It’s great how things come together sometimes. When a combination of planning plus serendipity collides to make something really *work*, it’s deeply gratifying. That’s how Lá Bealtaine was this year.
First in the new house. It is my habit most years to make a flower crown in May Day colours (yellow and white) for the day itself and then dry it out and hang it on my wall somewhere. The number of crowns grows as the years pass. Intentionally, however, I did not bring any of the flower crowns from the old apartment into the new house. So this year, the first crown has now officially been made, used in art, used in collective spellwork, and is drying in preparation to take it’s place on a fresh new wall.
That “Joy of the Future” card from the Heart of the Faeries Oracle is proving HILARIOUSLY CHALLENGING!!! Da fuq!?
I have been going through a really…interesting… time lately with old baggage and insecurity. It’s a good thing I’m a witch who knows how to eat their old skins. I’ve been reading the cards (and asking friends) repeated questions over and over, from different angles… really trying to go the distance with a few snags in the ball of twine that is my life. Pull on one thing, find it loops back to a shadow wiggling behind you, journal about it, cry about it (a LOT), feel it begin to process, rinse, repeat. I am aware that having the good fortune to finally feel safe in my living environment has provided the perfect setting for this kind of work – it’s in the safety and quiet that you finally realise… it’s just you now, bitch. Do you even KNOW how to be happy!?
The answer is yes…or more accurately, that I can learn. If there’s one thing I KNOW I’m good at, it’s learning…and beginning to learn… and beginning to begin.
So May Day. Full moon. Time to let some shit go. Also the first day of my period such as it exists. Other than emotional dysregulation (grrrreat), my chief symptom is swelling… waxing full and round just like the fucking moon. Good for shadow work though. And I guess it means I’m sloughing more than just metaphors…
I went a bit quiet in the days preceding. Journaling, reading cards, squirming at the answers, and resting. Then May Day came and despite the swelling, I wore all cream and white. All handmade. Two petticoats with lace trim. A handmade corded bust support based on the top half of the famous Symington “Pretty Housemaid” pattern. A corset cover inspired camisole made from the same wide lace trim that’s gathered into the hem of one of my petticoats. I had intentionally left my hair unwashed (but *not* uncleaned or untended) for over a month (May Day was day 35) and my roots were growing in like crazy (half an inch in a single month! weee!!!). Then I attended Mixtress Rae’s radio show to dance with my shadows and expel evil. I took part in a planned collective spell she lead during the show – 5 people working the spell including me, I think… across 3 continents. She followed up the spell with Kate Bush’s “Get Out of My House” which was very cathartic and effective.
I kid you not, that Faeries Oracle card is “A Collective of Pixies” which was not only perfect for the show, for dancing, and for May Day but ALSO for the precise thing I’ve been asking the cards over and over again. For those of you who own the deck, go read the guid book entry for that card!!!
I took all of this very seriously (amidst the joy of dancing and so on). I mulled my readings over and did follow up readings through the course of the weekend. I also finally fully washed and re-henna’d my hair. I haven’t used shampoo or conditioner in 3 years… or anything soap-like on my hair in 2.5 years… what I use varies a little but it’s mainly a hand-prepared clay mixture followed by a diluted vinegar wash about once a month at the moment. I like that I have to pay attention to it. I followed this up with some ‘home-spa’ style care. It was good. Medicinal. Needed.
“One morning, one morning, one morning in May, I saw a young lady all wrapped in white linen. All wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay.”
I’m not done processing things, of course. Who is? Ever? But this is ultimately what witchcraft is about for me… I’m grateful to have it. None of it’s my first rodeo but *that* feels pretty fucking cool!
Whoever or whatever reads this blog with any regularity may remember that last year I conceieved of a musical project called “The Devil Makes Three”…
I designed it along the lines of Tom Waits’ “Orphans” trilogy – each volume linking together to create a larger picture whilst also functioning as a standalone album. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to say with Vols. 2 and 3 from a creative standpoint. Their soundscapes were different from each other but clearly defined and I felt that they complimented each other nicely. If one listened to them in numeric order they formed a progression of musical style that said (to me) outward hunter/prey to inward haunting/personal.
The problem was that Vol. 1 was 1) only vaguely defined in terms of what I wanted to say creatively, 2) very literal in it’s interpretation of that creative goal, and 3) articulated through the tastes of others rather than a better representation of my taste… and as such also didn’t fit stylisticly into the broader picture. It provided no real conceptual or narrative development in the project as a whole and, in my mind, made it impossible for any (totally fictional would-be listener) to *want* to progress to the others.
I also realised that the three volume set was totally lacking in metal and metal adjacent genres… which was ridiculous as I listen to mostly metal/shoegaze/gothic psych doom rock nightmare-fuel-cruel-harpy-demonic-witch-magical-shapeshifter-shit by faaaarrrrrrr the most in my life!*
Having finally acquired a new (to me) computer, I can now post the finished result. I’m actually really proud of it!
I may do more proper liner notes for each disc in the future because I have really built in a LOT of stuff that I’d like to document… Imagine, if you will, that a witch can live and tell you stories by wearing music as a kind of sonic glamour. That.
But for now, Vol. 1 is called “The Words They Hear”.
If you were to ask,"What is it like to be a born a changeling witch?", or, "What was it like to be a child stuffed to the brim with dark magick?", or, "What does Badb/Nemain sound like to those with an ear to hear them?" ...you may consider this mix to be *an* answer.
In keeping with the rest of the project, there are 15 tracks on the album. There is some chronological progression but this is not an obligatory interpretation. Explicit mention of the Devil themself appears in the tracklisting – in this case you will note that I have featured Gil Scott-Heron’s genius track “Me and the Devil” …which then makes a distinctly more femme-gendered appearance in a Soap&Skin cover on Vol 2.
I would also like to point out the explicit recurring celestial rise/fall/rise theme on this volume… Also “Orion” is an explicit name I have called a certain thing in my life since I was a …teenager? That’s the first time it shows up in my poetry at any rate. But enough concept teasers, here’s the playlist:
Here are links to Vol 2. “The Stories They Tell” and Vol. 3 “The Tongues They Hold” for anyone interested in listening to the rest. As I said, I’ll likely write about each mix in their own dedicated blog post at some point. For now, I think it’s better that any would-be listener just develops their own relationship to the compilations but…
If Vol 1. is Badb/Nemain... Vol 2. could be considered Macha and... Vol 3. Anand.
Though of course, they’re all three all three all of the time.
~ Saoirse.
PS. At some point I also want to draw detailed and specific cover art for each one… because I have nooooo chiiiiiiiiill!
*There are some exceptions of note – one example in this mix is that I don’t listen to The Yagas as a band… but I do like “The Crying Room” as a track.
So I’m reworking the first disc of my “You and Me and the Devil Makes Three” mix-set to be less of a randomized selection of the others’ tastes and, instead, more in line with mine… and focusing on what it is to be a changeling (child) witch. It reminded me that I wanted to post a few videos (three, in fact) that capture what my dreams/nightmares were like as a little kid. While no single of one of these videos is an exact replica, taken as a group and sort of …meshed together… you get a near-perfect representation of what they look(ed) like.
Right down to painted faces, labyrinthine city structures and old parking garages, strange dingy forgotten tenement buildings, grown-up-children, poverty, splitting wounds, blood, and disease… and a lot of very sad lonely people crying for things I couldn’t even give myself.
The earliest and most ‘proto-typical’ of these dreams that I can remember was from when I was six. Many of them are recurring. Many show up in my poetry (of which I have included some examples in this post). And they are, of course, on-going.
… When the Morrígan makes sense to you, I guess it’s because REASONS. 😉
The medieval clothes, sad smiles, strange long wooden hallways with dusty floors… so real.
I know it’s supposed to be tense by cinematic design but I literally can’t watch this one without every muscle clamping in my body. So fucking scary! And good!
This one reminds me of a figure I encountered in ‘dreams’ inspired by the song “Golden Slumbers” which used to frighten the fuck out of me as a kid… A strange painted man in a suit, surrounded by other theatrical faces fading into the night on wide & shallow concrete steps under a single street lamp telling me “Once there was a way to get back home…”
Do with all that what you will… it makes for great creative fodder.
The first among other things, makes reference to the dragon-dreams in Laurence Yep’s work “Dragonwings”… the mental image of sore shoulders after intense dreams had a huge impact on me as a kid. The other two are “simply” more narrative descriptions of specific dreams.
~ Saoirse.
PS. The featured image on this post is a photo of me that is no less unsettling in it’s original form… Sweet dreams, witchy children 😛
"I know you'll remember me when I'm gone. Remember my stories, remember my songs. I'll leave them on earth, sweet traces of gold. Oh they're calling me home, they're calling me home." ~ They're Calling me Home, Rhiannon Giddens
Today would have been the 38th birthday of one of the dearest friends I ever had. Her sudden departure, almost 10 years ago, first set me on what became a #deathpositive path… having learned first hand what it is to have no support in traumatic grief – either societal or personal. All of my intense desire to open into the world of healthy discussion of death, bereavement, mortality, and our fleeting creative beauty (human and otherwise) stems from the broken quiet craggy place in my chest where she used to be… I have never had a fear of death but, oh, my biggest fear is to be left behind. “Don’t go where I can’t follow!”
So, to honour her (and another suddenly-passed loved one – my aunt) as deeply and unflinchingly as I can… here are three open & vulnerable poems.
For those who experience discomfort and anxiety around the topic of death or for those who are grappling with their feelings of grief, I found this recent podcast episode gentle, considerate, and very hopeful. It is conducted by Conner Habib – a major force in the #sexpositive movement – with Caitlin Doughty – founder of the #deathpositive movement and the Order of the Good Death:
I had a totally “squee!” moment when they mentioned the “In the midst of life we are in death” quotation… because of course I have that tattooed in Latin on my left arm and I say it every day at the altar when I extinguish the last candle:
Media vita in morte sumus.
For more resources on #deathpositivity – where you can learn, support, and partake in activism as well as look up any resources you may need on your journey of acceptance, appreciation, & celebration of the humanity to be found in mortality – here is the Order of the Good Death website main introductory page ~ https://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/start-here/
To Luus (1987-2015), I promise to continue to learn and to bloom. Happy Birthday.
To Ivana (1960-2020), I promise to wear velvet when the world needs a punch in the face.
I play music for you both.
"Only in silence the word, Only in dark the light, Only in dying life: Bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky."
Recently, I have been trying to give form to certain ideas. At a snail’s pace, my kind of speed. One of these ideas has to do with a burgeoning awareness that something I have always been able to feel and certainly always yearned for is taking shape… Simply put, it can be called ‘lifestyle’ or ‘vocation’. It’s about the sensory experience of every day. It’s about how that intermingles with the hopes and dreams of the past. It’s even about certain life goals that have recently become a little more tangible.
It can be glimpsed in my thoughts about ‘between’ spaces. I’ve been calling this place ‘the Labyrinth’.
In the Labyrinth, rooms are often arranged according to discipline or genre. Style of activity. Or by medium. It has places that are dominated by memory. Or by myth. Rooms and halls devoted to presence. It has a rotting fairy Versaille, sidhe mounds lie just beyond the walls of it’s outer gardens. I know what grows in it’s crevices. I know what areas get built vs. which simply materialise and I know why – I know what I’m trying to do there. It can only be entered or exited from this side of reality… on the far side it might be infinite. I have not checked.
Though Hilary’s performance style isn’t my favourite now, her work & THIS ALBUM were deeply formative… This cannot be overstated.
In the Labyrinth are all the scariest saddest most soul crushing things I have ever personally encountered. In the Labyrinth are also the scariest saddest things my loved ones have encountered…
In certain rooms in the Labyrinth, it has windows to Nazi Germany. To two little girls in the rubble of Cologne. In other rooms hang portraits of Sarah Chang, Ani Kavafian, Hilary Hahn, Nathan Milstein, Andrew Manze – the violin room. In another, Carter Brey, Andre Emilianoff, Rostropovich, and Jacqueline Du Pré… though I hasten to say the cello room is much scarier than the violin room. More horror and shadow. In the violin room, baroque music echoes from an old scratched record player that I can’t find. It floats between sage green curtains with gold fringe, it gathers in gusts of dusty leaves strewn along the floor. It’s faded tiles are arranged a little like a chess board (but not quite). The violin room has a fallen wall that leads outside. It’s almost always Autumn from that vantage point.
Imagine… Sibelius echoing through the ghostly gallery of memory.
There is joy in the Labyrinth. Some of the most beautiful sunlit gardens I have ever seen. Bright and fresh of a cool morning. In some parts of it I have lots of little demon fairy friends… absolutely inspired by the work of Brian and Wendy Froud, Jim Henson, and others.
“Step out of the page into the sensual world.” ~ Kate Bush
Many parts of the Labyrinth give me the eerie feeling I have seen them before. If you have seen The Storyteller series with John Hurt (and Brian Henson as his dog!) you’ll recognise much of the look of my Labyrinth – including the way a room filmed from a different angle looks like a different story.
If I have something big and overwhelming to face, I walk the number of steps and turns and corridors and gardens it takes to get there. And then I come back.
And therein lies an important nuance – Big and Overwhelming Things. These are not just bad things. Not just lost things.
Yesterday, I sat down to work on sketching out wardrobe ideas. The goal has been taking shape in my mind for quite some time of what colour palette I want. What silhouettes I like that also work on my body and my sensory preferences. What works where I live and what I can have ethically shipped or acquired? What layering? What technique? What cheeky little references? How shall I paint myself? Where will I hide symbols & sigils? Which tattoos will I allow people to see? How semi-permeable do I want my persona to be? What kind of variations do I want to build into that without always causing getting dressed to be such a cognitive burden (as fun as it ALWAYS is – I even enjoy pjs!)
JEEZUZ! 7 of Cups, this is getting personal!
It’s hard to go from basic learning to a cohesive finished result. I’m convinced a practiced artist is able to make something and 51% of the time say to themselves, “that was deliberate”. >_< In performance, they always said that the true masters spend their whole lives practicing to make the hardest things seem easy. No one wants their audience to wince in anticipation of a famously difficult passage!
But if I have a flare for aesthetics and a knack for getting my hands to make what I envision, that’s all I have. “Flare” and “Knack”. Good fairy names, to be sure… good to have on side, but not synonymous with a finished project. Not yet the bit where I’ve crafted and lived in my visions. Not yet corporeal. And the tension or dissonance of this arises in a few key places:
Clarity of vision requires honing and specification. Decisions in favour of one thing at the expense of another. Do I have ‘talent’ for this kind of executive functioning?
NO. (It’s one of my specific autistic ‘traits’ that I suck at this.) It will not just take practice. It will require a lot of frustration, erasing (::gasp!::), paper with pencil dents in it that won’t erase any more, bad stitching… and quite literal ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ because I really shouldn’t be trusted with so many sharp implements.
Do I know how to manage my fabrics to minimise waste without being over precious?
Ehhhhhhh… always a question, never an answer to that one.
What happens if I change my mind?
What happens if my tastes change?
What if my body changes?
Should I plan contingency into these patterns?
Could I remake them into something else?
Where should I store repair-remnants so they don’t get eaten by moths?
Shit, I ripped something… again.
But if I draw something after a lot of work and swear words (while also being happy and absorbed in the process) and I show that sketch online and “it looks well enough to the untrained eye” (as it has been drawn by an untrained person!) and some people like it… is that ‘talent’? Or is it burgeoning skill. Is it diligence? Or is it bare minimum that I managed to draw it at all…
Found some old stuff!Self-portraits. 2021 & 2023?Experiments – derivative but useful!
What then if the drawings truly do become clothes. (Doesn’t that sound like magic!?) Is THAT talent? Or is it… propensity? Am I pretentious? Am I ‘talented’ or am I just a fucking handful? Who’s gonna hoover up the trail of threads and linen dust…
Maybe I have a talent for being a handful!
If I share process online, who is my audience?
I literally have no idea… but I HAVE always felt that documentaries about creative process, textbooks and lectures about the preparatory sketches and intentional symbolism of art, and old photographs of ‘artist in studio’ were the most magical Otherworldly thing on the planet.
I want to make the clothes I find in The Labyrinth. I want to come back along those corridors still wearing what I saw there. I want to help that stuff cross the divide – not just the clothes but the air quality, the poetry, the paintings, the furnishings, the music, the ideas.
It’s a stormy yellow-green coloured day today. Deeply blustry and misting with rain. I have a massive headache. But I want to build Otherworlds and I want to learn what it takes to do that.
The word ‘talent’ is a value judgement that has no objective significance at all. In my experience, ‘talent’ is a word used to diminish not only the hard work of others but also the reality of what it is to try something and kind of suck at it until you kind of suck a little less! Perhaps people accidentally sabotage themselves in using this word. If it’s always someone else that is so talented… What do we think their talent is? Is it the same as what they want it to be or thought it was? Have we ever seen what their work looked like not just when they started but at every point along the way? Good days? Bad days? Days where they had a dentist appointment and forgot to cover their paints so everything dried up? Days where they’ve LOVED baking until they realised they mis-measured their yeast …or the oven stopped working but the light stayed on? Days where the internet told them they were great but a favourite family member grimaced at their ideas?
What if you’re a 60 year old man who wants to learn to swim after years of being body shamed. What if you used to dream of talking to fish and you want to explore that again in the physical realm? I bet you could become an expert at loving water – not just a ‘talented’ swimmer.
Some people have opportunity, privilege, & support. Too many people don’t. Maybe most people have an incorrigible mix of these things. A pervasive paradox.
Culturally agreed upon standards for what looks like talent totally exist… but they are relative at best. Not very nice and of limited use. Picasso, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other such humans dwell in the realm of talent and genius only because they deny entry to others. Sabotaging others with jealousy and aggression. Their work is good, just not THAT good. The idea of ‘inherent talent’ (to me) just screams ‘big fish, little pond’.
The concept of ‘perseverance’ exists but I think it gets misapplied to the point of losing a lot of what’s useful about it. Can you persevere at being scatter brained? Do we value that word internally or are we waiting for it to be applied externally?
Play TOTALLY exists. But if ‘play’ is ‘talent’, then can talent be ‘lost’? And if talent can be lost, then I think it must not be inherent. Which, to me, means you could be 96 years old and still decide to redevelop it if you chose… just because you can. That sounds more like curiosity and skill-building! Achievable things! Real magic.
If ‘talent’ exists, then everyone must have it. I think it’s down to the inherent tension and dissonance of asking yourself what yours are… and inventing them when necessary!
~ Saoirse.
P.S. It’s a total joke that I put my own work next to all these amazing true geniuses. I laugh at myself, not them!
[CW – there will be reference to symptoms of trauma but I will not discuss details nor will I indicate any specific type of experience other than to discuss how it affects my magico-spiritual process.]
Half moon this morning. Waxing gibbous. Serendipitously, this is the card I received in a single draw from the Pagan Otherworlds Tarot. How apt.
I have been posting a bit more openly about music lately. Mostly here on the blog. I want to talk a little more specifically about why this – for me – constitutes witchcraft and deep magical healing work.
If anyone wants a recommendation for an amazing young musician and singer coming out of the American ‘Old Timey’ Trad world (as distinct from modern bluegrass!) they should check out Nora Brown. Holy shit her work is good. She’s currently collaborating with a fiddler named Stephanie Coleman and equally her style is deep, rhythmic, and rooted.
I’ve known of Nora Brown for a few years now but yesterday I made an attempt to watch the Tiny Desk concert above. I say ‘attempt’ because by the time they started into ‘The Old Blue Bonnet’ I was shaking, hyperventilating and so on. Having too many visceral and deeply loved memories of American-specific experiences… looking up at the moon through pine needles… fireglow shining through a cabin window at the bottom of a mountain valley… a small trickling stream beneath my feet… elk in the morning, bears on a walk. The music of the unassuming – jeans and t-shirts – trading information, laughing, and the deep heartbeat of boots on a floor keeping the tunes flowing. People talking with their feet and singing with their hands…
I couldn’t do it yesterday.
I told my partner it felt like a world had vanished but that I (and only I among anyone I know now) could hear faint echoes of it calling out “Goodbye! Goodbye!”*
So today is the half moon and I drew the half moon card. To me, the card says ‘Now you can do it and I will help.’ I took slooooow breaths, clutching the deck (my bridge between worlds), listened to this gem of a video and let what once was run its course through the channel of my emotions. Tears again but more manageable this time.
Old grainy photos of a good party trick…if you have lots of fiddlers!
It is, of course, not at all accidental that so much of American trad songs are fixated on war, death, loss, poverty, jail time, labour, loneliness. (The backbone of the ‘American dream’?) When people move too fast over land that isn’t theirs their own pre-existing problems grow with them. I don’t find much to ‘redeem’ about this… but I do find subtlety and nuance, I guess. The tunes I like the most have the least pretense – they’re tunes by and for flawed people. Maybe even the damned (depending on your worldview… I use demonic imagery in my witchcraft for many reasons). They carry no false promises and their dogma sounds tired.
I don’t know if I will ever use my violin for fiddle music again… I have no idea how that would feel in the body. Playing music, by definition, replicates the movements and bodily experiences of the past. That’s what practice IS… taking what you have already done and keeping it alive. Maybe that’s what makes it so hard and so rewarding at once. I am comforted by the knowledge I have of different forms of music and the fact that deep down I am fortunate to have some access to those skills and worlds… but I tend to feel shattered by the awareness that I come from a world in which I did not fit and I live now in a world that doesn’t know about any of that – at all. And I still do not fit.
This, incidentally, is how trad music is formed. Traditions carried. Stories retold and reworked. Sources cited (as is done so amazingly in the Tiny Desk video!)
To be a witch for me (among many other things) is to go to the altar and lay my music at Her feet. To carve a space that is mine… with bits and bobs of my story – the stuff that makes me howl and cry; the stuff that makes me dance; and the stuff that I know emerges syncretic and flawed… and to let it emerge and take its new form anyway. I take it all with me. These things are in my satchel. It’s painful to perceive, now, that no one around me knows it. I’m a person with no context. It must be enough that I know it.
Baby-face Saoirse playing the bodhrán in Ireland. Think this might even have been in Cork!
The half moon will help me see that and shift my perspective back towards joy. And, I’m not totally alone… I can still light a bonfire on occasion and surround myself with other music makers. I know I’ve left things behind for a reason and I guess I’ll keep the practice of fitting into nowhere at all. Chronically transatlantic like so many before me… but hopefully reckoning a bit better with empathy and collective responsibility!
Below, a couple poems I wrote a few years ago, during an earlier phase of processing these things:
The Morrígan often ‘speaks’ to me through verse (UPG) and the following poem felt like an answer to wondering if she was there ‘even then’.
From 2022, it makes reference to John Prine as well as “Blackbird” performed by the Lonesome Sisters (written by Debra Clifford about her mother… Debra herself passed away in 2022.)
Another old photo. Wistful whistle tunes and homemade wings…
~ Saoirse.
* Rayna Gellert*** has composed some great songs out of this tradition that capture many of these feelings for me – “Strike the Bells” from her album ‘Workin’s Too Hard’ and “Nothing” from her album ‘Old Light: Songs from my Childhood and Other Gone Worlds’ come immediately to mind. Whew!
** This link is to a live performance (including the only mistake I’ve ever heard him make! ^_^) This is important firstly because I think his live renditions have a more dirge-like quality than his recorded version (which is on his album ‘Soon Be Time’) and secondly because he performed this song live for the first time one night at my college (a few years after I had stopped going to the mountains each summer to a camp where he and others taught) … I was talking to him after the gig and he asked me how the tune came across. I told him it was beautiful and made me cry and he told me it was the first time he’d done it on stage!!!
*** Incidentally, the same summer location was where I first had the privilege of meeting Dan Gellert, Rayna’s father. Holy shit that man can play and on the most gorgeous fretless banjo to boot!
I would love to hear your responses, thoughts, etc. in the comments. But please note, I’m not soliciting for comfort or validation. I’m wary of encouraging what I so often interpret in comments as codependent language. I’m fine! I am me and you are you. Concepts & practices such as witchcraft are shared but also truly individual – this is what makes them so potent! 🙂
Wobbly sleepy songs about crows and true love at a witches altar… #lifegoals I guess! #tradmusic #morningperson #altar #paganaltar #altarspace #hygge
“Blackest Crow” is one of MANY variations on the traditional lover’s lament… other versions sometimes are called The Turtle Dove, or, As Time Draws Near. It has lots of ‘floating verses’ and lyrics are pretty hard to pin down.
Bruce Molsky has a famous version on his album “Lost Boy” that I’ve listened to since I was very young and which formed the basis for my harmony part ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJzQNQoUe6w (Side Note: I first met Bruce when I was about 13 or 14… a wonderfully nice guy and a great teacher! Took his fiddle classes a few summers running as a teen and ran into him years later in college on the night he played ‘Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie’ live for the first time ever. He asked me afterwards what I thought and I answered honestly that it had made me cry. Sometimes memories sound like they must have happened to someone else!)
The tune I sort of badly transition into (normally I do this whole chord thing but I wasn’t awake enough) is called “Wildwood Flower” and I can’t find the original version that I used as a base! I thought it was from Brett Ridgeway’s list of sample tunes but I’m not sure now… anyway, here’s Stephen Seifert’s version instead ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGQuVVEnqDU
(If you can mentally filter out the Christian elements, there is no better feeling than waking up on a cold mountain morning to someone playing music like this on a cabin porch.)
I promise I normally play it better but like… with more coffee and less camera!!!!!!
Perhaps it is the time of year – verging on the vernal equinox and a hushed but stirring feeling in the air. On Imbolc, some say that fine weather means six more weeks of winter: the Cailleach has cleared the clouds so that she may gather dryer firewood for more cold weather. If you see a bird fly by with sticks in its beak, on the day, that’s her! The birds have indeed been gathering with a frenzy of late, the weather gusts cold and wet, and everywhere are light burgeoning shades of green and delicate hints of mauve.
This one felt stuck until this morning…go figure. Note ~ “rota” (wheel…) or “rondellus” is the medieval term for a round. “Andante con fuoco”, also in music, means “at walking pace, with fire”.
I’ve been feeling restless – even anxious – and keenly aware that my priorities need a rearrange. It’s been weeks since I’ve been able to sit at my altar without knocking something over or dropping cinders on the floor – that’s strange. I like to spend most of my time alone and yet the world seems very loud and backlit with blue flickering light – that’s telling. I’ve been losing sense of what I love, what projects I want to work on, feeling anxious to meet deadlines that don’t exist – time to slow down. After all, this year’s motto is: NO RUSH.
Gorse… beautiful and so very sharp. I like it for protection/warding work.
It may not seem like much, but I’m leaving Instagram. I feel I am responsible for my own use of time, my own sense of honesty or personal connection with others (and with the collective!), and my own health. Instagram makes it seem that those who live with flare and authenticity have no trouble documenting that on their platform…but I have not found this to be the case in my life. Instagram also makes it seem as though there is no such thing as agency or artists or social awareness or anything at all without their dicey validation.
When catkins look like corpses… “I’ll cut you in half, while you’re smiling ear to ear/And the freedom that you sought/is drifting like a ghost amongst the trees…” (Magic by Bruce Springsteen)
But there ARE other ways to show process, to document inspiration, and to allow others to partake in the kind of slow quiet beauty I wish to cultivate. Hence, this blog post features some examples of the few moments of quiet that I have recently pursued and remembered to value… none of which were posted on Instagram but that I’m happy to highlight here as a signpost for the future.
Variations on a theme…Current corset progress…Modded Somnia Tarot.
A thread of red in the labyrinth of life.
Quietly yours,
Sorsha.
*First line of the Morrígan’s prophecy to the Donn Cúailgne, as translated by Thomas Kinsella.
