, welcoming water on the wind, and came to rest at a lake. There, I set about learning to swim, flying underwater like a black comet; and there were plenty of frogs and silvery fish to eat, so I was more than content. Indeed, I came to love my sleek new body, my glossy feathers, my bright blue-green eyes, more than I had ever loved myself as a woman.

I would sometimes sit on a rock by the water, drying my lovely, green-tinged wings, and think of people, remembering them always doing doing doing, as if their lives depended on it. As a bird I knew better, for being is so much more satisfying, so much more delightful and virtuous. When the elders had said that the animals, in their wildness, were wiser and worthier than humans, they spoke the elemental truth. I knew this because I felt it, in my hollow bones and bird-flesh and right to the tips of my feathers. I was air and water, earth too, and fire was in my heart. I dwelt joyously by my lake. Simply being. Being cormorant.

Though on the night of the first new moon, when starlight was all there was to see by, I changed back. I had just got cosy in my nighttime roost, when I was overcome by a keen-edged pain, and I fell from my perch to the ground, writhing and crying out. Arms and legs burst from my bird limbs, my graceful neck receded, my gleaming feathers recoiled, and my pointed bill shrank back to smooth, wide lips. After my few weeks in bird-form, I lay in shock, confused by my huge size, my great soft and gangling body. 

This, then, was the curse: to be animal, yet not wholly so. To be turned back, excruciatingly, every dark of the moon, so I was neither one thing nor the other. Torn from the bliss of being, and shackled to doing once more, a mere human. It was only for one night, each turn of the moon, but it was still too much. I would spend those long nights longing for my bird body, shivering with the cold on my bare, goosebumped skin. A woman alone, dreaming only of fish and flight.

This was my life. Mostly bird, but woman too.

Then one day a man arrived on the shore of the lake. A man with sad eyes and a sweet, humble face, carrying a swag and dragging a little canoe. He set up camp in a sandy clearing where the ground was ridged with tree roots, and made a little shack for shelter from the rain beside a golden-flowered banksia tree. Lighting a fire to warm himself, he sat staring into the flames, looking forlorn.

The sun soon set on that beguiling scene, and the smell of smoke from the campfire lingered in the air all night.

The next morning the man sat on a stone by the water’s edge, like a shag on a rock, watching the sunlight igniting the shallows, rippling them with flares of gold. Later, he paddled out in his canoe, slow and steady, handmade fishing rod in his fist, and I saw him catch a brown trout. He killed it dead, quick, hitting it over the head, and it slid with a wet slap onto the floor of the canoe. With head bowed for a time, as if in a posture of grief or reverence, the man sat with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands hanging limply, a tear in his eye. Then he slowly paddled back to the shore. 

The smell of cooking trout drifted over that evening, and for a moment, just one bird-flown  moment, I wanted my human form again, so I could taste it. Mild and slightly greasy in my mouth, chewed between two rows of white teeth. Then I caught a fish and swallowed it whole, raw, straight down my gullet, with a gratified snap. 

It seemed the man had come to stay at my lake, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, to have a human so close by, so tempting and repelling. I was cautious, but curious too.

Each day I swam closer and closer, popping up near his canoe, and watching his shy face. Sometimes he would look down into the water, as if he could see right to the bottom, into the green and weedy deepness, and I wondered what he saw there, this human with his limited human eyes. 

He saw me, eventually. My streamlined, sheeny body, my azure eyes that saw through water and air. He did not speak, but smiled, and watched, and wondered. He did not need to say I was beautiful, for I knew it already. 

Then the moon hid once more, on a dark, overcast night, and I could not help crying out, whimpering as I transformed and trembled on the cold ground. And he came through the blackness, the sweet-faced man, with concern and awe resonant in his breathing. He lifted me, carried me in his strong human arms, back to the camp, laying me gently in his shack. He said not a word, but breathed out softly, and slept, invisible by my side. 

That night I wasn’t cold or alone. 

Though before the blush of dawn I left him, with a whisper of thanks, a shriek and a soft splash, as I changed back and entered the water. From the lake’s cool centre I saw him on the shore, poor bewildered man, wondering if he had been dreaming. 

That day I swam to him as he fished, darting around and under the canoe, a black shooting star in an upside-down sky. He was silent, as ever; but we animals know that language is so much more than just words. His sweet face and his sad eyes and his man’s body, all said, Come, my dear little cormorant, my black water-raven. Come, catch me a fish. 

So I did. I caught him a glistening, wriggling silver fish, and he took it from my bill, dispatched its water-full life with tenderness, and gazed quizzically into my vivid avian eyes. 

He knew me then.

That night we dreamed—the man in his shack and me in my tree. We dreamed of a grey fishwife, with a dillybag full of moon-bright fish, and waterweed in her grizzly hair. The old woman said there was a way to break the spell, to make me changeless once more.

‘Take cormorant-caught fish,’ she said, with a glance at me, ‘and skin them without tearing. Smoke the skins dry, and sew them together with fishbone needle and fish-gut thread. Make a fish-skin blanket, and speak not a word until it is done. Then,’ she said, with a cock of her head to him, ‘throw it over your love.’

So I caught fish for him, I did. I sped through the water like an aquatic acrobat, seizing my slippery prey. He cut away their flashing skins with a skilled hand, and hung them over a low, smokey fire, before piercing the skins with his fine bone needle, joining them seam to seam. 

By the next new moon the blanket was half-made, and I came to his camp when I changed, spent the dark night with him, warm skin against skin, my hands taking their fill of touch. Man and woman. All too human.

This is how we were—a fisherman and a cormorant, a human and a bird—making a magic fish-skin blanket, together. To break a spell.

Then the moon changed again, in her unceasing round, hid her face anew; the blanket was finally finished, and I came to him in woman-form once more. That night was joyous, expectant, all cares laid aside. But before daybreak, he took the blanket in his hands, smoke-smelling and fish-sweet, and spoke his first and only words to me: ‘Will you stay?’

It pained me, then, his soft-hearted humanness, his confusion about the curse. In the growing grey light, the bird in me shook my head, resolute, for I was done with doing, though the woman did so with regret. He nodded, acceptant, bowing to my bird-wish, sorrowful and silent. He let the blanket, all our weeks of work, drop heavily by his side. Had it all been for nothing?

And then the sun’s light broke free of the horizon and I began to change, right before his sad, human eyes. To shrink and lengthen and fledge, until I was small and black and beautiful. I flapped my wings, turned my head on its long, graceful neck, and he remembered what the fishwife had said. Throw it over your love.

Picking up the fish-skin blanket, he took me gently in his arms, held me close to his fluttering heart, and cast the magic blanket around us both. Then we beat our gleaming wings as one, and dived down deep. 

~

This story was first published in Heroines: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry – Volume 1, The Neo Perennial Press, 2018.

The Mountain in My Mind

below –

an unseen 

flow 

Miraculous in how it has come into being through effortless effort, to soothe my frazzled nerves at a time of both inner and outer turmoil, this painting says precisely what needed to be wordlessly said.

I keep being drawn to depict this soaring yet grounded being with deep roots, as seen in earlier work, like Beneath the Mountain, which this image reprises.

Everything flows, and there is no straight path. 

As usual, it’s available on Redbubble.

The Mountain in My Mind, watercolours and gouache on gesso prepared paper, 2023

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture

No person is their disease, and no one did it to themselves—not in any conscious, deliberate, or culpable sense. Disease is an outcome of generations of suffering, of social conditions, of cultural conditioning, of childhood trauma, of physiology bearing the brunt of people’s stresses and emotional histories, all interacting with the physical and psychological environment. It is often a manifestation of ingrained personality traits, yes—but that personality is not who we are any more than are the illnesses to which it may predispose us. (pp. 83–84)

I’ve long understood that most, if not all, illnesses in these broken times (my own included) are ‘diseases of civilisation’, such that they would not only be rare in healthy cultures, but would also be imbued with meaning that points towards a path of healing (and a likely cure). The Western medical approach—stemming from the misguided belief that mind is seperate from body—that treats disease (even what we call ‘mental illness’) as purely physiological, and to be ‘fought’ with medication or other physical interventions, rather than as a natural and necessary process related to the whole life experience of the person, is a large part of the problem. To quote from a book I love, The Alchemy of Illness (1993) by Kat Duff:

Allopathic (meaning “against suffering”) medicine and psychology take an aggressive stance against disease with the explicit aim of eliminating pain, illness, and infirmity from our world and lives. This is a heroic ideal. It is infused with notions of superiority, expectations of conflict and conquest, that reflect the imperialistic ethos of our culture. (p. 37)

I’ve fallen into that trap many a time, thinking that the next treatment or diet or expensive supplement will be the thing that does the trick (not that such things can’t be helpful). But the truth is that physical and emotional dysregulation are symptoms of underlying causes, often stemming from adverse childhood experiences; and just about everyone has been affected by some degree of trauma—little ‘t’ if not big ‘T’. This trauma is being unwittingly passed on, generation to generation. No wonder the dominant culture is a mess.

What if we saw illness as an imbalance in the entire organism, not just as a manifestation of molecules, cells, or organs invaded or denatured by pathology? What if we applied the findings of Western research and medical science in a systems framework, seeking all the connections and conditions that contribute to illness and health?

Such a reframing would revolutionize how we practice medicine. Rather than treating disease as a solid entity that imposes its ill will on the body, we would be dealing with a process, one that can’t be extricated from our personal histories and the context and culture in which we live. (p. 89)

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022) by Gabor Maté, with his son Daniel Maté, is an extraordinary and comprehensive book that moves ‘from cell to society’ in its analysis of illness, trauma, addiction, and pathways to healing.

I appreciate books like this in which the author has an honest, confessional approach. Maté not only admits to the things he did wrong and deeply regrets as a physician, because the medical system simply did not teach him any other way; but he also relates the truth about his own depression, workaholism and emotional dysregulation, stemming from his traumatic and deprived childhood in postwar Hungary, and the affect this has had on his family. Even in his late seventies, his learning and healing journey is ongoing—which surely shows us that it is never to late to start on our own healing way. 

I was particularly shocked by the section that discusses birth trauma and obstetric violence, especially the story of an indigenous Canadian woman in labour, taunted and abused by nurses just minutes before her death. My jaw literally dropped. That such racist and misogynist cruelty could take place in a hospital, from people who are supposed to care, was truly awful to read. And that this violence affects women in the process of bringing new life into the world, impacting not only on their ability to mother in healthy ways, but on the infant’s experience of life from the very moment they are born, points directly to the source of the problem. When the natural process of birth is unnecessarily interfered with, harm results at the societal level. Maté writes:

The issue is autonomy, an indispensable human need. Birthing practices express the hidden or overt values of a culture in terms of who wields power and how much genuine control people are able to exercise over their own bodies. Modern research finds that maternity-care interventions may disturb hormonal processes, reduce their benefits, and create new challenges. What then, I asked Sarah Buckley—a New Zealand-based physician, advocate, and author of a highly regarded overview of the normal physiology of childbearing—explains the rapidly growing rates of medicalized interference? I expected an answer based purely on medical concerns. In fact, her response was sharply perceptive as to how acculturation into the much broader myth of normal takes place. “Doctors,” Dr. Buckley said, “are the agents of our society’s expectations that we imprint on mothers, when they are very open and vulnerable, that technology is superior to the body and that women’s bodies are intrinsically bound to fail. It really is obvious that the culture wants to impress upon women this view of their bodies as inherently defective and needing high-level technological care.” And that will carry on, she added, “into how she brings up the child to be in accord with the demands of the culture.”

Though systemic sexism tilts the playing field against women in particular, there is also a more specific cause of unnecessary medical interference, one foundational to the Western medical view: a distrust of natural processes and fear of what can, may, or will go wrong. (pp. 150–51)

When it is the culture as a whole that creates the circumstances in which the symptoms of illness and addiction become the body’s way of saying no (to paraphrase the title of Maté’s 2003 book, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress), it can seem like an impossible task to find a solution. Yet there is hope. Maté makes it clear that we are not controlled by our genes, and therefore stuck in inescapable patterns of behaviour or disease. Rather, we are epigenetic beings. The environment—our circumstances and experiences, and crucially, how we respond to them—determines the expression of our genes. If we can change our environment, and our attitude towards it—if ‘we can learn to be responsible for the mind with which we create our world moving forward’ (p. 366)—then we can change a great deal about ourselves, and ultimately the culture at large.

Just as illness is a process, so is healing:

When I speak of healing, I am referring to nothing more or less than a natural movement towards wholeness. Notice that I do not define it as the end state of being completely whole, or “enlightened,” or any similar psychospiritual ideal. It is a direction, not a destination; a line on a map, not a dot.

Nor is healing synonymous with self-improvement. Closer to the mark would be to say it is self-retrieval. In fact, our modern self-improvement culture—which has to a large extent been co-opted by the same consumerist forces responsible for the conditions we have been chronicling—can too easily obscure or complicate the healing journey. When we heal, we are engaged in recovering our lost parts of self, not tying to change or “better” them. As the depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin told me, the core question is “not so much looking at what’s wrong, but where is the person's wholeness not fully realized or lived out?”

This process of self-retrieval, or reaching towards wholeness, though it may have milestones, is continuous and lifelong—and unique for everyone—and it is helped along by our feeling and imaginative capacities. As Maté says, ‘The intellect becomes a far more intelligent tool when it allows the heart to speak; when it opens itself to that within us that resonates with the truth, rather than trying to reason with it.’ (p. 364)

I love that Maté mentions Bill Plotkin and other explorers of the mythic realm such as Michael Meade, and that he is unafraid to relate his experiences of ayahuasca ceremonies, and the possibilities of other psychotropic medicines, alongside other psychospiritual approaches to illness. Modern medicine’s ignorance of (or refusal to see) the emotional, social and spiritual origins of illness prevents it from ever finding the true causes. As Kat Duff has written, quoting Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell, ‘a long personal or cultural history that has repressed the pagan gods encourages illness.’ (The Alchemy of Illness, p. 53) Without contact with the wild source of everything, we get lost, and things begin to fall apart.

Healing, as process or journey, is available to us at any moment, if we cultivate the will to keep bringing our attention back to dysfunctional beliefs and thought patterns, peering courageously into our pasts, whilst believing in the possibility of a different future.

The idea is to retrain the brain, to strengthen through conscious effort the prefrontal cortex’s capacity to break out of a past-based trance and repatriate us to the present. Any repetitively self-deprecating thought pattern can be worked with in this way.

The method is an experiential one, requiring commitment and mindfulness. It needs to be not only done but fully experienced. Only when attention is present can the mind rewire the brain. “Conscious attention must be paid,” Jeffrey Schwartz insists. “Therein lies the key. Physical changes in the brain depend for their creation on a mental state in the mind—the state called attention. Paying attention matters.” (p. 424)

This idea of attention echoes what Iain McGilchrist has said: that attention, far from being just a ‘cognitive function’, ‘is actually nothing less than the way in which we relate to the world. And it doesn’t just dictate the kind of relationship we have with whatever it is: it dictates what it is that we come to have a relationship with.’ (Ways of Attending: How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World, 2019, p. 28)

Reading The Myth of Normal has been yet another reminder for me to re-devote my attention to what matters, and to rediscover the healing path I had mislaid for the past several years. It was always there, waiting for me to set foot on its dark and unknown way once more.

As Paul Shepard says in Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998):

Our world does not make us; nor do we make ourselves; we are the continuing creation of the interaction between our organic structure and the way we shape the world around us. It’s possible to do it badly. It’s also possible to do it well. We are an epigenetic phenomenon: our development is elaborated continuously during our entire lifetimes as it has been down through the ages. (p. 38)

Feared and Revered: Feminine Power Through the Ages

I recently went to see the exhibition called Feared and Revered: Feminine Power Through the Ages, at the National Museum of Australia (on loan from the British Museum).

I left it feeling glad that I had made the effort to go, and I would have liked to have spent some more time there, to really soak it all in, but I also had mixed feelings. As others have mentioned, many of the objects in the collection were of course stolen, so there is that uncomfortable legacy of British imperialism to grapple with; but the narrative provided was also flawed, at least in part. 

The title itself is a thorny thing. Are ‘feared’ and ‘revered’ suitable words to describe how women and the divine are/were understood? Reverence is apt, at least in a pre-patriarchal cultural context, though aspects of it did extend well into patriarchal times in some instances. But I wonder whether the notion of fear (in the cultural, not the individual, sense) is a more recent interpretation, stemming from the very times that began to lose that reverence for women and the Earth. It seems that either word could cancel out the other—a culture of reverence can have no real cause for fear; a culture of fear can have no real feeling of reverence. Though ultimately I think both terms do have relevance, and many goddesses do have fearsome aspects.

It’s the ‘feminine power’ of the subtitle that proves to be more controversial. I would have preferred it to be ‘female power’, or better yet, ‘female (cultural/spiritual) authority’. ‘Power’ is a loaded term, and easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to the kind of authority that women once wielded; but the use of ‘feminine’ instead of ‘female’, to my mind, suggests that the exhibition was less to do with women, or the fact of femaleness, whether human or divine, but more about an abstract idea of femininity. The opening commentary on the wall mentioned how some artefacts combined ‘multiple gender identities’ or ‘transcend gender entirely’—and I found myself rolling my eyes (as I’m sure many other women did too). Was it too much to hope that the regressive contemporary concept of ‘gender identity’ would not be mentioned, let alone imposed anachronistically upon past ages? Thankfully, I didn’t notice it cropping up again, but it left me with the sense that despite being a display full of images of the female body, actual women were sneakily and subtly being sidelined (just in case anyone was offended).

As for the notion of power/authority/strength, it was evident—though it has to be noted that the majority of the display was firmly ensconced in the patriarchal period in which the conception of the female divine (and of women themselves) was already, or was in the process of being, degraded, eroded, and redefined to suit a male-dominated narrative. The section titled ‘Passion and Desire’ was a good example of this, especially as two Greek painted vases seemed to deal almost exclusively with male sexual behaviour, which was inappropriate given the theme. The ‘Magic and Malice’ section also had the usual portrayals of women as witches and demons, without explaining that such depictions were usually the result of (often Christian) distortions of earlier earth-based practices and beliefs that did not split ‘good’ from ‘evil’. 

The only real exceptions to the patriarchal era (but only just) were the Cycladic figurines, the earliest of which was dated to c. 2800 BCE in the early Bronze Age. Being the oldest pieces, derived from an earlier neolithic tradition, and incredibly beautiful, these were the highlight for me, but they do indicate the temporal limitations of the exhibition. Feminine power through the ages should look back even further than the Bronze Age.

What’s more, the vague commentary for these three figurines said: ‘Their meaning is unclear, but their abundance suggests that women or femininity were culturally or spiritually significant for these early societies’ … It’s as if Marija Gimbutas never existed.

‘Through the ages’ did, however, mean that there were numerous contemporary pieces, which I was not expecting. Some of them were entirely suitable, like the yawkyawk (water spirit) pieces made by indigenous women from the Northern Territory; others were a little jarring, such as Kylie Minogue’s Aphrodite tour costume (though I did like the headdress; it’s in the background of the statue of Demeter below); but one, a series of images by a Muslim artist depicting the names of Allah via black and white abstract patterns, was entirely beside the point—not a trace of the female to be seen, as if the category had simply evaporated.

I’ve always struggled a little with the museum experience, finding it can be mind-numbing and generally exhausting to be constantly standing, looking, and reading tiny snippets of information. Perhaps it is due mostly to my own health issues, but I wonder whether it is also in part to do with the decontextualisation of the artefacts. Cultural ‘objects’, whether stolen or rescued from oblivion, end up completely abstracted from their original settings, and therefore partially devitalised, like wild animals are devitalised by being kept in captivity. The Russian icon of the Virgin Hodegetria (She Who Shows the Way) had clearly lost some of Her magic by being placed behind glass. I feel sad for her.

Overall, I wanted to know more about the lived context of the pieces: Where were the objects/images from? Where did they originally stand (a temple, a church, a private room)? Most importantly, how did people interact with them? Were they really feared and/or revered? I also wanted more enquiry into the meaning of things, and what this meant for women themselves, but in an exhibition that tended towards abstract ideas, a genuine appraisal of embodied culture and women’s place in it, then or now, was always going to be missing. (Though perhaps the accompanying book would fill in more of the details.) 

Despite my misgivings, it was still a great privilege to see the pieces in this collection, so I am grateful for the opportunity. With artefacts from six continents—from Egyptian Sekhmet to Mexican Cihuateotl, Indian Parvati to Inuit Sedna—it was diverse, culturally and aesthetically. Apart from the elegant Cycladic figurines, other highlights—and definite beings of reverence—were the Mesopotamian clay relief of the Queen of the Night (Inanna/Ishtar; also sometimes identified as Lilith), c. 1750 BCE, and the Irish Sheela-na-gig, 1100–1200 CE. 

And my pick for the most fearsome goddess was definitely Chamunda (the most terrifying manifestation of Kali), with her corpse-like aspect and those uncanny extra arms. But even she, as ‘the destroyer of the ego and of maya (illusion), the false distinction between opposites, including the mind and the body, the self and the universe’, as the commentary put it, ‘symbolises compassionate guidance.’ When we see beyond her frightening appearance, we find that she is just the other half of the beautiful Parvati. They are one.  

If Isis’s words from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses were understood as a spiritual truth about the nature of Earth and Cosmos, if we remembered that reality is a who rather than a what, and if women truly were venerated, what a different world—of much more reverence and far less fear—we would live in. 

A few more images can be seen on Instagram here and here.