~A Mermaid's Tale~
~A Wyld Sea Witch surrendering to the Ninth Wave of the Goddess ~Archive for wyld
Collected tales of fey isle. A re posting for Sorrow
Prologue.
Collected tales of fey isle. ( A work in progress) Grand Mother’s stories.
It is a well known fact that rats will leave a sinking ship. Their tails wormlike, slithering wet across the deck. They know by instinct to get out when the going is good.
I was told of a storm that struck this Isle with such force that it is said that it lashed the shores and changed its shape forever. Waves that built their muscle and weight far out in the ocean, hit the shore with such a pounding that the Island seemed to creak and groan. The wind pushed and moaned at the wooden doors of the houses.
Branches scratched and clawed black fingers at windows.
Candles guttered, their flames sputtering in the wind sending out black puffs of smoke like distress signals as their small bright flames fought against the darkness and the wind.
Small children sharing a bed ,clung to each other beneath their quilts at the sound of the pounding wrath of the wind and rain; their faces lit up like small moons by the flashes of lightning.The waves worked hard, beaching great piles of seaweed and shingle, sculpting it into mountains of green sludge and stone. In the valleys lay giant bones of bleached driftwood, like dinosaur skeletons, scattered along the shoreline.
Then, the next morning , in the pale watery light when all was calm again, the shadows of the Islanders were seen, picking their way down to the sea. They searched the treasures of the deep, turning stones and scraping seaweed back from wood, examining the changes wrought by the storm. It was with this foraging along the shoreline in amongst the sludge and shingle that they found her.
She was curled around a stone, hugging it tightly to her chest. There was seaweed tangled through her hair and scattered everywhere around her were small delicate shells, looking for all the world like confetti strewn across her body.
Now it has been said that she was on board a ship that the Islanders themselves had tempted, brought to the rocks with great fires and wreckers greed. There were others who said the selchies must have brought her, that the seal people took pity and pushed and nuzzled her to the shoreline.
Others said that she was of the blood of the seal folk but they had lost her in the great waves.
Of course there were dark mutterings that she was a witch and that she survived the sea, it left her, spewed her forth like some unfinished meal, unable to swallow her devilish skin. There were those folk who did not comment nor mutter; they just stared at her in a daze of wonder. They thought she was a gift from the sea, a miracle of salt and wind.
After the shock of finding the girl lying amongst the stones and the seaweed, the Islanders carried her body to the only person on the Island who knew any healing. The general opinion was that she was dead anyway, her body was cold to touch and her skin had no glow of blood pumping beneath it. She was lifted and carried gently, by Calumn a local fisherman, who had claimed last year to have seen the selchie folk gathering on the rocks as he returned homewards at dusk.
He strode ahead of the little band of storm weary folk, the girls head lolling against his shoulder, her arms swinging loosely by his sides.
He watched her face closely as he carefully placed her on the wooden table and with great tenderness he asked if there was anything that could be done.
Strong hands took her from him, a voice told him to leave, but to come later with wood for the fire. He searched the gloom of the croft for the source of his instructions but could only see the dim outline of a small woman. As he left there looked once again at the girl where she lay, the miracle of the storm.
Wyld moment
Because the weather has been so great, I have not been attending to writing or anything much indoors, I just feel I should make the most of it no matter what. In fact I am about to make some lunch and then walk up to this point above to look at the view, which takes about an hour and a half to walk. When everything is fixed here I will pack up a note book to write in and set off up the hills. Yes I know how lucky I am, I thank it all every day for unfolding in front of me, these beautiful spaces hold everything I need to live to the fullest in my being. They ground me with their peace. I walked through a field of wild flowers and grasses on Saturday and was held by them, in the moment. The wyld spirit felt strong there. I stood and listened intently, feeling the energy of the growth and the beauty of its language. I watched a tiny white- tinted blue butterfly, so delicate, it landed in front of me and I watched it warm its wings in the pool of sun. I looked at all the different species of grass and flowers only recognising a handful of names.
More butterflies appeared and flitted around me, so busy in their work of survival and so beautiful in the dance of it all, totally unconscious of their beauty, they exist, the delicacy of their performance..the wisdom they use to find exactly what they need in each flower. The silent communion between the source and their searching. The same silence in that present moment, as I watched, and felt it, attuning to it, except it was not total silence.
The bird song, the soft hum of bees, the far away sounds of children playing . As I walked back, I tuned into all the sights and sounds and smells around me, the soft slap of my feet against a dried out mud road, the distant sound of a garden mower. The smell of a barbecue fire, the sap of sun warmed trees. Everything around me is burgeoning green. Each year it never fails to take me by surprise, just how green , how thick the leaves are, how many shades of summer there. It all just keeps on thriving. The energy of it pulses through me and around me, I breathe it in deep and send it back out, thanking the gift of the moment, thanking the wyld and all its aliveness.
Wild Quotes~
~ You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough – even white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them. — Crow elder
Wilderness is not just the ‘preservation’ of the world, it is the world. …. Nature is ultimately in no way endangered; wilderness is. The wild is indestructible, but we might not see the wild. — Gary Snyder
“In his book The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, Robert Bly says that to be wild is not to be crazy like a criminal or psychotic, but “mad as the mist and snow.” It has nothing to do with being childish or primitive, not does it manifest as manic rebellion or self-damaging alienation. The real marks of wildness, he asserts are a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.”
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
- Greek ProverbThe frog does not drink up the pond in which it lives.
- Chinese ProverbI have argued in this book that we are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted, and they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought. To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained. I offer this as a formula of reenchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.
Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, 1984, p. 139All good things are wild and free.
- Henry David ThoreauThose who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
- Rachel CarsonI went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
- Henry David ThoreauOnly after the last tree has been cut down
Only after the last river has been poisoned
Only after the last fish has been caught
Only then you will find out that money cannot be eaten
- Cree Indian ProphecyEarth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.
- Mohandas GandhiEvery part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe. Even the rocks, which seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent shore in solemn grandeur thrill with memories of past events connected with the fate of my people, the very dust under your feet responds more lovingly to our footsteps than to yours, because it is the ashes of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch, for the soil is rich with the life of our kindred.
- Chief SeattleSomething will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free from noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
- Wallace Stegner
