Echoes of Samhain

 

Out here in the mountains, it is hot, windy, dusty and the local farmers are spraying vines and apple trees with pesticides, so that an acrid chemical trace catches in the back of my throat. Another luxury  golf course may be constructed  a short distance away, the fynbos destroyed, hectares of  fertilized grass needing mowing and thousands of litres of wasted water going to an abomination designed to please tourists waving dollars and euros around. My neighbours and myself are  trying to persuade an elderly man with rapidly advancing Alzheimers to hand over his revolvers. Up on the hillside in the informal settlement there is an outbreak of dysentery among young children and everyone is hoping that it isn’t cholera.

Despite this, the valleys are green and vivid with scarlet and magenta bougainvilleas. and wild white roses line the farm roads around Elgin. An enchanted countryside on the verge of summer.

We shouldn’t bother with  celebrating an incongruously summery Samhain in the hot despoiled wastelands of Africa. But there will be dress-up parties with too much drinking and silly jokes about sexy witches. This morning I choked with laughter over my coffee reading this from  my friend Aquila ka Hecate.

And yet.

Echoes of Samhain are drifting my way from across the oceans. Even as I repot pelargoniums and  go out into the garden with a watering can, the sun hot on the back of my neck, there is a sense of darkening, endings, descent. In night dreams and daydreams, I feel a sense of separation and liminality. Dreams  stay with me like cobwebs tickling the face on waking in the morning, insubstantial but lingering, haunting. I feel cloaked, shrouded, stirred by the dead.

In part, this has to do with my old fears around the Christmas festering season. The chaos on our highways with drunken drivers and road rage. The xenophobic  violence erupting in unstable and fragile communities. The gun-glorifying culture we have here. The rape culture. Closer to home, my own memories of family conflict, terror from seeing my mother battered on Christmas Eve. The excessive drinking. The greed and recklessness, the disappointment when the thoughtless gifts and flustered shopping and overeating couldn’t make up for the emptiness at the heart of that old Christmas myth. The overlooked and forgotten baby soiled and howling in a crib adorned with tinsel and ribbons.

But it has to do with another process, a dark night within, the liminal shifting across boundaries in search of — well, I don’t know. A kind of descent, a kind of stripping of self. I do often wonder about the transformation that  began in Wales and was so brutally truncated. As if part of myself entered a hillside in the Black Mountains at twilight with mist falling and never emerged. That changeling within.

No doubt more will be revealed, as a wise friend of mine says.

Losing the blue antelope

 

Following on from Hecate, Wish You Were Here.

 

About 15 years ago I was staying in the small Karoo dorp of Prince Albert and went into the local museum where I saw a painting of the vanished blue antelope. An antelope that once  roamed the plains of the Klein Karoo, the Overberg valleys, the Strandveld, and which was hunted to extinction. So rare, so irreplaceable.  There is a wonderful website that remembers this lovely, lost animal.

“The blue antelope is all but forgotten in South Africa today, partly because it became extinct so early and partly because, unlike the quagga, it never seems to have been very numerous or widespread. The first European to record it was probably Peter Kolb, a German who travelled extensively through the southwestern and southern Cape Province between 1705 and 1712…. It was subsequently noted by other eighteenth century travellers who encountered it east of the Hottentots Holland Mountains, mainly in the triangle formed by Swellendam, Caledon, and Bredasdorp. They were struck by the dark blue-grey tint of its skin, which explains its name. In 1774, the Swedish naturalist, Carl Thunberg, reported that it had become extremely rare. The last individual was apparently seen around 1800.” (Klein, 1987)

The last wild apple groves

 

The last wild apple groves in the world are found in Kazakhstan, in the Tien Shan mountains to the south. They are being cut down and destroyed, grove by grove, slope by slope. Many wild fruit and nut species are already extinct.

 

A fragment from Sappho:

All alone a sweet apple reddens on the topmost branch,
high on the highest branch, the apple pickers did not notice it,
they did not truly forget it, but they could not reach it.

Wild spring: new moon in Libra

 

 

In this hemisphere, a wild spring is blossoming and the new moon in Libra  has something risky and enchanting in it. The skies are filled with milky starlight, leaving me to guess at the dark circle where the moon hides. A flicker of rim, a light-filled cusp.

At the end of this month, Saturn, the limit-setting force, will enter Libra. A time calling for skilful negotiations, balancing, diplomacy. A time to be realistic in reaching for transformation. Holding opposites in tension.

Working my simple magic in the dark garden last night, I could feel the tension of opposites, the headstrong winds blowing crossways overhead, the mountain winds shaking up the energies of the valley. The skies diffuse and glimmering, the birds restless in the trees. My centre of gravity shifting a little. The Libran longing for balance and justice, for beauty, for inspiration and love. The recognition of loss and heaviness and uncertainty. The hidden dark moon, the sowing of seeds, the planting of dreams in unknown fields.

Wild herbs growing all around me, the scents of thyme and rosemary and flowering lavender. Pungent sages, juicy plectranthus, the bitter juices of bulbinella and aloe. Birds calling and flying back and forth in the dark treetops, the skies milky and starlit. Changes afoot: the rewilding, the return to the Mother, the mediating for justice. Standing barefoot in the garden in an old crimson and gold shawl, shaking out fragrance and seeds and flickers of light. What will come to pass is already  coming to pass. Change is upon us, the worlds collide and blur, the planets shiver and  if we are still and patient enough there is music filling the earth. A small gecko glimpsed in the light from the kitchen as it clings to the door mantel. Dew falling and my feet  are damp, the leaves of the agapanthus gleam as though oiled. The birds calling like lost children, the skies so soft and brilliant, the moon hidden in her dark power.

A wild spring, the dark moon in Libra. Dreaming under stars, working  a small but not insignificant magic.

Anarchic laughter

 

Well, yes, we need it, that wicked wry grin. From Pat Robertson, who else?

     “Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

Witches at play

 

On a flyaway day, this from Ray Bradbury:

“Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.”

Rewilding the body

 

With gratitude to Derrick Jensen’s forum

 

Great As You Are

by Susan Griffin

Be like a bear in the forest of yourself.

Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath.

Every hair has life

and standing, as you do, swaying

from one foot to the other

all the forest stands with you.

Each minute sound, one after another,

is distinct in your ear. Here

in the blur of mixed sensations, you can

feel the crisp outline of being, particulate.

Great as you are, huge as you are and

growling like the deepest drum,

the continual vibration that makes music

what it is,

not some light stone skipped on the surface of things,

you travel below

sounding the depths where only the dauntless go.

Be like the bear and

do not forget

how you rounded your

massive shape over the just ripened

berry which burst

in your mouth that moment

how you rolled in

the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling

with your sensate skin,

how you shut

your eyes and swam far and farther

still, starlight

shaping itself to your body,

starship rocking the grand, slow waves

under the white trees, in the

snowy night

How do we make revolution

 

A short question. While I play with geckos and rage about the rape culture in South Africa and watch rain pour down onto newly green trees and make a supper of pasta primavera for friends.

How do we make revolution in a world that seems to conspire against liberation?

African woman in the mists of time

 

 

I’m always thrilled when we get a chance to gaze back into prehistory.

Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, is the newest fossil skeleton out of Africa to take its place in the gallery of human origins. At an age of 4.4 million years, she lived well before the famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy, of the species Australopithecus afarensis. Hopefully she won’t get a soap opera name.  

This discovery of an almost complete Ardipithecus  ramidus skeleton who is over four million years old comes embedded in the fossil remains of a complete eco-system with tree fragments, pollen and other mammals — meaning that we can reconstruct not only the early Ardi hominid’s features, but (in great detail) the world in which this young female climbed trees, walked among shoulder-high grasses, and fed herself crouched around the glowing embers of a fire. She walked upright, she hunted, she ran and played on the African plateau. She belonged and was one with nature.

And it is encouraging that the bones of this Ardi skeleton have now been treated as part of the Ethiopian national heritage, rather than being spirited away to European and American universities. Respect for the ancestors.

Alma Thomas in the White House

 

The gifted and under-appreciated African American artist Alma Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1891. She  moved with her family to Washington DC in 1907 after the Atlanta race riots and she became the first graduate from Howard University art department. In 1934 she became the first African American woman to receive a Masters in Fine Art from Columbia University. She spent much of her life teaching and encouraging young people  who wanted to study art. She was the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art at the age of eighty. Her abstract expressionist work has been compared to Byzantine  mosaics  and the pointillist canvases of Georges Seuurat, but she said that her greatest influence was found in nature, in the colours and light  of her local landscape. She died in 1978.

The new American president Barack Obama and  his wife Michelle have chosen canvases by Alma Thomas along with  the works of other African American and native American  artists to hang in their private rooms at the White House as well as in the Oval Office. Watusi by Alma Thomas now hangs in the East Wing, in the office of First Lady Michelle Obama.

This, people,  is one way to change the canon, to open up the hierarchies of valued art to include those who have been excluded for too long. One way to change how we look at art, to remove the blinkers, to see afresh.

As Maya Angelou put it:

‘I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.’