A New Land

This is the second story I had published in an anthology, and am sharing here for the first time. (Read the first, The Fisherman & the Cormorant here.)

I wrote it in 2016, it references the Welsh tale of Bloudewedd, and is a tale for the spring equinox.

A New Land

‘Oak, broom and meadowsweet.’

‘What, Agnieszka?’ my husband asked.

I was sitting in the armchair by the window, sun pouring over me. The book I was reading lay open on my lap. It told the story of two magicians who magicked a woman from the blossoms of oak, broom and meadowsweet.

‘No oak or meadowsweet here,’ Gregor said wistfully. ‘And broom is a weed. How do you say? Noxious.’ 

Perhaps we are like the weeds, I thought. Introduced. Noxious. Do we really belong?

‘She was a woman not born of woman,’ I told him, ‘but created by men. Made to be the bride of a man cursed never to have a human wife.’ I sighed. ‘She had no say in her life.’

‘Poor girl. And made from flowers. It is unnatural.’

Yes, poor girl, I agreed. But what could be more natural than flowers? 

It seemed an age since I had been in the garden, or worked on a painting. I’d been laid up in bed with a bad case of early spring flu. Gregor had been tending to me, and to the vegetable patch too, which was springing into new life. Though something, or someone, had been eating things during the night.

‘A possum,’ I said.

‘What damn possum pulls up beets and radishes by the roots?’

Gregor led me out to see the damage. Some nibbled kale, a small round beet with a bite out of it so that it looked like a waning moon. It did not seem so bad.

‘It’s good-for-nothing kids, I tell you.’

But I knew it could not have been. Some bored children might vandalise a garden, but what children would then eat what they had found? Raw beetroot and radishes, Russian kale and spinach. No, it could not have been children.

That night I woke, my mouth dry, and I carefully descended the stairs in the dark. In the kitchen I poured water into a glass and drank. How lucky we are to have water come straight out of the tap like that. It was not that way in the old country. But, I wondered, will our luck one day run out, like the water?

I looked through the kitchen window over the dark garden and then put down the glass in surprise. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shadow begin to move towards the veggie patch. Slight, oddly-shaped. I stared. She stooped and seemed to take something before moving off into the darkness. 

Why did I say she? Something about her size, her quick, graceful movements. I knew she was a girl. And something moved in my belly, a fleeting recollection of sad tenderness. 

If Gregor and I had had children, perhaps we would have felt more like we belonged here, their births and lives rooting us with this soil, this land. But little Jezebella did not live even a week, and there were no others after her. It is so hard to be a mother without a child, never called mama, never to be called babcia, grandmother. Yet we made a life here, Gregor with his piano, his teaching. Me with my painting. Both long-since retired, mostly we pottered about the garden, tended the vegetables and roses, ate kasha and schnitzel and cabbage rolls.

Our house is the very last one on this street, quiet (as we had wanted), but surrounded by the bush. So we grew a European garden around it, and our beloved vegetables, sealing ourselves in to our own little domesticated place of old memories. Despite many decades living in this land, we still did not understand the wild landscape here, the strange spikiness of the plants, the grey-green drabness of the eucalyptus forest. We shut it out, thinking only of Europe, what we had had to leave behind—the green countryside, the great cities, the culture—ignoring the way the sealed road ended abruptly just beyond our driveway, degenerating into dirt and continuing on into the bush, nothing more than a fire trail. Sometimes it felt like we had emigrated to a place at the very end of the earth. What was there beyond us but emptiness?

I didn’t tell Gregor about what I had seen. I don’t know why. She seemed like my secret, come to me out of the empty, unknown place beyond the garden. And the next night, when Gregor’s slow, deep breathing told me that he was sleeping soundly, I crept down to the kitchen again, for I knew I would see her. Yet, I must have stood in the dark for hours, in a daze, for just when I thought I had glimpsed a movement in the moonlit garden, Gregor found me, switching on the light.

‘Agnieszka, what are you doing standing in the cold? You mustn’t get ill again.’

Startled, I stood gaping at my sleep-bedraggled reflection in the blackness of the window. 

*

I woke to the sound of kookaburras laughing loudly, yodelling magpies, and the sweet song of a blackbird—yet another creature who did not belong. Like the weeds. Like rats, rabbits and foxes. All emigrants, like Gregor and I. Though had any of us had a choice? We had all been subject to human intervention—species introduced unwisely, wars waged. We were all here now, and we had to go on living. 

I was still regaining my strength, and walked unsteadily along the driveway to the letterbox. I knew the postman had been. You could always hear the squeaking brakes of his motorcycle from a mile off. Though as I reached in to get the mail the neighbour’s German shepherd appeared from nowhere, barking madly. I froze, remembering all of the vicious dogs I had seen during the war, and their even more vicious handlers.

‘Fred, no!’ a young man shouted, running out and grabbing the dog.

Fred? More like Killer, or Fang.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, as he roughly dragged the dog by the collar back through the gate. ‘Bad dog!’

I shook with anger and fear. Why did I dislike the dog? If anything it was the humans who owned him who were at fault. And that fence was not high enough to keep in an animal of that size. It worried me. He could bite someone. What poor creatures might die in those powerful jaws?

After that shock I felt listless, tired. I busied myself for a time, laying out our traditional decorated eggs to mark the season (I had never learnt to celebrate Easter in autumn), but I could not bring myself to paint. Gregor made me comfortable outside where I could breathe in the peace of my plants, the vitality of spring. The faint sound of the piano drifted out the open door, and I strayed in and out of sleep.

But that night I could not sleep at all. I crept downstairs again—I could not help myself—and I saw her, touched by the moonlight, crouching in the garden, her hair so long it flowed right round her small body. And then I heard the dog bark.

‘No! No! No!’ I fumbled with the lock, then flung the door open, rushing out, yelling, ‘Run! Run!’ And I saw her turn to me, eyes wide, before she skittered away like a frightened rabbit.

Gregor came stumbling down the stairs and outside. ‘Agnieszka, what on earth?’

‘She is not safe, she is hungry. She’s just a little girl. Oh Gregor, we must help her.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘There was a girl in the garden, eating the vegetables.’

‘A girl? What girl would be out there at this hour?’

Even after all his talk of vandal-children, I could tell from the tone of his voice that he didn’t quite believe me. He was worried. I trembled in his arms as he coaxed me back into the house. He warmed some milk on the stove and poured it into a mug, holding it to my lips, making me drink. 

‘I saw her.’

‘Yes, my Agnieszka, I know. But now you must go back to sleep.’

Calmed by the milk, I did sleep. Though I dreamed over and over of a rabbit running, running, a dog snapping at her heels. She plunged into a hole in the ground just in time to escape his jaws, and I knew, somehow, that she was running still, through the underworld, just like the sun did each night.

*

I left food out every night after that. Bread and milk, and vegetables, peeled and sliced. More palatable like that than straight out of the ground. Gregor was not pleased about this new obsession,  still not convinced there was a hungry girl visiting our garden, but he indulged me. And every morning the food was gone, down to the last drop of milk, the veggie patch left untouched. 

Now it was his turn to say, ‘Possums, foxes, rats’. I only shook my head.

I began to ponder, to dream. If I were to charm a woman out of flowers, what blossoms would I use? Not oak, broom and meadowsweet. Perhaps eucalyptus, wattle and native iris. I knew my woman would be sharp and spiky like this place, but beautiful. She would belong. And unlike the men in the story who created their hapless, captive bride, I would set her free.

I started to paint again, but not my usual still lifes. Now I painted landscapes. Olive green and ochre and ironbark grey, full of light. The land that had been empty now seemed full of great mystery and splendour. I would stand at the letterbox some days, staring at the pale road disappearing into the trees. It was like I had brand new eyes.

I was sleeping more soundly now, knowing that the girl was well fed, but one night I was woken. Perhaps I heard the dog bark, or an owl screech. Whatever the cause, I was suddenly wide awake, and carefully eased myself out of bed. I tiptoed down the stairs, opened the back door as silently as I could, and crept out into the garden. I sat myself on a bench, the bench I would often sit on during the day, to read, or admire my roses. In the gentle quiet and dark perfume of the night world I waited until she came. 

And she did come. Cautiously, with an animal grace, moving in complete silence. She watched me alertly as she ate the food I had provided. And I watched her, her tiny mouth nibbling so neatly, her long, tangled hair, the worn rabbit-skin clothing that covered her delicate frame. When she had had her fill she came to me and crawled right onto my lap, her weight little more than that of dead leaves, as if she was just a wisp of air in the shape of a girl. The fur she wore was soft under my hands.

‘My Jezebella,’ I crooned. ‘My child.’

I must have fallen into a doze, nestled there with the girl’s small, warm body pressed against mine, because suddenly it was dawn, the world emerging in shades of pale blue and grey, and I felt her slip from my arms. A coldness immediately moved into the place where she had been. And when I opened my eyes I saw a rabbit turn to look at me before hopping away into the bush.

As I slipped back inside the house, back up the stairs and into bed, I realised that I felt different. I even smelled different, covered in the musty scent of a feral creature. I pulled the covers around me and closed my eyes, imagining the dirt road outside that pierced through the trees, and smiled. I knew what I must do. I felt a new wildness in me, and in my heart I went into the grey-green forest, and I never looked back.

~

This story was first published in Heroines: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry – Volume 2, The Neo Perennial Press, 2019.

The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam, by Shireen Qudosi

She is the Holy Spirit, Dark Mother of unseen worlds singing between the world of form.

She is the feminine aspect of God, enshrined in the tradition of the Goddess. 

She is the cavity in the heart, the womb of life, the cave of revelation. 

She is sanctuary. 

She is the primordial void before creation. 

She is of earth and of the stars, reverent and holy. 

She is ethereal life, the Dark matter between all life. 

The Black Madonna, 

She is the dark, and She is beautiful. (14)

The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam (2023) is the first in a forthcoming series of books by Shireen Qudosi on Islam, and more broadly the crisis of civilisation, through the kaleidoscopic lens of the Dark Feminine. A writer and speaker with a focus on faith, identity and belonging, Shireen looks with the eyes of the heart at our confusing and uncertain world in order to (re)discover old/new understandings about the human experience.

The Song of the Human Heart is both a memoir and an exploration of what faith is, has been and could be, through the metaphor, and spiritual and emotive reality, of song. As she writes,

This work, this question of faith in its highest altruistic expression, is art – or at least in my opinion, it is best positioned thorough a pairing of art and inquiry versus simply a strictly political, social, academic, or theological lens. Religious inquiry is enriched by creative spiritual expression. (9)

True to this, the book is a multi-sensory and layered experience, interweaving personal history and current events with theological and mythical examination, poetic revelations as part of an unfolding spiritual journey, and, of course, music and natural soundscapes (an accompanying playlist can be found on Spotify, which features one of my favourite songs!).  

A core focus of the book is that of illusion—the curse of civilisation, the distortion of ideology—that makes it impossible to see the true wonder of reality.  

Presciently, at just four years of age, Shireen knew that she wanted to be a witch when she grew up—someone who could transform things, transform herself; someone who could see through the illusion of a curse, and break it. But the witch of folklore is also an outsider, an outlier, and in questioning exactly what it meant to be a Muslim in the years following 9/11, Shireen found that she became that too. As she remarks, ‘most people branded into a religion at birth tend not to know much about the workings of that religion … The label doesn’t diffuse the essence of the faith, no more than a piece of paper can create a marriage or cultivate a sense of citizenship’. (7) 

To her, at the surface level, Islam was grotesque: ‘A religion of beards, robes, demands, hysteria, and the force of authority’. (11) This was Man’s Islam—a distortion; an identity label devoid of actual faith. Yet by having the courage to wander in dark lands without a map, to slough off layers of false identity and assumptions, and to awaken to ‘a greater presence beyond the container of an ideology’, (9) she finally found Allah’s Islam: ‘a feminine faith rich with mystery and duality’. (11)

The modern world prides itself, for the most part, on being secular, rational and scientific, relegating religion and faith to the realm of superstition and ultimate irrelevance, at least in the fields of politics, economics, and social policy. Yet the purpose of religion—or perhaps we could call it a sacred cosmology—is to offer us a way to understand and relate to the world, thereby influencing how we live, and whether that way of life is sustainable or not. The secular world, with its lie about human separation from nature, its myth of progress, its endless destruction disguised as ‘development’, and faith in the salvation of technology, is itself composed of numerous belief systems, grown from and propagating many falsities, therefore causing how we live to be harmful and unsustainable.

Anne Baring and Jules Cashford state that ‘the sacred is not a stage in the history of consciousness but an element in the structure of consciousness, belonging to all people at all times. It is therefore part of the character of the human race, perhaps the essential part’. (My emphasis in bold; The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, 1991, 8–9) If this is the case then the question that must be asked, as Shireen says, quoting Professor Omid Safi, ‘is not do we need less faith or more faith…but what kind of faith’. (17) What sacred stories should we be telling to create a life-enhancing culture? 

Importantly, the secular world often fails to understand that 

the patterns of extremisms and cults that grew from distorted and oppressive ideologies are not exclusive to one religion or the other – they’re a part of belief systems and are surging across secularism and the cult of progress no differently than any other ideology …

… The problem isn’t religion so much that it’s broken patterning of the human mind and behavior – the curse. The curse is not a curse exclusive to Islam or any other religion. The curse is encoded into the grids we keep propelled and in working order within the prison system we call civilization. (17)

Shireen explains that if religion is a template for understanding the world, then rather than being rigidly dogmatic and imposed by force, it should be adaptable and based on playfulness, for ‘Orthodoxy leaves no room for wilderness. It leaves no room for wonderment.’ (77) Our current religions clearly lack the qualities of playfulness, wildness and wonder, but also one other crucial element: the feminine. (In this instance ‘feminine’ means that pertaining to the female, rather than any kind of sexist gender role or characterisation.) In the context of Islam this is particularly ironic as the authority ‘was only initially given to a man as a placeholder until the women rose from the earth we’ve been buried in’. (11) It was never intended to be a male-dominated faith of order, fixed symmetry, and constant illumination. Instead, the hidden reality is that, beautifully, ‘Islam is like the moon in a time-lapse of the night sky across a month, changing faces and forms as it spirals and curves in the pattern of infinity’. (12) It is nested in the natural world, and a flowing, unpredictable feminine darkness, brimming with the sacred.

Shireen’s conception of the Abrahamic faiths sees Judaism as the foundation of monotheism, Christianity as its heart, and Islam as the crown. ‘All three stem from something that knows God by an older name: the anima mundi, the soul of the world’, and at the heart of her work is a ‘devotion to how the root touches the crown’, for

What is the temple without all parts in balance, including the crown, the star atop the tree of life, and the crescent rising above the minaret? … The crown is not an entitlement or a birthright because you happened to be born into that expression – into that religion. It has to be activated. (14)

Like the chakras, the root, heart and crown of monotheism are like energy points within the body of collective human consciousness. If one is blocked there is imbalance, rigidity, and closure of the mind and soul to the wisdom we desperately need. In order to unblock and activate the crown represented by Islam, a journey into the abyss of the Dark is called for.

'La Moreneta', the Virgin of Montserrat, Spain (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Recognition of the need for darkness, of its fertile ground, of a movement downward and within, has been with me for several years now. It is fascinating how this earthy spiritual truth (including an interest in the enigmatic Black Madonnas) is emerging all over the place as an antidote to the excess of light that characterises the modern world—both literal, in the case of electric light and our ubiquitous screens; as well as figurative, in our overly ‘enlightened’ rational minds that have forgotten how to feel our way into other worlds. We are blinded by the light of civilisation and have forgotten how to see reality in all of its multi-faceted glory. The Song of the Human Heart therefore provides another unique perspective in this ongoing conversation.

We are being called to return to something so primordial that it cannot be contained, an elemental faith that remembers the world as spirit. That is how we reclaim what has been violated, murdered, scrubbed, and malformed by theorists who know nothing of the Dark. The Dark, the elemental faith, and the benevolent chaos will tear down what must not stand, especially in our own lives. And she does – the question is are we listening? (82–83)

That this perspective comes from a Muslim woman is, I think, significant, for Islam has been a focal point since the shocking events of 9/11, not just due to ongoing extremist acts, but also in regards to the fate of that religion’s women and girls. Thus, Shireen’s standpoint, beginning by questioning what Islam is, accepting the label of Muslim Reformer, then finally moving ‘toward something beyond inherited identity’(9)—as well as from the point of view of a woman and a mother with a uniquely imaginative intelligence and voice—is both needed and distinctive. 

Yet what she has to say goes beyond the question of Islam and examines the problem of civilisation as a whole. Part of her work is in the field of combatting radicalism and extremism. She defines radicalism as stemming from religious and secular ideologies that believe there is only one way to be and belong in the world; while extremism stems from the belief that the use of force (whether physical or psychological) is an acceptable way to get people to believe what you believe. (69) These terms need to be seen as distinct from being a radical, which Shireen defines on her website as ‘[thinking] like an outlier’, and therefore possessing the critical, creative and adaptive faculties that extremists lack.  

Shireen makes it clear that extremism—any war over reality—is not merely a problem of religion or the East, for the East and the largely secular West are both cultures of control, both ‘devoid of the sacred and [sharing] the commonality that in order to belong to either, you have to give up something of yourself’. (41) These problems are therefore relevant to everyone, everywhere, and urgently need to be addressed. As extremism is on the rise, manifesting in numerous new forms, I find Shireen’s book particularly timely. She says,  

Our realities are a collection of little bubbles of history and experiences that shape our world. Sometimes those realities crash, but where they overlap we have a habit of staking a flag or an identity marker: race, politics, religion, nationality, and other largely inherited and groomed dispositions. Rather than see the explosion of views and respect those views as long as they are not destroying another reality, we try to expand our bubble – mistaking our own interpretive reality with facts, and facts with truth.   

She goes on to say:

When violent separatists attack [people] who have chosen to do as they will free from influence, what they’re enraged by isn’t the freedom of expression itself; they’re fighting for what they believe is true. They are willing to annihilate the vessel of an idea (another person) so that their idea is held unblemished in the mind of the collective. In other words, it’s not enough that they believe in something; others must believe it too. It is the highest order of violation of natural law or God’s law, that honored the freedom to examine and understand the world for ourselves. (69)

There are a multiplicity of ways to be in the world, and myriad manifestations of faith. Ideas should be discussed openly and constructively, and religious beliefs should be mutable, they should flow and change as the need arises; they should spring up in different regions in different ways, as emanations of the natural world and its distinct variations of place and Spirit. Instead, we have a world in which different groups clash as confused and fearful people hold increasingly myopic and inflexible views; globalisation simultaneously attempts to homogenise everything, erasing cultural and ecological diversity; and our disconnection from the land causes us to live in progressively more virtual mindsets.

A central component of any religion, indeed any understanding of life, is the concept of Mystery, which, I believe, should provoke healthy doubt as much as awe. As Shireen states,

… the confidence of fundamentalist extremists can be dangerous. Confidence belies faith. To be utterly confident in your assumption without study, inquiry, life experience, and devotion to the spiritual world can be dangerous. Conversely, to be of faith is to have confidence in the communion between God and the world … To be of faith is to be curious and humble in the knowledge that we really know nothing … (My emphasis in bold; 67)

All spiritual traditions, and even our comprehension of what it means to be human, should be open to questioning and critical analysis, for the constantly changing cosmos, let alone our rapidly changing culture, cannot be understood in any kind of fixed or complete way. The human mind in general, and each individual, can only understand and experience a minuscule fragment of the whole. Hence, a humble openness to the as-yet-unknown and the ultimately-unknowable is needed, alongside acknowledgement that faith and personal maturation are evolving processes that continue throughout life (and perhaps beyond). Without acceptance of faith and learning as continual, as things that must be pursued and worked for and deeply considered, as a journey without a clear destination, all we are left with are empty labels and identities. We’re left with stale, senseless dogma rather than a wild and unpredictable Darkness filled with treasures, and a heart-song that fills us. 

As Shireen says, confidence—the mark of ideology and false identities—belies faith, and thus any questioning is perceived as a threat: ‘In the minds of those for whom religion [or identity] is a label, a question creates a crack in the illusion of faith. The rage we see against what is ideologically provocative is often a projection of one’s own lack of faith.’ (66)

All of this hinges on the notion of truth. ‘[L]egendary samurai, Miyamoto Musashi said: “Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie”’. (70) Truth is an attribute of foundational reality, of nature, and is largely beyond our control. It has an existence outside of our always incomplete interpretations of it. And the notion of bending, flowing, and submitting to truth leads straight back to Islam, which literally means ‘submission’. 

I remember hearing an extremist say just that—that Muslims are slaves to Allah—and obviously I found this idea of submission and enslavement to a patriarchal God repulsive. But as Shireen explains, true submission isn’t ‘submission through surrender or defeat … Faith is submission to God of free will and pure heart that trusts God wholly. There is no force, no compulsion, no war, no convincing, and no debating. It just is’. (36) For her, Allah’s Islam is a fluid faith in rhythm with nature that has ‘no interest in control, rigidity, force, or separation’. (55) Faith is not something you are, it is something you experience. It’s a relationship with the sacred that must be cultivated. 

This watery, cyclical and relational quality is particularly feminine, directly evident in female embodiment and intuition, our moon-influenced biological cycles, our movement in life from maiden to mother (biologically or otherwise) to crone. Our changeable, ungovernable female bodies are themselves a threat to systems that value order and control over anything else. The Dark Feminine, a vastness beyond any comprehension, which has always been feared and loathed by light-worshipping cultures, is also a threat.

What is most beautiful about the Dark is that She is not compliant … At this point in our human history, there is nothing greater than that which is outside artificiality and control, including the artificial control of our ideologies, our systems, and the stories that are reinforcements of the curse. The Dark, the most decadent human aspect of womanhood that would be revered as holy in other times, will seem entirely alien to many now. The first deep breath of a once-caged animal is always a threat to those who have made homes of their cages. (48)

Detail of Hallower, by Meinrad Craighead

It may seem counterintuitive to say that a movement away from recognised and fixed (if distorted) categories of knowing and identification and instead towards the unnamed and unplumbed plurality of Mystery is a movement towards truth—yet this is the paradox of faith that Shireen reveals. By going against the flow of our cultural ideologies and internalised assumptions, by moving into vulnerability, we enact a sacred rebellion, we open ourselves to the song of the heart. We need ‘The vulnerability to stay with the song through its entirety without looking for the finality of arrival. The vulnerability to allow dissolution: the dissolution of our ideas, our preconceptions, our pride, our certainty’. (73)  

In the practice of shamanism one of the core initiatory journeys is that of ‘dismemberment’, when the body/identity is torn apart in the spirit world, perhaps even devoured, before being ‘re-membered’, reassembled in a new form, hopefully free from false identities or misunderstandings of reality. Even in everyday life we endure many kinds of ‘deaths’ and ‘reconfigurations’ as we respond to life’s challenges. This process can and does occur multiple times, for our assumptions and habits are often deeply engrained and difficult to shift. In the spirit world—the Dark—the destruction of falsity and contact with truth allows the initiate to return to ordinary reality with an enduring connection with Spirit, and wisdom to share with the community. 

Ultimately then, we must find the courage to welcome the terror of complete vulnerability in order to be internally transformed before we will have any hope of transforming the external world: ‘You don’t need to preach or change anything beyond your being. You look for what changes in you. That is the song you sing. Your duty in faith if you accept it, is to find your song and sing it unashamedly.’ (16)

And if/when we find our heart-song, and no longer require external validation from culture, that is when we become dangerous to the system—sacred rebels creating a true revolution. Shireen makes clear that

In the path of the sacred feminine, you go within and reclaim, restore, and rebalance a personal connection with the outer world so that it doesn’t matter as much whether our external system is patriarchal or not, we are like water and flow around what is rigid and immovable … The sacred feminine finds the power within … (56)

This internal change is essential, because ‘how can you force a group to recognize women’s rights as human rights when they just as easily violate human rights? You can’t. You have to find a new story, a new carrier for the message, a new song’. (57) The task is to go beyond Man’s Islam into the dark underworld, where the false beliefs we destroy can be rotted down into a fertile compost that will provide the new soil to rebirth the old/new story of Allah’s Islam—‘a faith birthed in the womb of a cave [which is just] one song in the chorus of creation … one gateway to God’. (21) In the blackness of the cave, humankind’s most ancient sacred space, sheltered in the sanctuary of the primordial earth, we can find ‘Our common humanity, the source of genuine interfaith between devotees’. (59)   

I love and agree with Clark Strand’s personal motto—‘Ecology, not theology!’—so Shireen’s conception of faith being of the earth, of emerging out of a cave, and connecting everyone, resonates. She also speaks of a fully embodied spirituality, not the transcendent, disembodied theism of patriarchy, but an immanent feminine faith, interconnected and intertwined with all elements of life; and in particular a remembrance of the role of women as ‘vessels of embodied creative life force born into this world while also tethered to the world of spirit through our wombs and cycles’. (32)

The Dark Mother of all creation has been speaking to us our whole life through our bodies. She is the mother we ignored when we were conditioned or rewarded for ignoring the wisdom of our body, the medium between the spirit world and the material world … The language of the body is the first tongue that is silenced … I am a woman. We are women. We will not apologize for it, not shrink away because one ideology or another is unsettled by our presence … (50–51)

I think (hope) that perhaps the world is finally on the threshold of meaningful change because women are (re)asserting our boundaries and saying, fiercely, No more! The rage we feel is ‘a signpost of a boundary violated, sacred ground deconsecrated’. (85) Embodied truth has always mattered, but possibly no more so than now.

The activated sacred feminine is to be a woman embodied in her experience, which no man can hack into on a whim or as a passing interest. A womb-an is both a portal for the creation and the birth of life, whose intuition is beyond logic. A woman, who like the elements cannot be controlled or contained, is terrifying to a program of control. (48)

The return of the Dark augurs the return of women as guardians of the sacred; the reemergence of an ancient paradigm of natural law. Our current world is falling apart as we are engulfed by seemingly unsolvable conflicts and calamities, but Shireen maintains that the Dark Mother ‘will stop at nothing to heal what she loves, including burning the world in order to break the egg and birth us into a new world so that we may rise as the phoenix’. (51) The role of the Dark—the Black Madonna—Kali, as Clark Strand writes in Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age (2015), is ‘to restore balance by bringing the powerful to their knees’. (115) Through destruction will come a new creation. 

Detail of Night, by Meinrad Craighead

Importantly, Shireen’s journey has led her to discover that ‘I was the answer to my questions. I was what I needed to find’; (12) and ‘what is of the highest value to learn, what will serve you most, is what you figure out on your own’. (101) Thus, our interactions with the sacred—the anima mundi—need not occur within the vessel of any particular belief system, but should be on our own terms, according to the call of our own heart-songs. However, her claim that ‘Islam is brimming with non-linearity that, if understood and embraced, would help us break the gridlock of the static world and submerge our consciousness into a rich metaphysical reality’, (98) is intriguing. She describes this as a quantum reality, fractal and multiple, encompassing mythic time and unknown possibilities, and an entire pantheon of repressed goddesses. 

These ideas prompted me to reread Henry Corbin’s paper, ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal’ (1972), which examines the visionary narratives of 12th century Persian sheik Sohrawardi, and his concept of Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd, ‘the country of non-where’. To me this non-place seems somewhat analogous with the Dark that Shireen describes, for once the journey there has been completed,

the reality which has hitherto been an inner and hidden one turns out to envelop, surround, or contain that which at first was outer and visible. As a result of internalization, one has moved out of external reality. Henceforth, spiritual reality envelops, surrounds, contains so-called material reality. Spiritual reality can therefore not be found “in the where”. The “where” is in it. In other words, spiritual reality itself is the "where" of all things. (My emphasis in bold, 4)

This is tricky to envisage, but this hidden reality (which Corbin argues is imaginal not imaginary), once entered and related with, actually inverts and encompasses external reality. Henceforth the spiritual journeyer comes to dwell constantly within and connected to the sacred, despite also being in the seemingly everyday world. This understanding of life as immersion in the anima mundi, an animistic perception of everything alive and ensouled, has mostly been forgotten, but it desperately needs to be rediscovered. I believe that The Song of the Human Heart is the kind of visionary work that might just help us find it again.

In the end, whether we have been placed into a religious tradition or not, we are all free to pursue our own relationship with the sacred, and find our own unique path, because ‘faith is a dance with the divine that we are here to remember and invoke. We’re moving belly against the ground, skin raw, slithering, in a divine dance that is the frequency of life forever in movement toward Source, to the wellspring of Love, toward union of all parts’. (15)

Shireen Qudosi’s book is overflowing with wisdom, most of which I have only just touched upon here. I am so looking forward to reading the next book in the series, The Song of the Mystery.

The Song of the Human Heart can be purchased as a PDF from Shireen’s website, or as an ebook or paperback from Amazon.

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.

Belonging to this Land (and a Welsh Word about Longing)

A few weeks back there were hazard reduction burns taking place in the mountains, controlled fires eating up fuel which could have become next summer’s disaster, so for a few days, the air was filled with smoke. Helicopters whirred in the distance, and blackened leaves and pearl-grey flakes of ash fell from the sky.

This got me thinking: Was it like this in my ancestral lands? Did a similar smokiness fill the air in autumn as the field stubble was burnt? Were there bonfires to celebrate Samhain, with dancing in the flickering, orange light?

Fire is often considered a comfort in the northern lands, a warm light in the long, cold dark of winter. A life-giving and life-sustaining presence. 

In Australia, on the other hand, fire can be a destroyer, a frightening and unwanted visitant in the hot months, when the smell of smoke is worrisome, to say the least.  

Yet, as the fires burned in these days of autumn, I almost welcomed the sharp, familiar scent, for I could imagine myself back there, back in the northern lands, in time’s past, when fire was a friend.

The smoke hanging in the air gave the sunshine a golden cast, and the autumn leaves on the trees blazed in sympathy. This autumnal change—the bright burgundies, ambers and lemon-yellows—is not seen in the bush. The valley across the road looks the same. Olive green. Eternally muted. There is no leaf-change on the native trees and bushes (but for the burnt-looking, reddish tinge of new growth on the gumtrees in spring), and no fruitings that I can see (though plenty of seeds around). 

Am I blind? Do I know the land so little?

I feel like a fraud sometimes, or an intruder, living here. It is and is not my home. My ancestry is from elsewhere (as it is for most Australians)—Poland, Ireland and England—and there is an indescribable longing for those places that I come from, yet do not know, ghosting in my cells. My bloodline came from the northern hemisphere, yet here I am, far south of the equator—a northern soul in a southern body.

Is it possible to mingle these northern and southern parts of myself? I know it is necessary, for the soul fits inside the body as a hand fits inside a glove. The glove has no purpose if it is not worn, if the hand does not move within it. 

This is the place of my birth, the soil from which I was made, so I must get the hand to fit, my soul to belong. 

It is in learning about this land, in naming the other beings around me and knowing them better, and in observing and being present to the seasonal changes, that I may achieve better integration of north with south. Though the north will always be there. Blood is strong, and I must respect the past, the old ways that would have been my ways. Once. Long ago.

My task, I think, is to try to fuse old and new, north and south, soul and body. To find belonging here whilst honouring the lands I dream of and yearn for. Those lands of my heart. But to find heart-land here too.

This Earth is so full of diversity, a profusion of life and places, landscapes and climates, all different, but all connected. In rooting myself more deeply here, in knowing my mountain homeland better, perhaps I will bring the multiplicity of the rest of the world closer, and then I can be more truly myself. Then, possibly, I will belong.

*    *    *

After writing this I came across a four-part series of pieces by Jay Griffiths on the subject of ‘home’, which you can find here; and the beautiful Welsh word hiraeth:

There is a Welsh word for homesickness – hiraeth – which is famously untranslatable into English.  It is a past-haunted word which leans backwards in time and can hold the sense of an impossible longing for a home, a person, or a land that may never have existed, with a yearning sense of one’s incompleteness without it, it is wistful for the unattainable. (Part 2: A Beggarly Account of Empty Boxes)

Perhaps that is what I am feeling. Hiraeth. A longing for something that is, essentially, unobtainable. All the more reason to seek, to home in on, a sense of belonging, a sense of home, right here.