CANARY IN THE COALMINE

MADNESS

What did she know? That woman, yesterday, in the thunder, on the street, soaked and angry old woman with fag stuck to wet fingers, stained with brown. Her mouth yelling at the dusk, at anyone. Scaring them when it is she who is fragile. I saw. I walked a way away and saw the people walk past her, cringing. And pretending they didn’t hear. I don’t hear. It’s pissing down rain and her trolly is full of black plastic bags. But I walk past her, and she stops calling for a second. And she looks. And she knows I know what she has gone through. Who has abandoned her. Why she was lied to. How hard it is to stay alive. How much she wants to stay alive but cannot do more than rage, because she was beautiful. Is that it?

No one sees. No one asks. No one holds her. Promises cannot sustain her. What does she know? How does this happen when we are told we deserve good things and they never manifest? How do we come back from the lies?

BORN A BASTARD

I think I am two people. Well, maybe more. They—we—all have voices. I look out through eyes at what I think of as world, but I see only streets and cars and walls, and yet I think I am an aspect, a mote, of earth’s hugeness. I think of fjords, and desert and gorillas and wide sky but then I realise this is me thinking.

LAND, WATER, FIRE

An invisible person’s imaging. From what? Books? Opinions? Social media image postings? I think I know Cuzco and Hippopotamus and mange on dog’s back, and the ways of love and raiding of ancestors, but is that true? Except boats. I have lived experience of ship and boat, and I am called Captain by a bank.

Images are made from books, unless I stand, one day, before the weight of Lascaux, within cave of Binomil, upon the sand around Uluru where lizards watch like old people, or under green lights called Wawatay by some and guovssahas (the light you can hear) by ancestors of this flesh and bone and blood. I have not seen.

I have to see or else I am full of deception.

WALLS AND DESKS

From the tellings of a school room that had four walls, and desks to divide us and keep us from sitting in long grass or beside Mother River, and bells and rigid standards of behaviour. And uniforms. And god save some queen who didn’t do the same for what Gondwana has become, or India or Africa, or America, or—oh stop this mind from ranging like a satellite, recoding digital frames of reference that are made of ones and zeros. Is the I of us mere interface? Perhaps. Different schoolroom to the one around the corner, or catholic one, or Steiner one, king’s college, mission school. Or the many ones that sit around a fire with elders who tell stories that sound real but might not be.

ROOT WISDOM

One person is deep-voiced. Rich in root wisdom. Not afraid. The other lives in that person’s shadow. Hears and sees the past, the reality that a past thinks it has created, or that created us from a pierced cell. But is it real? Was it real? Do we remember what we are told to remember? Do we ask questions of people of authority who have learned wrong things and yet now are bowed to, called expert, as though what taught them was important because of a thought? That importance is a box? Expert is a box. Knowledge is information and so is persecution and loss? And grief and howling and the groan of giant tree as she breaks from her growing at the axe who was invented by thought. Who became expert. Who is killing, when killing is what brings life? Or so it is said.

MIND

There’s this cube. And there is light in here. And cube is made of mirrors and I sit in a centre and observe infinity. Which person—amongst that countless terror of an overpopulated me—is sitting in a centre? What is a centre? When Mind leads me, like I am a clan and a population of perspectives and images, to think of me as me, can I have got it upside down? This body.

THIS BODY

How is it that I was convinced? Was I convinced? I don’t remember. That there is one of me. And there is also the question of who that is? Is it the name I am called by? That seems way too limited, when thoughts come from unknown directions to colonise consciousness with importances that are dust, really, when the whim of flesh is misdirected. When the big dust rises and chokes. When the mold inhabits joints and lungs. When the Hidden, that cause diseases and despair, refuse to show self. Themselves, itself, self?

I live in a tragedy. And I live a life that is heroic. And none of it is real. Except this room and these words that somebody else is writing. How do I know the writer is somebody else? Because she is braver than I. I am beaten by memories that highlight wonder but hides bruises and humiliation because they might mark me. Might lay a scent on me that attracts daemons.

Daemons

A word that once meant gods.

Words are all we are. And meat. And a mess of conflicting realities all overlapping to produce some kind of relativity that seems like self. Oh, the stories we have convinced ourselves to be.

I am not one person. So “I” is a misnomer. I have to choose one to present to others. I have to wear a thought-form that represents a series of strung-together concepts that cannot all be real but feel as though they are.

I know this to be true because I don’t know anyone outside me—not really—because I think… I think… I know them, only. But that is them doing that, and I make up a collection of observations and listenings, and I call that “you”. But that can be such a lost way of thinking.

WAR

That’s what is done. Then action based on thinking. Especially if we connect with a construct that has an equi-distinct construct: thinking that seems like same. We then think, Ah! So thinking has mate. Has threads that seem like others who think. Has companionship. So war is made.

This morning I read a friend’s question: what is freedom?

LIGHTNING

Freedom is such a within-thing. It is terrible, because do I even know what this word means. Is it a word that emerged to cause a memory? Yes. But we are back at the beginning of the circle, because memory is one way, or another way, depending on who does the thinking.

I’m sitting on a chair. In a small room. With light from a window. And two people talk as me. Me and me. One is wild and untamed and courageous and intelligent. What a baseless sense of self is that? An amalgam of words that indicate a ness. I have created her to enable functioning in a world that I only think I know. The other cowers behind her and darts, like a squirrel, from memories of worthlessness and invisibility, to remembering a newborn at my breast. Which is real? Or is cube real and we are impossibly all that ever could be, hiding in the seeming-smallness of a single body. But that’s not true either. Because someone told me that human animals are bacteria and viruses and atoms of vastness and electrical storms of synaptic relationship.

And we all wear skin, as though separation is the reason for thinking and doing being different, eventually. But who is in skin? Who is this I?

THE LIE

Is this what modern texts term “mental illness” as though mind and thought and brain and consciousness and conceptualisation are somehow separate to self? Separate to body? Is that what the pills (called medication) are for? I—this person who is courageous and intelligent—hides from those who would label her. Who would pill her and say, there, we were right. We are always right. While squirrel says please give me the pills and doctors kindly diagnose neurodivergence; a problem stemming from being sold when I was woman-born.

But I keep her silent.

How dare I? Think. It’s a god-thing. A complex of importance in consciousness that has no validity to mountain and river and fjord and forest and desert. Or is that all imagination because of this little room? And people like Jane Goodall are stories? Of species encountering species that should not, could not, dare not be in communication anyway. That that is all made up and Jane is dust in a tomorrow that never comes because none of this is real and someone else, who also thinks they’re me, has agreed to the deception. No, not deception, imagined ness?

TWO SPIRIT

I agree. Not that there is necessarily a choice. That’s also a stream of consciousness. But I know I am more than one of anything. I think that if I sit and really listen, others will come forward, like whales breaching in Antarctica seas, silenced because of how deep I imagine is ocean. I have never been to that depths, you understand, so I am conceptualising. Is conceptualising a lie?

NESTING AND SHINY BITS

Conceptualising is the gathering of twigs and dried leaves. Bits of string and sparkly things that we have agreed with ourselves to be words. Important words. Like love. An abstract unlike mud and blood and sweat and mucous and thunder. Those last bits—we have experienced those last bits—so there is that, to break down mind from vastness to something else.

DISTANCE

Is a concept. Like hours and minutes. Like age. Like yesterday. Like memory that may or maybe doesn’t have existence, except as pieces that can be snapped up by squirrel; that can be for the last moment of what life has been when we think life as “self” is over.

COVE

How can a body harbour so many people? So many words that get cobbled together to sometimes form things like Frankenstein’s creation. Nameless and misappropriated as a cobbled together life:

“The name of the creator—Frankenstein—soon came to be used to name the creation.”

ADAM

“Mary Shelley’s original novel never gives the monster a name, although when speaking to his creator, Victor Frankenstein, the monster does say “I ought to be thy Adam ” (in reference to the first man created in the bible). Frankenstein refers to his creation as creature, fiend, spectre, the dæmon, wretch, devil, thing, being, and ogre.

Sort of like civilisation.

I am inside and yet I see skin. I see as I write. Inked skin. Conceptually beautiful. But this skin is not befriended by the uninked. By the flesh and blood body who thinks in a way I do not. This is a flesh and blood and sinew and neuron and muscle and gut and hair and vein and capillaried expression of… probably all of us.

A SIGN

Yes, that also. To beggars and what people of other ways of thinking call “homeless” and “addicts” and “dropouts” and (funny one) “reprobates”. But we are acknowledged by them. They know us. Nods. Shy smiles. Even an occasional bow. Fisher King in ragged lands. Clans of madness in somebody’s or some bodies’ thinking.

ALBION

That we build up images? And we are told stories that promise nothing, because there never was a fact to any of it?

Like wild white water falling over a cliff. The division wilts. The separation cannot be maintained. I reach for squirrel, but he is gone. I know he is still busy and how sad he is that his forest is now concrete, and his mate never happened. But did. Then didn’t. And all this storing away of food that might one day be necessary is just an excuse to not stop.

I am the canary in the coalmine. We all are. Whether in one body or he body of earth. And I am terrified.

SITKA SPRUCE

I dug deep into my flesh. Covered her in ink. Ancestral storybook and no, I’m not nothing, when I touch…

the wildwood and fen and hunter and hunted

frost and rock render and mist heart of the lake

mountain broken ships curraghs off inish mór

peat rain rot upon this forest floor

reindeer wolfhound boar cattle

hen black bear and quiet after crying

tectonic plates to the chalk of the conchearca

ash of volcano and stone out of brodgar

midnight sun rent arctic river wind’s warning

mother ocean seals snow geese and dead mariners

bell of the red stag and map of my coastlines

piper of eagles and clan gathered for winter

drums of all people the roots of vast forests

what am I if we are forgotten bee swarm and owl head

tundra and bogland sídhe hollows of annwn

her mother, your brother, their lovers

And all of them come from us and will be us

bone stone shell ridge and lightning

                                    … not nothing

…

Thanks to all who support my work

ON SPIRITUALITY AND EXISTENTIALISM

RUNG ONE —Mystery

How did it start? Was there some calling, or a plethora of inexplicable awes and confusions, when you were a child? Was it seen? Heard? Was there a something that is no longer remembered? Were you too afraid, or was the experience so profound, you told no one. Because you didn’t understand, so maybe were scared. Not of the it, but of what could happen to you if you told?

RUNG TWO —Religion

You create a form of prayer. Something apart. Seemingly both holy and special. But it is nameless because it has been smothered by religion, the only mirror in a concrete world. So you do what is both rebellious and same. Someone has invented a new one. I know about that. Did you know I know about that? Of course. Because I, also, have been there.

RUNG THREE—Specialisation

So you hunt stories that fit. You transfer worship from a word called god to a word called goddess. Sometimes you put the two in the same sentence, thinking that’s fair. Can’t be biased. What do women think? That we have left rung two for rung three? No. Divisionism is created.

RUNG FOUR—Importance

Now come the predictable accoutrements. You have heard of robes and candles and incense so you create patterns that set you even further apart from others. This often causes deeper rifts. Within families — apathetically, inconsequentially or emphatically — enmeshed in the behaviour of rung two. They don’t want you to do this journey down. It is radical. It is sinful. They are afraid for you. Of you. You offend them. They have been advised about what happens to bad people when their flesh dies, and they are terrified for you. For a soul. A word without meaning. Terror can go one of two ways, aggression or retreat, and you stand your ground because, you are certain, you are on rung four and they are back there on rung two. To your mind, kudos.

RUNG FIVE—Holiness

So now you have it set. You do all the appropriate things for one who is stepping deeper into the labyrinth. You have your robes, your incense, your candles, a recipe, also, by other radicals (you think) who carved this territory. You raise your arms to the full moon and you invent and agree to a gender. You gender earth. You who are woman, supressed, shut up, shut down, forced to breed, have your teeth knocked out and your body used to satisfy, while wondering should I also feel something other than this expansion and contraction of a vagina around whatever? You seek to experience rung one, but, you think, on my own terms. Do others resent you for it? Of course. This is what rung five is all about. Being appropriate. Men are left to compromise. Get batshit angry at exclusion. Continue to aggress earth. To be excluded, or revered for serving those who desire war or whose maiming fascinates the self-righteous.

Is any of it right? Who defines right or wrong? Are the two not constructs, flaunting galaxies as less significant than an opinion?

RUNG SIX—Theft

You raise in the invented hierarchical rank to claim some title that, despite the warning, silently remains the confusion of rung two that, in some, artistic but artificial way, induces a feeling of both euphoria and altitude. You are climbing down, down deep but you convince yourself (maybe others) that this is ascension. You are better than anybody else. Not free, mind you, just more important. You name stuff. You claim credentials as high priest or high priestess. Of something. You now possess an authoritative opinion as to what that is. I know, I’ve been here. I believed it also.

So somewhere you learned of initiation. That’s akin to when a relationship is told by someone, somewhere, to go to the next level. You add that to the mix. Initiation at the hands of another human representing whatever you have been enticed by that has the most danger, but no consequence.

Because there is an illusion of danger (like being initiated at the point of a sword and threatened and devoting yourself to some invented deity, oaths you ought not betray, secrecy akin to the food of faerie) but without recognisable consequences, you eventually think what or who, in a so-called past that is both mysterious and other than white bread and margarine, can I use as a mirror?

Oh, that would be Egypt, or the jungles of the Amazon, or the inhabitants of the lands and species all but conquered, and ravaged, that either face extinction or have ceased, altogether, being what they once bred as. We will raise them up in our image. Or, at least, what we romance — seduce — ourselves into thinking were/are/represent.

You want to be them. You take what you want. Or think you do. Dust really.

So you take up the colours of Africa, Turtle Island, Gondwana, India, Persia, the South Pacific, or those buried in endless sand and tundra, but that archaeologists dug up, and mutilated, calling the corpses and grave goods discoveries. For display and academic recognition, even while secretly knowing someone who came before them actually put them there intentionally. A bit like saying fuck you, I don’t care.

The mummies are all royalty, you are told, or were in some way wiser than you are now, so you must learn the surface of the Rosetta Stone and mimic what you guess. Who, you conclude, after hundreds of years of specific religious indoctrination, they were.

RUNG SEVEN—Ritual (repetition)

Then you’re stuck with it. For what? Six months? Six years? A lifetime? For however long another human agrees to what you are pretending. Your specialness. And even while doing so you attend the gatherings of those on rung two because you really haven’t moved from there and deep within the secret rooms of your consciousness you know that. And you also fear the ramifications — and rightly so — of being cast out. After the xmas lunch you go wherever home is and sigh. Then you get on the phone, or visit other seekers that look and think like you and sigh even louder. You must cling to, and gather with, others who believe as you have learned to do. If you don’t the darkness, below what hints at being some final rung, is what? Bottomless?

You cling to rung six. The candles, the incense, the accoutrements. But you add stuff. Stuff you have stolen from others. People with a culture you neither have, nor are. You learn to make the dream catcher, to beat the drum while singing with the invader’s tongue, explaining in the invader’s accustomed narrative. To speak of Earth Mother and Sky Father, as though this is your real language. Very often suggested by a half naked and nubile warrior-looking cartooned girl/woman with extreme breasts and a leopard by her side that is obviously present as a companion, or else a bearded warrior man, with leaves weaving in and out of his face and mouth and a sword, or an AK47 in his hands. The people throwing rocks at tanks not part of this.

Yet.

Do you secretly know you do not honour those from whom you steal but mimic? Still stealing? A culture not your own. Bitter, within the shadows, that you have not been claimed by them despite how you lie? But you did it first. You made it known beyond the privacy of your four walls or the asylum outpatient clinic. So others will follow. There was a movie called Field of Dreams, oh, in the deeply historic past of 1989 and don’t even know that if you build it they will come is the screenplay version of Canadian novelist W. P. Kinsella’s 1982 book, just as Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was the inspiration for the current group titling themselves Church of All Worlds (for the tax perks). Please read that group’s title again so we are certain we are on the same page re this rung. Certainly, nothing comes from nothing but, then, where is your research?

RUNG EIGHT—Convincement

You realise you can make a buck from all this gathering of reasons for existence. So you experiment with different products to make incense. You get good at making crowns to sell because aren’t there queens and kings in all this? Significant things. Stuff beyond Marvel, ergo it must be real? You get a gleaning that your own DNA thread may have something of significance to it so you might read the writers, like Margaret Mead or Joseph Campbell or even Carl Jung, and patchwork together an even more complex self. You dress in clothing that you think reflects what indigenous people wear; their shamans. Some allude-to ancestors. Or some ascended masters business model. You have to get fancy though because your history has been blancmange for centuries. Made beige under the weights of the persecutions of those calling themselves holy. Being beige and goodly is a. what you hate, and b. unforgivable. You can’t possibly be descended from slave owners or murderers-in-perpetuity. Can you? Or worse, peasants and factory workers. But from the depths of the labyrinth comes the breath, barely above a whisper: oh yes you can, oh yes you are. So you keep an even more delusional distance from rung two and get loud. Defending rights. Anyone’s rights. Anyone you consider also repressed, because aren’t you? Weren’t you? At two or three or four or five. When you opened that first gift under the tree, or searched for that first chocolate egg that was supposedly from a bunny, that you have told yourself is really a goddess of spring, condescendingly because by now you are sure you know it all.

Then your mother dies. Your best friend is gang-raped. Your home is razed to the ground or you lose your job and you wonder where a next meal is coming from. Or you tried that drug and phew, doesn’t that take the pressure to perform down a notch? Or the ritual wine becomes wine-o-clock and one more can’t hurt, and besides, you were offered that by the priest or the representative of this god everyone talks about and despite how they violated you, the wine was good. But let’s not remember that, unless someone speaks out first, and then it’s okay to rage.

And you wonder where all your chutzpah has gone, but you don’t show it. Somewhere, someone said if you show you’ve been harmed you might not be the all-powerful representative of some deity named for a landmass or a season (that’s conveniently forgotten or else never learned). You wake sweating, knowing none of it is real. You look the question in the eye for a mere second. You ask what’s real because everything you knew on rung one has tattered in the broken bodies, bloated on white flour, their lungs collapsing from mine dust or asbestos. Their brains turning to mush from the lollies still at the counter of the newsagency. In that split second you are afraid. In that split second you acknowledge, silently, that it is all pretence because death is real but if the crown is gold-looking enough, it could actually be gold but after another fashion. Maybe.

RUNG NINE—Existential

There you are, a long way into the abyss, checking the safety of this rung, as it is potentially the most dangerous of them all. You could fall here. Get angry. Get bitter. Make division your weapon against being nobody special, after all. You see your grandmother buried and, although she was a poet and an activist against the poaching of elephants or in defence of the whale or the endangered penguin, she got old, became incontinent, got put in a home and conveniently dies, her legacy forgotten, her will empty of useful things like money. And the people from rung two still hold all the aces because she is put in a box. There is a nice xian service. The box seems to burn in some 2000 degree Fahrenheit fire intended to erase her completely, or else she is put in the ground with a plethora of other corpses, all in neat rows until a housing development is approved, and stone (in some deep parody of ancient memory) erected that says when she was born and when she was dead, and who loved her, as though she hadn’t also lived for a trillion years in some form or another until she became what we recognise as an individual of a particular species. In difference to every other species, that we cannot consider, because if we thought we were as impermanent as them we could not destroy them as we choose for the newest iPhone or Adidas trainers. No. We take the position as vegetarian. We add that to the list of holy things and we do not ask what vast forests were destroyed for the almonds or the soy.

But the rats are now free of the laboratory cages and the seed of pointlessness sprouts on the kitchen windowsill.

Is any of it real? Has anyone got the truth? Are their aliens among us? Are you descended from angels? Is the awakening 888 when once it was 777 and before that, it was Crowley’s 666. No. Between them is/has been 11:11 therefore you are important and your god is sending you messages so just keep up with the trend.

But then even that popular phenomenon gets old. Cotton now killing water. The proponents of that yesterday-trend shuffling like crazy and oops, fuck me, you better garment yourself in the title of elder and make that the significance because otherwise… well, we know what happened to grandmother. But you still need the wine. You still need to be a radical pot smoker but now you call it cannabis to be on trend. And act all smug despite what happened to all those kids who smoked your hydro too young and felt the need to kill their bodies at twenty three.

And you get fat. You are allowed. All the other pagans are fat, aren’t they? You go to pagans in the pub and eat a meal and wonder what to talk about and hope you are seen, are recognised as belonging, got the outfit right, know the true way. But then the diabetes kicks in and the hips become sore and you have to hide all that because you’re supposed to remain forever-young.

And alone at night. Or with a wife/husband that you love, don’t you? Despite not really being yourself around them because they, too, could leave, even if it means living on the street in a tent. You think, I could do that, don’t think I couldn’t except you haven’t, so far, except on that camping weekend.

RUNG TEN—Don’t Look Down

Now, here you are. At a severe and very real crossroads. You’re back is to the wall in your secret place. Your adamancy for self-expression and being appreciated now for show because how else to remain significant? And you look down. Your foot feels for the reassurance of yet another rung but there isn’t one. It’s all fall from now on.

You have two choices: one is to cling to the significance of every rung, just a bit of each, and hang there until you are a cadaver on the slab in a morgue, being filled with formaldehyde, after lying in the stark hopelessness of a hospital bed still believing in meaning but knowing that, with depths comes an erasure of self because no one can tell you what happens in the blackness of that potentially endless fall.

Or you can let go. And find out.

When does this happen? Is this death? You can be twelve or ninety eight (random ages). Still wondering what death is. Being deluded into believing it won’t happen if… if….

The thing is, no one has come back from the real thing to explain eternity. Having your bits seeming to stop for seconds, maybe minutes, until the defibrillator shocks your heart, is not an experience of death but a pause in life. Anything you have to say does not explain the abyss because you’re not still flying.

RUNG ELEVEN—The Calling

Did I know rung ten? Yes, and no. Have I died? Very young, yes. Then several more semi-deaths and deaths that didn’t remain. Was I resuscitated? Obviously. Was I called? Yep. At rung two. The question has always been obfuscated by every other rung I climbed down to this point. By what?

By what was I called?

By what were you called? Or were you? Or was being a brat to your sister or your mother or your father the entire reason for challenging rung one?

Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize in the year (on the Gregorian calendar) of 2016. Did you grow up with his poetry? Did you hear the lyrics and fear? Did you experience a visceral reaction when you first heard Desolation Row? Do you understand his prophesies, in retrospect? Because you’re there now. Even if you have a top floor apartment, with subtle lighting and Uber meals delivered at your beckoning, overlooking the bay. With the dog. The question becomes the only light bright enough to see by. Because this is better, I have the ketamine. I can get away with snorting a little more cocaine.

What happens when you let yourself realise that in the hugeness of an observable, named-by-some-fucker universe, you are nothing? When all that remains of all this seeking for meaning, that became something else, something tainted, something caged, is the question what was it for?

RUNG TWELVE—Seeking Rung Thirteen

When you first began this journey down the bone ladder you were so full of hope. So nourished by delusion. So adamant. So certain of your rightness. That you had meaning. That you could heal or make, or speak or decorate or sing or drum or play the harp or the uilleann pipes or, or, or.

You know you are nothing.

Except…

One might ask oneself is there a difference between falling and flying? The outcome is generally the same. From the observation of what is known as gravity, anyway. That’s the problem with observation. It is not realised from the point of view of the observed. Usually. At least not the object that didn’t walk away. Observation is not experiential. Observation is the perception of an experience. Is it often repeated? Well, that’s the difference between falling and flying, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

Thanks to all who support my work

FOREST PEOPLE

Crack. The resin buried deep within the log could no longer remain dormant under the intensity of the fire. The tiny explosion adjusted the blaze in the hearth. The embers momentarily opened their impossibly red eyes and a shower of sparks sprayed up the chimney.

Fáith is not distracted. Not one part of her. She holds the ash shaft securely in the vice while she shaves the fluff from within the follicle of the feather.

She takes it gently between the tweezers and releases the vice. She uses the tiny badger hair brush to line the follicle with a breath of glue. She fixes it to the wood, equidistant from the two white gander feathers. They face towards the bow. The black, the king fletch—the goose fletch—faces away.  She does this arrow after arrow. Hour after hour.

Outside the cottage is a world of silence. That certain blue that only seen on a frozen landscape at night. No wind. Utter stillness. The air thin. Birch and rowan bejewelled with icicles, spruce tufted with snow, the ground thick with it, both powder and firn.

The wolf lies on his rug at the grate, his lids half closed, his head on his forepaws. Both he and Fáith seem at peace, relaxed. Like sister and brother from the same mother their hearing is flawless. If there is a sound to be heard—the jangle of a bridle, the kick of a heel against a flank, the sound of breath they will hear that. From miles away. Whether on foot, on horseback or riding the reindeer-pulled sled, if the otherkind try to approach the two will be gone. There is no other way to travel this far into the forest. Any petrol-driven vehicle will run out of fuel at least a day before it reached this remoteness.

Fáith was not born here but she has grown up here. She is this place.

Her da had lived to forty but her mam had died when her child was just one year old.

Her da and his wolves had stalked the kill with Fáith secured to his back in a finely crafted leather-and-weave cradle board. To get her used to their territory. Her mam had hunted those razor-toothed, iron traps the otherkind had ordered set to catch the wolves. Or the people.

She’d missed the one that took her leg off at the ankle. She died before Fáith’s da found her, the blood like crimson butterflies on the snow, her mam seemingly the creature itself, just sleeping.

Fáith knew they were after her. The Church. That crazy species of two-legged otherkind with their vengeful god. Their belief that their species was superior and chosen. That hers must be saved. Brought in and saved. She knew they lied about her people, an Lucht Súille. Indigenous hunter gatherers.

Wolves are always wild. There is no such thing as a tame wolf. When the otherkind had first contact with an Lucht Súille they had thought the wolves that travelled with them were domesticated. They shot anyway and those not struck down had fled, the people not shot rounded up and herded. They had been forced to walk that long walk. It was only then that the otherkind realised that two-legged and four were pack and that both were wild. It was the word wild that was the confusion. Tame was what? Safe?

Tame is not safe, Fáith muses as she attaches a nock and a broadhead to each of the twenty four arrows. Tame is vulnerable.

To make this forest safe for their enterprise the Patron, the title of the leaders of those who claimed an Lucht Súille’s ancestral lands—before the burning of vast tracts of forest, before the railway, before the cities—had devised the systematic hunting of her people. When they worked out how to parley, the interpreters gave an Lucht Súille two choices: adapt and settle in the cities or live on the land allotted them. Land without forest called a reservation. They were supposed to make do and not hunt anymore. They were to have nothing to do with wolves.

Some of her people thought adaptation might provide better for their families, in the fast-growing cities. Working for the foreigners. They left the reservation. They lived in small rooms, crowded, in upright coffins. Cinderblock flats. Alcoholic. Shunned because of the slight slant of their eyes, the clan tattoos. Thought of as barbarians. Eaters of the raw dead.

They ate what the shop owners sold them. They ran up debts because they did not understand money. White flour and bread. Sugar, a new food. Canned staples. What meat they could pilfer was old or rancid. No fish. They worked the roads to pay their bills. They had nothing. A relentless cycle. They were subject to disease, to liver failure and diabetes. They got fat and died young. Their children lost their language and their lore.

Many of the people who used to live where Fáith now sleeps had fought back. They had fought from the tree line, not wanting to venture onto the wrongness that was now pasture where once the forest had dwelled, habitat and mother, from before time. They all died. They brought down a merciless punishment on the women and children, the elders, who had not fought also. It was all slaughter then. Just forty-seven years ago. The otherkind had guns, Fáith’s people the axe and the bow.

Fáith’s parents were second generation reservation people. They had become lovers because their own parents were all close: knowledge holders. From different clans they shared secrets freely now. Those secrets, and an Lucht Súille lore of both clans, were told to Fáith’s mam and da. In case of hope. In case of a future. So that the knowledge of who the people truly were did not vanish from the world.

Her parents had escaped, and it was years before their absence came to the attention of the authorities. Punishment had been the murder of all the known knowledge holders, including Fáith’s grandparents.

Her mam and da had known how to call to the wolf in the correct manner. Politely. How to honour the hunt trails. To honour the kill. To stay alive. To live well. To follow the dragon lines, the ancient ley lines the nomadic must travel in order to honour the seasons of the year.

The wolves understood the nuance of the language of their two-legged cousins. They had hunted and shared the hearth with them for millennia. They remembered. They led the runaways to the furthest, still untainted territory within the forest where they lived in isolation. Where Fáith was born. The wolf, upon his rug, is the son of the pup placed within her crib on the day of her birth. Fáith has lived twenty winters and this pup, five.

The second last thing she does for the night is to clean the tools her da had made for her. Put them into their individual compartments of the chamois bag with the straps. Stow this into the pack—tough leather, reindeer hide—that she keeps beside the door alongside the quiver of twenty-four arrows, just below the frame that supports the recurve bow. Her da had made that for her from the wood of the mountain ash just a year ago. He had crafted it especially for her. She was given it the night of her initiation. The night her da had inked the first of her clan tattoos into the skin of her face with the ink made from the soot of the mountain ash. The perfect blue line from her left ear, across her cheek, over her nose just below her eyes and on to her right ear.

Just months after he did this for her he died. She gave him to the crows and hawks and bears, the way she had been taught, for all of us are food.

The last thing she does is to pull down her snowshoes. The wolf is instantly on his feet. He prances to the door in anticipation.

They move in silence deeper into the forest. Far enough so that the smell of their urine will not attract anything back to the cottage.

That night they sleep curled together on the rug before the hearth, like puppies, the smouldering back log sending off no sparks. This is how it is done.

The next day they hunt from the hint of silver-pale predawn until well into the blue and shadow of the night. Fáith carries all her weapons and wears her pack on her back. Game is scarce this deep into winter. All they bring down are two hares. White. Only visible by their movement. Fáith shoots the one and has time to slit it from throat to groin, gut it and skin it before the wolf finally stops tormenting the other, with a defining snap to its neck. A race the hare would have won a month earlier or a month later.

The wolf carries his quarry back, tossing it high in the air and pretending it is still alive. Fáith eats the rich, warm liver and heart of her kill, tossing the remaining offal to the wolf. She guts and skins his trophy before returning it to him whole. As is fair.

Winter fur. Good hides. She will use them to thicken the lining of her boots.

Splitting the silence of the night, the jangle of harness. A baying. Fáith and the wolf are instant stillness. Which direction? They waited. To the south was the high squeal of a winter hawk echoes through the rarefied air. A warning.

Now attuned, the pair wait. Their enemies are many miles away. Still unknowing. The advantage is with the hunted.

The whuffle of a horse’s nostrils, the snow giving way beneath hooves. Four horses. Two hounds. That means four men; less probably because they’ll need at least one horse for supplies. Even odds if confronted. Unless they have rifles. They are bound to have rifles.

And the scent of blood is upon the snow. The red of it a deep stain. None of the hunters will know what had been killed or by what. Woman and the wolf still hold the advantage.

The otherkind will burn the cottage but she is not attached.

They run. Most of the night. Mile after mile deeper into the snow, higher into the alpine raw.

Daylight is four hours of grey becoming white becoming grey with no horizon within the perpetual mountain. What’s the plan? None. Not anymore. They follow the caribou trails north through nights lit by green and amber borealis, grandmother of rivers, teaching the deepest ones the sorcery of silence that the brooks and burns are too young to comprehend. It is the silence of the oldest boulders that pock this tundra.

She gathers kindling and easy to snap elder wood, uptorn roots from this or that ancient storm for nightlong warmth. She builds their fire to the side of the entrance of shelter to dissuade the curious predator from trespassing a sleep of peace. These sanctuaries are lava tubes, remnants of the mountain’s savage and molten history, countless millions of years ago.

Freedom. No domination. She will not let them down. If they are all that remains, so be it. They are these mountains, this snow, the ways of the thunder and the black water beneath the frozen river. The two are bonded for life and, while with this land there is no death.

They sleep curled together for warmth beneath a vault of the blue ochre handprints of once-upon-a-time children.

RED PILL, BLUE PILL?

If we have the distinct and unfathomable continuum of living in a body long enough for it to age, we have choices. How do we do make them? What is life for? Can we distance ourselves from this contagion of disrespect and yes, assumption, of expected integration? External pressure, though, tells us we are decrepit, withering, when we live aa long time in the same body. Even I don’t understand why.

The phases of being alive have been forced on us. The delineations. I consider them immature and limited. No one does so with magpies. Or sheoaks. Or sky. Why do we accept this enforcement?

So don’t. It is insane.

A POTENTIAL BLUE PILL

When I had lived a nineteen/twenty earth-to-sun ratio I conceived and birthed a child. Due to my insistence that I could raise him non-traditionally he was not taken from me, as happened to so many young women who did not ascribe to the marriage experience.

There was no government money so from that infant’s initial months of living I I had to have a job. I was employed as an assistant nurse in one, of what would become many, geriatric hospitals. The first few nights were tricky because I did not take medication to dry the breastmilk, electing, instead, to wrap my torso in cottonwool, and to wind clingwrap around it all to avoid the inevitable leaking.

Nightshift. Old Peoples’ Home. One way door to a coffin for the rejected. That’s what ‘retirement villages’ were called in the 1970s. I cleaned the bedsores of 50 year old women who had been partially paralysed by stroke. I dressed the Orkney ex-soldier, of two world wars, in his best tweed, because it was his birthday and he thought his family was coming; they never did. I saw his eyes. I assisted highly-qualified health workers to tie people with dementia to chairs to stop them wandering to where they thought home was. I wept when the women was left under a shower without the cold tap on to mitigate the burning. That no one noticed until too late. My disgust, at the estimated thousand ‘nymphs’, sucking the life from the person trapped in an immovable, but breathing, body, when I pulled back the bed covers to clean her because of incontinence.

I know horror.

The senior staff and I racing two adult, captured, cockroaches down the corridors at 3 in the morning to keep ourselves awake. The inmates (erroneously called patients) fed a semblance of food, who received no compassion, were admonished when the drooled: pills in a kidney tray with their name on it, the effects unknown to staff. A slow erasure of individuation and identity.

WHERE DOES THE OLD IPHONE END UP?

No one came. They–you–were (are) discarded. I have left out the more nauseating cruelties I have witnessed, as that is not the point. These discarded people travelled, wrote or painted, were survivors of hurricanes and holocausts played chess, gyrated to the rhythm of the erotic, drank absynth, defied acceptability perhaps, were academics, walked the streets by the thousand for fair pay, fought against the White Australia Policy, raised families in an era of strict gender roles and intense xianity. Knowing that to deviate was to be shunned, some did so anyway (I know, I asked for their stories, over tea and toast, and the centrefold of Cleo magazine at 11 PM, and was graced and astounded).

They were being punished for becoming “elderly”, a description of wisdom transformed into a noun of erasure.

CONTRIVED GRAMMAR

What I heard, and am still hearing, in the word “elderly” is feeble. A fragile, redundant human animal. I was always offended by the word. It may have been to do with what I had seen, the shocking treatment of people who had once held, so lovingly and wildly, to hope. That there was meaning to being alive. Instead I stared into the eyes of despair and confusion. No wonder, never wonder, just a dreadful realisation.

WISDOM-HOLDER

The elders of many tribal and indigenous groups, worldwide, are revered. They are wisdom-keepers. Memory-palaces. Are we also them? If not, why not? We have stories of a social and environmental era that someone of fifteen could never imagine. Life before screens? Before mcdonalds and uber? Before superannuation? Long before we realise that The Truman Show is a horror story and the Hunger Games is herding us through catastrophic competition.

Why we live, whatever ideology or philosophy is picked up along the journey that provides a potential glimmer of meaning for being in a body and self-aware, requires vigilance. BECAUSE IT MAY NOT MATTER. How we live, what we learn, being strong, daring, communicating, listening, being heard. Awake to some exquisite unrealised energetic arrangement of synaptic lightning, with secrets that the caterpillar cannot know… while caterpillish.

40

The transition to that of an elder begins around forty. What to release? What to mirror self on? Certainty in competition with some social standard none of us see coming. There’s the key.

THE RED PILL

We are starlight. Is that literal? Yes. From all I have learned, yes. There is so much hype to deconstruct. If I advise anything it is to not only be wild but intelligent. To break the mould of societorial derision and…

Thanks to all who support my work.

This post is available for further commentary on my Patreon site

https://www.patreon.com/way_of_witchcraft