Seren's Log

I think of the ancestress once again, sitting still in her shed, holding back the Flood with her bowls and straws. I recall how she entrained her consciousness with her sisters' bleeding, with the proto-moon, with dogs, jackal, and the black leopard; with the red ant mound and with Snake; with Great Tiamat the sea and with earth's fresh waterways; with the “blood” of red meat and with red fire; with plant sap, roots, fruits, grains, and flowers; with the bloody geometric strings of cat's cradle and the veins of precious minerals; and with the sun and planets and the razor Pleiades.

Although it may be “better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness,” I say it is better still to un-curse the dark. We must learn the world whole. Light is evil as well as good; dark is is good as well as evil.

We must learn the world whole.

- Judy Grahn, Blood, Bread, and Roses

Ilse, 2006

Zac Jones, July 2008

.Lost.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you,

If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

- David Wagoner

Éowyn and Coco, February 2008

Port Macquarie, NSW, November 2006

“Why blame yourself? Why blame yourself?” the liberal consolation of the anecdotal Vicar who's missed his birdie putt.

Who else shall I blame for this drought stricken life? My mother? My father? My brother? The world?

There is so little time. This is all the time I've got. This is mine, this small parcel of years, that threatens to spill over on to the pavement and be lost among careless feet. Lost. The water out of the sieve and the river run dry. The quietly contained sea where the waters don't break.

I want to run up the hill in the freedom of the wind and shout until the rains come. I call the rain with my head thrown back. Fill up my mouth, fill up my nostrils, soak the parched body, blood too thick to flow the channels. I will flow. Flow with summer grace along a crystal river. Flow salmon-flanked to the sea.

Why dry? Why dammed up when the hidden spring informs the pool? How to bore down to where the water is? How to cut an Artesian well through the jelly of my fear?

I blame myself for my part in my crime. Collusion in too little life, too little love. I blame myself. That done, I can forgive myself. Forgive the rotting days where the fruit fell and was not gathered. The waste sad time. Punishment enough. Enough to live wedged in by fear. Call the rain.

Call the rain. Drops of mercy that revive the burnt earth. Forgiveness that refills the droughted stream. The rain, in opaque sheets, falls at right-angles to the sea. Let me lean on the wall of rain, my legs at sea. It is giddy, this fluid geometry, the points, solids, surfaces and lines that must undergo change. I will no be what I was.

The rain transforms the water.

Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies