Mantra for Despair

  may Her Light 

  give me strength

 

  may Her Darkness 

  uplift me

Heartbeat

I wrote this story at the very end of 2015, and it feels like it wants to be set free now. One of the members of the writing group I was part of back then said it was my tour de force. Another member said that she found it quite disturbing (understandable, if you are claustrophobic). Personally, I think it is one of the best things I have written, and it contains a few of my favourite things.

Peak, watercolours and gouache on gesso prepared paper (2017)

Heartbeat

All I am is darkness, coldness, silence. I know that I have been here a long time, though I have forgotten what time is. In the dark, time ceases, or stretches out to infinity. It is and is not. 

When they led me in I was little more than a girl, yet I knew the world of sunshine well enough. I played out in the light, with other children, my hair golden, my skin turned brown. And I knew the moon, the way it changed and moved, its pale inconstant face. Perhaps I still feel the moon, here in the dark, though all I can see is its hidden aspect, lost in a black sky.

When they brought me here, into the heart of the mountain, I still knew light, colour, and I still knew time. Yet alone in the dark, time seemed to slow and confuse me with its passing, its lack of passing. I was unused to unseeing, to no change from night back to day back to night, and though colours played inside my mind, teasing with visions of what I had known, they soon faded and ceased. 

It was only when the two priestesses and the priest came to bring me food and water that I was able to understand that time was indeed still moving forward. Once a day they would come. Or was it once a week? No matter. They always brought a small pot of strong bone broth, stone cold, with soft root vegetables in it, and a lunate slice of melon, the rind rough as a boulder’s side. The priest carried a lamp to light the way along the passageways and through the caves. The two women carried the food and water, and took away the empty pots and bowls they had left me before. 

I remember when they first brought me in, I saw the inside of the mountain lamplit, and the rock walls were speckled with shining flecks of mica, the stars of the underworld; and when we reached the cavern, the very heart, my heart leapt. Such a vast space, glimmering with trails of dank water, filled with the architecture of the earth, those mineral columns everywhere, bulging and flowing. Though the lamp did not shine far, this is what I saw. 

It was the very last thing I saw.

When they left me there in the dark, their footsteps dying into the distance, I was afraid to make a sound, for even my own breath seemed to echo and vibrate around me, making the mountain speak. So I sat still as stone and peered into the blackness. Though after some time my eyes stopped ‘looking’, for there was nothing to see, and I became accustomed to the lack of light, the lack of sight. I became the darkness, merging with it. It filled me up, as the empty cavern was filled with it, and I dwelt within its fertile possibility. That is why when the priest came with the lamp I had to shut my eyes. For though the six-sided lantern was shaded on three sides, those sides held towards me so no light would touch me directly, and the flame was low and dimmed, it was still too bright. Through my eyelids I saw red, the only colour I truly remember. 

I liked red. It reminded me of the red cloak they had draped around my small shoulders on the day of my journey inwards. We all wear red cloaks. The colour of the heart, the colour of blood.

To begin with, when they brought food, I would slurp at the bone broth, the sounds I made bouncing around in the dark, and then bite into the melon, letting the sweet juice run down my chin, like the water that dribbled down the sides of the cavern. I hungrily awaited the coming of the priestesses and the priest, to see the lovely red behind my eyelids, to eat and know the passing of time. But as my body cooled, adjusting to the inner earth’s temperature, I craved food less. I stopped thinking of what was outside. I stopped desiring colour. In the dark void of the cavern my eyes stopped seeing, my mind stopped thinking. Thought became black. Non-thought. I sat still and silent, and though my eyes were no longer of use, I found that my ears opened and heard more and more. Small sounds on the very edge of hearing became louder, distinct. The movement of distant water echoed shrilly as it fell upon rocks, or sighed along subterranean rivers. Stalactites went slowly drip drip drip as they reached down to their steadily growing offspring. A slight whisper: the mountain breathed. Though soon enough, all those disparate sounds became one and the same with silence itself. One with the encompassing darkness.

I hardly noticed when the priestesses stopped coming and the light of the priest’s lamp did not reappear, for I no longer needed the food of the outside world. My body had turned cold as iron. My breathing was drawn out—time-consuming, consuming time—and my heart beat less and less. All I thought was darkness, stone, immovable weight. I became part of the mountain.

I was the dark. I was rock and mineral, cold hardness, heavy solidity. The warm blood moving through my veins chilled and slowed, moving more like veins of quartz in granite. Moving not at all. The whole of my understanding of the swift rush of human time left me, and I entered into geological time, knowing aeons, time stretched out large as planets and compressed small as an atom, buried underground. There was only Now.

Then one day I heard it. I say day, though there was no such thing, there being no sun, and only eternity, the long black thread of time curled in upon itself. It may have lasted a second or a decade, a minute or a millennium. It makes no difference. I heard what I had come for—the heartbeat of the mountain—beating only once, perhaps twice in a century. If that. It was a sound like a low boom, a deep rumble; though more of a feeling than a sound; more of a knowing than a feeling. It rolled through me, shook my core, and I think my face may have cracked with a smile. Though I can’t be sure. I hadn’t moved for so long.

An age passed, held in the reverberation of that majestic heartbeat. Then I saw red–orange–yellow–white, and harsh sounds tapped and clinked around me. They had returned. I could see them with my ears. Two surefooted young women, and one old priest, nervous in the dark, holding the lantern carefully, the wick burning low, though still wickedly bright to my unseeing eyes. They were so loud, so quick in their human movements. They reeked of flesh and blood, sweat and strange odours, as of food, sweet perfume, sharp smoke. I could not object to their presence, their  unwelcome light, the memories rising unbidden from the scents they exuded. I had no words. 

The two young priestesses gathered my long, long hair, that had grown around my inert body like delicate tendrils of crystallised minerals, and they lifted me, so fast, so alarmingly, though with a gentleness that was soft, not of rock. They carried me out, out along the winding tunnels, away from my mountain womb, away from myself. Salty tears ran from my scorched eyes.

Before we emerged from the mountain, someone tied a soft cloth over my eyes, placed a hood over my head, then they carried me out into the blazing daylight. I could not see it, but I felt it all around me. The priests held a canopy of rich red cloth above my head, shielding me from the sun and the heat, blood-coloured tassels and ribbons swaying. Despite that shelter I still felt white hot, starting to melt, to soften, my blood beginning to move again, my veins aching with the effort of it, the tender and painful humanness of a beating heart. 

I was placed high on a splendid dais, my red cloak grey and white with the dust of the mountain, my pale, translucent skin masked by layers of grime. There was the expectant hush of a large crowd—hundreds, thousands of eyes upon me—and I felt something at my feet, an almost imperceptible tug on my cloak. 

I remembered what I had seen as a girl, on the day that I entered the heart, and I had stood before the silent people, my head newly shaved, my young body covered in the red cloak that was too large for me, trailing on the dry ground. I saw the woman emerge, carried from the dark cave entrance, blindfolded, so ancient and stone-like. She was placed on the platform beside me by the two strong priestesses who bore her, and I reached out and touched the hem of her cloak, accepting sacred dust onto my fingertips. I put my fingers in my mouth, tasting the inside of the mountain, tasting the darkness that was myself. 

‘Does the mountain live?’ I asked the woman.

There was a long pause, long as a mountain’s breath, and then a gravelly, croaking voice said haltingly, slow as stone, ‘The … mountain … lives.’ 

A great cheer of rejoicing went up through the crowd around me, filling my ears with thunder, as they began their long-awaited celebrations. 

Then the priestesses took me hand in hand, while the priest lit the lantern, and they led me into the heart of the mountain.

Beneath the Mountain, watercolours and gouache on gesso prepared paper (2020)

Hope in the Holy Darkness

I read Waking Up To The Dark (2015) for the third time recently. It’s fascinating, but also the most gentle, calming and comforting experience. A remembrance of the holy dark and the never-ending embrace of the Black Madonna—Mother Earth.

I think I have come to agree with Clark Strand—that there are no human solutions to the problems we face as a species, to climate change and all the other tangled mistakes we’ve made. We have simply gone too far, and thus can’t avoid the destruction that is already here. Kali will inevitably have her way. Strand writes:

In Hinduism the term Kali Yuga referred to the last of four “world stages,” a period of strife, discord, and destruction that was the necessary precursor if the cycle was to start again. Kali was the dark mistress, the “Black Madonna” of that final world stage, but it was important to remember that she had no malice or evil intent. Only those who saw death as the end would fear her. Only those who had lost touch with the ancestral rhythms of birth and rebirth would fly from her embrace. She was the Mother of the Universe, the Queen of Heaven who manifested in different forms as needed in order to defeat arrogance. Her role, then as now, was to restore balance by bringing the powerful to their knees. (115)

This is difficult knowledge, confronting and uncertain, and I don’t want to downplay it. It scares me, what we will be up against. And yet there is no malice or evil intent, only a rebalancing, a restoration of how things need to be. 

Strand’s argument is that the thing that has most changed human consciousness, to our detriment, is artificial light. It also led to the loss of our ancient sleeping pattern, which included a period of relaxed wakefulness midway though the night, which Strand calls the Hour of God (still existing in some religious traditions). This has caused us to become disconnected from the darkness, from nature, and from our own souls. Thus the antidote to the poison of too much light is the Dark Revolt: turning off the lights (living off-grid, if possible), and yielding up our bodyminds to the night.

Darkness is the one remaining revolutionary act. Changing the political order does not matter. Economies are all more or less alike. Governments and cultures rise and fall. The person who chooses to turn off the lights and lie awake in darkness embraces the truth of a life before and beyond all these. The only way back to the path we once traveled on as a species is through the darkness of deep time. (53)

I don’t believe we can force a change in consciousness, because consciousness does not belong exclusively to humans; it cannot be changed by acts of will, or by rational thought. But we can create the circumstances in which change can occur, and if we don’t choose to turn out the lights now, voluntarily, the earth will do it for us, eventually. 

Illustration by Will Lytle

Ultimately, all we have to understand is that we need only surrender to earth, to darkness, and to life~death~rebirth. Not an easy task, at all. Still, this gives me a strange kind of hope—hope that is rooted in the reality of ecology, biology, geology, soul, and the realm of the ancestors, and this is extraordinarily comforting.

There is no loneliness once we realize that the whole world and everything in it is mothers and fathers as deep as the dirt beneath our feet. The whole planet is nothing but mothers and fathers—of every possible species—who have passed before us into the dark. And we ourselves are no one but those mothers and fathers come back into the light.

Everything that is born will someday die, and all that has died will come to life again. That is the rhythm of the universe. Call it birth, death, and resurrection. Or call it the workings of a planetary ecology in which nothing can be added or taken away. It amounts to the same truth in the end. Light follows darkness, and darkness follows light. (34–35)

Life as we know it is going to end, as will our own individual lives, but Life itself will not end. Even with all the harm humans are doing, I no longer believe that the earth is a passive victim. I know she has agency, and will act when she is ready. A great upheaval is already occurring, an apocalyptic age—and yet, this may be the unveiling of what once was, the revelation of what may yet be. 

Endings lead to beginnings. How is this not cause for hopefulness? Whatever happens, we are never alone, always enfolded in the embrace of earth, our Mother.

In the same way that everyone without exception has been born from a mother, everyone returns to the Mother as well. She is our origin, our destination, and our present place of rest. We cannot take one step apart from her body before or after death, not even while we are alive. She is the Mother of all things: the living body of the world. (102)

I was lucky to find this book second-hand two years ago, when it was out of print and difficult to source, but I noticed a new paperback is being published in September, which looks beautiful. Read it, and find comfort.

And happy solstice!

To Go Down Deep: A Poem

to go 

down deep 

you must 

turn away 

from the 

light and

go blindly 

seeing with 

the eyes of 

the heart 

following 

the voice 

that calls 

silently and

the inward 

song that 

sings your 

being from 

earth back 

to earth

April 2016

Let There Be Darkness!

In gleaning words from old notebooks recently I came across an intriguing little tale I wrote at writers’ group way back in June 2017, using the prompt: In the sky there were no stars.

Seeing as the need for more generative darkness to counteract the distinct unenlightenment of our light-addicted culture has been an idea close to my heart for some time (see Endarkenment), I thought I would, after some extensive editing, share this story as one of possibility.

I preface it with this thought from a book I highly recommend:

Let there be darkness. 

The last truly revolutionary act left to human beings in the twenty-first century is to turn out the lights. Other acts are possible—acts we may call revolutionary—but they do not meet the criteria of the word as it must necessarily be interpreted today. Nothing short of turning out the lights will lead to an overturning of the endgame global system that now has us in its thrall. 

~ Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age, 2015, pp. 50–51

*

In The Sky There Are No Stars

In the sky there are no stars. Even the moon is dimmed to invisibility by the ubiquitous light which forces its way up and down and sideways into every alleyway, every crevice, every potential shadow. 

My grandmother told me about the stars. She said they were like tiny pinpricks of light shining through a dark blanket, but I struggled to imagine them, for I knew only light and could not picture dark. 

Darkness is banished. Darkness almost never was. Everything is white, bright, glaring. Even at night, light intrudes, piercing through the window, so that we are never free of it. When we sleep it passes through our eyelids and enters our dreams. We have no peace.

I say we, but wonder sometimes if others think as I do, or if it is only me. 

Everyone is told, from the moment we begin to understand words, that it is the light that sustains us, that all that matters is its radiance. We are told to shun shadows, and never—but never!—to leave the safe confines of the constantly floodlit city, barricaded by a high white wall. We are told that on the other side there is nothing, and with light blinding our eyes we cannot see beyond at all. 

Though how is it possible that the world ends on the other side of a wall? And has anyone seen past it?

Such thoughts are dangerous, and I’ve been clipped round the ears more than once for staring into space, for imagining, for daring to contradict what I have been taught. Why should I even think of what is beyond the light? And why should such a word as escape come to mind? What do I need to escape from? Don’t we have all we need here in the City of Light?

It’s hard to explain these blasphemous thoughts. I want to call them dark, but since I don’t know what dark is, I can’t be sure of that word’s accuracy. Still, they remain in my mind, unknown ideas, impossible speculations, and I can’t shift them. 

I decided I had to try to find the darkness, for I believe what my grandmother told me about the stars: that they are still there, always there, behind the light.

Though in an eternally lit place where eyes can always see, it is not so easy to keep secrets, to do things undetected, but I made what preparations I could. I clothed myself in white, camouflaged myself with the only world I knew. I crept soundlessly and unseen to the foot of the wall, and began to climb the rough whitewashed stones. Perhaps they never expected anyone to try it, perhaps it had always been this easy. I pulled myself to the top, and over, and jumped down to the strange, unlighted earth on the other side. 

Now I was finally beyond all sight, free to discover the dark, to find and uncover the shrouded stars.

An illustration by Will Lytle, from Waking Up to The Dark

Wise Words: To Know the Dark

For the first day of winter here in the southern hemisphere, this little poem seems apt. 

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

(Wendell Berry, New Collected Poems, Counterpoint: Berkley, 2012, p. 121)

Messenger of the Invisible

It has taken me some time to complete (and then photograph) this new painting, mainly because midway I experienced (I suspect) some kind of fatigue-inducing virus, which meant—to my frustration!—that I did almost nothing for about a week. Also, it was initially intended to be nothing more than an ‘experiment’, but clearly I need to have a little more faith in myself and what I can create, for I am very pleased with the results.

Messenger of the Invisible, watercolour and gouache on gesso prepared paper (2019)

I have not been writing, and thus feel unable to say much more at present, but I am including some quotes below that elucidate some of the ideas behind this work, and what she represents. All are taken from the absolutely brilliant book I have been reading by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Arkana: London, 1991).

The bird who appears out of a distant sky has always been a messenger of wonder as the visible incarnation of the invisible world. In many Bronze Age myths the cosmic egg of the universe was laid by the Cosmic Mother Bird, and its cracking open was the beginning of time and space. (p. 13)

The bird was the life of the waters, the epiphany of the goddess as the deep watery abyss of cosmic space and as the seas and the rivers, underground wells and streams. The bird that flies high above the earth and the bird that swims on waters resting upon the earth linked two dimensions that were not the native element of human beings yet surrounded them above and below. The image of the bird at home in both dimensions brought the upper and lower waters together, offering an image of a unified world. (pp. 58–59)

The bird, since Palaeolithic times the messenger of the vast incomprehensible distance and so of the whole invisible world, was taken by the Minoans, as by many another culture, to constitute the supreme image of epiphany. (‘Epiphany’ in Greek means literally the ‘showing forth’ of the sacred, which is the presence of the divine recognized as immanent in creation.) (p. 124)

The moon was an image in the sky that was always changing yet was always the same. What endured was the cycle, whose totality could never be seen at any one moment. All that was visible was the constant interplay between light and dark in an ever-recurring sequence. Implicitly, however, the early people must have come to see every part of the cycle from the perspective of the whole. The individual phases could not be named, nor the relations between them expressed, without assuming the presence of the whole cycle. The whole was invisible, an enduring and unchanging circle, yet it contained the visible phases. Symbolically, it was as if the visible ‘came from’ and ‘returned to’ the invisible – like being born and dying, and being born again. (p. 147)

Wise Words: The Blinding Of The Stars

We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.

The blinding of the stars [due to light pollution] is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlines. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation … And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination.

(Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places, Granta Publications: London, 2007, pp. 202–203)

Winterlight

This week I am resting after being away from home for a couple of weeks, so I thought I would show you some of what I saw in that somewhat different place: the winterlight of afternoon, the intimations of spring as the wattle begins to flower, the small beauties of the bush; and the extraordinary book I have been very slowly rereading, trying to let its wisdom soak into my flesh so that I can begin to awaken to the sensuous world once more.

(Apologies for the quality of some of the photos. I didn’t have my camera with me, so all of these images were taken with my phone.)

The efflorescence of the hairpin banksia, Banksia spinulosa

Prickly Moses or juniper wattle, Acacia ulcifolia

Golden wattle, Acacia longifolia, breaking into bloom

Probably a species of boronia

The dried efflorescence and seed pods of the Old Man Banksia, Banksia serrata 

Witchlines: Wedding The Troll-Hag

Here is a second Witchlines tale inspired by The White Bear King Valemon, looking at things from the point of view of the troll-hag who takes Valemon captive. 

Wedding the Troll-Hag

Do you think me ugly? Do you fear my stony gaze, my teeth sharp as knives, my spiderweb hair, my blood-red lips? 

It’s true: I would have him—that handsome bear-king, Valemon. I would pull him into my bone-crushing embrace, bind him to my earthen breast, merge his wild beauty with my own wild monstrousness. I would draw him down deep into my body, to sleep with me as one.

I love the smell of decay. I love munching on bones, and reducing flesh to ashes and dust. I love to bring all life back to its beginning. I simply can’t help it, you see, for it is in my nature to do as Nature does.

Some see the rot, the darkness, the unknown, and they call it ugly, they call it frightening.

I have a hard, stony body, it’s so, hairy with root tendrils and mycelia. I am black and cold and unyielding. Yet if that is all you see you do not see true.

I would have Valemon—yes!—and I will, in time, for there is no avoiding Death. Yet I don’t take without giving first; and after I take I give yet again.

Don’t you see? That young woman would never have found him without me, would never have become a bear-wife, married to the wild; nor would she have lost him either. I drew them together, I pulled them asunder, and then led them both towards me. While I held him close, I ripped her clothes, tore her lily-white skin, half-starved her, and put some dirt under her fingernails. I steered her towards each fateful old crone—flesh of my flesh, knowing of my knowing—and I tested her, with each breath she breathed, each step she stepped, each word she spoke.

Is she kind? I asked. Is she courageous? Is she clever and resourceful? And most importantly of all: Does she love him as much as life itself?

You may think my methods harsh, my ways all too earthy. But if you want soft, you must be prepared to take the hard; if you want light, you’ll have to walk into the darkness. Show me that you can be unyielding, and only then will I yield. 

I am not so cruel as to take all. I am always willing to be generous, for I know that Life must have Valemon and his bear-bride before Death claims them. They have wild gifts that they must bring back to the tamed world; gifts gleaned from contact with my own chthonic realm. I will give them that.

Look again. Am I still hideous? Or do you see a glimmer of beauty in my eye, like the morning sun cresting the horizon? 

If you haven’t seen true yet, then let me reveal all: I am Life just as much as I am Death, for one cannot be without the other. I am the marriage of light and the darkness, night and day, fertile black soil and bleached white bones, plump juicy fruit and the sweet stench of decay. I am mother and lover to the bear-king, and to his bear-bride; and they are just as much me as any other earth-born being.

Know this: the wild must be free to wed itself to the human, and the human must be free to wed itself to the wild. The bear-husband must have his bear-wife, so that wild and human merge, furred, clawed, and kindly wild, else there is no wholeness or beauty.

And in the end, I’ll still have him, for everything is wed to me.

White Bear King Valemon, by Theodor Kittelsen
(Source: Wikimedia)

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)

In The Dead Of Night: A Poem

In the dead of night 

  there is life and light : 

the dead dance 

Dreams whisper our desires

Grandmother Owl swallows us 

  whole

and in her belly we 

  grow

(23^rd August 2017)

Grandmother Owl, gouache on card (June 2018)