Heroines II

The second Heroines anthology is launched today, featuring my story, A New Land. It’s about an old Polish immigrant couple—Agnieszka and Gregor—and a mysterious nighttime visitor to their vegetable garden.

This tale (along with The Fisherman and the Cormorant, which appeared in the first anthology last year), is part of a series of stories I began to write as I completed Sharon Blackie’s online course, Sisterhood of the Bones (now called Sisters of Rock & Root). This course revolves—quite literally!—around the wheel of the year by examining each of the eight Celtic seasonal festivals, delving into the meanings and themes of each, and connecting it with an associated myth or folktale. 

When I began with Samhain in April 2016, my aim was to use the course to deepen my connection to the land I live on, not just by observing the seasonal changes, and thinking about how I could connect my embodiment here in Australia back to my European ancestry, but also to write a story for each seasonal celebration, thus creating my own local mythology. 

Each story would have a number of features: 

1. It would be set, obliquely or otherwise, at the time of the festival in question

2. It would take place either in, or in relation to, a real place near where I live, in the compass direction associated with the festival

3. It would feature, or at least refer to, an animal associated with the festival, though with an Australian twist

With each story I would take inspiration from the themes of the festival, the associated myth/folktale, or a combination of the two, along with what arose from contemplation of the places and animals.

I completed five of these stories, and was very excited about the possibility of self-publishing the whole series, perhaps with artworks too, before I became stuck. That I got stuck at the story for the summer solstice, one of the festivals I feel a little ambivalent about, says something. As does the idea of voicelessness that seems to need expression through it. I feel as if I have lost my voice over the past couple of years, and this is something I wish to overcome. 

That two of my stories from this mythic series have now been published suggests that I was onto something with this idea. At the very least it was enabling me to create more of a feeling of belonging with my own landscape, and that was a powerful thing. I miss that.

I don’t know if I will ever finish writing the series, though I dearly hope I will. Right now I am just trying to take heart from the fact that two of my stories have flown out into the world! For someone who only started writing fiction in 2014, that is a great achievement in itself.

Heroines: Volume II is available now from the Neo Perennial Press.

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

Always Coming Home

In her acceptance speech when awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in November 2014, Ursula Le Guin said:

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. (The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and the Compass Rose, 2015, ix)

Le Guin has been one of those visionary writers herself, and perhaps never more so than in her book Always Coming Home. Published in 1985 it is hardly recent, yet it imagines a future society—the Kesh—living in a radically altered world, long after the ‘hard times’ which are coming, and happening, now. As Le Guin writes, by way of explanation: ‘The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California’. Thus, it was, and still is, a book ahead of its time.

I first learned about Always Coming Home in an article by Sharon Blackie, in which she describes it as one of the few science-fiction, post-apocalyptic novels that tells of a society that she would willingly live in, because ‘it offered a world that was built on strong, caring community’ (What Comes After Civilisation? – The Wild Women Versus the Wild Men). Reading this, and because I already love and admire the work of Le Guin, I knew I had to get my hands on a copy.

Perhaps what struck me most about the book was the animistic relationship the Kesh have with the land around them, conveyed most eloquently through their language, and their unique perception of the world (which is clearly inspired in part by Native American culture and philosophy, but also contains Le Guin’s own distinctive form of wisdom). For instance, to the Kesh the word ‘people’ is applied to nonhumans as much as to humans; so there are quail people, coyote people, woodrat people, oak people, and so on. (If we saw all creatures as people, we would treat them differently, no?)

Most beautifully, they call death ‘Going Westward to the Sunrise’, and a series of songs are sung for the dead or dying, to send them on their way; when a child is born it is said that the girl/boy made so and so their parents, not that so and so had a girl/boy; feathers are considered to be words, and therefore accepted with reverence as gifts or messages from the birds; and when a person is in the presence of something holy, or that fills them with awe, they say (and often repeat) the sacred word: ‘Heya’.

Names are also of great significance to the Kesh, and most of them have a number of names throughout their lives. Names that are not just given by parents, but that come to them, or are found, due to life experiences, happenings, or visions. As a person grows and changes, so does their name. The character of the main story, Stone Telling, says:

In [the town of] Sinshan babies’ names often come from birds, since they are messengers. In the month before my mother bore me, an owl came every night to the oak trees called Gairga outside the windows of High Porch House, on the north side, and sang the owl’s song there; so my first name was North Owl. (7)

If you are familiar with Le Guin’s Earthsea series, then you will know that names are of vital importance in those books too. In that world people have an everyday, ‘use name’ (which is the name their parents give them, or a nickname they acquire, known to everyone), as well as a ‘true name’, given to them in adolescence by a witch or wizard skilled in naming (known to the namer, the named, and perhaps never disclosed to anyone else, unless they are truly trusted). This true name usually reveals something about the character or qualities of the person, and therefore fits them (perhaps you could call it a soul name). A true name is also a word in the Old Speech and therefore contains great power. Wizards can control someone or something if they know their or its true name; this is the basis of all magic in the world of Earthsea. 

I love the way the Kesh imbue meaning in their names, many of which are related to the natural world. To be called something that embodies some aspect of yourself or your life, or indeed, the wider world—to be Morning Star, Flicker, Lark Rising or Mooncarder—seems so much more authentic than the way we generally use names.

Further, Kesh culture, being animistic, is shamanistic, which I find fascinating. They practice vision quests, drumming, trance dancing, fasting, dreamwork, speaking with nonhumans, and use song and chanting for healing (alongside more conventional medicines)—all spiritual practices that are common in nature-based societies, and that we need to relearn in our own culture. 

Also in common with most nature-based societies, they define wealth by how much is given, not how much is gained or accumulated; to be wealthy is to be generous—a moral position quite foreign in our modern world.

The culture that Le Guin has created in Always Coming Home is indeed extraordinary, and does provide an example of an alternative way of being, a strong, soulful community in close relationship with the natural world, embracing the great mystery that is life, and for this it is truly inspiring. Like Sharon Blackie, I too would willingly live in the world of the Kesh.

To end, I wish to share with you a few wise quotes that particularly resonated with me, all taken from Stone Telling’s story, which is told in three parts throughout the book, surrounded by poems, songs, myths, histories and other cultural lore.  

On authenticity and the true self:

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off. (29)

On knowing and unknowing:

We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that what we do not know remains boundless, without limit or bottom, and that what we know may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it. What is seen with one eye has no depth. (29)

On the importance of using our hands in collaboration with our minds:

Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.  (175)

The cover illustration above is by Mike van Houten; the beautiful illustrations from within the book are by Margaret Chodos.

Why the Wellspring?: The Influence of Water

You may wonder where the name for my blog came from. 

Well—pardon the pun—the explanation is a lovely liquid tale, to be sure. 

Over the past couple of years the idea of wells and wellsprings, rivers and oceans—of water in all its fluid forms—has been very close to me, welling and bubbling up from those deep inner places, washing much negativity away, bringing new life and fruitfulness. 

Water is a feminine element, associated with women, with fertility and abundance, cleansing and healing, and emotion, depth and time (the words ‘time’ and ‘tide’, for example, are etymologically related). 

As Jay Griffiths, one of my favourite writers, says in one of my favourite books, Wild: An Elemental Journey:

The wildernesses of waters, rivers and oceans are linked to the female. In many cultures, probably most, women are associated with what is “wet” and men with what is “dry” . . . In Chinese thought, fire is yang, male, active, phallic and conscious. Water is yin, female passive and unconscious. Freud and Jung, too, through analysis of folktale and ancient literature, concluded similarly: water is fertilizing, a place of regeneration; it represents what is potential and female. (212)

The first life on this blue Earth originated in water. As does all creativity—in the Rio Abuja Rio, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls it in her classic book, Women Who Run with the Wolves—‘the river beneath the river’.  

I have come to think of my own creativity as arising from the gushing flow of a river. Indeed, being a river—the River of Creativity. It is always flowing (though there have been times in the past when it became blocked and slowed to a mere trickle). Yet though it streams constantly, it still has its ebbs and flows, like the ocean—high and low tides—calms and storms—seasonal changes. The wide and fathomless ocean underlies the river, exerts its own fluid influence from below, as it is pulled upon from above, by the moon. 

Water Nymphs by Alan Lee

When I was pondering what to call this blog I was led to think of a little poem I had written in October 2014:

A deep well, 

ocean of memory, 

springing up 

blue and pure, 

flooding 

the parched place 

inside me.

This is deeply symbolic, and a favourite poem-gem of mine. 

It seems that water, wells, and the flooding of dry, parched places, bringing the return of life and creativity and all things wild, are ideas and images that will not let me go.

I recently read a brilliant book by Sharon Blackie—If Women Rose Rooted: The Power of the Celtic Woman. Chapter 2 is entitled ‘Wells and Waters: The Wasteland’, and Sharon writes:

Wellspring. The word, like a good well, runs deep. It conveys so much more than simply the source of a stream or spring: it says something about the source of life itself. According to the Collins English Dictionary, a wellspring is ‘a source of continual or abundant supply’ – which tells us why wells, along with certain rivers and lakes, have been recognised as sacred by nearly every culture on the planet, and throughout every age. (27)

It seemed like a kind of synchronicity. All of my thoughts about water and wells echoed here, in this very powerful book; and in Celtic culture in particular, in the voices of the maidens who once guarded the wells, the sources of life. The silencing of these wise voices, after the violation of the well-maidens, as told in the story of ‘The Loss of the Voices of the Wells’, and the subsequent coming of the Wasteland, is partly what inspired me to begin this blog. Sharon says:

Each of us has our own unique set of stories to tell: the story of the years we spent in the Wasteland, the story of our awakening, and then the story of the path we took out of it. Telling those stories helps us to understand ourselves – not just the place that we’ve come from, but where we might be heading. Similarly, telling our stories to others can help them to work through problems they are facing in their own lives. (60)

And:

The Voices of the Wells were lost, long ago – but the Voices of the Wells were women [who represented Sovereignty, the spirit of the Earth itself]. We were the voices of the Wells. We can take up that old mantle. We can take up our golden grails again, and offer their life-giving drink to the world. (62)

Lady of the Waters by Brian Froud

I know from past experience how powerful, transformative and healing telling my story can be, and I would like to tell some of it here—even if I do ‘tell it slant’, to quote Emily Dickinson. And too, I would like to be one of the voices that speaks for the Earth, if I can. 

After much thought, I decided to create this blog to be an outlet for my creative work, and to call it Offerings from the Wellspring, for all the ‘offerings’ I post here will be drawn up from my own personal well, from my River of Creativity. These offerings will be poured out into the world to express something of me, and, I hope, to inspire and influence others. 

(Of course, it must be said that offerings were also made to rivers and other bodies of water, back in the old days when people lived in close relationship with the land, so the giving and receiving goes both ways.)

Interestingly, the word ‘influence’ itself is associated with water. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it originates in late Middle English, from Old French or medieval Latin influentia ‘inflow’, from Latin influere, from in- ‘into’ + fluere ‘to flow’. The word had the general sense of ‘an influx, flowing matter’, also specifically (in astrology) ‘the flowing in of ethereal fluid (affecting human destiny)’.

Influence is flow is fertile. And from fertility comes new life, growth, abundance.

So, like a well that never runs dry, I hope my work here will flow abundantly, and become an offering back to the Earth, to the sources of life, and to any visitors who come this way. To bring regeneration and renewal back to the wasted lands that we inhabit in this modern world. To bring the same back to my own life.

I leave you with an excerpt from ‘The Well’, by Irish poet and writer Cathal Ó Searcaigh, that prefaces that water-filled chapter from If Women Rose Rooted. Let us all find and go back to the source: