The land of the ice, snow & stars

I do not know what words to speak, even silently, on a still day like this. 

White sky, white roofs, like a held breath, a waiting, a sleeping. 

The snow is soft and silent over the earth. If only it were a healing blanket on the planet. What if, beneath it, the earth's bones, flesh and blood reknit every winter, mending what we have harmed? 

How peacefully we could then rest in winter, imagining the lands and waters being slowly restored to health. 

Until learning about global warming, I had no thought at all that the glaciers at the poles were necessary for life on earth, that they hold within the depths of their ice-blue hearts the great powers of winter to cool the temperature of our entire planet. 

We often see snow and cold as harmful, even deadly—antithetical to life. Not as a life-giving shield of protection to our planet and all living things. But now we see how lacking in understanding we have been, and that it is at least as much Protector as Destroyer.   

If only the realm of the Snow Queen could be revived in the far north and the far south once again, and the healing could begin.  

If only healing could ever happen as quickly and easily as harming. 

Once, a lovely person confided to me a one-line poem she had made: "I'm lonely for when the earth was okay." 

I am lonely for that time, too. Even while realizing that I may have never even lived in such a time. 

The stars, if my eyes could see them, might ease this loneliness, for a little while. They, thankfully, are too far away for us to have harmed, at least thus far.



The Nature 365 video journal above was filmed in far northern Minnesota by wildlife photographer and filmmaker Jim Brandenburg, and directed by Laurent Joffrion. Subscribe to view these glorious short earth films every day of 2017.

A blessing of bones

LAST NIGHT, I was blessed by the Old Bone Mother.

In her old hands, she carried reindeer bones. Click! Clack! They rattled as she prowled through the dark stone cavern-space where we sat.

Bones scratched over scalps, rested over hearts as the Dreamers dreamed their way along twisting inner paths, anchored by the pulse of the Drummers.

In the Celtic lands She is the Cailleach. The Unmaker, the Uncreator, the Unwinder, the Remover. Her breath blows cold on the back of the neck in the Dark Time, She throws boulders that make mountains, She brings the fierce cold, She is an elemental force as She moves through this world, collecting what needs to be Taken.

She Takes.

(This was how the story was told to me: She Takes.)

Deep beneath the sacred mound of Sí an Bhrú, Newgrange, in a dark womb of a chamber, She sings as She knits together the bones of those and that which have been Taken, reshapes them to live again on the earth in new form.

Because of Her, nothing is lost to the world, not ever lost, not truly.

And in this space, where the Old Bone Mother paid a visit to the Dreamers, a trickster-shapeshifter-shaman of a man told us: "We are given two great gifts in life. The gift of being created. And the gift of being uncreated. Throughout time, throughout culture, how we respond to these two gifts becomes our religion."

The Cailleach's blessing is to take from us something that needs to go. It is too soon to know what is gone from me. So many things I no longer needed, that I wanted to push out the door like a houseguest overstaying her welcome by months or years.

Tears overflowed, silently. My heart overflowed, silently. This went on for a while. And then I felt at peace.

Last night, I was blessed.



Last night, the drum was alive under my palm. Though stored away for long years, it still had not forgotten how to sing, how to vibrate and shiver its skin in answer to my hand, resonating for long moments in the humming silence. I played the drum, the drum played me, for a moment all one and the same.

I have walked the passages of Newgrange, Sí an Bhrú, in body. A dozen years ago, in the springtime, when the lambs frolicked and the Cailleach slept.

Did the echoes of that mystery plant their seeds in me then? The potent magic of the Irish-green grass, the druid sun tracing gray stone spirals, the paradox of timelessness amid great age, those stay with me.

But if I am a drum, one beat was struck on me that day at Newgrange, resonating over years until the same hand last night struck me once again.

Maybe it is as he, the shapeshifter-shaman, said: "We are all Drummers on the Skin of Mystery."

Mystery is rattling in your ears, striking Her fists on your bones. When She strips you bare to scour you and refashion you, when you are uncreated and lose your identity, your trappings, your anger or your way, say to yourself it is a gift.

She Takes, and it is a gift.

Last night, this is how the story was told to me. And then, how I told the story to myself.

And now, I tell it to you.

In which a candle is lit

A day made for fire. 

A day so dim, still and cheerless--a day so November--that flickers and flamings felt needful to my mental health.

Our home has no hearth (woodsmoke brings on a headache, anyway), so I lit two votives. Juniper, who is yet a young and inexperienced cat, jumped up to investigate. I shooed her away. But with the persistence of the feline, she would not stay shooed. And in an instant, the fire elementals had kinked her eyebrow hairs.

After that, she abandoned the intrigue of the candles and sensibly curled up against my side.

Maybe going to sleep is what I should have done, too. Instead, I worried, about not having found work yet, and every other thing I could latch onto. Like the November sky, my inner weather was murky with cloud. Every pathway of thought ended in a confusion of tracks. What step to take next? Where am I even trying to get to? Questioning this. Second-guessing that. Resisting…spinning like a leaf in a pool where the stream’s been dammed.

But the next day, the sun was blessedly bright. With it came a sliver of clarity: Perhaps I can’t pin down where I am, because I am in motion.

Where I am is not where I was—yet neither have I reached the place I am trying to get to.

This year in particular, my thoughts were shaped by the people whose creations or lifestyles or insights have lit me up. Through these gurus, it may be that part of me has leveled up in some way—but uncomfortably, the rest of me hasn’t caught up yet. The outside doesn’t match the inside.

And maybe that is why I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time expanding my Pinterest boards. Maybe, in an intuitive sort of way, I’ve been trying to shape a vision for where I want to get to. What does this same-only-different Carmine look like? What does this different life look and feel like at its essence?

My mantra this year has been: "Listen and receive." To paraphrase Sonya Darien over at tiny buddha, if everything I am receiving is perfect as it is, what is it that I am not seeing?

“Receive” means embracing the whisker-burnings as well as the flame’s beauty…the darkest of November skies and the mystery of not-knowing, alongside the moments of near clarity--like the sharp call of the soul-as-Blue Jay that says Wake up! Be patient. Something is happening.

On the paths of confusion, it would be wise to trust that all is happening in perfect timing. Even and especially in the closing-down days of November and December.

Photos: Early November 2013, Minnehaha-Park-above-the-floodplain

Dark three times

You live in a small, dusty Midwestern town, sometime in the 1930s. A town of creaky screen doors, faded flower-print dresses waving on clotheslines, chicken coops, cornfields and white wood-frame churches, where the night sky is still lit only by fireflies and the Milky Way.

It is an utterly ordinary dusty town. People listen to the radio in the evenings after they wash the supper dishes, and the only strangers occasionally encountered are the neighbors' out-of-town relatives or the door-to-door salesmen who come from other small and dusty towns.

And it is so dark and quiet at night. Quiet with a fine, silvered silence broken only by hoot owls, crickets, nighthawks and the rustle of the corn as the fox slinks through the stalks.

The townspeople mostly close their windows to this particular music, since warmth and safety can feel hard to come by.

One day in late autumn, when the harvest is in and bees cluster in their hives—an overcast day, when crows roost in the bare branches and caw loudly at small boys—a gypsy wagon with faded paint and gilded rosettes sets up on the edge of this dusty town.

Nobody knows where the wagon came from, or what it's for; but, being so unexpected, so unusual, the wagon (and the odd sounds that come from inside) stirs up a wondering that slowly builds as the afternoon passes.

Finally that evening, the townspeople hear the winding, beguiling melodies of a strange music wafting over the corn fields. Composed of accordion and clarinet and fiddle and they don't know what all...but the woman's voice calls to them, so they shrug on their coats and go, walking in pairs or bunches as the excited children race around them in the dark. After all, despite the dullness of their ordinary town, aren't they as curious as any other human creatures? And as drawn to magic and mystery?

So they gather on the edges, in that liminal space between town and not-town; wild and not-wild. They gather in the dark, under the moon, by the light of the leaping violet fire, where a ragtag company of musicians play well-worn instruments late, late into the night. Laughingly they gather on hay bales set around the encampment. Some close their eyes and sway slightly as the otherworldly, dark-velvet music enwraps them. Some shyly waltz together in that hinterland where the flashing edges of the firelight dance with the darkness.

And for a while, they are reminded that this world, which encompasses and breathes through themselves and every other living thing, is an enormous, unfolding story, of which each is part. That darkness is the other side of brightness, and joy the other side of pain.

The music to which they danced and dreamed that night sounded like this.

Ashes

Celebrate

Dark Dark Dark are based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While they don't to my knowledge travel via gypsy caravan, they do tour nomadically around the world.

Standing still

Fire.

Roaring, snapping, flickering fire. Blossoming to life beneath our hands, warming our bodies, beguiling our eyes, comforting our light-hungry spirits....

Entering the longest, darkest night of the Northern hemisphere, I long for fire.

The slow, mesmerizing dance of flames entrances human creatures in the way that only another elemental force—flowing water—can. Gaze upon this glorious, ever-changing, fulminating flower, and you are swallowed by the Now. You live your existence in leaping flames, free for a timeless moment from circling thoughts that pull you away from Here. You are fully present and still...at rest, at peace. Like calls to like: This living creature brightly burning in the darkness is an analog for the shining spark of life we each carry within.

Before dawn on this shortest of days, the solstice—stillness—held us so close, lulling us in sleep, whispering of rest, renewal; of cold things in stasis and warm, fur-bearing beings nestled deep in dens, noses tucked under tails.

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, it has been said. Better yet to love both darkness and shadow—as essential and rightful to this world as light. For only in the deepest darkness can we see the endlessly roaring fires of the stars, and most wholly love both the darkness and the flame.

But for today, the Winter Solstice, Darkness is our music, and Light, our beloved dance partner.

Winter solstice: 5:12am this day, in this place.

Falling silver

The rain fell all day, out of a pewter sky, pelting away at mushy piles of snow. I wound garlands of blue twinkle lights around the picture window, the dining room door frame and the built-in buffet; a festive glow to lighten the dimness.

Dark as it is, the rain sounds like silver...hissing under tires, slurrying down icicles, ringing and puddling in crystal hollows. Silver is the color of December for me: Silver snow, moon, bells, stars. Silvershine, silverlight, silvershiver.  The tiny, precious silver beads my mother used to decorate gingerbread men, that lay silver-sweet on my child's tongue.

I love both of these songs that have silver in their names—there is a sort of slow majesty about each of them. Adam Sparhawk and his wife Mimi Parker are the gorgeous voices in Low, an indie band based in Duluth, MN, that has opened for Radiohead and periodically tours around the world. Singer-songwriter Haley Bonar, from South Dakota, also lives in Minnesota and has opened for Low.

They are almost lullabies...good night, all.