… morendo poco a poco.
~ Saoirse.
Tag: poetry
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[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:
This one (from 2021 or earlier… can’t remember) makes reference to two songs, “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” ** (performed by Bruce Molsky) and “I Lost Something in the Hills” by Sibylle Baier.
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! 🙂
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As with so many things, a simple mental association double checked through the lens of a ‘quick Google’ yields a seriously mind-boggling rabbit hole. This blog post serves as a contextual supplement to this video:
I have had the topic of names on my mind for a long time. Anyone who plays traditional music will know that the name of any given tune is, shall we say, flexible. The way in which a lot of trad music works is that any given player or performer and certainly the more reputable recording artists will cite who’s version of a tune they play, where they have introduced changes, and will often also indicate if their own regional style has affected their playing or not, etc. A living folk tradition needs both that kind of flexibility as well as that kind of connectivity and accountability.
Recently, I decided to approximate a version of Shady Grove, pilfering most of my style and technique from this OLD video by “Gretchenman” (just look at his fingers fly!!!):
In doing so, I did a quick search online to refresh my memory about the lyrics (because I do sing along sometimes when I play) and check in on some basic background information on the song. Shady Grove (Roud 4456) is mostly considered an Appalachian tune [1,2] and there is a possible link with the English/Scottish tune Matty Groves (Roud 52; a famous version of which was recorded by Fairport Convention, for example) [3]. The two songs share the same melody and the fact that one is a murder ballad and the other a song in which a woman’s name has seemingly toponymic qualities interested me from a personal gnosis perspective. Drawing wild and highly metaphorical connections in my own head, I liked the familiarity of something that sounds like a place having an almost euhemerised quality… certainly Ireland abounds with such locations and its medieval literature/mythology has whole genres and stories centered on naming places after people and people after places, or just blending the two entirely.
Now, I’m NOT claiming that there is any such analogy to be drawn in historically viable or collectively verified ontological* terms. It’s just a fun poetic exercise. Creative license, as it were.
However! The rabbit hole referred to earlier drew me from link to link: first investigating the lyrical content of Shady Grove; then to it’s Roud Index Number and associated articles about the development of the song over time (including various collections in which it is annotated as well as different known recordings of it); then to re-acquainting myself with some of the basics on Cecil Sharp (because it’s been a while). Lo and behold… I forgot a) about his nationalism and the troubled legacy of his methodology in seeking out ‘Englishness’ in music, especially in Southern Appalachia [5] but also b) that he was in other ways influenced by William Morris’ socialist lectures and …potentially also approached his work through the lens of spiritualism at some point!? 🤯
This last bit seems totally unclear to me and I am finding it hard to validate until I can actually access some of the academic articles I’ve found online [6]. (This is where I am REALLY happy to have a free external reader’s card with UCC Library…ah, the perks of living in a Uni town!) But in scrolling through the Roud listings on Matty Grove, I saw they had an entry in Sharp’s diary from the 29th of August, 1916 in which he makes use of the word “séance”.
It’s strikes me that it’s possible this word has some other meanings or context of which I am not aware (I yielded no obvious or immediate answers from a quick search online) but it would seem there are a few articles out there at least that might make this clear once I’ve had a chance to read them. In theory, it doesn’t strike me as too unreasonable because this IS a time period in which a lot of academia (especially those with nationalist or otherwise politicised interest in folk movements) drift in and out of spiritualist circles and ‘methods’ of inquiry**.
I am not sure how all of that will go yet but I also hope to read a few more recent assessments of the problems in Sharp’s legacy.
Magickally, one of the things I am doing in playing such a tune (in which I usually face my altar, by the way) is reshaping identity. Drawing creative connections on the euhemerization of names, of nouns as names/names as nouns, and asking questions of my own anthropopathism and ‘pathetic fallacy’***.
At this point, the choice to play “Flatlands” by Chelsea Wolfe and Mark Lanegan over the first part of my video should begin to make added sense.
It all comes back around to walking the razor edge between what seems appealing as a creative or metaphorical idea and what is actually academically and historically viable work. We have to be okay with their inherent dissonance. You might even call it… an art.
~ Saoirse.
PS. If you head to the Vaughan Williams Lectures page I only JUST noticed that they have a nearly 50 minute lecture: “There’s method in the magic: the theory behind folk magic in medieval and early modern England by Tabitha Stanmore” FROM 2020. Why am I so slow on the uptake!!?? I haven’t watched it yet but will do soon! 🤩🤓🥳
* Here I am using the philosphical defintion of ‘ontological’ rather than the metaphysical one!
** Giving the Golden Dawn, Theosophists, and soooo many 19th and early-20th century artists and thinkers bombastic side-eye. Criminal offensive side-eye.
*** Oop! Hello, Ruskin!
§ 9. And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition of prophetic inspiration.
§ 10. I separate these classes, in order that their character may be clearly understood; but of course they are united each to the other by imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, according to the influences to which it is subjected, passes at different times into the various states. Still, the difference between the great and less man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of ‘alterability‘. […]
§ 11. Now so long as we see that the ‘feeling‘ is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces: we are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley’s, above quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow. [7]
John Ruskin at Glen Finglas by John Everett Millais, 1853-1854 (Public Domain) - (1) Shady Grove (Roud 4456), Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music, mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/shadygrove.html. Accessed 6 Feb. 2024.
- (2) “Vaughan Williams Memorial Library: Shady Grove.” English Folk Dance & Song Society, http://www.vwml.org/search?q=Shady%20Grove&is=1. Accessed 6 Feb. 2024. (Of note, the English Folk Dance & Song Society owns the Cecil Sharp House.)
- (3) Spiegel, Max. “Origins: ‘shady Grove’ a Mondegreen ?” The Mudcat Cafe, mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=131461. Accessed 6 Feb. 2024. (“Mondegreen” is my new favourite word now. Story of my hearing impaired life!)
- (4) “Vaughan Williams Memorial Library: Little Matty Grove.” English Folk Dance & Song Society, http://www.vwml.org/search?q=Matty%20Grove&is=1#.
- (5) “Cecil Sharp.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 Jan. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Sharp#Political_Views. (Yes, its Wikipedia ~ but the citations at the bottom of the article look like they’re worth exploring.)
- (6) Zon, Bennett. “Folk Musicology (Chapter 3) – Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture.” Cambridge Core, Cambridge University Press, 25 Oct. 2017, http://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/evolution-and-victorian-musical-culture/folk-musicology/CD9C631EAD127C74867F87D718429351. (One resource among a few that I have bookmarked… I’ll hopefully get my hands on these soon!)
- (7) Ruskin, John. “Of the Pathetic Fallacy from ‘modern Painters’ (Volume III, Pt. 4, 1856) by John Ruskin.” The Pathetic Fallacy, Ruskin (1856), http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/ruskinj/index.htm. Accessed 6 Feb. 2024. (I have no interest or affiliation with the author of this site as a whole, this link is simply where I have accessed an online free readable copy of Ruskin’s writings on the Pathetic Fallacy.)
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Every now and then – almost unsuspectingly – a poem will emerge swift and nearly full-fledged. When this happens it always reminds me of No Face from “Spirited Away”. I feel that as I emerge from a place of intensity, often a place that’s not so good for me, the poem spews forth like tarry gall – I get the thing out feeling cleansed and returned to self.
Or perhaps the poem emerges like some kind of ectoplasmic gauze with my words already jotted on it. My poetry is always filtered through and/or dedicated to the Morrígan as the medieval literature abounds with (Her) prophecy and sorcery in verse. (A rabbit hole I’ll explore on this blog as time goes on.)
In any case, yesterday I was playing the dulcimer and mulling over a few things and upon striking the last lines of a tune, the poem started coming out. In my distraction, I hit the strings of the last chord in such a manner that a resonant overtone or harmonic sounded loud and clear – like a bell.
Luckily I was already at my desk. Dulcimer placed carefully to one side, pen and paper already in hand.
Here is what I coughed up:
* The quotation at the beginning is taken from the opening line of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
** It should also be noted that there is a version of “Hares on the Mountain” that makes an appearance in this poem. It’s Roud Folk Song Index No. 329 (here’s a link). I don’t know if anyone else finds that certain songs (be they old or new) have a way of following you around in life but this is one such song for me. Specifically, for this poem, you can find renditions of it by Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker or by Shirley Collins.
*** There is only one half-truth in this poem. 🎃
I’d love to hear any thoughts people have on how their gnosis occurs… and does it take time to understand certain parts of it? Is it instantaneous or cumulative? Or both?
Sincerely,
Sorsha.
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It’s birthday month… and for the last few months I have been working away on what visual links I can find in certain tarot and oracle decks, who created them, where they were created, and what I think that means about the experience of place on the minds of those prone to nightmares. I’ve been calling this the “Nightmare Children of the Tri-State Area” project… but of course if we approach it art historically, it will always be rather Beksinksi or Bosch-like in this realm too. (Also Escher…)
“In Hoc Signo Vinces” by Zdzisław Beksiński. Reproduced here under Creative Commons Licence (Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.0 Generic) from “Gandalf’s Gallery” with whom I have no affiliation. Another amazing Beksinski piece to check out is “Figure (1978)”. For now, here’s a sneak peek into what artistic themes are playing a role here:
“Six in the City” A & B ~ self-portraits from old photos edited together with my own outdoor photography. 
“Golden Slumbers” is a poem I wrote on October 14, 2023 while walking through my memory of specific nightmares and giving them more collective language. I have been feeling very inspired by Escher and Piranesi in this, among others… 
“Curses” is a poem I wrote on November 26, 2023 while walking through my memory of specific experiences in the wetlands around New York and New Jersey… and giving them more collective language. The decks in question*:
More sketches, explorations, and thoughts to follow soon! In the meantime, let me know what you think 👻
Hell Panel (detail), Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch (between 1490-1510?) Reproduced here from Wikimedia Commons. Sincerely,
Sorsha.
* All decks featured here of my own volition and arising from my own use of them. I have neither been invited nor commissioned to do so and I have no affiliation with Deviant Moon Inc. or Nicolas Bruno. Apart from having one of these decks (the TdL Paradoxical) given to me by a friend, I have purchased all of these myself.
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Hello there… a poem conceived ‘of an evening’ in the aftermath of a maddening supermoon in early autumn. Shall we play a game of ‘wake the dead’?
I’d say most of my poetry arises from attempting to describe the place where sensory detail and cognition meet… but please think of this however you choose!
From the Deviant Moon Tarot (Paradoxical)… this card always reminds me of Tom Waits. ~ Sorsha.
*The title is from Tom Waits lyrics to “No one knows I’m gone”.
*Deck featured in header image ~ Trionfi della Luna (Paradoxical)
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Broadly speaking, the merit we do or don’t assign to the imagination is always on my mind. How do we perceive our purpose – as ‘human persons’ – and do we get to factor in things like… baseline personality traits? Neurological health? Any form of personal needs or even preference?
I suspect it is often perceived as melodramatic when a person states they need imagination and creativity to survive… but in my case at least, this is quite literally true. However, I won’t claim this for neurodivergents exclusively – burn out is a serious issue. We, just like the planet around us, have *finite* resources. Fallow periods allow for growth and growth holds value when tempered and balanced. Diversity – socio-cultural, neurological, biological, and ecological is strength. …At least, I think so.
A small face on the edge of firelight… I have been dangerously ill many times in my life… and I will never have the more robust and dependable constitution of someone who has not repeatedly nearly destroyed their body in pursuit of constant socially and economically approved extroversion and productivity. I have spent my whole life trying not to be what I am – autistic, yes… which is also a passionate dreamer, irrevocably introverted, desperately sensitive, creative, earnest, and an inquisitive but flawed (‘slow, airheaded’) human.
…Someone I know was recently told, while presenting material on sustainability at a conference, that unless he slept in a hotel room pre-booked for him on location (without his prior consent – he lives within walking distance) he ‘hadn’t really attended the conference’. I have often heard people talk about being pressured to stay on at work after hours or else they’re not a good employee. I myself have been bullied in the workplace and phoned by employers in the evenings and on days off… The world seems to use the word “hobby” to refer to how we spend our *lives* when not working… When people ask us what we are we tell them our professional titles…
Once, on holiday, when I was very low from family trouble, bereavement, and having left my profession due to aforementioned bullying, someone interrupted me over dinner chat to ask (twice) “why, what are YOU doing?” …I’ll never forget how that felt.
“Media vita in morte sumus” *
I say this in sacred space every single day – I am #deathpositive after all. But #deathpositivity is not about expediting the dying process and it is not about the pursuit of suffering and grief. It’s about integrating a healthy organic relationship with the fact that we are finite and it seeks to combat socio-economic oppression… amongst other larger more collective causes.
Carry on or carrion? I dwell between worlds because that’s where I live …and I guess I’m no longer willing to be apologetic or ashamed of that. I am a living organism with no truly objective purpose. I happen to exist…but certainly I was not born to support exponential and exploitative profiteering. I’ll stay a ‘shiftless dreamer’.
Today’s video ~ verdure from void & poetic motifs… (The featured image on this blog post is of Jane Morris (née Burden) photographed by John Robert Parsons in 1865… and part of a current set of projets or ideas I’m working on.)
* tr. In the midst of life we are in Death.
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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.
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It seems fitting, in the beginning, to acknowledge that no art is created in a vacuum. Here is a small adaptation I made to a poem by Rilke (I,3 from “The Book of a Monastic Life”). I made mine a bit more overtly about my own shadow, void, and devotion to the Morrígan.
'But when I lean over the chasm of myself - it seems my Goddess is dark and like a web: a hundred roots silently drinking. This is the ferment I grow out of. More I don't know, because my branches rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.' Happy wanderings, Sorsha.
