The Talesingr's Children

The Talesingr’s Children

The Talesingr had lost her words.  She would open her mouth and nothing would come but the croaking of an old crow, the sound of wind on the bare hilltops in the bitterest winter.  Yet the tales were there, crowding inside her, jostling one against the other to be set free, to be loosed from her flesh and dripped like honey from her tongue.  They scratched behind her eyes and made them sore.  They camped in her stomach like legions of warriors before a battle, tense and sleepless, making her belly churn and ache.  The younger ones, more adventurous and indeed, thinner than their elders, squeezed down past her bony knees to try and find a narrower pass to freedom, succeeding only in making her feet throb with every step.  They howled in her head all day and all night and she was bereft of sleep.

In desperation she went to see the Dreamspinnr, bringing payment of an antler bone pendant and pine resin for the fire.  The Dreamspinnr looked at her through deep hooded eyes for a long time.  The tales cried and clawed their way up her throat when the Dreamspinnr opened the Talespinnr’s mouth and peered in, breathing smoke into her face.  But they could not climb out.  They scratched inside her skull and wailed, making her head ache as if it might burst, but the way was barred.  The Dreamspinnr sniffed at the Talespinnr’s breath, looked in her ears and grunted.  Then she sat down again.  And spoke.

“The oldest stories bar the way.  You have kept them too long, and they are afraid to leave.  You have hoarded your words, you have not been generous with them.  They are dying, becoming nothing more than rotted thought and leaf mulch, and they drag their feet and infect the young ones with their sickness and fear.”  And the Talesingr wept in regret, for it was true.  She had held back the stories she liked best, waiting for a time of great importance, not wishing to waste them on a day like any other, or a listener like any other.  Stories with which to regale a Queen who might one day visit, to win a contest with a fellow Talespinnr from another land…or to win a lover who might stay if the tale pleased him well.  Stories she had carried within her for so long she could not even remember how they began…or ended.  Stories that were no longer stories, so crippled they had become pushed deep inside her.  She had loved them too much and her love had deformed them, stopped them growing tall and true, turned them from tales into nightmares that snatched at her dreams and turned her hopes into ash.

The Dreamspinnr stoked the fire between them, sending fragrant sparks into the small space of the deerskin hut.  She said…”I will journey to find what you must do.  You and your story children must stay and keep the night with me.”  And the Talesingr, tears streaking her face, nodded silently as the stories inside her hushed and held their breaths for the first time in too long.

All night, as the Dreamspinnr danced and sang and beat her drum, the Talesingr watched.  Outside the wind howled and the snow lay thick on the ground.  It was the time when the Talesingr was most loved.  When her stories warmed frozen hearts and filled empty bellies.  And she could not speak.  If she could not speak, she was no Talesingr at all and she had no place among the people.

When the grey light of dawn filtered through the gaps around the deerskin door, the Dreamspinnr laid down her drum at last, and spoke.  “You will go out into the woods.  You must go towards the rising sun.  At the end of the second day, you will find a cave. You will enter the cave and light your fire.  And there you will stay.  For three days and three nights, you will spit the words of your broken stories into the fire, you will make the marks of their bones upon wood and cloth and hang them in the trees for the winds to find and take where they will.  You will give your twisted children a fine funeral, and set them free.  When the wailing in your head has ended, and the stories are gone, your voice will be returned to you.  Then you will return to your people, and new stories will come.  But you must not hold them back.  When they are born, do not seek to keep them locked inside you, set them free and tell them to whoever will listen.”

The Talesinngr nodded in despair, for she must lose forever the story children she had born, but there was no other way.  She took up her bow and knife to keep against the wolves, and walked towards the rising sun.  To farewell her children and leave nothing of them but ash and the scattered scratches of their bones hanging from the bare branches.  Who but the crows might hear their tales now? 

The Tale of the The Seven Bird Spirits

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All text and images © Christina Cairns 2011

Late Harvest...

Autumn colours mixed with the colours of our southern winter...intense greens, of grass and leaf and tree washed clean and bright with rain.  Some more little wood hangers for my art stall.  Because I am a novice at this, I did not realise that my 'allocated stand' was actually 'allocated floor space' and nothing more, and now must scramble to knock together some kind of display stands to put my larger paintings on.  Beloved says he can make something...ah well, I suppose it's all a learning experience.

And another tea bag leaf

I have something waiting in the wings to show you.  A slightly different direction...or rather, several directions at once.  I have the first pieces completed, but their stories are still floating about my head like a cloud of butterflies, beautiful, but the details are elusive and hard to pin down.  So we must be patient and let them land and become still so as to observe them closely without harming or alarming them.  Stay tuned!

Making and painting...

I've been busy the last couple of days.  Making and painting.  I've been fighting a headache on and off since Monday morning, so I gave up on housework and when it subsided in the afternoons I decided to do something fun rather than cleaning.  And I have a good reason to get moving on the creative front, I've committed to this Art Expo in a month, so need to get some smaller works done for my booth/stall.  I've never had an art stall before, so this will be a learning experience.  I'm keeping expectations fairly low, I hope I can cover my costs and learn some useful things about running a stall, and anything on top of that will be icing on the cake.

I've taken the smallest booth available, so have room for 3 large paintings, a few smaller works, some wood hangers, and I think I'll have a small selection of prints for sale, though I haven't decided which ones yet.

If anyone has any brilliant advice on what to take, what not to take, even what to wear (!) please don't hesitate to leave a comment!

Anyway, here's what I've been working on.

Two more olive wood hangers.  Beloved has just cut me a whole STACK of them, so I will be busy!

Having fun with teabags!  An ink sketch of a leaf skeleton, on an opened tea bag (post cuppa!), hand sewn to an old book page.  Biggest munchkin found the tattered book with pages falling out and brought it home because she knows mummy likes stuff like that (though she's told me in no uncertain terms that she found it so it's HER book, but I can have a few pages!)  It's in Russian, but that's all I can tell you, it could be a book of hymns or the Communist Manifesto, I wouldn't have a clue!  All neatly mounted and packaged in cello...gosh, I'm so organised!

And acrylic painting of an ornamental pear leaf on tea bag paper, with metal (gold) leaf, hand sewn to an old dictionary page.  This one is my favourite so far, it has a little bit of magic in it, because I didn't notice the words on the right until I was almost finished!  So it now has a little poem for a name.

The red 

season

harvest

the full

autumnal heart

Another pear leaf.  No mount yet (ooh, I must remember to sign it!)

A closer view

And finally, a couple of things that are not for the stall.  Do you remember this?  I think it's finished now, though I still don't know what it is or what to use it for!

And this is a choker for moi!  Well, unless someone offers me oodles of dosh for it!

We have actually had rain, REAL rain, but it's far too little.  And maximum temperatures for the next week are all around the 20ºC, so not very wintery.  Everything in my garden is topsy turvy, all my bulbs are coming up, my apricot tree hasn't lost it's leaves yet (they're just starting to yellow a little now), meanwhile my almond tree has lost its leaves, started flowering, and now has all its new 'spring' leaves!  Mad!

Aprons and fairy pancakes...

I haven't written for two whole weeks.  It's not so much that I can't think of anything to write, rather that I have so many ideas wooshing around in my head and I haven't had the chance to lasso any of them and wrestle them to the ground.  But it's 10-45pm and I've had a glass of Baileys and am nodding off as it is, so I think I'll leave deep 'thunks' alone for the moment, and throw some pictures of what I've been up to at you instead!

I promised a pic of the aprons...well, one will have to do for the moment, though they are now all finished. This one is a gift, but I've made myself one in the same fabric, minus the frilly bits (I'm not really a frilly person!)

One scarf commissioned by littlest munchkin...though probably rather longer than it needed to be.  She wanted one just like the one I made biggest munchkin last year.

Then of course, biggest munchkin wanted a photo in hers!

Then a lovely lunch at a very exclusive alfresco restaurant.  

Yes, dear readers, it is actually winter.  Looks like it will be a very dry one.

The chef in her kitchen.  The rather untidy courtyard/barbeque area. 

(Hah!  Beloved teases me about my paving efforts, but they're still there, still doing their job, after about 7 years!)

Ooh lovely, the kettle's on!

Here's the menu.  I was going to make a comment about the frequent appearance of be-socked feet OUTSIDE (I'm constantly telling them to 'put your shoes on'!)  Then I looked at the next pic and though better of it.

Mummy in her gardening clothes...and socks!  Very flattering I don't think!

Mmmmm, pizza!  And Flynn makes another appearance.  Looking innocent and NOT digging up the bare patches in the lawn.

Then we were treated to a floor show of aerial gymnastics...by the chef...and waiter!  

Just as well daddy wasn't there...children believe hills hoists are designed to swing on...daddies on the other hand, believe they are designed to hang up motorbike filters, tent flies, karate protecty shin pads, old tarps and the like.

And we discovered that faeries are rather partial to faery size pancakes with lashings of maple syrup!  Littlest said she could see tiny footprints in the syrup, so they must be very sticky faeries!

And last, for now, this is what you might call an aural doodle.  Sat down earlier this evening, after munchkins were off to bed, and muddled about with Cordelia and a little song melody, and thought, hmmm, I like that, I'd better record it so I don't forget it.  It might even get words one day!

Thank you all...and blessings abound...

Just a quick post to thank everyone for the beautiful comments.  If anyone has taken comfort or found understanding for a friend or loved one through my words, then I am so very happy for that is why I write.

Today I went over to a friend's house to do a simple meditation, just sitting back and relaxing and listening to a CD of words and music.  At one point, the guide on the CD asked us to think of all the things that we are blessed with in our lives.  And I thought of my beautiful girls.  Yes, I should have three little girls...but I have two here with me to fill up my heart with love...and fill up my life with chaos and laughter (and the odd tantrum), and Hannah Montana posters (aaarrgh!) and refusals to eat cooked carrots (although oddly, tinned ones are fine), and a fringe that I am absolutely NOT allowed to trim (I've threatened to sneak in and cut it when she's asleep!), and half eaten biscuits under the beds along with dirty socks (always odd ones), and soggy dolls in the bathroom (and something that left a bright pink stain on the white grout)......and hugs and cries of "you're the best mummy in the world!", and impromptu interpretive dance performances (usually at bedtime) and singing loudly while climbing trees in the front yard, and two note recorder playing, and "I have to be a monkey for today's assembly item!", and "I don't have any clean knickers (have you looked in your drawer?)", and homemade Mothers' Day Cards with enough glitter to make Tinkerbelle sneeze.........well, you get the picture!  Life is full to bursting, and my precious little ones are growing so quickly it makes my head spin sometimes.  But they are my blessings, and so you see, I am blessed indeed.  There is a Morgan sized hole in my life, but how can I be sad for long, when I have faeries such as these shining like rainbows in my garden?!

Lullaby for a lost mermaid...

It hardly seems possible that a whole year has passed since I wrote THIS.  But my little mermaid would be 11 today.  Time passes so quickly.  When I was pregnant, I had great plans to write a lullaby for her, her very own special song, and sing it to her to welcome her into the world.  But I was so busy getting ready for the new arrival, I didn't have time.  I thought, 'it's OK, I'll write one when she arrives.'  I thought I would have all the time in the world, that when I brought her home, I would be able to sing it every night, for many years, to send her off to sleep.

When she arrived I knew there would be no singing her to sleep, no years of kissing her goodnight, that I could never take her home.  I wished I had written that song, so I could welcome her...and say goodbye.  Instead, I sang what I could remember of an old gaelic lullaby...and lament...late one night in the hospital, just her and I together.  I didn't want anyone to hear me singing.  I didn't think they'd understand.  But it was something that I needed to do, the instinct was very strong.

Months later, I did write her lullaby.  It's not a lament, it's the song I might have written if she had come home safe and well.  But I don't have a reason to sing it very often.  So I sang it tonight, and it's rough and painful, but maybe she hears it and knows it's her song.  And it's here if you want to listen too.

Meditations on home....

I've been thinking a lot about 'home' over the last week or so, after Terri Windling wrote not one, but two evocative blog posts about home, belonging, and how where we are relates to who we are.  I meant to pick up the conversation thread earlier, but better late than never, as they say.  I was reminded of a strange short film I saw on TV years ago.  In his 1991, "I dreamt I woke up", filmmaker John Boorman (Excalibur) created a dreamy meditation on the notion of home and finding a place to belong.  This paragraph jumped out at me, because it's how I feel, how I've felt as long as I can remember.  That I'm not quite in the place I should be, in order to be really me.

And the world itself has never looked quite right to me.  But when I came here to Wicklow in Ireland twenty two years ago, I felt I had come to a place that had always existed in my imagination.  That here I could somehow come to myself at last.  Is that what home is?  Finding in the outer world a place that coincides with an inner landscape?  What makes a landscape?  Is it the contours, the colours, the light, the rock, the things that grow upon it?  What is the mysterious thing that touches us and says 'This is your place'?

As a descendent of immigrants from another, very different land, I’ve always felt as if I had a foot in two worlds and belonged to neither. This country is the only home I’ve ever known, I know its rhythms, its seasons, its beauty and its frustrations. But culturally, spiritually...this land remains a cipher, a mystery that I cannot take part in beyond a superficial level. This land has a people whose deep and abiding affinity with it has survived against all odds. But I am not of this people, and I cannot truly share in the knowledge they have. I can learn aspects of it out of intellectual curiosity, but I can never embed myself within their culture, I can never belong to it or learn its deepest secrets. I will always be an outsider.

As a child growing up, the stories I read, the cultural traditions I learned, the spiritual teachings I was given were all imported from somewhere else. They did not arise here, out of the soil of this country, in a symbiotic relationship between people and land. They rose out of a different landscape, they were the tales of my ancestors, stories that spoke to my soul, things I seemed to already know even as I was discovering them for the first time. Myths that made my heart sing...and ache. But they did not fit. There was a huge and impassable gulf between the land in the stories and the land beneath my feet.

Great stories, the ones that survive and are most loved, I believe are not created out of the aether, but rather they grow out of the land. They are embedded in it, linked inextricably to it. They have a sense of place and their role is to teach each new generation what that sense of place is. How to behave with respect for the land and its spirits (be they ancestors, or animal spirits...or faeries), how to belong, how to honour the earth beneath your feet in the place where you live so it will continue to sustain you, the place your ancestors have lived for generations. Stories like this hold vital lore. In oral societies it is the only way to pass down from generation to generation the important information that is vital for the survival of the community. Stories are the living library preserving knowledge of what plants are good to eat and when best to harvest them, or which leaves and flowers cure headaches or toothache or soothe a fever. When the animals that are hunted for food or fur will be on the move and what signs to look for. Everything you needed to know.

But what happens when these stories are cut from their roots and transported thousands of miles? Rather like cut flowers they live for a time, but deprived of the soil that sustained them, they eventually wilt and lose their vitality. They no longer speak secrets of the fields or forests they came from, but become something pretty and meaningless to put on the mantelpiece and nothing more. As a child I revelled in stories about faeries and bluebell forests, old magic oak trees and hedgerows, standing stones and King Arthur. But it was all abstract.  I’d never seen a bluebell...or an oak tree...or standing stones. I had no idea what a hedgerow even was. And King Arthur was a name. There was nowhere I could go to see where he might actually fit into the landscape. I knew of Elderflower wine, but I didn’t know what an Elderflower was. And conversely, though I know there are many edible native plants, like most Australians I haven’t got a clue which ones they are. If I was lost in the bush, I wouldn’t know what I could eat and what I couldn’t. I have no LORE passed down about them.  If you blindfolded me and waved a distillation of ‘the bush after rain’ under my nose it would make me hopelessly homesick. But if you said “what is that plant, what is that animal?” I probably cannot tell you. If you point to a wallaby, I can tell you it’s a wallaby. But I can’t tell you which particular kind, what it eats, or its habits. And, more than that, I cannot tell you its stories. I know quite a bit of folklore and mythological associations of animals like foxes, ravens, deer, wolves, cats, dogs, horses, cattle, bears, salmon...and so on. But I don’t know the stories of the wallaby, or the dugite, or the redback spider, or the pink and grey galah, or even the magpie (probably my favourite Australian bird). I can probably find out but they won’t be MY stories. Not the stories of my ancestors. They won’t belong to me and, perhaps even more important, I won’t belong to them. They might be in my head, but they won’t be deep in my bones.

As I grew up, I wanted to be many different things, but I suppose even more than an artist (which I took as a given), I wanted to write. I wanted to write stories like the ones I loved reading, the stories of oak trees and standing stones. But isn’t the first lesson of being a writer, ‘write what you know’? Every time a story bubbled its way into my brain, I’d be stymied before I even started because I didn’t know how to root it in a landscape I could only imagine. And the other possibility is even more fraught with danger. To take Australian indigenous stories and rework them could be considered ‘appropriation’ of the worst kind. How can I give my stories roots in this land when the traditions I grew up with don’t work here, and the ones that do I’m not permitted to use?

Many customs and traditions and folklore didn’t survive the journey across the oceans. The traditions of Easter and Christmas did arrive with my ancestors, but they’re empty of a great deal of meaning here, they are celebrated in seasons that make no sense. Easter is filled with bunnies and chocolate eggs and baby chickens...just as autumn is beginning to kick in. Christmas is celebrated with plastic pine trees, the original symbolism of an evergreen tree completely lost in a land where leaves don't fall even in autumn, let alone summer. I remember the excitement I felt as a child when spray-on fake snow appeared in the shops...we could make our windows look like something out of ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Dickens.  Just like a REAL Christmas! Except of course our houses didn’t look right and it was too hot to even pretend it had snowed. It’s no use just swapping the seasons around, celebrating May Day in October for example. Our winter is short and mild...a pleasant respite from the harsh summer. I don’t feel at all like celebrating when it’s on the way out and summer is rushing headlong in. Yet spring brings with it a burst of colour as even the desert blooms, and summer is our harvest time. But again, it is harvest time for imported species. I don’t know what is fruiting among the native flora.  Spring brings daffodils out, and in November every street nearby is awash with mauve as the jacarandas bloom.  Summer here is cherries and peaches, apricots and grapes. These are my indicators of seasonal changes. Aliens to the land I live in. Nothing I know fits.

And yet I love this land deeply and I don’t know if I could ever live anywhere else. Perhaps for a while, but my heart would always be where the sun sets over the sea by white beaches, where the smell of eucalypt trees after rain is like a magical essence powerful enough to wake the dead. Where the first flush of green after the long, brown summer makes my heart sing. The smell of peppermint trees down by the Blackwood River, the utter beauty of Green’s Pool near Denmark. The sound of the dawn chorus...could I live without the sound of magpies warbling?

So what can I do? I want to find a way to live (and perhaps even have a go at writing) that roots my traditions, my ancestors’ stories, into this land so that they truly live and breathe and grow in this landscape, a way that harmonises with but does not in any way compromise the traditions of the people who have been here for more than forty thousand years. It’s got to be possible, somehow. Because I honestly believe that until we late-comers find a way to truly belong to this country, we will carry on misunderstanding it, exploiting it, destroying it, and denigrating its first people and their traditions.  We need to create lore (rather than law) of this land in a way that roots us here, making us part of the intricate web that binds everything. Because until we do that we’ll only ever be visitors, temporary residents scratching the surface. We will never truly be home.