The Gleewomen

My dear Indigo Vat has at last undergone a long overdue Naming. For a while now I've been aware of the fact that I appear to be running a natural dye website, when in fact I am a writer of fantastical and ecological fiction and essays. I do now and then mention natural dyes, but I think this has become confusing. I've been waiting for the right time, and the right name, and now both seem to have come! Welcome to my Gleewoman's Notes. I plan to be using this space more often, shifting my focus a bit to emphasize shorter, more informative posts that explore particular facets of natural history, human history and the many literatures and myths of the fantastic, as they come up in my life and catch my interest and my heart. There will also be posts about daily life, but I hope to create a space here that is a bit more honed and focused, a space that can be a resource for all who visit.

The Musicians, Lucas van Leyden 1524

So, without further ado, a little bit about gleemen, the Old English term for minstrels, bards, jongleurs. I chose the word "gleewoman" (modified to the feminine) for the new title of my blog because the role of the traveling singer and taleteller has always plucked a deep cord in my heart, ever since I was small. Before newspapers and movies and books read in bed, there were the wandering ones who came bearing not only local gossip and news from the next village, not only bright silks and juggling balls to entertain the small ones, but stories ripe as apples, stories with their roots so far back in time and in the land that no one could say where they had begun, or where they might end. It is this tradition—of the stories passed on round fires for millennia, stories that always had hearts made out of wonder, hearts threaded with hulda and vila and dragons and trolls—that I write in, to which I sing my songs at dusk. 

Girl Playing Music, Marie Spartali Stillman 1844-1927

I love that the literal etymology of gleeman is exactly as it looks—a man who is mirthful with music; a man who brings the joy of music; perhaps most specifically a man whose trade is the glee of song. Glee in its original sense was connected with music, but also with the Old Norse gly, for joy, which had its hooves in other gl- words associated with shining, smooth, radiant things. And of course back before the printing press, and up until today in oral cultures, story and poetry and song were inextricably linked. So glee is the joy of good tales as well as good songs. 

A gleeman or gleemaiden (as the rarer women-minstrels were also called) was not the fancy sort; not the kind of minstrel who was invited to the king's court. No; these jolly gleemen were for common folk, and their stories were all the richer and freer for it. Getting roped in to the life of a court bard surely had its advantages in pay and comfort, but it also meant that the poet had to tell tales and sing ballads to the liking of those in power. You danced the king's dance, not your own. And so although gleewomen and men probably rarely dressed in shining robes, the stories they told could gleam brighter than any buried treasure. And to juggle from town to town, trading in the glee of story; well, that must have been a shining life in many ways, despite its inevitable hardships. 

Sapho jouant de la harpe, 1475, French illuminated manuscript

When I was seventeen, I did my final project for a medieval European history class on jongleurs. These were the French equivalent of the English peasant gleeman—not the aristocratic troubadours, but the fellows who rambled town to town hawking every kind of entertainment. Jongleur, after all, is where we get the word "juggler." For my project, I created the leatherbound journals, complete with watercolors and pressed flowers, of one such roaming taleteller. "... In which one wayfaring jongleur recounts his journeys in Southern France in the year of our Lord one thousand two hundred and eight," reads the title page. I remember staying up very late the night before it was due, dashing out paintings of St. John's Wort and scrambling to find something suitable for affixing dry oak leaves. The tale—a bit florid, I daresay, with this decade of hindsight—is threaded through with factual information about the lives of jongleurs. Here is a little taste below, to bring that old world to life...

Rebec player, medieval illuminated manuscript

I spent the night beneath an oak tree, arms stiff and wary around my harp, as if she were an anchor, holding me steady against the waves and eddies of the darkness, against the small voices of the little folk who dance with the full moon. [...] 

I am bound to no one, nothing but the wind, the winding roads, and my harp. The villagers are delighted when I pass through, because it is not often that they hear the sweet voice of a harp. Such instruments are usually played only by the troubadours, the nobles, and since they rarely travel beyond their castles and manors (preferring their luxury I suppose), the folk must settle for the more common sounds of whistles, drums, rattles and gitterns, on occasion. [...]

I came upon the small town of Mailline early this morning, and greeted the stirring folk with the lively plano, followed by the juggling of nine balls stitched from cowhide and painted in colors like the sunrise. It is always wise to capture the ears of the villagers with a quick, loud ditty, then enchant their eyes with flashing hands and colors, woo them with small feats, and then tie them in completely with the sound of the harp. [...] The villagers of Mailline were especially enchanted with my songs, and gathered round, abandoning their chores to listen, cross-legged or leaning against the central well. I played for them an alba about a shepherdess and a knight who, after sharing their love for a night, had to part with the first rays of sun, the first notes of birdsong. I sang a sirvente, criticizing the ever warring dukes of our land. [...] I also recited, without my harp, a simple verse, embellished with my own additions, of the tale of Joseph and Mary. I always like to weave into a performance at least one religious piece, for safety's sake, though I find they don't lend themselves particularly well to romance...

The Minstrel, Kate Elizabeth Bunce 1890 

Although the world we live in is no longer so small nor so simple as that of early medieval Europe, nor as wise as the nomadic hearthfires of the many myth-telling indigenous peoples of the world, I think the allure of the wandering mythcarrier is as strong, maybe stronger, than ever. After all, don't we all pick up our hems and go sprinting (or more literally driving for two hours!) toward Point Reyes Station when Martin Shaw comes to tell his tales at night in the old church? Aren't we all starved for the kinds of stories that make you drop everything to sit at the feet of poetry?

It is this lineage of story-making to which I have been very joyfully and also very humbly apprenticing myself for most of my life. (Not necessarily the traveling, performative bit, but who knows? Perhaps one day...) This past year has seen some changes in my Wild Talewort business and the intensity and speed with which I write and share. These outer changes reflect some deeper inner shifts as I travel with ever more devotion along the gleewoman's path, trying to make sure that the joy of storymaking reaches as deep into my own heart as it can, and then on out into the world, doing its best to sing a song of hope and reconnection.

The Beggars, Lucas van Leyden 1520

Terri Windling said something brilliant about the relationship between tale and music in her recent lecture at the 4th annual Tolkien Lecture at Pembroke College. "I believe there's something in these old stories that does what singing does," she says. "They both have transformational capabilities—the way a melody can change your mood. It can't change your actual situation, but it can change your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape from reality. We create it to be able to stay."

I hope that this refreshed blog space can be a place of respite, gleaming bits of beauty, bright juggling balls and love-songs, amidst all the bad news, negativity and disconnection rife online and in our world. I hope that these scraps of magic will help you (and me!) stay with it, with the true songs in our hearts, no matter how dark the winds that blow. 

Buried in Quilts of Pine Pollen Dreaming

In the places where ghosts might be sleeping, it is good to bring gifts. We brought bishop pine pollen and shook it, yellow veils that could turn anything to joy. 

I want to show you the pathway into my March Tinderbundle. The word is BURY. The word came out of a place, a day, a walk into a sleeping world protected in its dreams, in its brambles and tall grass, a day shared with a very special kindred spirit, whose artwork will grace this bundle instead of my watercolors this month— Catherine Sieck. This Tinderbundle is the secret alchemy between two adventuring wild-hearts (mine and Catherine's, bearing picnic foods and notebooks and one cup of chai between us) and a sleeping place with bones buried in its earth and benevolent spirits at its gables.

Catherine Sieck's incredible paper cut work! 

This is a sacred place. A place half-forgotten, protected in its forgottenness. I will keep its name in the earth for now.  I don't know the real one any way, the true one named thousands of years ago. The bishop pines dusted it all in pollen. Each one of these towers, these strange ladders of catkin, unfurled quilts of pollen when touched, silken. Initiating us into this descent into a brambled dream in a cove on the edge of Tomales Bay.

Quiet your eyes, and your mind. Pluck a hair from your head and leave it as a gift for the wind. You are entering a place out of time, pollen dusted, buried in vine. 

Step in through the world-round window, step in through the tin rippled door. 

A great bishop pine not giant fifty years ago watches over the ruined redwood cottages, veiling them in silken exhalations of pollen. For thousands of years Coast Miwok people lived in this cove. Without a doubt their bodies are buried here. There is a sense in the air of benevolent eyes, benevolent hands who love this land very, very dearly, who found joy here, despite all hardship. A sense that you must come here bearing love, or be chased away. In the late 1800's, a Coast Miwok family built the cottages here, working on ranches and as fishermen to stay afloat in a world utterly changed. It was no doubt a hard life, and yet unlike so many of their people, they were able to stay on their ancestral land. This land. They were not taken away. 

Later, in the 1960's, an artist of great and whimsical heart bought the abandoned cottages just before Point Reyes became National Seashore. He painted and built and dreamed here until 1996, when he died. His name was Clayton Lewis, and his was a happy place, and the ghosts who lived here before him liked him, I think; he saw beauty like they did. He honored it, his whole life here. You can feel it everywhere; how people have loved this place. 

I say these facts and names because it is good to honor the dead, those who came before; but also this is a place of no names, a place out of  time. The glass is blown out of the windows. The houses are drifting back into the arms of the land--ivy and eucalyptus and pine. Daffodils from some long ago garden bloom and so do calla lilies but the grass and hedgenettle are taller, fiercer. 

Birds fly down chimney pipes, and die, and make piles of bones.

Buried in green. It will all soon be buried in green. Asleep inside the thickets. And I am reminded of the Sleeping Beauty tale. Not the girl, nor the prince, nor the spindle, but the sleeping realm overgrown in thorns. The way the land heaves upward to protect, to bury, to hold, something precious. I find I agree with Ursula Le Guin, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, who lament that wakening kiss, who cry out that the heart of the story is this "still center," as Le Guin writes, "the silent house, the birdsong wilderness" (Sylvia Townsend Warner). (From Le Guin's essay "The Wilderness Within: The Sleeping Beauty and 'The Poacher'")

Asleep; Arthur is asleep on Avalon, his bones in earth; Mother Holle sleeps in the ground, in some great barrow; Snow White and Brynhild and Oisin sleep too. There are so many stories of sleeping queens and heroes whose bones protect a place, who will rise up at last when the land which sleeps with them is in need of their protection.

Asleep, this place dreams in green ladders and windows opened with vine.

It dreams in tiny sacred towers whose windows are air and eucalyptus naves, where the light ghosts through, blue.

It dreams in bobcat prints along the sandy bay shore, walking slow in the shading cypress trees, in the slip slap lap of salt water, the peering faces of harbor seals and mergansers in the rippling blue. 

To wake such a place-- this would mean tearing down or fixing up, bulldozers or tins of paint and hammers and a neatened pathway down, a sign marking the way. This is a thought almost physically painful for me to bear. There are too few places left in this world to the rhythms of simultaneous collapse and rebirth; too few places left in the quiet of kinglet and raven calls to dream. Too many places ripped out of their ancient sleep. I can only say--let it fall, let it fall, let it fall at the pace of this dreaming, no faster, no slower.

Catherine and I, we dreamed with it for a while, touching the wooden doorframes gently, with love, spilling out offerings of chai and strands of hair and soft words, because it is always good to give something in exchange. We spoke quietly, like we were in the homes of dreamers. We sat barefoot in sun like two cats and the word BURY came out of it all, a word whose root is bhergh, related to barrow and burrow, borough and burg and borrow, and, amazingly, the name of the goddess Brigid, the root meaning to protect, to defend, to preserve, as well as a dwelling, a hilltop place, defensible (barrows are also hills, after all...). Buried treasure. Buried seeds. Buried bones. Deep burrows, protecting moles from snakes. The ground the body of the mother, the earth, the goddess, protecting. Things buried rise again, when they are ready. 

What an enormous honor and joy it is to work with the wonderful Catherine

We gathered yarrow, green feathers standing up from the earth. I took them home and cut them up, poured oil over them, and buried the jar in my garden. An old world way to keep your medicine temperature controlled, dark, cool, but also, I think, to infuse it with the great old electric earth, protected entirely in her hands. 

And we gathered leaves and sticks and seedpods from the sleeping place itself. I laid them on raw silk and wrapped them to make an ecoprint, in the tradition of the incredible India Flint, then buried both bundles in the earth too.

The yarrow, the bundled fabric, they are dreaming now in the ground, treasure to be unearthed anew, and given to you. Along with a story, the story that this sheltered cove of  cottage and raven and kind spirits wants to tell. This is a secret, yet. A secret that will fly to your doorstep by the darkness of the moon, March 20th, when it is buried in the sun's shadow, if you so desire.... 

Tinderbundles, here!

Collecting Story-Pollen: of Cedars, of Mushrooms, of Bees

I went to Honey Grove to create the latest Gray Fox Epistle  (arriving in subscriber's post boxes the 4th or so of November!), set not in my native California, but there, in the boundary between the wild woods of Vancouver Island, and the haven of peace and cultivation and sacredness that is Honey Grove. I went there to be like the honeybee, gathering the pollen of a new place in my writer's hands, into my heart. I went, and I crossed my fingers that I would be able to write anything at all.

The experience was more beautiful than I could have possibly hoped. As I mentioned a few posts ago, the first morning Nao let me taste the honey from her holy bees, and then a bit of propolis (the antibacterial, antiviral, resinous material they make from ingesting tree sap-- mainly fir or cedar around here-- which they then use to seal up their hives), and finally a spoonful of pollen (like little beach pebbles). It felt like a baptism into the landscape, into the world known and loved (literally) by the Honey Grove Bees.

Below, my dear readers, is a little taste of the pollen I gathered, which indeed became an Epistle, currently out in the mail-webs, traveling to meet the hands of its subscribers! That Epistle was written early in the mornings, before light, when I was still drifting near dreams. I ate a little honey each morn to make sure I had the bee-magic in me as I wrote. When it got light, I shared breakfast with my new friends, and the magic of the day began.

I've learned, the more I write, the more deeply woven into that craft and art I become, that writing is as much about Being Present in the World as it is about sitting at the desk and doing it, pen to paper. You have to go out, penless and paperless, and Be, in order to have something to tell of. You (at least I) need to feel some deep wonder at the world, and deep curiosity, at its every particular, otherwise what is there to say?

Without further ado, the pollen:

Cold mists gathered low each morning, walking the ground with silver feet.

The sun came to burn them off, but the mist liked to stay a bit longer on the spider strings.

Emmett the duck took good care of his ladies in the duck-pen, and showed off his lovely wing feathers to us as we passed. In the Epistle, there is a woman with a goose foot, orange as Emmett's...

The autumn vegetables, the last raspberries, the richness of this land that Nao and Mark cultivate is truly profound. And when you are amidst it, you can feel it positively pulsing with the Love they have put into its tending. I've never been anywhere like it, so suffused with this kind of care and creativity. Honey Grove felt to me like a work of art, in the best possible sense-- a place created from the deep wellsprings of all sacred creativity and knowledge of the lives of Plants, a place also engaged in a deep and respectful conversation and relationship with the wild woods around it, with the soil, with the air. And Nao and Mark its gate-keepers, its edge-walkers, its parents and its friends and its students.

Nao planned a small Gray Fox Epistles reading with a handful of her friends. I pored over her collection of my Epistles with a morning cup of tea, trying to decide what to read, and having a bit of trouble!

I've never gotten to see all the Epistles at the Other End, when they reach their readers at far corners of the globe, mail-battered, lovingly read. A delight!

We made a spice cake for the reading-- after all, what is cosier than tea, and cake, and stories aloud? The three really must go together.

And yes, in case you were wondering, this cake was even better than it looks. Oh my heavens. The ideal tea-cake, in my opinion, wreathed in garden-picked calendula. 

Then we wandered off to gather beautiful bits of the forest for a small altar, the Land Around Us deserving a place at the reading too, as it is always the ultimate Pollen to me when I write-- the movings and livings of the wild world.

Gus the magical dog, of course, accompanied us with much aplomb, and the expectation of at least a few treats. He is just the sort of companion you hope for on a misty walk, snuffing and frisking about and making sure you remember to poke around in the bushes too.

I love that one of the only ways to really see the individual drops of mist is on a spiderweb. Two of the most delicate miracles in the world-- mist and spidersilk-- together. In the Epistle, there are misted threads of spider-line, and there are pearl necklaces scattered in moss just so...

Nao (above) and I both wore red coats, because it is hunting season. I'm not used to wearing red, and I realized as I walked what an invigorating color it is. A powerful color, as a woman, the red of menstrual blood, life-force. I associate red with mythic tales-- red coats and capes and vests and skirts and hats. Somehow it leant that essence to our walk, which felt like a walk out of Time, into the soft Magic of the Land, and back again (to eat our spice cake....)

I couldn't stop marveling at the red cedars, which we don't have in my part of coastal California. They feel like very feminine motherly trees to me, with the most delicious gentle smell to their scaly needles. Above, Nao gathers a few fronds. When I look at this photo now, as I thought at the time, the tree feels like a big wise old lady, leaning down in a maternal way to let Nao take a few bits of green.

For thousands of years, in First Nations cultures, the cedar has been one of the most important, and most holy trees, used to make a huge range of items, from canoes to longhouses, baskets and clothing and rope from the bark, medicine, capes, masks... Virtually every part of this powerful tree was used, to such a degree that the cedar is referred to as the Tree of Life to many Pacific Northwest native peoples. Meeting it here, I can see why.

I gathered some feathery fronds as well, to take home with me and to nibble at (they taste divine).

This silvery cedar bark seems to have been pecked by what looks to me to be some sort of sapsucker (they wood-peck in straight lines like that)-- perhaps a red-breasted sapsucker, which according to my research resides year-round on Vancouver Island. Amazing, to imagine a bird designed to drink the sap from trees-- I imagine cedar sap is delicious, and I wonder if the bees gather it for their propolis.

We gathered fern-moss when we entered the damp forest...

.... and marveled at the lacy edges of mushrooms, dark and wise underground beings who know of decay and of regeneration....

.... the red of the old amanita, dangerous mushroom of shamanic hallucination, of Viking beserker rages, of fairy-tale temptations.

Back in the cottage, we laid our altar, we drank tea, we ate spice cake, I read a quilted patchwork from two Epistles to the little gathering of women.

We were both aglow, when the guests left, with the magic of it all. 

And all of these things in one way or another were gathered in my red notebook, where all my story-writing occurs-- the hive where I put the honey, the pollen, the propolis. The story-Epistle that emerged, which is a retelling of the Grimm's Queen Bee, at once Is, and Is Not, of this place. It is not Merville (the township where Honey Grove resides), and yet it is. It is not exactly these fir and cedar woods, and yet it is... and so it goes with all tales.

But the Bees, well, they are always and only the Bees, nothing else. They are the true carriers of the tale, and of all the stories of this landscape. I am so grateful to have met them, and I am so grateful to Nao and to Mark and to Gus, and to all the beings of Honey Grove, for such a perfect visit.