An Animist Collective
A COVENANT WITH WILDNESS
What is this god you rant about that has you on your knees like children looking up to a vengeful and jealous parent? Afraid? Begging for forgiveness for some long ago atrocity no different to any in the now, when children starve or die from working in your mines for precious bits of bling, crippled by your silence and self-righteousness and the old people, holders of history, are thrust behind your walls as though death is an abberation.
Here we are! Valleys and moor, crag and eldritch mist upon a lake capturing sky and season upon the mirror of ceaseless chatter. The giants, a thousand years or more from seed to canopy, communicating in a language humans have forgotten or else close ears to for what is known but chosen not to hear. Our relatives, arboreal and interwoven at the root, speaking their languge to rock and lake, to bulldozers that don’t wanna listen and remain defiant in their killing.
Remember you are wildness? Do not fear the firefly or the waning of the moon. It’s that god someone invented, who burned and slaughtered your ancestors, wove chains around every culture they encountered when the people said no, let famine kill countries and gave the nod to ermined men: take your money, your language and your wisdom, and say get on your knees, you are unworthy (for what we are not informed). When no life requires worth. Life is. Life doesn’t need your purse.
If you want, pop along to the SKINSCRIPTED, STORIES FROM EXILE playlist for time out.
YOUR HUMAN HOST
A lifetime coming to this understanding, has included the study of the history, lore, mythology, customs and cultural affiliations of the priteni (painted/tattooed) Celts/Gaels. This person’s strongest taproots link her directly to Caradoc ap Cunobelinus, chieftain of the Catuvellaun on her mother’s paternal line, proud Éireannach woman, great grandadaughter of Kathleen ní Chiarbháin of Co Galway, the shield, twa corbies, inked into the stories of her skin. An lucht siúil, spuriously termed gypsy on her maternal grandmother out of Co Cork, and French, the depths unknown beyond that bastard Charlemain, from her father, from an ancestry in Paris and Caen to a death, in 2016, also exiled.
Initiated into some westernised construct of magical arts in 1968 she was born for this work but was aware, very young, of the lies hidden behind the belching suppuration called belief. No learning is wasted, but then one day serious discernment and all populism sloughs off. Does that bother some people? Absolutely. De Angeles, ní Chiarbháin, is somewhat of a mirror and not everyone likes to have their image exposed.
I must explain some of us live in exile through necessity, confusion or threat. Some of us rage against this shackle of government, enforced uniformity and agreement, and understand why those who agree with the captors get the bigger guns.
Instead, make music, sing the land and sky and sea. Write, listen, train, learn, communicate your quests. Be proud you seek the language of world. All that we are. What we will ever be.
In specificity is story worth sharing with others. ROOTS & WILD APPLES is for a better night, around the hearth, than praying to some emptiness that someone says is god while chainsawing down a forest, polluting flesh and killing the helpless in some abbatoir while paying for clean water.
The work is remembering that myth is for the uninitiated who have not sought the message. This is magic and wild apples are its fruit. An anarchist druid thing. Some mutual mystery.
Perhaps don’t think too lonelily, but listen. That body you are within or are, will never go away no matter what you have been told. You are as much a world as world, an ancient vastness that never ceases.
It’s funny, but it’s sad how short a time we are deluded into thinking we live.
AUDIOBOOKS ETC
The award winning series Legends of the Sidhe series is now in audiobooks. These are a series of independent stories in the genre of Magical Realism. First released in Ireland 2006, published in print Llewellyn USA.
1: Crow Magic, 2. The Quickening, 3. The Shining Isle, 4. Under Snow, 5. The Changeling
ANIMISM VS RELIGION
+ MUCH MORE
