Doorway through an ancient yew tree, Paimpont, Brittany
Doorway through an ancient yew tree, Paimpont, Brittany
When we say the Okanagan word for ourselves, we are actually saying ‘the ones who are dream and land together’. That is our original identity. Before anything else, we are the living, dreaming Earth pieces. The Okanagan perception of the self and that of the dominant culture has to do with the ‘us’ that is place: the capacity to know we are everything that surrounds us; to experience our humanness in relation to all else and, in consequence, to know how we affect the world around us . . . We also refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable. This means that the flesh that is our body is pieces of the land come to us through the things that the land is. The soil, the water, the air, and all the other life forms contributed parts to be our flesh. We are our land/place. Not to know and to celebrate this is to be without language and without land. It is to be ‘dis-placed’. The Okanagan teach that anything displaced from all that it requires to survive in health will eventually perish. Unless place can be relearned, all other life forms will face displacement and then ruin. As Okanagan, our most essential responsibility is to bond our whole individual and communal selves to the land. Many of our ceremonies have been constructed for this. We join with the larger self and with the land, and rejoice in all that we are. We are this one part of the Earth. Without this self and this bond, we are not human.
Jeanette Armstrong1
Once upon a time, the people of our Celtic nations knew what the indigenous people of other lands knew: that our fate is inseparable from the fate of the land we live on, and the fate of wider Earth. Once upon a time, Celtic women knew that we are the land, and the land is us. Once upon a time, we spoke with the moral and spiritual authority of the ancestors and the Otherworld. Once upon a time, before the coming of the Wasteland. Before the forces of the patriarchy systematically stripped us of that knowledge and of our power. Before the great patriarchal religions and the men who spoke for their misogynistic gods systematically rewrote our stories.
Once, we were native to our own places; once, we belonged. There is a Gaelic word for it, and like so many Gaelic words, coming from a language which rises out of a deeply connected, animistic worldview, it is not easily translatable into English. These are the languages of root and leaf, of field and stone, of seaweed and salt. These are words whispered in our ears by the land as if by a lover; the languages which tell us that we and the land are one. In Irish, the word is dúchas; in Scottish Gaelic, dùthchas.2 It expresses a sense of belonging to place, to a certain area of land; it expresses a sense of rootedness, by ancient lineage and ancestry, in the community which has responsibility for that place. In Welsh, the word cynefin has a similar meaning. This is the way our ancestors lived.
Early Gaelic and Welsh literature paints word-pictures of a culture in which there was little separation between plant, animal and human. A culture whose coexistence with and co-dependence on the rest of the natural world was a given, founded on the principle of taking no more than the local land could support. In Ireland the dinnseanchas, the stories and lore of place, were the foundation stones both of personal and communal identity, and of moral obligations to the land and the tribe. There was no dualism in this culture; the everyday world and the Otherworld were woven together in a shimmering web of complex, interdependent entanglements.
This way of being in the world is the key to our native traditions – but now, that sense of belonging to the world that those of us in these Western lands once had, that sense of deep rooting in the Earth, is all but dead. The patriarchy crippled it; Modernity dealt it the final blow.
As a woman, I want to make it live again. My own womanhood is expressed in the stories and traditions of my native lands, for this little fragment of the Earth not only nourishes me, it made me. My body is created and recreated from these Celtic homelands, from the ever-transforming particles of life which once formed the bodies of my ancestors, or the bark of a tree, or the outer skin of a stone. I will give what is left of me back to it when I am dead. This land hasn’t just formed my physical self, it has shaped my character, my identity. It knows me. The mountains have heard and echoed back the sound of my voice; the wind has carried and recognises my scent. This land is who I am. We belong to each other, this land and I, and the Heroine’s Journey, the Eco-Heroine’s Journey, I’ve written about in this book is above all a journey to that way of belonging. A journey back to a solid rooting in the land where we live, and the traditions of our native places.
But if the power of Celtic women springs directly out of these Celtic lands and our native traditions, what happens when we move away from those places? Is there something we can carry away with us? Is there some sense of belonging, some way of being in the world that we can derive from our ancestry, even if we are physically rooted in another country entirely? It’s a problem which many women in the Celtic ‘diaspora’ wrestle with – and there are many such women. Estimates suggest that there might be as many as 70 million people of Irish descent around the world, another 20 million people who claim Scottish ancestry, and several million more whose ancestors were Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Many of the women I have spoken to, often several generations after their ancestors first emigrated from these lands, still identify strongly with their Celtic ancestry, and hunger to find ways of meaningfully incorporating Celtic traditions into their lives.
Sylvia Linsteadt is a slim, blonde, twenty-five-year-old writer who lives with her partner in part of an old Victorian house in Oakland, California. She may inhabit the dense urban centre of this sprawling city, but her large backyard is teeming with chickens and bees, flowers, vegetables and herbs. There, she lovingly tends an angora rabbit called Hawthorn, whose coat she clips and spins into yarn. Culturally, she describes herself as ‘a bit of a mongrel’, but she tells me that her Irish roots call to her more than any others, and have done ever since she was a small child. ‘When I was younger,’ she says, turning a mug of tea round and around in her hands, ‘I read a lot of books about Celtic beliefs and customs. My deep sense of the land as sacred came first to me through Celtic literature and spirituality. My sense of the Earth as wholly animate came out of the native traditions not of America, where I live, but the Celtic lands of my ancestors.’
That way of seeing the world – and being in it – pervades Sylvia’s work and life. A few years ago she made an enormous leap of faith and gave up her first ever full-time job – working in an office as an assistant to a small publisher – to follow her dream of becoming a writer. ‘It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do,’ she says. ‘It was a choice between compromising, struggling on for the sake of a safe job, closing myself inside, away from the land and the world I loved – or I could take a chance early on in my life, now, when there’s less to lose.’
Today, Sylvia earns a small living from selling heartfelt and beautifully packaged stories and fairy tales which come in hand-addressed envelopes in the mail, crammed with dried leaves and petals and tied up with hand-woven yarn. She spends as much time as she can outdoors, walking and practising the art of animal tracking; her beautiful blog, The Indigo Vat,3 is filled with tales of her meanderings around her beloved Point Reyes peninsula and the Coast Range foothills of central-northern California. Sylvia’s stories are unique: straddling the continents, they have one foot in the Celtic lands of her ancestry and the other firmly planted in the Californian landscape to which she is deeply attached.
‘I do feel deeply rooted in this land, yes,’ she says. ‘But I wish that the heritage of my immediate ancestors in this place wasn’t predicated directly upon violence, slaughter and the oppression of a people and a way of life that had been grounded here for at least 9,000 years. The old stories of this land, the old native traditions of its people, are not mine to touch. My own people have done enough meddling, enough ruining, enough destroying, and I have no right now, a white girl made up of almost every imaginable European culture, regardless of my longing for rootedness, my longing to belong to the land into which I was born, to go adapting and adopting the sacred stories of a people who my direct ancestors probably discriminated against, probably even killed.’
For Sylvia, as for so many of the women I spoke to, this is a vein of shame, anger and humiliation that runs very deep, and she holds strongly to the view that Native American stories are not to be appropriated. ‘Certainly those are stories to be learned, revered, respected; but not retold, not in my voice. And that would be too easy, anyway, taking stories from other people about the land you live on, instead of listening and learning its stories yourself. Those were stories gathered and earned over millennia. Those of us who came later need to work for our own wild myths, break ourselves open to let them in.’
Sylvia’s yearning to find a way to merge her ancestral traditions with the physical reality of the land she now lives on, led her to look at the old European stories she once devoured as a child in a different way: she began to wonder whether they could adapt themselves, whether somehow they could shape-shift to fit a very different ecosystem.
Although she speaks passionately about the ways in which this wild and rocky coastal landscape of Northern California reminds her of the Celtic countries where her ancestors came from, the native creatures and the plants here are quite different. This is a land of redwood, coyote brush, red alder and thimbleberry; of mountain lions and tule elk, coyotes and gray foxes, orange-bellied newts and red-legged frogs. But, she tells me, there are Snow White tales from West Africa to Chile, from Albania to Iraq and from France to Louisiana. So while it’s true that those tales were born originally out of specific landscapes, languages and cultural contexts, they too, like the people who carried them, are migrants.
‘I began to wonder,’ she says, purposefully twisting a stray lock of long hair with long fingers as she speaks, as if somehow she could use it to weave one of her tales, ‘if I could walk with old stories over these landscapes, plant them here, see how they take to the bobcats, the Douglas firs, the manzanitas and kestrels. My heritage and the traditions of my “people” are based in lands far away. But can we break open the old stories like you break open a fruit, find the seeds, and regrow them here? See if they can find their gray fox whiskers, their elk hooves, their red-legged frog songs? To see how they can shape-shift with the redwood-coastal fog on their necks, the resin of chaparral on their tongues?
‘I don’t know what it’s like to live in Scotland, so I have to find and to write stories that are based here, where I live. And so the story of the sealwoman who lost her skin becomes the story of a sea lion. My story “The Children of the Land Under This Land” came from the old Irish myth, “The Children of Lir”, in which four children are turned into swans by their jealous stepmother. This retelling, set along the wild California coast, begins when the famed pirate Sir Francis Drake drops the anchor of his Golden Hind along the shore of a Point Reyes estuary in the year 1579, altering the lives of the Coast Miwok who have lived there for millennia.’
The characters and landscapes which inhabit the stories may shift, but the heart of the stories does not change. You cannot transport the Cailleach Bhéarra to the deserts of New Mexico; her place is here, in the wild, wet, stony land she created and personifies. But you can carry the ancestral memory with you; a memory that will help you to find the Old Woman of the World in whatever shape and form she manifests in the place where you live. You can carry with you our native ways of looking at the world, a knowledge that the Earth is animate, a sense of life as sacred, a need to live in harmony with the cycles and seasons of the year. These are the native traditions of your people; they belong to you. The old stories will teach you, wherever you take them. They will show you how to become the bean feasa, the Wise Woman.
There she goes now, the young one, walking the old stories into a new land. Standing tall, with long flowing skirts and long wavy hair piled high on top of her head. There she goes, the perfect reminder that it is not just the mothers and the grandmothers that we need, but the daughters too – the ones who might yet find the courage to live as we did not. ‘I take them out with me, the stories,’ Sylvia says. ‘I take them out walking alongside the courting coyote prints and the place where brush rabbits come to graze the long grass in the early morning next to the salmonberry canes.’
The themes and threads of the story remain, and women like Sylvia are taking up those threads, using them to weave connected, grounded ways of being in the world – ways of being that are not based on impossible yearnings for an overseas land which they will not live in and can never physically belong to, but which are deeply rooted in the place where they live now. ‘I am here,’ Sylvia says. ‘This land is my home, whatever colonial baggage that statement carries with it. I have a duty and a longing to know it and to belong to it. The stories of my people, my ancestors, can help me do that.’
Women are spinners and weavers; we are the ones who spin the threads and weave them into meaning and pattern. Like silkworms, we create those threads out of our own substance, pulling the strong, fine fibres out of our own hearts and wombs. It’s time to make some new threads; time to strengthen the frayed wild edges of our own being and then weave ourselves back into the fabric of our culture. Once we knew the patterns for weaving the world; we can piece them together again. Women can heal the Wasteland. We can remake the world. This is what women do. This is our work.
In these times it’s not enough to awaken ourselves, to find our community: the world is in need of restoration, and each one of us is challenged to do the work of collective change. The day of the Heroic quest is over, with its all-conquering, dragon-slaying Hero saving the world, one sword-stroke at a time. The Journey we need now is not a journey of active, world-beating individualism, it is a journey of collective re-enchantment – a re-animation of the Earth. It’s time to become native to our places again. It’s time for women to shrug off the yoke of the patriarchy, and reclaim our native power. The power that is the Earth itself speaking; the authority of the Voices which came out of the Wells. If there is to be change, it will come from us. Right here, where we stand. Women were always the story-givers, the memory-keepers, the dreamers. Listen now to the land’s long dreaming. Do you see what it’s dreaming? It’s dreaming you.
On the Ordnance Survey map, the waterfall which lies just upriver from our cottage is named Asnanomedan: an anglicised corruption of Eas an Amadáin, Waterfall of the Fool. I sit here for a while every day among the trees which cluster thickly around and obscure it, listening to the water’s flow. I close my eyes and concentrate; one day I’ll understand what this Riverwitch is saying to me. I sing to her sometimes, so that she will know my voice in turn. Sometimes, I bring a poem; I say it aloud to the trees so that they too can know me.
After years of being uprooted myself, I’m finally learning about trees. Here is what I have learned about trees: they are tenacious. A rowan tree is beginning to grow out of a tiny crack in the old bedrock exposed by the river. The stone protects the seedling from the worst of the winds and gives it shelter. It clings tight; it will not let go. Here is what I have learned about trees: their roots are deep. They establish their roots first, and then they reach for the sky.
I have sat here by this waterfall for over a year now, and I am learning to stay still. Sit long enough in the same place, dreaming and singing, and you may learn to hear its voice. But through four swirling seasons I sat, the fool by the waterfall, and still I failed to hear. I was surrounded by ash and alder and willow, dense and interwoven along the sheltered river banks. I appreciated their beauty, learnt of their waxing and waning as the year’s wheel turned. Still, I mourned the lost oaks of Min Doire, plain of the oaks. This place cries out for oaks. We had been told that the ancient oak woodlands were cleared here to the last tree, and amid the press of rich foliage I feared that it must be true. And then I saw it, one morning in April, before the ashes had burst their buds.
Hidden in a gorge, protected by the waterfall – an oak tree. A sessile oak: the last old native oak in Min Doire. Its bony hand clutches as fiercely to the bare rock in the middle of the divided river as does an eagle to a rabbit. There is no guessing how old the tree may be. Older perhaps than I dare imagine. It stands there still, all moss and knots. Every morning I see it, that old tree, clinging on with such a determination to live this very day. It will never give up. But it is not trying to live forever. That would be something different entirely. The tree has many beautiful, strong words for ‘today’. It has none for ‘forever’.
The last of the ancient trees. See, they hide there still; they have not left us. We can find them, if we only learn how to look.
This old oak remembers a time when there were so many others of its kind, a time that is encoded deep in the earth-memory of this land. And so, a few days later, a spade cuts deeply into the scrap of land which runs down from our cottage to the river. I stand and watch while David digs. When he’s done and the hole is big enough, I take the seedling. This tree-to-be, this tiny thing, has grown from an acorn gathered in County Tyrone from one of the oldest oak trees in Ireland. The man who grew it is passionate about keeping the ancient, native tree stock alive. He grows the trees and hands them on, freely, to anyone who will take them. Carefully, I lower it in. I am careful with its roots; they’re fragile still. A little light compost, a little fish-and-bone meal. Together, we put our hands to work, each of us patting and firming the soil around it.
Gently, little tree; it’ll be a good many years before you grow, a good many years before you reach the stature of the last native oak of this old land of Min Doire. We will not live to see it. But if we tend you, sit by you each day and whisper our stories as we listen in turn to yours, you may yet root. You may yet rise.