An ancestral remembrance of the witch burnings and persecution of heretics, healers and medicine people by fire and a culture antithetical to life…..
Vocals recorded at Church of Storms, Lizard & at Zennor, West Penwith
(Tho I Burn) Fire, Be My Ally
The Names Of Stars
when I was small
the oaks spoke
in
ancestral tongues
of the
Forest Mother
spinning twig
and branch
trunk
and root
leaf
and seed
from
the names
of stars
lightning cracked
spirit tongued
blue flamed
thunder rooted
words of power
sap and blood
we shared
rhizomal dreams
and songs
of wind
and rain
of Sun
and Moon
and deep Earth
we knew
let not
these memories
fall
with the
last tree
but live on
in each
of us
children
of
the Forest
…………………………………….
image : ‘Forest Spirit’, Rob Purday
Steven Newcomb on the Doctrine of Domination
This is a brilliant and important talk, from both Tessa Lena and Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape). As one of the world’s most prominent scholars of the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny, Steven’s insight and knowledge is especially valuable to the entire process of decolonisation and cultural healing in all parts of the world where western dominance has brought subjugation to its lands and people. He is able to get right under the skin of the root problem, expose the linguistic drivers that perpetuate its doctrines and brings a depth of perception that was never the more important to our well being than right now.
He is the author of a best-selling book Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum, 2008), and is a co-producer of the documentary film, “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code,” directed and produced by Sheldon Wolfchild (Dakota), with narration by Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree).
In Pursuit of Vanishing Purity – Jennifer Tarnacki
We landed excitedly in Alaska in early February with an internship lined up, a few hundred bucks, and colorful plethora of wildly misconceived notions : it is a giant ice cube where polar bears run amuck, grizzlies attack at the slightest provocation, and every man, woman and child hunts moose for their dinner. Of these misconceptions most have been broken as definitely untrue, usually accompanied by a cringe of embarrassment.
In short order we acquired a truck and then a dog, which seemed to be required by law, and moved into a shoddily built dry cabin on six acres, not a neighbor in sight, down a gravel road in the bog. “Dry” cabin does not mean there’s no liquor, quite the contrary, because once you start to live in a cabin with no running water in Alaska, you suddenly really want hard liquor. Dry means there’s no plumbing, and there’s quite a few of these cabins in the frozen north; it’s often easier than putting up with freezing pipes all winter. We deemed it the Bogland Estates, or Chateau de Bog.
Initially, I was thrilled. The exquisite freedom of six acres! So little rent on this bogland with no plumbing! I don’t need running water, showers are for wimps! Early spring months passed by in a rosy glow, buffered from reality by our exuberance, anticipating the snowmelt and longer days. Trips to the frozen outhouse required mental preparation, gently coaxing myself, “Okay, it’s time. You can do this. Walk over there. It’s not that gross” (it undeniably was). I’m not ashamed to admit I peed in buckets to avoid moose encounters in the middle of the freezing night.
Spring nights were spent staring intently into the fire stove. I started dreaming about bears, as though my subconscious was trying to connect with the spirit of Bear, and because that which you fear has a way of finagling itself into your dreams. Mini earthquakes rattled the flimsy frame of the cabin for a terrifying few minutes every now and then.
We found ourselves quintessential Alaskan gigs for the summer: him on a fishing boat bound for Bristol Bay, me at a bear viewing bush flight company. He left for the sockeye salmon season just as the sun started to linger longer in the sky.
I turned to the water, tracking my days in the movements of tides thrumming in and out of the bay; the cycles were a sureness, a consolation, something to hold onto. A moose and her two calves began to visit my front yard every morning and evening like clockwork, ambling along their own paths, often emerging unexpectedly from behind the outhouse, stopping in their tracks to eye me as I eyed them; a strange daily communication.
Months of living alone in a dry cabin will turn you a little feral. I realized this with certainty when the bear guides suggested that I shower. Hauling water, bathing in buckets, filling the wood stove, WiFi a distant memory; survival chores take up the bulk of the day. It is essentially camping with the slightest veneer of a home.
Why on Earth would anyone do this?
It’s like hitting a reset button.
In that unwashed state, I felt glimmers of the reason that propelled me here in the first place, driven by some inner force, some inner knowing that in placing your body in a wild environment, some alchemy of spirit can happen.
Living simply, immersed in the dirty off grid, I was able to release myself into wildness. Becoming an observer of nature, letting the changing of the seasons wash over me, really feeling the building of every lunar cycle, the waxing and waning across the sky over the mountains. It’s slower and more subtle than we usually perceive, but always there for us to feel.
Midnight sun began roaring in earnest above, building in an intense crescendo towards the solstice, making my nerves and metabolism go into frenzied overdrive. A creative exuberance pulsed through my veins; the joy of an Alaskan summer in full swing, so gorgeous it seems to shimmer and shake and glitter.
The water called me to it every day, drawn to the liquid immensity underneath me. The scent of algal blooms, kelp, and sea rot became the sweetest intoxicants to inhale. In the bay, I could breathe in and out with the environment, feeling the intimacy and connection with the salty water. I could notice the exchange of gases between my inner worlds and outer atmosphere, my skin feeling more and more like a porous interface, aided by an awareness that we are made of water and elements recycled from the stars.
Otters and seals in the water tracked my movements; I could feel their awareness on me. Water birds dove and skimmed. Bull kelp grew large and bobbed to the surface in alien looking blobs, their long roots tethered to the sea floor like an underwater forest, otters slumbering coiled in the fronds. Salmon from the open ocean returned to their spawning grounds in a mass frenzy of movement into the streams and tributaries of the bay. Orca hunted the seal, seal hunted salmon.
As the light began to shorten again, the animals responded. Salmon skeletons began to wash ashore; their decaying remnants fed the ocean. Bears prepared for hibernation and migratory birds attuned to the Earth’s electromagnetic fields to lead them south for winter, guided by a magnet in their brains.
Having nothing but the bare necessities: shelter, food, water, space, allows you to open the curtain behind the veneer of civilization to reveal a natural world so complex it blows your mind: the goosetongue grass that feeds the bears fertilizes the humus and michiorzhial fungi web of the forest floor that in turn grows the spruce trees and blueberry bushes that shelter and feed the bears again. The cycle repeats everywhere.
This indivisibility with nature, it slowly falls over your body. In the ever-present awareness of large creatures around you, you feel yourself to be woven into the web of life — human, not superior. We hunt moose and dipnet salmon in order to stock our freezers, participating in the universal preparation for winter, just like the other creatures. It casts in stark relief how much we rely on and need our environment and our animals to be healthy.
We humans think, ponder, reason, extract, build, create masterfully, but who is to say a tiny songbird completing its 1,000 mile journey across the Atlantic using magnetic poles as its guide has accomplished a feat any less epic? Or a family of whales navigating their blue world using sonar to ride ocean currents from one hemisphere to another? Or the cultural knowledge bears have of their ancestral lands, passed down through generations?
To learn and witness these myriad adaptabilities and ways of existing in the environment, whether underwater or skybound, is to know there is a force of creation. The biodiversity of creatures we live amongst is a tangible reminder of this: endless forms, most beautiful. I began to feel that in conserving our animals, honoring the sacred ecology of wild creatures, we would be conserving our humanity.
I began to see our skin as an interface holding something encased. This something, You, the endless god knows of you, in a thin cell, sharing the world with other conscious beings. Whether its a bear smelling prey miles away, or a migratory bird seeing Earth’s magnetic field, or a newborn whale learning to sing, or deaf and blind human building up a rich tactile awareness with which to experience and communicate. Life, in all forms, has a Oneness, an undeniable divine interconnectedness. This awareness toppled me from the supposed top of the food chain down into the grit and muck, and in that muck I found an intimacy, like returning home.
This could happen anywhere. There is equally unruly wildness in a patch of grass between highway medians in Newark, but by the very fact of its vastness and its creatures it seems to happen a little easier in Alaska. I still won’t feel resourceful until I’ve fished and hunted for my sustenance, and I’ve unequivocally determined that running water is the bomb, but for now I can still feel it working its strange, slow magic on me, an alchemical change, a cosmic homecoming, and I know I won’t ever be the same.
This piece was originally published at Medium under the title ‘A Cosmic Homecoming’ and is reproduced here with kind permission of the author, Jennifer Tarnacki
Prayer
I found fresh tracks today
and felt the shy beautiful eyes
of their maker, watching
as I made offerings
to the water spirits
beneath the old oak
by the brook
who sang
of fresh snow
that had fallen
far above
in the shimmering
silence of the night
top image : Warlock by Neil Burnell
Dakota 38
A powerful film.
Healing and reconciliation.
Much humanity.
In the spring of 2005, Jim Miller, a Native spiritual leader and Vietnam veteran, found himself in a dream riding on horseback across the great plains of South Dakota. Just before he awoke, he arrived at a riverbank in Minnesota and saw 38 of his Dakota ancestors hanged. At the time, Jim knew nothing of the largest mass execution in United States history, ordered by Abraham Lincoln on December 26, 1862. “When you have dreams, you know when they come from the creator… As any recovered alcoholic, I made believe that I didn’t get it. I tried to put it out of my mind, yet it’s one of those dreams that bothers you night and day.”
(Now), four years later, embracing the message of the dream, Jim and a group of riders retrace the 330-mile route of his dream on horseback from Lower Brule, South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota to arrive at the hanging site on the anniversary of the execution. “We can’t blame the wasichus anymore. We’re doing it to ourselves. We’re selling drugs. We’re killing our own people. That’s what this ride is about, is healing.” This is the story of their journey- the blizzards they endure, the Native and Non-Native communities that house and feed them along the way, and the dark history they are beginning to wipe away.
Chalk
Speak of your exile
of how
you don’t belong
or fit in
– its the key
that unlocks the door
to the way
Home
This fragment
of chalk
nesting
on all my journeys
in my breast pocket
nesting
on all my journeys
holding you
in my palm
I saw
a form
in my mind
Felt ancestors
around me
their whispers
issue from
my fingers
as
I sought
the form,
a form,
a way of speaking,
an invitation
both given
and received
and heard you say
speak of your exile
of how you don’t belong
or fit in –
it is
the key
that unlocks the door
to the way
Home
Treeline – A Story Written In Rings
“Its not me, not my power that heals the trees. I receive teaching from the trees before I allow myself to touch them. I am very grateful for that”
“Our lives are made possible by others, both humans and nature. We don’t live in isolation.
Kodama. Kodama. It is a spirit that lives inside the tree. There can be one in each tree. The form of the spirit is something that cannot be seen. But one can feel their existence there and appreciate it.”
“…..you get that sense of history, of many spirits have been here before, not just human spirits, but many creatures have lived here and they still live here; I get that sense that I am not alone, ever.
The forest is a holistic place, a place thats connected. They’re like treasure chests full of biodiversity, genes of species that are really, really old. This is a special little heartbeat, where these things reside….”
A stunningly beautiful film that follows ‘a group of skiers, snowboarders, scientists and healers to the birch forests of Japan, the red cedars of British Columbia and the bristlecones of Nevada, as they explore an ancient story written in rings.’
Wilding, Nature’s Way
” ‘Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest’ is a 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve, on New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula, and its kaitiaki/manager of 30 years, botanist Hugh Wilson.
When, in 1987, Hugh let the local community know of his plans to allow the introduced ‘weed’ gorse to grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate farmland into native forest, people were not only skeptical but outright angry – the plan was the sort to be expected only of “fools and dreamers”.
Now considered a hero locally and across the country, Hugh oversees 1500 hectares resplendent in native forest, where birds and other wildlife are abundant and 47 known waterfalls are in permanent flow. He has proven without doubt that nature knows best – and that he is no fool.”
Siberian Shaman Gives Interview
This one rings true…..
much gratitude
this is Owlmirror’s 100th post!
Many many thanks to all…..
Interview with the Siberian shaman Alya, who wished to stay anonymous. Filmed by the TV Channel Russia-Culture in cooperation with Ethno Taiga. Translated into English by ©Excellence Reporter.
Q: There are shamans in Siberia. But who are they? Probably people don’t know much about them, and what do they represent?
Alya: Yes, unfortunately most people have no idea what a shaman is, who a shaman is, what they do and what for. They all have a preconceived idea. And as a general rule people are afraid of what they don’t know. Shamans are being afraid of, sometimes even vilified. People make up all sorts of rumors. As a matter of fact it is much easier to defile than to accept a concept. Of course not everything is comprehensible what the shaman does, precisely in order to avoid a prejudiced, unpleasant attitude towards the shaman. I will allow myself a little, well… to…
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