Our Lady of the Dark Country

<Mother of the World, by Nicholas Roerich 1937>

What follows is the full introduction to a brand new book of mine called Our Lady of the Dark Country, a collection of my short stories, poems and a novella about powerful women, about the deep feminine, about Earth's magic. I am deeply happy to set it before you in this slow, dark, nourishing root of the year like an egg set in a quiet pool, for you to take in deep as starlight in this winter season. Something is shifting deep below the surface of things; the ancient ways of snake and woman are rising. This is a women-made book. My friend and the amazing designer at Heyday, Ashley Ingram, laid the book out for me as a freelance project. The artwork of Catherine Sieck and Nomi McLeod is featured within. And the cover painting is by none other than Rima Staines, a wild madonna-sibyl that she painted for our collaboration on the latest Dark Mountain volume. 

This book is an opening and a rooting. May it serve you well. 

*For US orders-- buy a copy here, or at any online bookseller, or request through your local shop! *

*For UK orders-- buy a copy from the Hedgespoken shop here! *

Introduction to Our Lady of the Dark Country

Women of America, of Europe, women of my blood and mothers of my ancestors, women of all the lands of this Earth: the words in this book are needles. Thread them where they need to go: through your body, through your life, into the ground as roots. They have come from a true place in me, from the place where forgotten stories have been buried, and I give them to you in these pages gladly.

We have come to an epistemic crossroads, a crisis of the “real.” I will not be able to win an argument with an archaeologist, an academic, a business man, or possibly even an old friend, by trying to state facts about the indigenous feminine traditions of Europe, about the Neolithic, about the work of Marija Gimbutas, about war, about peace, about menstruation, about sexuality, about freedom, about truth, about the heart, about the reality of magic, because facts have become a slippery thing and it seems that these days what matters is who fears what, and who gains what, and not What Is True. A fact is not What Is True. A fact is only an arrow that points toward who has the power and what story they want to tell.

A dozen times a week, sometimes a day, I want to write angry essays, immaculate in articulation and bombproof in argument, essays that are swords, cutting through two thousand years of tyrannical, imperialistic, misogynistic, life-denying narratives—the ones that are presently calling climate change a “pagan” notion, the ones that allow big oil and big gun lobbies to persist even in the face of the deadliest public mass shootings in history and a planet on the brink of devastating environmental chaos, the ones that enable the exploitation of just about everything and everybody remotely exploitable and objectifiable—but if I write angry essays like I am beginning to do here I will be dismissed by many as an angry feminist. Hysterical. It’s just her womb talking.

Well, actually, it is, and I’m proud to say it. I’m bleeding today. My womb is shedding like a snake. It is windy outside and just started to rain, loud and sweet on the roof. It is dusk. There’s a cake of quince, saffron and almond flour baking in the oven, and wood pigeons roosting in the bay trees, and I am indeed an angry woman writing but it is time, women of my blood, women of America, women of this Earth, that we were not ashamed. That we no longer believed anybody who told us our bodies and the wisdom of our bodies was not true. It is time we were proud and not embarrassed to say “I am bleeding today.” It used to be that a woman bleeding was sought for what she knew, for what she thought, because she was closest to something bigger. A moon, a tide. It is time we started at the very snake-center of our bodies and saw again the birthright of our strength, our power, and of a knowing that is older and vaster by far than the life-destroying cultural story we are currently living in.

You don’t have to know all the details about what happened, and who did what, and why—the series of Bronze Age invasions from the Russian steppe, the rise of the Roman Empire and a fanatical Christian state, the Inquisition and witch burning times, the colonization of the “New World” and onward—and how all of it is still embedded in the legacies we enact today, to feel what is beneath, in the dark country of our bodies, out of sight. All you have to do is begin at the center of yourself and listen. Earth’s language and the language of the living world will speak directly to you there, and tell you What Is True, from that wellspring which has long been associated with the womb (if you have a female body), and the center of yourself and your lifeforce (if you have a male body).

I want to pause here and make it clear that this book, though deeply feminine, is not only for women but for men too, and everyone between, around, above, below and sideways from those gender designations. I want to make sure you know I am not disparaging the male gender here as such, but only an aggressive manifestation of it—called patriarchy. There is little good in hate, and especially something so silly as the hate of an entire gender. Over-simplification, as my good husband often says, is rarely useful. And I have been blessed in my life with strong, caring examples of masculinity. I am married to a wonderful, respectful man. I was raised by a wonderful father, with a wonderful brother, kind and protective uncles, two loving grandfathers, and am now blessed to have a generous and good-hearted father-in-law and two brothers-in-law I am proud to call my family. Some of my most cherished teachers have been men, and some of my loveliest friends.

The violent objectification inherent in extreme patriarchy affects men as much as it does women. Differently, but terribly too. As I heard Lyla June Johnston (the Diné and Tsétsêhéstâhese poet, musician and activist) say in an interview last spring, the witch hunts damaged the men of Europe as much as the women. The witch hunts broke them too, for there is no faster way to destroy a man’s spirit (besides enslaving him or sending him to the trenches of a senseless war) than to take away and kill the women he loves—mother, wife, daughter, sister—and leave him with the horrific belief that it was his fault, that he didn’t do enough, that he could have done more. That he failed them. So while this book may appeal more to those who identify as “women,” it is not only for women. I write these words for all, in celebration of what the feminine might look like untrammeled and in balance with the masculine—in the past, in the present, and in the future.

I believe we are walking around with the witch trials still burning in our blood, and it is time to turn and look. There are lies still branded in our culture and the story of what it means to be a woman in the West, put there by the ancestral memory of breast ripper and hot rod and iron maiden and shackle and pyre, put there by forced marriage and forced silence, corset and shame. No manner of rhetoric would save you if the men of the Inquisition wanted you dead, even when you confessed to a mythology made entirely by them. Satan and the Devil do not belong to witches or to women, but to the life-denying story that says: to be born of a woman’s body is to be soiled. This is our original sin, they say. You must spend your whole life atoning, paving your path to elsewhere, away from Earth. To be a woman who practiced the old indigenous ways of Europe, who knew her power and the power of earthfast stone and holy spring, bird and knot and hare and womb, a woman who was a priest in her own right, a doctor, a seer—this was to be a direct threat to male Christian power. Some women were carried to “trial” in baskets, so their feet wouldn’t touch the ground, because the men feared that they would get power from the Earth that way.

But the worst part of it all is that the Inquisition worked so well it not only killed hundreds of thousands of women, but actually erased the truth of the witch and her (or his) indigenous roots from the old land of Europe. Erased them right out of the field of history. It is only very recently that this narrative is being amended. The story of the witch replaced the reality of the witch and we are left in its ashes still, alternately scoffing at the notion that a witch was ever a real person, or caricaturing her as a terrible old woman with warts who deserved to be killed by a young hero because she put babies in her oven and ate them.

Imagine if we spoke of the Holocaust with a snicker—“well, I mean, Jewish people weren’t real, it was just a mistaken hysteria, and that’s over now, don’t be silly.” And then we dressed up like them for Halloween to scare each other, and to laugh. Don’t be fantastical, witches were never real anyway, and if you want to talk about it, about women’s oldest knowing and a time when we were not objects under the hands of more powerful men, well, that’s some weird goddess shit, go ahead, suit yourself, but you will immediately be written off and shoved into a women’s studies department or the occult shelf. Meanwhile the rest will go on calling the real thing History and not men’s studies, starting with the earliest so-called “real” civilization, Mesopotamia, and the old Epic of Gilgamesh in which a man clearcuts a forest and builds a city, or the Enuma Elish, in which the newer gods kill the older gods, including the dragon-creatrix Tiamat, using her body to make the world. This is how you do it, this is how you build a civilization, see? they tell us. But if you read between the lines and into the more marginalized texts (the ones called “Women’s Studies,” for example) you might begin to suspect that to be built upon the carcass of dragon might be a metaphor for the overhaul of an older mythology by a violent, patriarchal one—the conquest of a peaceable, fecund, matrilineal agrarian culture that had been flourishing for the previous five thousand years or so without trouble or resource depletion.

Don’t get me wrong. I spend a lot of time in the bookstore in the Women’s Studies section. I make a beeline straight for the mythology shelf and the science fiction and fantasy wing. Deeply intelligent, important things are being written and published and placed in these sections, and I feel most at home among them. Here be dragons. But I think there’s something inherently troubling about the way this genrefication of both fiction and historical studies creates a hierarchy that looks a whole lot like the hierarchies of the Roman Empire, the Christian state, the US government, the workplace, and in many cases the home, whatever we say about feminism.

The eminent Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas provides a fascinating, and to me very frustrating, case study. After enjoying great esteem among her male colleagues for many years of work on Bronze Age Proto-Indo-European culture in the 1950’s and 60’s, she began to point out that there were an awful lot of female-shaped figurines in the ancient substratum of sites across southern, eastern, and central Europe long before said Indo-Europeans arrived. She went on to suggest, based on decades of study not only of ancient Neolithic cultures but also the folklore of eastern Europe, that they might have had religious value, possibly as representatives of goddesses in a matrilineal clan culture. She noticed what she thought were many small temples and a remarkable lack of weaponry or ornate burial mounds with kings in them, having dug most of the sites herself and read the reports for the rest in one of the eleven languages she was fluent in and her male colleagues were not. As if this wasn’t apparently bad enough (using the word “goddess” and “matriarchy” seems to immediately make the academic community uncomfortable) women who weren’t academics got excited about her work in the 1970’s because they felt she was uncovering at last a feminine heritage that was empowering, a new narrative that honored women’s bodies, women’s ways, and returned to them a millennia-long tradition of goddess worship across the ancient western world.

As far as many of Gimbutas’ colleagues were concerned, this was the equivalent of digging her own scholarly grave and burying her academic reputation alive, although her work was no less thorough, thoughtful, or well-researched than before. But she had begun to adopt a more interdisciplinary approach, weaving in her knowledge of folklore and linguistics to interpret the figurines she was uncovering, and probably a bit of imagination and intuition too. A more feminine way, maybe, but still founded upon thirty years of study and thought.

I’d be curious to know if the reaction would have been the same had she noted a remarkable number of male figurines, and suggested the worship of predominantly male gods. I have little doubt that there would have been no academic outcry. But a goddess is a very different thing than a god. Today, her work is much beloved among feminists and goddess followers, but generally dismissed by the academic community, and while we can laugh it off as a big loss to them, I think it’s actually quite chilling. An essay by a man who’d clearly not read all of Gimbutas’ work and certainly hadn’t thought very much about it is the only one included in the best contemporary volume on Old European culture. In his piece he dismisses all of Gimbutas’ conclusions with a writerly sneer and says not much of anything else besides that they might have been sex objects, pornographic in some way, maybe dolls or maybe just female bodies but, come on people—you can feel his sarcasm between the lines—let’s not be ridiculous here, let’s not be fanciful, sacred? Religious? Wide-hipped female figurines with possible snake heads, how could they be sacred or religiously important in any significant way? Let’s not get worked up about this, that’s just what the women want them to be and they can’t be right because, well—

And here we come at last to the terrible crux of the problem, and my diatribe. They cannot be goddesses with central significance to the cultures they were found buried within because—because—

It’s subconscious at this point, deeply so. You can see the trend. Why should we be so outrageously embarrassed when a woman suggests matrilineal goddess-worship that we won’t even consider it a real possibility?

Because it upsets the entire narrative of academia, of “progress,” of what we think we mean when we say “civilization.”

Because it takes us straight back to the woman beneath the apple tree speaking to the snake in the garden. Whatever she knew, whatever the snake was telling her, they’ve been trying to silence for at least the last two thousand years. And we’ve been trying to silence her in ourselves.

But I think something is changing now. I see it in the news, and it I feel it in the air, and in the center of myself, and in the ground.

Women and men of heart, Earth’s snakes are speaking. It is time we listen for the truth they tell us through the centers of ourselves. Women and men of heart, we make a spiral around this planet. It is time to tell the old stories that have damaged us differently. To go beneath what we’ve been told and into the dark country, into the Earth, where the other side of those stories is hidden, the truth that was carried all along in the roots of the trees despite thousands of years of war.

In this book I offer stories of that place, from the dark country that was never truly conquered or secondary, no matter what they told us. The place that was always the beginning, the center, the root. The place the snakes and dragons went when they had been called monster, and evil, and finally just a fantasy, one too many times.

The rain is falling harder now. The bishop pines roar with wind. Soon the owls will be calling. The house smells of quince and almond cake.

Come in. There are doorways, very near, that the dragons will walk through if we listen, and thread, and have the courage to stand up in our bodies and call them home.

SYLVIA V. LINSTEADT

The Bishop Pinewood

Inverness, California

November 2017 

The Autumnhouse

A field vole (c) Barrie H. Kelly

Vole, who lives at the root of an old fallen pine, knows the way in.

Her doorway is humble and easy to miss, but if you leave marigolds, or the last gold leaves of the buckeye, or the first acorn, at the root of a snag, she will most likely appear, plump with the last of summer's seeds, black-eyed, and kind. She will show you that the doorway is just here, through the hole in the rootplace of the tree which she uses regularly but which is also suddenly a smooth-carved, rounded door made of pine, with a bronze knob made of the bronze of ancient women who long ago tempered it among the embers of your blood, and now Vole is a plump, kind-eyed woman in a great tawny-furred shawl, opening that door for you, holding out a hand of welcome, gesturing you through. 

Inside, you are in a root, hollowed and smoothed and snug, a house that smells of ancient resins and fresh humus, nuts roasting, woodsmoke. There are windows, odd and random, glimpses of the afternoon's long gold light, the slantwise shade of rich sky blue, a buckeye heavy with shining nuts. The fire is new in the round-bellied hearth. Hazelnuts roast on top, and an earthenware bowl within, bubbling scents of corn and bean and sage and a hundred savory roots, a thousand. Only a Vole-woman knows how many. In the center of the round root room is a cushion woven thick of green and brown and yellow wool, and beside it a table made of a polished branch where all manner of wooden birds are perched. The woman settles back onto that cushion, taking a thin, sharp knife and a bit of wood from her belt. She begins to whittle and carve, singing high whistled vole songs that are almost too strange for your ears to follow. 

Varied thrush are coming, coming, coming through the night. Varied thrush are winging, winging, winging with the light. She chants as she carves. Pleiades are rising, varied thrush are flying, Scorpion has gone, Scorpion has gone. As she carves and sings, the root is no longer a snug house but a deep rush of sky and star and feathers. It is the inside of a thrush-breast, speckled as night, pulsing with a compass magnet and a map so old the stars sing to it like the singing vole. There the earth calls south, south. The stars have changed to gloaming. There is a place the thrush knows and flies toward, right into the window of the autumn house, guided by a thousand thousand ancestors. For the briefest moment the thrush flies right into your hands—a big songbird, orange and bluegray in painted swathes, with a song of two tones in one note that opens you up sidelong and brings the acorns swelling everywhere in the trees, and every ghost in your blood released to feast at last among them, welcomed home. 

The  Enclosed Garden, by Meinrad Craighead

Vole-woman stops singing. The house is only a root again, warm and safe. The hazelnuts have roasted. She places the wooden thrush she's carved in a window that peeks out onto a different forest where the stags are wild-antlered, big-chested, weaving after the long-necked and prancing does. Then she hands you a nut, hot and crisp and oily, the papery husk of it flaking into your hands. As you eat it, there is a sound around you like the rustle of falling leaves—buckeye, bigleaf maple, curls of madrone bark, old pine needles. It's a skin, vaguely shaped like you but also like a snake. Vole-woman scoops it up in a deft hand and throws it into the fire as you eat more nuts and listen to the thrushes as they arrive, singing autumn in to roost. 

Talking About The Weather

Fog walking on light feet across Abbott's Lagoon, Point Reyes 

Yesterday just before dusk, the fog came in. The fog came galloping, a herd of ghost elk with the wet western ocean in their hooves. It came pouring down the valley between two bishop pine ridges, straight from the sea. It marched east, brisk with salt and damp. And it was a greater balm to lung and heart than it had ever been before, though I have always loved the fog. I nearly shouted my gladness when I saw and smelled it, I nearly got down on my knees.

It has been a harrowing ten days in Northern California. Fires turned the gentle, beautiful agricultural counties and communities of Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino into the closest vision of hell I've yet seen in my life. I am lucky to say that I only saw these visions second-hand, in photographs and videos online. We live one county away, on a ridge between Tomales Bay and the ocean, in dense, dry pinewood, and have been on high alert every night, our hearts sick with sorrow and fear for the thousands who have lost homes, the dozens that have died, and the possibility of more fires starting. Stories from friends at the edges of evacuation zones, watching a black sky; stories from friends who fled at 1 am and drove past walls of flame, who lost everything; the air has been thick with the smoke of their loss for hundreds of miles. The air has been sick with the immolation of thousands of houses, cars, hotels, wineries, shopping malls, forests, hillsides, pastures, fields. In traditional Chinese Medicine, it is our lungs that hold and process grief. Our lungs are breathing wings, sifting the sorrow of thousands, and the voice of the screaming earth.

Native California grassland on a serpentine-rock hillside at the Oak Granary in Potter Valley, one of the areas in Mendocino affected by the fires (the Oak Granary land did not burn, but the fire came very close)

We have always been at the whim of the weather. Fire, wind, water, moving earth; these are the first deities we ever named. I believe the time is upon us when we are being called to name them again.  I do not think we have a choice, now. It is clear that no matter how safe we thought we made ourselves behind the trappings of industrial civilization, we are as vulnerable as we ever were. More so, because we have forgotten that these elements, they comprise our home. We are given everything we ever had by the selfsame soils, waters, winds, fires, and this remembrance is a balm and a strengthening gift that can nourish and buoy us every day.

We are so small in the face of such titans, these old earth deities, these weathers. And they are everywhere growing more erratic, more intense, more unpredictable, and more dangerous to us, because they are the earth's own voice, describing a total systemic imbalance. We are animals dependent on a living planet, a fact we've been trying to hide from ourselves in the West for centuries.  We can't hide from it anymore, and it is frightening and sad to see so suddenly and so clearly the truth that all the scientists and all the predictive models have been saying for years: this is only the beginning.

The old god called Mt. Tallac (in modern parlance), and the other, called Fallen Leaf Lake

In Homer's Odyssey, no king or sailor or soldier would dream of setting out on a journey of any length without first propitiating the gods of water and weather, pouring wine upon the earth and offering a fine flank of beef to the fire. (I know for a fact that the women were doing it too, in their hearths and homes, to their spindles and baskets of wool, to their fires and flocks and gardens, only the ancient Mycenean epics are male-oriented, so it's mostly the men we see.) In fact I think this is my favorite part of the whole tale-- the sheer preponderance of passages in which men offer wine and meat to the gods. Because it mattered; not necessarily in the sense that those propitiations bought their givers much protection (though they may have now and then), but because they demonstrated a worldview in which human beings understood that they must bow down to Thunder, to Wind, to Rain, to the Ones Who Walked the Mountains. When you pour wine to the earth and pray for safe passage to the deities of storm and tide, it's not that you think you can control them; it's that you know you are small before them, and that your respect toward them is a thing of value. To them, and to you. Because it repositions you within a network of living influences and beings, and feeds  you in turn, in ways both seen and unseen.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not in any way saying that these wildfires, fueled by years of intense drought and heat in California, and 80 mph hot Diablo winds from the Valley, could have been stopped by wine poured out on the earth and meat given to the gods, or by any other kind of prayer. Or that any of the other natural disasters we've seen this year could have been. Hurricanes, earthquakes, heat waves, floods. These are the weather of the world responding to biosphere-wide, human-made climate imbalance. They are enormous and terribly powerful and impersonal in their scope Welcome to climate chaos. Or so a voice has been ringing in my head all week. And another voice, a far-down-in-the-center-of-the-earth kind of voice, saying the supremacy of humans has ended. Not that we are all going to be swept off the face of the planet, or die en masse (I pray nothing of the sort ever happens), but more that we are being asked again to acknowledge the old gods. For real. Fire. Wind. Water. Earth. They are walking again. They are here to tell us something.

That weather, seasons, the elements, the circle that is earth-time, the web that is the living biosphere—these are not peripheral to our existence as a human species, though we have behaved as though they were for at least the last 200 years in the industrial West. Treating them with the reverence and mythic-thinking that the words "god," "deity," or "goddess" confer is not spiritual hogwash. It's not New Age woo. It's a thing that science can't do for us, but which we desperately need—to address the unseen dimensions of our planet's forces, the vast and mysterious powers that we can never hope to control. We should never have hoped to control them, but we did. Now, it seems to me that one of our only hopes for long term survival as a species, is to acknowledge what we don't understand, what we can't control, not with fear but with respect, awe, and humility. Storms, fires, floods, earthquakes; if we began to approach each in this spirit, acknowledging that we will have to change our ways of building, transporting ourselves, feeding ourselves, healing ourselves, in order to survive them in the coming century, would we find ourselves within a culture of reverence again, and the names of old gods surfacing on our tongues? 

The old pines and native grasses of the eastern edge of Fallen Leaf Lake, northern Sierra Nevadas

I don't know. I've been feeling helpless, and heartsick, and so sad for what has been lost in the communities across Sonoma and Napa and Mendocino that have been burned in these fires. So sad for the homes and lives ruined, for the thousands of undocumented people so deeply integral to our communities who have no insurance to protect them and no guarantee whatsoever for their own safety in this present political climate to begin with. So sad for the untold number of animals dead among the ashes. So sad for the continued barrage of storms and shootings and bad news of every stripe. I have been feeling, to be honest, a bit hopeless.

 Last week in the smoky air, I wrote the following poem-chant-cry in a state of deep grief. I wept the whole way through, but when the words were out, and the crying ceased, I found I had come to the threshold of hope after all. I wasn't expecting to, but I had.

So, I share these words with you here that you may grieve and then hope in turn.

Ashfall: a rain of white from other houses, other hills

Ashfall, it is a language of too-late, of sorrow.

Today I cannot find it in me to hope for utopias to spring up from the ashes,

for seeds we had forgotten to grow where everything has been destroyed

Today I don't know any longer how to tell a story that is that kind of seed

how to be honest and still say:

it will be better, my unborn daughters

it will be fine, my someday sons

Today what I see is a dark smoke across the ridges, the settling ash, a red sun

and what I smell is a sorrow five thousand years old

burning heavenhigh in a language of smoke that only Earth knows, keening to Sky

All week we have together breathed the ash of these five thousand sorrows

All week the great old bay and her lands have lain gasping under

the smoke of a scream that is still tearing across the dry hills from a throat of fire

Earth's dragons are searching for something we took from them and then forgot we took

Oh Goddess, Oh Earth, we took your children, we took your daughters, we took your sons:

the hills, the stones, the soil, the water, the air where the snowy geese go flying a thousand leagues to get back home; we took them but we didn't know we did because we had forgotten your name, and the names of your children, and we thought there was no cost, and we needed them badly because our own children were hungry and we were hungry and so afraid and lonely because we had forgotten that

we

are your children too.

White ash is falling

Dragons are awake, and walking.

No one is going to take us home now; we must take ourselves. 

That is not a mountain, but a god of granite and earth

This is not a fire, but a dragon of loss who will burn the world to hold her children again. 

Listen, the atmosphere speaks in stories made of weather, of wind, of drought, of flood. 

The earth speaks by moving, by fire, when we have forgotten how to hear the subtler words 

We are so small. The air is full of ashes. Our lungs are full of each other's houses, and sorrows, and the hills that know no ending but the seeds. 

Weep for me my children, says a voice. 

Weep for me, tears on ash. Then dry your eyes. 

In the garden, the ruby-crowned kinglets 
have returned for the winter from somewhere far away
Ring the bell of greeting
Kiss your husband 
Praise what flies and what carries and what holds forever
For we are home among the stars

* * * To raise money to donate to fire relief funds, and specifically to support undocumented families who have lost homes and livelihoods and will not be able to apply for any kind of federal aid, I am offering my novella The Dark Country for sale again for a short time. ALL PROCEEDS (besides shipping & printing costs which are about $4.00 per book), will be donated to the Graton Day Labor Center (Centro Laboral de Graton). LINK HERE * * *

To Lay Down in the Middle of the Forest When You’ve Lost Your Way

Earlier today a dear friend asked me about poems that have to do with the forest. And I remembered one I wrote a little over a year ago, part of my A Green Language poetry project (no longer up, but hopefully a printed book before too long!). 

It came to me almost entire in a single sitting one July morning last year, as if spoken by a kind and gentle old woman in a time when I very much needed such kind and gentle words. 

It seems we need words of gentleness now more than ever, so I share this with you here in the spirit of hope, and of another way which is not fighting, which is not part of the binary of good or evil, us or them, but something other, and older. 

To Lay Down in the Middle of the Forest When You’ve Lost Your Way

Never forget that it is all

the pilgrim’s path, that you are walking

a long, long way, that whatever

end you think you are seeking has

already changed its name, and is

not the end that’s seeking you.

On good days it will seem a romantic,

bright thing, this adventure, your boots

thick with mountain dust, a cane cut

from hazel in your hand, a rucksack full

of apples and oatcakes given to you by

someone who loves you on your back,

and on those good days you will think

the easy path goes on forever through

the open, that spring hills will always

be green and the kestrels always hovering

on amber wings.

Of course you know better:

that it’s only a spring stroll if you never

reach the forest, and no adventure at all.

It’s only a spring jaunt for wildflowers if you

don’t fall down on your knees and weep.

And nowhere is it spring forever.

You will find the pinewood inevitable.

The path will dissolve into a hundred paths,

each made by deer. There will be no waymarkers

and no stars. Your rucksack will feel empty,

and you will lose your hazel cane and

all the songs you ever learned

in the face of what scares you, in the face

of what is ugly in your own heart, in the face

of what is tearing the world to pieces.

Many will tell you to forge onward, to show courage,

to fight back, to look for signs on the duff, to not

stop moving for fear of cold, to not give in, to seek

the sunrise through the trees, to tell yourself

something stirring, something bright, to run away.

This is all well and good but most often the forest

isn’t done with you yet and fighting it is like netting

wind; all you will achieve is a tattered pair of boots,

an aching heart, a fresh strength of despair

and the sunrise no closer.

That’s just it, says the humus when you’ve

come at last to your knees.

Ah, say the pine needles when you begin to weep.

There, there, rest your head, as you cry out for help,

for guidance, for mercy, that the box opened long ago

might be closed, and as you lay down in the middle

of the pinewood in the depth of your sorrow,

whatever its name, the earth will swallow

you, and it, right up. Do not be afraid.

You are not dead yet.

All you must do is lay down just there

where you’ve lost the path, and

you will be taken into the heart of things

where three women tend an ancient pine tree

and a spring of hot water that bubbles up

from a vent in the earth. They will coo and fawn

over you like a little child, they will strip your

roadworn clothes, they will send you and all the

unwanted guests in your soul into the earth’s

hot water to be made beloved again.

After a long while, as long as it takes

(for they have been singing old lullabies

in a minor key and you may have been asleep)

they will help you out and dry you off

and rub you down and comb your hair

and braid it new and in that combing you will

hear a thousand blessings sung may you be

well may you be safe may your mind be gentle

may your way be bright may your thoughts go

gleaming may you measure your worth and

your days not by hours spent or money made

but by the quality of light in your soul and

how often you have asked yourself

what you might give away.

They will dress you in the dark skirts and aprons

and beads and leather slippers and long

embroidered vests of your ancestors and then

they will press a lantern in your hands and point

your way back up through roots and badger dens

to the surface again, to the forest where you lost your way.

Your rucksack will be full of strange new flatbreads,

a flask of mead, a pouch of tobacco,

a book of poems from very long ago.

You may still wander the forest a good deal

longer, but in a different manner, looking carefully at

the leaves of the many trees, trying to identify

birds by their songs, or where the bobcat walked.

You may gather the golden resin that falls

from the pines to ease your aches, or sit

quietly for long hours listening for the

voices inside the creaking limbs. You will have

stopped your striving, walked a hundred

figure eights without complaint, made a web of

your own footsteps, for once undesperate and slow.

And then all at once without warning you will

find the edge of it, a meadow beyond, and the

sun coming up. There it will be again, your path,

shining through the grass, gilt with dew, easy

as morning, unruined, unhurried, but just in time.

(c) Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2016