Witchlines: The Fire

The third and final tale we have been exploring as part of Witchlines is The White Bear King Valemon—a Norwegian version of the tale more commonly known as East of the Sun, West of the Moon, or sometimes The Bear Husband. This myth is also closely related to the story of Psyche and Eros. 

For this creative task I was called to focus upon one aspect of the story that had drawn my attention, and to tell the tale from the point of view of the bear-wife as an old woman, relating the events to a grandchild.

The Fire

It happened long ago, before I became lined with wrinkles; before I became stooped and grey-haired, like one of the three wise old women who helped me. But in my memory, it happened yesterday, for it is all so clear, and so dear to me. 

I’ve told you before of how I left my father’s house and went willingly with the great white bear, so large and fine, his fur softer than anything I had ever touched. I was a queen riding on his back. 

When we reached the bear’s house, he carried me across the threshold, as has always been the custom in these parts, and he set me down in a large kitchen, with the biggest hearth I had ever seen. Well, I walked thrice around that room, marvelling at the solid wooden table, with platters of bread and cheese upon it; admiring the shiny copper pots and pans that hung from hooks above the fireplace; breathing in the scent of the dried herbs that dangled in bunches from the ceiling. It was the most handsome and well-appointed kitchen I had ever seen. Yet what amazed me most was the fire, for it glowed with a strange warmth I had never noticed in a fire before, as if it was saying ‘Welcome home’—to me!—who had never set foot in that house before. Yet there I was, mistress of it, and I had never felt such belonging.

My bear-husband, kind soul that he was, assured me that I would be content in his house—all I had to do was keep that friendly fire lit. To this I readily agreed, for what is a home without the light, warmth and comfort of a fire? I knew I would keep it well.

That first night, in the darkness of our bedroom, I knew my husband as a man for the first time—and it was the sweetest of sleeps in his strong arms. But in the morning, before the sun rose and illuminated the room, he was gone.

Well, I was quite bereft. Yet when I went into the kitchen, all alone for the day, I was cheered by the sight of the fire, which burned low, but with such a strong ember-glow that it hungrily devoured the kindling I fed it, and grew quickly into a jovial, dancing flame.

Each day I would go out to collect wood from the edge of the forest where my bear-husband roamed, and where orange butterflies flickered through the trees, and I would build a pile of firewood large enough to feed the fire until the darkness came again. In the kitchen I would knead dough to bake bread, and sing love songs to myself; or I would sit and sew or knit, all the while giving fuel to the fire. That fire became the constant companion of my lonesome days, and I came to know all its colours and moods: the flickers of red and gold, and the white-blue heat at its heart.

Each night, as the light in the kitchen began to grow dim, and the fire became ever more amiably golden as it cast its glow about the room, I would present it with the last of the wood I had collected, enticing it into a gentle roar, and then retreat to the darkness of the bedroom to await my husband’s return.

Every night was dark and sweet; and every day was filled with the friendly warmth of the fire. In the morning it would be waiting for me—embers still aglow—somehow alive. It ate up sticks like a wild animal chewing on bones. It danced crazily as it grew, laughing and singing its fire-song.

I loved that fire. Its warmth sustained me, filled me, made my body sing with delight at the love I had found. It was always gentle and welcoming. Yet, with time I noticed the fire taking on a new and wilder light. It would beckon me close, so that its heat would make my skin blush red, and it would whisper strange things to me—of how it could bring me light in the dark; of how it could reveal the unknown. 

Well, after three years of this fireside bliss, I journeyed back to my first home to visit my parents, and you know what my mother gave me, what my father said. Yet I could not help myself—the fire had planted a question-seed in the dark of my breast. I carried the candle stub my mother had given me in my pocket, a tiny receptacle for a tiny flame, almost ready to come to light within me. 

When I returned to my home once more, the fire was there to greet me, as if I had never been away. It danced mischievously, it sang a mysterious song. It shimmered more golden than ever, and lit the hidden place in my heart.

That night, after reuniting with my husband in the darkness, I crept out of the room and into the kitchen where the fire smouldered red and pulsed, like a beating heart. I tenderly roused the fire, watched it birth itself the same and anew. Then I took the candle stub from where I had folded it into my nightgown, and with a piece of tinder I lit that candle, and thanked the fire—that generous, warm, wild friend of my days—and I turned back towards the darkness.

(Source: Wikimedia, by Giovanni Dall'Orto)

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).

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. 

Fire in the Belly of Vulture

At the end of February I took part in a weekend-long workshop entitled ‘Activating Your Creative Force’ at the Blue Spirit Yoga and Healing Space. Run by shamanic practitioner Mirella Gleeson, and theatre director, writer and community arts facilitator Cymbeline Buhler, it was an opportunity to use shamanic methods to tap into creativity, to discover and destroy blocks/obstacles, to retrieve a lost soul part, and to work with a power animal.

I have been learning about and using shamanic techniques for some time now, and shamanism (and the ancient, earth-based wisdom that it originates from) has brought a great deal of transformation to my life, so I am always keen to find ways to deepen my practice. The workshop particularly interested me as I have come to believe that spirituality and creativity are one and the same, for they stem, ultimately (and magically), from the same source—whether you call that source Spirit, the Divine, the Otherworld or Creative Energy (or any number of other terms). Both spirituality and art give meaning to life, and life itself can be, should be, an ongoing creative process that produces meaning. 

Artists (of any kind) work by bringing into being that which was once invisible, intangible, inaudible. So making art truly is an act of Creation. 

It is shamanism, in part, that has helped me to find ways to journey to and connect with the source, that beyond place where ideas, stories and visions come from, and to have the confidence to believe in whatever I bring back, to let it have life, most especially in the form of writing.   

One of the first workshop activities that we did was a guided visualisation in which we had to imagine ourselves in a landscape, and for all my recent talk of water and wellsprings (see my previous post here), it was a desert landscape that immediately claimed my attention (though water did come to it, in the form of a life-bringing flood). This was not entirely surprising, as the desert has been a powerful symbol for me since I read Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés a few years ago. As she writes, ‘The desert is not lush like a forest or a jungle. It is very intense and mysterious in its life forms. Many of us [women] have lived desert lives: very small on the surface, and enormous under the ground’ (33). Ain’t that the truth! But, on this occasion I didn’t want to be in a desert. I wanted to be in that lush forest with golden sunbeams dancing down through green leaves. Yet isn’t it so often the case that we get what we need rather than what we want? The desert was where I needed to be, with aridity, heat and sun/fire. The desert was going to have her way. And it was where I met my power animal.

Now, I don’t usually speak about power animals publicly, but I am making an exception in this case, seeing as the animal in question has played a crucial part in the creation of this blog. So without further ado, allow me to introduce you to Vulture. 

As part of the workshop we made masks, and here is mine: Vulture with wings of fire—an alchemical fire of transformation—and a blue tail, symbolising the rain/river/flood that comes to the desert and makes it bloom. (I later learnt that the Mayans associated vultures with water and control of the rain!) The spirals symbolise the circling flight of vultures, and the cyclical/spiralling nature of time and all life processes. Vultures eat the dead, and are therefore at the forefront of the process of death and regeneration—and while the subject of death and decay may be something that we prefer not to think about, it is wholly necessary (there is no life without death), and a powerful subject to explore. After all, death is always with us. I don’t just mean literal death (though that too; and whether we acknowledge it or not, our cells are always dying and renewing themselves, for example), but all the little symbolic or psychic deaths we endure as we grow as people, as relationships end, as we leave places, as we lose our youth or our health, as our lives change and evolve. We are constantly required to let go of our past selves, to let parts of us die, to enable our new selves to live on, renewed, different, older, and hopefully wiser. Life and Death constantly dance together, spiralling around each other. In fact, where does one end and the other begin?

Estés says most eloquently:

This is our meditation practice as women, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of life itself. The one who re-creates from that which has died is always a double-sided archetype. The Creation Mother is always also the Death Mother and vice versa. Because of this dual nature, or double-tasking, the great work before us is to learn to understand what around us and about us and what within us must live, and what must die. Our work is to apprehend the timing of both; to allow what must die to die, and what must live to live. (29)

Vulture embodies this important work.

Also, a realisation that came through loud and clear was that Vulture looks death in the face (quite literally), so she must be entirely fearless.

From a writing exercise we did to explore the main themes of our power animals, I wrote this very raw poem:

From spiral flight,

I see, I smell.

I go to the bones, 

the bones call. 

I eat death, 

and death is life is death is life. 

It spirals onwards. 

I see, I know, I eat. 

I re-flesh the bones. 

I come, I remake, I regenerate. 

I do not fear. I am Vulture.

Vulture is endless regeneration. Vulture is fearlessness. This is what I needed.

And the desert is not a place of lifelessness, though it may seem empty at first glance. As Estés makes clear, the life can be small, so you need to look closely, to pay attention; and sometimes it is hiding underground, just waiting for the right moment to emerge. In many arid places, animals, such as frogs, aestivate. (Aestivation is essentially the opposite of hibernation, when creatures like frogs, fish, insects and snails go into a state of summer dormancy or torpor, only waking and emerging again when it rains.) So the particular ‘belowness’ of the desert, the hidden underground life, is just as important as what is visible on the surface, if not more so. What is hidden might be huge and vibrant and magnificent. It just needs the right conditions to draw it forth.

I have been thinking much about cycles and seasons, that there is a time for all things, even the desert and dry summer. There is a time for emptiness, for being emptied, and then for regeneration. That is something of what the desert is for me: a place of possibility, where new life grows out of death, where transformation is possible. 

Overall, the workshop was a thoroughly rewarding experience, as well as being overwhelmingly FUN! It made me feel more alive than I have in years. That is the power of untrammelled creativity, of spontaneity and playfulness, and I am grateful to Mirella and Cymbeline and all the other people who took part for making it what it was. 

Furthermore, another good thing came from it. One of the participants was Michelle Genders, an independent artist who works under the name of Emma Kay Inks, and I agreed to take part in an idea she dreamt up—The Deep Scarlet Red Pen Project. This is the result (which has been featured on Michelle’s blog and Facebook)—a drawing in red (the perfect colour) of Vulture, done entirely left-handed. In this I have been inspired by the English artist Kate Walters, who not only works using shamanic methods, but also does a lot of her drawings left-handed (and even with her eyes closed!). 

Fire in the Belly of Vulture

Drawing with my non-favoured hand, while difficult, is strangely liberating. Firstly, it helps me to lower my expectations (which is very important for someone like me, who hasn’t done much drawing for years, and tends to be very self-critical); and secondly, the wonky wobbliness of the lines can in fact make the drawing more interesting than any right-handed drawing would ever have been. There is also a certain vulnerability to it, for as it was made with my weaker, less coordinated hand, I had to accept the flaws and work with them. Somehow that makes it feel more authentic as a work of art. 

I am in love with this creation, its imperfect perfection, the blood-redness, and the details of the feathers and wings which remind me so much of the textures in landscapes, of geological layers. I even like my very rough preliminary sketch.

The vulture depicted is a griffon vulture or Eurasian griffon. They are found in southern Europe, north Africa and parts of Asia, and at around one metre in height, with a wingspan of 240–280 cm, they are huge birds, with, I think, their own unconventional yet majestic beauty (which appeals greatly to the nonconformist in me; beauty takes many strange forms). Due to their size, they are relatively heavy (especially when they have a full belly), so to save energy in flight they make use of thermal air currents, which enable them to stay aloft for hours at a time without the need to beat their wings at all. Thus they provide an important lesson in how to use energy with efficiency, to actually draw upon the powers of the Earth and the ‘natural way of things’; and to be patient and resourceful, for they make the most of the opportunities that come to them—as scavengers, they simply wait for food to become available; they do not kill.

Photo by Pierre Dalous

I won’t go into further detail about the traditional symbolism of vultures (for it is what they symbolise to me personally that is most important), suffice to say that they are quite a feminine bird in many traditions. Said to be fiercely protective mothers, they raise their young for longer than most other birds (around three months), and in Egyptian tradition they were associated with Nekhbet (goddess of childbirth and feminine energies) and Mut (the mother goddess). The vulture is also one of the many animal manifestations of the Great Goddess of neolithic culture. 

All of this is apt, right for me at this time; and from this encounter with Vulture’s powers, I felt ready to make my work more public by creating this blog. Vulture has been an integral part of the process, and will remain so, peering over my shoulder as I write, circling above me with her astonishing wings outspread in protection and blessing.

In my drawing, Vulture has eaten what is dead, so death can be transformed by the alchemical fire in her belly. Something new then begins to gestate (myself/art/stories/this blog?), preparing to be born; the bone she clutches will be re-fleshed. Death and Life, held together in an eternal paradox—Death Mother and Life Mother. Vulture easily embodies these contradictions, for though she is fire, burning things to ashes, she also brings rain, which leads to the sprouting of delicate shoots, and the greening and flowering of a desert place that once seemed so very empty. Death and life, decay and regeneration, fire and water, all held beneath her wings and spiralling out into the world. These opposites are linked. Contrasting elements join together to create wholes. Everything is connected. It would seem, in the end, that even in the desert water is not far away, for ‘even desert is not the opposite of sea but her daughter—for the sands of the desert are formed of seashells’ (Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey, 263).

Fire and Water