Wildwood Girls

Eagle’s wing and open sky

Stolen sisters spirits fly

Eagle’s wing and open sky

Stolen sisters spirits fly 

At the edge of a great forest, where diamond oak and tall pine fill the air with green leaf and sharp flowers, a Wildwood girl was dancing alone. Her feet stamped up a storm of silver in the early morning dew and her crow wing hair fell a waterfall down her back. She was of the forest’s wild - her ear knew the language of bird and pine; ancient, rock whispered stories inhabited her heart and guided the dance of her feet. But though her tongue sang the song of freedom, she was the last of her kind and her heart was shot with a deep, desperate loneliness. 

“Beautiful girl! Come home with me. Be mine own!” 

A young man, his skin white and his hair shining in the sun beckoned her over. 

“Your kind want nothing of mine,” the girl said. But he had a basket full of food and sweet wine and a tongue ready for conversation and she could not resist the chance to sit and eat and talk with another human being. 

“We would spend every day like this if you were mine. I will return tomorrow” 

Later that night she lay awake in her Forest bed - her lips longing for sweet wine kisses. Maybe the forest didn’t hold everything she wanted after all… 

The next day the Man brought her a dress of silk with tight drawn ribbons. 

“For you my lady.” As the butter soft silk caressed her skin, the man held out a sparkling ruby ring. 

“I can make you my Lady and you will never be lonely again.” And she was caught. 

*** 

The Man’s home was grand. White painted walls shone in the bright sunlight and far-travelled red roses lined the entrance. Within moments of their arrival, the WildWood girl was hurried inside by what seemed like hundreds of servants and she was bathed from tip to toe in warm water. Scrubbed free of the wild and combed free of the weather, her black hair was bound up with pearls and curled into neat ringlets.   

That afternoon, the Wild Girl and Rich Man walked through his gardens. She admired neatly arranged beds filled with strange and beautiful flowers imported from distant lands and carefully clipped conifer hedges. Around the gardens, a high, painted fence kept the wild at bay ensuring that not a leaf, petal or hair was out of place. Everything here was crafted to perfection, including the WildWood Girl. 

That night, as a soft breeze blew the day gently into night, the Man came to her room. Between tangled sheets and entwined limbs, her fears dissolved into a heady mist of love making. 

And so the days passed in an intoxicating haze of roses, sweet wine and glistening moonlit movement. 

Before the girl realised that time had passed, she felt the wind change and the sun move further from the land. And as the season changed, it seemed to her that the Man spent less and less time with her; his touch was rougher, his kisses quicker, his conversation clipped and curt. She realised how little she knew of him and his life. Her heart longed for home, but the loneliness of her past pinned her to her silk bed. 

One night, as she lay alone, a storm blew and the House shook and shuddered. The Girl was afraid. Once it was that a storm would not have worried her; she would have danced to the rhythm of the thunder, but in her fine room and in her thin night gown, the wind seemed wild and thunder fearfully loud. 

“I don’t want to be alone!” she cried. Footsteps and the door opened. Her Master stood in the open door way, silhouetted in sharp lightning flash, but he was not her master any longer. His brow was low and dark, his eyes burned with a furious lust, his gold stitched suit was ripped open and in his tense fist, a sharp knife screamed for blood. 

“No one notices, no one cares
For wild wood girls with crow black hair!
With me, WHORE!” 

And then she was being dragged into the dark, ripped from comfort, the garden, over flower and bush, the woods over rock and branch, heavy rain stinging her skin, thunder booming, deeper and deeper into sharp leafed woods. 

After what seemed like forever, she was thrown to the ground. The air was thin and sharp as cut glass. Through a curtain of soul cut rain, staghead of dying tree cast silent shapes onto the sour earth. But the wild girl’s eyes were caught - before her was a roughly dug pit and there, thrown and discarded like so many broken dolls, flesh battered and bruised bones shining white were the forgotten, lost bodies of black haired girls.  

“No one notices, no one cares
For these wild wood girls with crow black hair!” 

The girl screamed and ran but he knew the dance well. He grabbed her hand, he grabbed her hair, he grabbed her neck and drew the shining knife from his belt. 

Then the rain stopped and the moon, bright and sliver, gazed upon the girl.  

Eagles wing and open sky
Stolen sisters spirits fly
Eagle wing and white moon bright
You are lost I still fight 

The Wild awoke and the Wild knew their own. An eagle descended, claws outstretched and tore at the Man’s arm. He cried out and dropped the knife. A fox, flash of red bit into his leg. A bow of the staghead tree brought an antler crashing into his back. Racoon, mice, birds, branch, leaf and bush even the earth itself rose up and chased the young Man from the woods, away from their girl, their kin, their own. 

But the girl was already gone. She had grabbed the knife and run. Dressed only in moonlight, she ran till her feet bled and her red blood mingled with the black earth of the forest. She ran till there was no breath left in her body. 

*** 

Before her eyes opened, she could smell lavender. She felt soft cotton sheets and shook herself awake. 

“Shhhhhh,” a rich woman’s voice. “Be calm. You are safe. Now when you are rested sweet wild thing, you must tell me what monster did this to you and we must decide what we will do to avenge you.”

 ***

The grandest lady of the county was having a party and all the rich folk of the area were invited. And what a party it was - lawns strewn with candles, white suited servants holding gilt plates of delicate meats and fruits, elegant music and refined conversation. The Wildwood Girl was dressed in a fine white dress, but her dark eyes were focussed on finding that face that haunted her dreams. 

Then she saw him.

Eagles wing and open sky
Stolen sisters spirits fly 

The Party fell silent. Everyone turned to hear her song. 

A Wildwood girl as free as wind
Taken by a man so brave
Dressed in silk and ruby red
But I was living dead. 

A dark night came upon me
When fine Man’s knife was at my throat
Down into a wood so dark
Graves of girls; my masters past 

But the wind it came
And the wind blew moon to me
And the forest knew its own 

Alive a Wildwood girl I stand
FALSE man knife I have in hand
His name upon the hilt it reads
Their blood stained on the blade you see

For no-one knew and no-one cared
For WildWood Girls with crow black hair. 

The room was silent. The Man’s face was pale with terror and pushed into his chest, the hilt of a knife bearing his family crest. 

Days later, the county judge sent him to a high hill where a Mangrove Tree bore the weight of his body well and the wild wind gathered up the rotting pieces of his soul to burn forever in the fiery depths of hell.

*** 

The next morning the Lady smiled warmly.
 “All is now well. The trouble has passed and the monster slayed. I’m so pleased that no real harm was done.” 

That night the WildWood Girl could not sleep. Her mind was filled with their bone faces, the pit, bruised bodies and those words “no real harm done”....  

She left the Lady’s home and returned to the forest. She danced and sang once more where her ancestors’ bones lay sleeping in the warm earth, her feet were guided by a new and terribly truthful rhythm:

“No one noticed, no one cared
For wild wood girls with crow black hair.” 

*** 

Once upon a time, at the edge of a forest, a girl danced alone. She was the forest’s wild; ancient, rock-whispered stories inhabited her heart and guided the rhythm of her feet. But she was the last of her kind and she is gone forever. 

Memories fade but stories run deep into the earth. Let no-more blood of stolen sisters of Canada and North America be upon our 
hands.  
  
**************************************************************
http://www.amnesty.ca/our-work/campaigns/no-more-stolen-sisters  

Sivuqaq - the wrung out island

Dark, still water.

Then Raven flew up and pierced the back skein of the sky with his black beak.

 

 

 

All was silent.

 

 

 

 

Raven burst from the heavens, holding in his beak the golden ball of the sun, stolen from the upper god. Moments later, the upper god appeared, bright and radiant and the world was born.

Raven reached into the waters and drew up a handful of rich dark earth - the Americas.

Raven reached into the waters and drew up cold, glittering rocks - Russia

He created the blessed tribes - Inhuit, Yupik, Chuckhi, Sami. The Upper god saw their beauty and strength and gifted his reindeers to these tribes, that they may be well fed and warmly clothed. With that the Upper God returned to the heavens and was gone.

Raven smiled over what he had made, stretched and spread himself for a float on the surface of the sea for a little nap. It had been a long day.

“And it’s not over yet,” the rays of the sun he had stolen and set in the blue tickled him awake again. 'There were a few hours of daylight left to make something', he supposed.

So Raven reached down into the waters of the ocean, but there wasn't much left. He reached and with his finger tips drew up a scrap of damp, squeezed the water out and what was left he sprinkled onto the sea and an island was made, if an island it could be called. It was small and barren and rocky and cold. Raven took some pebbles and spread them over the island and they were men, if men they could be called - they were weak of will and weak of body.

“Oh. Oh dear. I cannot ask the reindeer to give themselves to you,” spoke Raven “No. The Upper God would not have it; you are not good enough for Reindeer. No - you'll just have to eat what you can find.”

And so Sivuqaq - the wrung out, strung out, twisted out island - was born. The people stood on the barren shore and watched Raven fly up and disappear into the endless black sky.

The people were hungry. They caught a thong seal. They caught a ringed seal. They caught a walrus. But it was not enough.

One-by-one-the-people-began-to-die.

Then there was just one boy left. He was covered in scabs and scars. He was skin stretched over bone. He lay on the floor of what had once been a sleeping room and watched his breath cloud in the frozen air.

He waited to die, lying underneath a blanket of bird skins, but all the feather had fallen off and floated away just like the Gods that had left him there. Eyes pinned open by the bony fingers of hunger, he shivered and shook.

In a dry whisper he began to pray. He prayed for sleep. He prayed for food. He prayed for death.

Ah-Say-yah-Say-Yah-Say-Yah

Far across the world, Raven heard the boy’s cries. Out of the frozen sea he sent a barking, roaring walrus, long ivory tusks.

“Problem solved. There’s food for the boy” Raven smiled happily to himself.

Two tons of walrus stormed into the sleeping room, crashing and cracking the floors and walls. The boy lay helplessly on the floor, unable to move, let alone kill this great creature. And then it was gone and in its wake, all along the ground, were jellyfish - food! In a great burst of anticipation, the boy grabbed one jellyfish and ate it whole and another and ate it whole and another and at it whole! “The Gods are good!” he cried “The Gods are good!”

Just at that moment, Raven happened to be flying over and thought he’d pop into see how his walrus gift had helped the boy.

The boy was lying dead on the ground, surrounded by half-digested jellyfish.

So Raven brought the boy back to life. The boy shook himself and began to grab at more jellyfish, eating one, two, three, four, five.

Raven smiled, satisfied to himself.

The boy died again.

And Raven brought him back again. The boy shook himself and grabbed at more jellyfish. One, two , three, four, five.

The boy died again.

And Raven brought him back again and THIS TIME the boy’s stomach was stronger. He ate more jellyfish and felt stronger.

Raven smiled and off he flew once more.

The boy prayed for sleep and the Upper God heard him and sent him sleep. He slept a heavy, deep sleep for three days and two nights and then he dreamed.

Six women - five young and one old - came into the room. They glowed like sun on snow, their eyes were black as Raven’s wing and bright tattoos ran in intricate lines and circles across their faces. They cleaned the room, repaired the walls, sowed thick blankets of seal skin, lit the lamp. He wished to move nearer the golden light of the  lamp but just as he moved he woke up.

The room was cold, dark and empty.

For three days and two nights he prayed for the dream to return, shivering and alone until his sobbing brought sleep and sleep brought the women! He lay, eyes peeping open, terrified to move in case the dream disappeared again.

“Shhhh,” one old woman said “We musn’t wake him. The Upper God was clear. All must be ready. Go prepare the food!”

The boy’s nostrils flared and he breathed a rich breath of seal blubber, hot fish, walrus meat.

“Get up,” the Old Woman nudged him, “The meal is ready.”

As he ate, the old woman urinated into a pot and rubbed the hot liquid into his sore, blistered skin. It burned and stung and healed. Then she breathed softly on him and he felt his limbs grow stronger and stronger until he felt stronger than a bull walrus! Filled with life and joy, he took each of the younger women into his arms and onto the floor of the sleeping room and from that day on he would be called “The One who Loved 5 Divine Women”.

After that he was different, after that he would not wait for jellyfish or divine women. After that, the man set off himself in search of food for his island. He journeyed into the endless expanse of cold blue sky to find the Gods who abandoned his people.

Sitting in the rays of the sun, was Raven. “Give us reindeer,” said the Sivuqaq man.

Raven looked awkward, “I cannot. The Upper God rules the Reindeer and he would be angry… and he’s already pretty angry. But here” his face lightened “how about this.”

Raven gave the young man a handful of pebbles. “Throw these into the sea. They will be your food.”

Back on the cold shores of Sivuqaq, the young man threw the pebbles into the sea. Each pebble grew and grew, with shining blue and grey skin. The whales were born.

The Sivuqaq man walked over the island and as he did the island became brighter, stronger. He lived on the surface of the sea and the sea became full of fish and food. He lived among the walrus and their numbers swelled. The Yupik people settled on the island. But the Yupik people did not see the Sivuqaq man clearly and did not know their food came from his bright presence. On one hunting trip, a short-sighted tribesmen loosed an arrow and the Sivuqaq man was killed. With his last breaths he spoke: “Such are you, and such shall be your fate. When you go out to sea, you shall be drowned. When you stay ashore, you shall die of starvation. When you have food enough, you shall be visited by to´ṛnaṛaks, the spirits, of disease” and finally he died, but this time there was no Raven to bring him back.

And it was as he said. Life on Sivuqaq was hard. Life on Sivuqaq is still hard. And yet, held between sea and rock, the people survive and live. Between cold rock and cold sea, the people live and love. The Yupik tribe still live there today.

 

 

And that is all there is to say about that.

This origin story from Sivuqaq has been retold by Abbie Palache from a http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/inu/eos/eos15.htm which was, in turn, told to the writer by Ale'qat.

This version Copyright Abigail Palache 30/04/2015

Our world is dying.

The world was dying.

 

 

Birds,
beasts,
trees,
flowers.

 

The air grew still without the beat of insect wings.

The world grew silent without bird's song, cricket hum, wolf howl.

 

 

At last there were only two creatures left on earth:

an old man and an old woman.

 

When they had nothing left to eat and no words left to speak, they climbed up the mountain, to a high ledge, ready to throw themselves over.

They wanted to die.

 

As the old woman’s feet touched the edge of the earth, a deep, forgotten grief quaked inside her and a cry shook itself free.

 

“Why did this happen? What is this punishment for? What did we do? Why did all our children die?”

 

 

Silence.

They were ready to jump.

 

At that moment they froze - a baby’s cry! They followed the sound and there in a cradle of dirt was a baby boy. Their grief forgot, they took him to their small hut and cared for him as best they could.

 

But the child wouldn’t stop crying. No matter what they did, the child would not stop crying. Cradled or free, the child grizzled and groaned and sobbed and screamed. And dark thoughts came into the minds of the old people.

 

Suddenly, the door was thrown open by an invisible presence and the old man found himself pressed against the wall.

 

The Mountain Spirit spoke:

“Do you not remember? How do you not remember? You must feed the fire. You must worship the fire of this child. Strengthen its soul or it will die.”

 

With that, the spirit was gone and in the quiet that followed, the old woman felt loss; she didn’t remember rituals, ways or customs anymore.

 

Compelled by the Mountain spirit, the old people sat with the child by the burning fire and fed it. And then they spoke over it and found that the fire whispered the words that needed saying and they fed the children’s fire.

 

The boy grew into a strong young man.

One day, he found his feet leading him up the mountain. A cool, fresh wind caught his heart and loosed a song from his lips. He sang to the mountain, the wind, the rocks, the dust, the river and the Daughter of the Mountain Spirit heard him. When he turned and their eyes met, something passed between them - ancient and new.

 

“I wish to marry her - the daughter of the Mountain Spirit!”

 

The boy's parents were shocked and appalled. They refused  to allow their son to marry that strange, wild creature. Love between man and mountain? Not possible. Desperate eyes looked back at them.

 

“If I don’t marry her, I will die.”

 

And he did. Moment by moment, day by day, he began to die.
When he had grown too weak to speak or sing, his parents full of fear and confusion turned to the Mountain for guidance.

This time, no door was blown open, no invisible spirit passed through the land. The Master Spirit of the mountain spoke for the very last time and the whole world listened.

 

“You forgot. You forgot me. You stopped believing. You stopped knowing.

 You burned my heart, the forests; you dirtied my eyes, the great lakes.

 You thought yourself stronger than nature - does a leg or an arm think itself

 stronger than the body? Does an limb think itself more than the whole?

 You are part of me as I am part of you. But you are distant now. You are 

 other. Your ears can no longer hear the whisper of the grass, the language of

 the birds,  the stories sung by tree and rock. You became foreign and you

 began to die and the sickness spread and the world began to die with you.”

 

The old man and the old woman found their faces wet with tears. Above them stretched a dark expanse of sky - the vast emptiness of all they had lost and all they had forgotten. They fell to their knees and sobbed.

 

* * *

 

The young man and the daughter of the mountain spirit did marry and they had children born of man and nature. The Spirit of the Mountain never spoke again, but his Daughter sang songs to her children - songs in a language from long ago and a tune from far away.

 

With each note, with each song, with each story, a flower grew.

 

 

***

 

Our world is dying

 

 

Today we must remember again the mountain spirits and a new tribe will be born.

 

 

 

 

Copyright - Abigail Palache 02/02/2015

 

Thanks to Kira Van Deusen for recording this traditional Siberian tale.

Thank you to the Tuvan tellers who still speak these tales in their native land.  
For more info on this brilliant culture: http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/VANSIN.html 

 

Eating the Earth - a first draft

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a town. It was a peaceful, happy and prosperous place, protected from the world by a great mountain - its side strong with grey rock; its top glistening with snow.

One day, an old man came down from the mountain with a cart full of sweet buns.
"One bun for ten coins, two for twenty coins, three for free!"
A middle aged man in a smart hat stopped him.
"Old man, are you mad? You mean you will charge me nothing for three buns but twenty coins for two?"
"Yes," smiled the old man. The creases around his eyes and the lines around his mouth were as deep as a valley.
"So if I ask for one, I must pay ten coins."
"Yes," smiled the old man.
"And if I want two, I must pay twenty."
"Yes," smiled the old man.
"But for three, I pay nothing."
"Yes, exactly."
"Well," the middle-aged man said in the smug tones of one who has beaten the system, "I will have three buns for free."
The old man gave him three buns and then gave three buns each to a group of women and the elderly couple walking their dog took three buns each and the mother walking her baby down the street took three buns and his cart was as empty as his purse.

The next day the old man came down the mountain with his cart full of sweet buns.
"One for ten, two for twenty, three for free."
And once again the crowds flocked.

And the next day the same, and the next, and the next.

This went on for days,
                               weeks,
                                   months.



One chilly, spring morning when the sun shone brightly over the town, a young man stopped by the old man's cart.
"I'll have one please," he asked and handed the old man ten coins.
"What's wrong with you? You can get three for free you know," said a passing woman, in a fine silk dress.
"I don't want three," said the young man, "I want one."
"What's wrong with you? You can get three for free you know," said a passing man, wearing an expensive suit.
"I don't want it for free," said the young man, "I want to pay him."

A few people heard, but nobody listened. An old woman took three free buns as she passed by and shoved them into a bulging bag.

The young man stood next to the old man, watching the people of the town.

"They don't see and they don't listen," said the old man, putting a gnarled hand on his companion's shoulder. "They don't see."

The old man turned his head and the young man followed his gaze up to the great mountain that protected the town. What had once been a solid, strong triangle of rock and snow, was now split down the middle by an empty wound, a great gaping gash.

"They have been eating the mountain. They have been eating earth and rock and snow and soil," said the spirit of the mountain softly, his hand lifting from the young man's shoulder "and they didn't even notice."

When the young man turned back, there was no cart and no old man, just people with shopping bags walking from shop to shop, from stall to stall.

He stood for a moment as the world moved to and fro around him. No-one lifted their head to see what they had done.

The young man breathed deeply, turned and walked alone up the mountain path.

* * *

A Living Ghost Story - authentically encountering a the oral tradition

Sally lived with Mother in a little cottage in a little village in a little county of a little island that people called Great. But Sally didn't know that; Sally just knew that she had to do what Mother told her and if she didn't, she'd get a smacked bottom and go to bed without supper.

Mother was a hard woman, but she did love her daughter, even though she didn't always know how to show it. One day when Sally came home, her mother presented her with a gift - a pair of soft, yellow, leather gloves.

"If you lose these, I'll kill you."

Sally loved those gloves like the sea loves the shore, like the stars love the night. She wore them to church every Sunday and wrapped them carefully in a square of linen and tucked them into her drawer every Sunday evening.

And so imagine her surprise when she left her pew one Sunday and found only one glove in her coat pocket. Her heart fluttered and her chest caught in panic.

Mother was furious. Sally searched the whole church, she scoured the graveyard, hunted through hedgerows and combed through the coppice. She knocked on the doors of her neighbours but no-one had seen a yellow, leather glove.

Then there was only one house she hadn't visited. At the end of the lane that lead out of the village and into the wild of the moorland was Old Father's house. He was rarely seen and often whispered about in the playground. As Sally walked nervously up to his front door, the sour scent of rotten leaves caught in her throat and she stumbled, as if her feet were willing her to turn back and run far from this strange, dilapidated dwelling.

Father opened the door with a grunt and a sneer. Behind him, his shelves were filled with porcelain faced dolls with empty, painted eyes.

"I've got your glove girl. You can have it back. But if you tell anyone I had it, I will come at midnight and my girls will get you."

Sally promised she would keep quiet and she danced delightedly back home with both her yellow gloves on.

When she got home, she forgot all about her promise and she told Mother everything. As she repeated the words of the Old Father it was as if she was hearing them for the first time. She burst into a frightened flood of tears.

Mother locked all the doors and barred all the windows. She sent Sally to bed and locked her bedroom door tight.

Sally sat in her bed, her blanket wrapped tightly around her, and wept. She wept as the clock ticked to ten o'clock. She sobbed as the clock tocked to eleven o'clock. She cried to the moon and the star and prayed for morning.

But instead of morning, Sally heard the church bells chime Midnight. There was a creak and a sound of china footsteps on wooden steps. Sally held her breath.

"Sally, I'm on the first step. I'm coming to get you," sang a high-pitched, thin voice.
"Sally, I'm on the second step. I'm coming to get you."
"Sally, I'm on the third step. I'm coming to get you."
"Sally, I'm on the fourth step. I'm coming to get you."
"Sally, I'm on the fifth step. I'm coming to get you."
Sally could hear the soft thump of footfall on the wooden steps of the cottage.
"Sally, I'm on the sixth step. I'm coming to get you."
"Sally, I'm on the seventh step. I'm coming to get you."
"Sally, I'm on the eighth step. I'm coming to get you."
"Sally, I'm on the ninth step. I'm coming to get you."
"Sally, I'm on the tenth step. I'm coming to get you."
"Sally, I'm on the eleventh step. I'm coming to get you."
"Sally, I'm on the twelfth step. I'm coming to get you."

"Sally, I'm at the door. I'm coming to get you."

***

The next morning when Mother unlocked Sally's bedroom door, she found the room deserted.

Lying on the bed was a blood-stained pair of yellow, leather gloves.

***
Encountering the Oral Tradition in a Secondary School

When I was 7 or 8, we told each other scary stories and I always got really scared. Whether it was the doll who climbed up the stairs carrying a kitchen knife singing her haunting song or the drip, drip, drip of the tap that wasn't the tap at all but the slow drip of blood from an old woman's dead dog, strung up by some unknown assailant (incidentally I have a clear memory of it being a West Highland Terrier in my imagination at least), these stories have stuck with me through my whole life. They were modern, contemporary tales, sometimes featuring Freddie Kruger (Nightmare on Elm Street had recently come out and was being watched surreptitiously by some of my friend's older brothers and sisters) and often featuring hooked hands, mysterious radio reports of escaped prisoners and frequently featuring an unpleasant scarecrow or two.

A couple of days ago, as I flicked through Katherine Briggs' British Folk-Tales and Legends, imagine my surprise when I came across the story I have re-written above. The same shape, the same little rhyme, the same slow, rising climax to doom and death. Briggs' version was recorded first in Sheffield in 1897. But this isn't the only version of this tale - it seems they have been freaking out children and adults alike for many a-year.

I had this sudden and overwhelmingly satisfying sensation of being in a stream of story - of course as an oral storyteller I know I am always part of this stream, but this reached beyond being an adult and the discovery of storytelling as a contemporary revivalist movement back into St Pauls Primary School playground in 1992(ish). I had never read this story till February 2014 and yet I knew it - not because I had listened to a storyteller at one of the festivals or in a performance or at school, but thanks to the stream of orality that runs through childhood in game, song and story.

On the 13th February I had a great day at Oakmeeds Secondary School in Burgess Hill, creating ghost stories with Year 8s and I told them this tale. Kids who have been carrying iphones since they were out of diapers and have watched all manner of horror films carrying ratings way above their age; kids who live in the 21st Century and post their lives on facebook, snapchat and whatsapp; these same children piped up with 'I know a story just like that' and from the mouths of this new generation of children came the same stories that I heard when I was playing Red Rover and Tally-O, swapping POGS and singing songs by D-REAM (don't judge me too harshly). There were differences, slight alterations, some familiar pictures that floated from film into story, but as I left school that day I left knowing that whilst not many kids get to hear tales told in the traditional way, they are still telling those strange stories that form part of childhood's initiation into the great mysteries of the world, or at least the bloodthirsty mysteries of the world...

COPYRIGHT Abigail Palache (C) 17/02/2014

Why the Sky is Far Away - A Re-imagined Folktale

A Nigerian folktale. 
This a re-imagined, retold version. 

It was once that people did not farm the land or till the soil
It was once that people did not steal gold from bees or eggs from hens
It was once that people did not catch creatures from the sea in nets, did not take the fruits of the salty depths, did not cut the throats of pigs and sheep and cattle.

It was once that people were fed by the sky.

In a time before, the sky was much closer to the earth than it is now. It was so close, in fact, that people could reach up and break off pieces with their hands. Flaming orange sunsets, wild winter stormclouds, pale blues of morning and deep blues of evening, all were in reach and all could be held and all could be eaten.

Sky tasted wonderful!

It came in all flavours from sun-ripened apple to bone-roasted venison, from spiced cinnamon and ginger cake to creamy, buttery mashed potato.

No need for packaging, baking, chopping, preparing or calorie counting.
No need to till the soil or butcher the animals.
No need to starve or stress.

Imagine that world, just for a moment. A world where you never needed to cook, or shop, or grow, or water, whine or worry about the meal prepared. It was just there, a reach and a crack and you held in your hands a cool refreshing glass of sky or a warm handful of steaming cloud.

So people were free to watch and think, muse and wonder. What worlds must they have seen in the curling of the vine, the green of the grass, the ripening of the golden corn, the gambolling gait of the little lambs.

And from the reverie of crafty hands came beautiful buildings.
And from the rapture of warm hearts came dances of friendship and family.
And from the dreaming of poets and tellers came song and story.

Life was easy. Food was plentiful. Work was minimal.

But an easy life can make us careless.
We began to forget the songs and stories.
We began to forget the quiet dreaming.
We began to want more.

Gleaming cities arose. Great machines were built. Waterways, highways, byways, track ways, airways carved a new path of progress. The world was there for the taking and piece by piece it was conquered.

But as the wheel of the seasons moved on and through and on and through, people began to feel the space of time and distance between where they stood and where they had first come from. They wanted to dream again, but they had forgotten how.

And so, to fill that empty place, we began to fill ourselves in the only way we knew.

People began to gorge themselves. People began to gorge themselves on sky until they were bursting with a sense of fullness and when they found it was not enough they took more and more. But the empty hunger was larger than the capacity to consume - people found they took more sky than they could eat. They threw the left over hunks and chunks of sky into great piles, but still the emptiness gnawed so still they took sky and still they threw away.

The waste became so widespread that the leaders of the world met to discuss what was to be done.

Bins were brought in - great metal bins full of surplus, severed slices of sky, black and decaying. The bins were shipped away, far away to other lands where the rot was piled high and children with bare feet and ragged clothes would climb upon the stacks of sky and imagine that they were standing on an emerald cliff overlooking a sapphire sea as the foulness filled their fields.

One day it became too much. Father Sky looked down upon the world and saw what man had done with the gift of sky. He burned and boiled. In the form of a man, Sky Spirit entered the houses of law of all the great nations of the world.

"If your people continue to waste my sky, I will take it far away from your fat fingers," he spat. "If one more scrap of sky, one more crumb of cloud or bit of blue is wasted or thrown away, I will leave you."

He may have stood before them in a man's form, but his eyes flashed like lightening over midnight's desert and the whole world became dark and silent as he spoke.

And we remembered.
And we didn't feel empty any more.

For once in the history of man and earth, we all listened and acted as one. We heard our Father's cries as one and from that moment not a scrap, crumb or bit of the life-sustaining sky was thrown away. The piles of decay began to rot and turn to earth and, for a time, the bare-footed children felt the warm, brown soil between their toes.

* * *

It was the Great Celebration of the Season and Unah pounded a path through the streets. Her friends would describe her as larger-than-life, but Unah was more than that - she was enormous. Around her neck hung great slabs of cobalt and coral and her ear lobes dripped with waterfalls of gold and globules of silver and bronze. Hummocks and hills stared with envy at the curves and undulations of her great backside which moved with a rhythm all of its own, and the heavy swell of the ocean could do nothing to rival the heaving swell of her bosom. She had three husbands and countless lovers, none of whom could keep up with her insatiable sexual zest. Unah had her fifteen children playing and laughing and pulling at the the vibrant swirl of her volumnious dress. She laughed a laugh that echoed around the land and as she joined the great gathering of people dancing, drinking, singing, eating, their bodies vibrated with the feel of her mirth and movement.

Everyone ate and drank and danced until they could eat and drink and dance no more.
Unah was the last to leave the party, the last to dance through the door, the last to go to bed.

In the satisfied silence of the quiet moment between late night and early morning, Unah sat at her table and thought, 'Just one more bite, a little snack before bed' and she reached up and broke off a bit of sky.

It was juicy and fresh and tasted lovely.

BUT

Unah broke off too much. She was so full from the party that even her great gullet could gobble down no more. She tried to cram some more into her mouth, but it was no use - she woke up her husbands and children to help her finish off the final pieces and they tried their best but soon they were full and groaning. She went to her lovers, but all were full and all went back to bed.

It wasn't their problem - it was Unah's.

In a matter of moments, the great joyful woman found herself alone in the dark holding a piece of sky she couldn't eat.

'It's only a tiny bit,' thought Unah. She casually dropped the spare sky into a bin and went to bed.

When the sun rose the next morning, a great silence fell over the world. People stood like scattered stones on the streets, in the roads, the highways, byways, waterways and holloways, all staring up

up,
up,
up,
up,
at the sky.

It was very, very far away- no hungry hands could reach it now - hanging way above the world of man like a great dome of dreams.

From that day man and woman knew hunger and work.
From that day Father sky was far away.

But, from that day on woman and man came to have a deeper relationship with their Earth mother.

As the people of the world sweated and toiled and farmed, for their sweat and sacrifice the land offered up its gifts of food and water.

And a new kind of dreaming began.

People sang to the crops and cattle. They danced and decorated the trees and shrubs, the hedgerows and herbs. They praised the earth they lived upon. They listened to the old stories and sang the old songs to make sure they remembered to not take too much from the seas or the soil; they knew why the sky was so far away; they remembered Father Sky and in his memory they worshipped Mother Earth.

The bare-footed children learned to farm and to coax green shoots from brown earth and for a while the Earth and her children breathed in and out together.

But much is forgotten.

COPYRIGHT Abigail Palache - December 2013

A Folktale Frontier* - New Year's Eve 2013

I first heard this story in it's original form told by my friend and colleague Roi Gal-Or**. I heard it deeply, but I didn't tell it myself. 

Knowing this story actively changed my behaviour. There are many stories that weave together to form the tapestry of an individual, but this one was more direct - challenging my actions in the clear light of day, not in the dreaming world of the fairytale or the fire lit trance of a Norse myth - this tale slapped me firmly and sharply in the face. 

But I still didn't tell it. Even though every time I didn't finish a meal  a little voice whispered into my ear "That's why the sky is far away" I didn't tell this tale myself. Even though I saw great piles of rubbish in the streets, I didn't tell this tale UNTIL I heard a student on the 3 month storytelling course tell it. In his telling he conjured up the great metal bins. Suddenly, the story catapulted itself into my life in a real way - it was not in a land I had never been to, a long, long time ago - it was now.   

So why change the setting, the detail? Why 're-imagine' it and move it away from Nigeria and into a different state?  The answer is hard to explain. 

We can tell stories from other countries to preserve the culture itself (especially if it is a dying native culture) and that is a good thing - a sort of anthropological myth-keeper. But we can also tell stories from other countries and cultures to preserve the story itself beyond a specific cultural incarnation of that tale. It is my belief (and one day I will do enough academic research to write in more depth about this!) that stories grow from the land itself, but that there is something deeper that conceived the story in the first place - there is some universal, fertile web of whisperings that mean remarkably similar stories grow in starkly separate landscapes. This deeper layer is sustained (in part) by oral culture, by the passing of stories along great chains of settlements and as the story is passed from the heat of the desert to the chill wind of the mountains, the images change and new layers of the story being are exposed, whilst others (in the new incarnation) are lost and the story being splits itself. 

Problem is that contemporary culture in the UK, particularly in my area of the South East, has wiped out its own myths, legends and folktales but maintains a peculiar superiority-come-sadness-come-guilt over tribes such as the Edo (who lost much in the 1700s because of the British amongst others) which makes part of us kindly 'preserve' stories in the vinegar of the time and place it was written down and recorded in. As I said, there's nothing wrong with myth-keeping for any culture whether it is your 'own' or one that your soul feels connected to BUT...

The risk of preserving a story in this way is that, like a butterfly pinned down on a biologist's board, we will know that the story once existed, where it existed and how many spots it had but it will be dead. The listeners will listen in interest to a story from Nigeria, where most of them will not have been to, but what will the jungle warmth of the Oba's land mean to them? Will they absorb the message of the story as one being relevant to them or will the far-away, other-culture part of them hear it as a museum piece - an interesting artefact to help them understand the 'other' better? 

To keep the story alive, the story needs to keep adapting to it's environment. When the storyteller spoke of the great metal bins, the story-butterfly leapt to life in my being and began fluttering at my lips and tickling my fingers, desperate to be told in this new form. 

I don't want to tell this story because of any particularly active interest in Nigerian folktales - I do not feel a personal connection to them (although I enjoy listening to them) - I want to tell this story because this isn't a 'Nigerian story' - it is a Nigerian, Ethiopian, Japanese, American, Scottish, English story. It grew in Nigeria and through the changing migratory pattern of mythology we are seeing in this information explosion, the story found its way to me and through me it found its way into this new form. Once upon a time, these stories would have found their way from Africa to Japan, to England, to Americas on the lips of travellers or along great chains of migration. Or maybe the story would have been heard by the 'furred ear'* or the feathered or in the howling of the wind back when people's ears where tuned to these deeper frequencies. In his blog, Martin Shaw comments that current migration patterns are changing in the animal world in response to the global climate changes and simultaneously, it seems, stories are also changing their migration. Maybe there is no longer time for the slow adaptation of story - the crisis the stories speak to (in this case waste) means the story being is compelled to leap out at us from the surviving source in a form that may seem far away. 

Folktale frontiers, places of exchange where stories journey across cultures and landscapes are no longer the inns or campfires of the long roads. The folktale frontier is online; it's brought by high-speed rail and long-haul flights. The folktale frontier is at the tip of the teller's tongue as it's revived from great dusty books full of geographical and cultural references.*

Through this understanding I'm starting to realise how much of the teller's work is to learn to listen to the land. So 2014 is going to be all about listening! 

** For those of you who haven't taken a look, please check out my workplace www.schoolofstorytelling.com  *This blog entry was inspired (particularly at places marked with a *) by Martin Shaw's blog entry stories/animals/frontiers. Please check his work out below. 

"What are the new stories that these migrations and desperations will engender to the animals? Who has the receptivity, the furred ear, to absorb and include those emerging myths in the wider frame of stories that humans carry like precious cargo? Without that coming together, then things will fragment with every greater speed.

What these chaotic times are inducing is rapid move back to frontier consciousness; the indigo bunting will pay no regard to passport control. But land it must. And negotiate new policies, bartering, and opportunity; familiarise itself to new stories. All these migratory animals are having a vast education in emerging mythologies; their own constants, their Olympians, are but drizzle over the vastness of the grey oceans they fly over. Tundra is becoming forest, all is new. Jungle is becoming prairie. 

It could be that stories are being forced to move from their old geographical habitations because they have something important to say about this wider crisis. As the crane settles in a new and unfamiliar German forest as snow falls, so a Seneca shaman story is told in the tentative surroundings of a Plymouth pub. I believe the two emerging migrations are connected. They are speaking over the frontier divides – crow to myth to waterfall to folktale. Both need tuned ears.

What they have to say will not arrive as statistical data, but images that tug on the heart of the listener, that are sufficiently weighty and straight-up-startling to share new light on many coming storms. And a light that is suffused with the eternal, that ‘time before time’, rather than just the strained, stressed-out strip light of the now."

http://theschoolofmyth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/storiesanimalsfrontiers-goodbye-to-2013.html

Book Reflection - Branch from the Lightening Tree by Martin Shaw

I don't have a great attention span, especially for reading. I have finished many a first chapter of many, many books but rarely reached far into the second before being distracted by one thing or another. I do, however, have an ever growing reading list identified as I continue on the rewilding journey... So I'm going to post a few book-reflections (not book reviews) to help me keep focussed!

Branch from the Lightening Tree by Martin Shaw

This poetic analysis of myth was a fascinating read. Through well-known and lesser-known traditional stories, from the wastes of Siberia to the mysterious world of the Red King, Martin presents them through the eyes of a wilderness-rites-of-passage guide, demonstrating how the initiation phases are reflected in the journey of the hero or heroine of the story through image, metaphor and characater. Using personal and professional anecdotes, we see a real-life rendering of these stages and a suggestion as to the dangers of starving our lives of true myth and the addiction to our 'toxic imitiations' of ancient laws.

Here are a few of the gifts I received from reading this book:

"The boundless choas of living speech"
Samuel Johnstone

Martin Shaw writes beautifully about how oral-tradition story is a sort of collective consciousness of the tongues that have told it, the listeners who have heard it and the place in which it is told or is born. In the live storytelling setting, it is not just my story told in my way - that would be a presentation or a performance where the audience passively receive my images - rather the oral story exists within and between the myriad of minds in the audience and the teller's imagination, intonation and diction all held in the imagination of the place that the story is shared.

As a storyteller (or storycarrier) who works in the oral tradition, Martin Shaw demonstrates in his authorship, there is also a joy in hearing or reading a carefully written and crafted story- a version of the tale unique to that teller or writer that can then be boiled down till only the bones remain and be reformed and refigured by a new teller in a new time and place with new listeners. The written word has kept many of these stories in a kind of stasis between a loss and a revival of oral telling. Martin's clear passion for the written and spoken word is a lovely permission to love with wild abandon the "boundless chaos of living speech" and value and find joy in the written word.

Myth is "the power of a place speaking" 
Sean Kane as quoted by Martin Shaw

Here is a book that moves lovingly through the individual psychological map that myth can present, through archetypal analyses and towards a greater reading that begins to encompass society and our relationship to the wild. In his exploration of story, Martin finds a communication between man and the world he inhabits in the strange symbols, actions and encounters in these tales. After reading this  book, I'm finding myself pondering on the messages murmured by the starlings across the Sussex skyline or the running of a deer pack across a road rather than just admiring their beauty and otherness. Martin seems to write with an underlying assumption that the wild-world wants to communicate with those willing to listen. Mary Oliver's Wild Geese kept coming to mind as the wild geese overhead 'over and over announc[e] your place in the family of things'. Maybe myth and story are a way we can learn once more to listen to the earth.

Quantum physics teaches us that we cannot observe without affecting the outcome. To take this out of the laboratory and into our day-to-day living, when we see something in nature - a kingfisher's dive, a swallow's swift flight through a highly hedged hollow, a fox's footprints - then it is not as a detached observer but as the implicated observer -  we have interacted. To take this one stage farther, why not understand the movement of an electron through a specific slot or the movement of a crow as a message, as speaking a language specifically to us, at that moment? And as each electron's path through one observed slot rather than another has a power  to change the outcome of an experiment, maybe we should allow that which we observe to affect our individual path through life - look beyond the literal and find meaning.

"The place they are returning to is far more deadly than four nights on the hill, and stories become a place to both reveal and protect something of their experience out there in the bush. Bush soul is what we need, and then enough real human beings around us to craft that into some kind of significance."
Martin Shaw

If you love myth, nature, wildness, stories or are interested in the development of human beings and their relationship to the world, I can highly recommend this book. If you aren't, I would still give Martin Shaw's soundcloud a listen or check out www.theschoolofmyth.blogspot.co.uk for a taster of his ideas and work.

Next on the reading list - Spell of the Sensuos by David Abram

Why be an injured fox, when you could be an eagle?

There was once a young man who felt an emptiness and then a desire and then a great pull. It was as if a great rope had been tied around his heart, dragging him from his home, from comfort and security and his Mother's warmth, to search the deep forests and high mountains.

At times he thought he was searching for truth and at others he thought he was searching for meaning. One day he thought he was chasing a happily ever after and the next that he was searching for the words that would heal a dying King. One bright morning, he glimpsed the burning tail of the firebird and one dark night he shared a cup of wine with the wandering moon.

And still the rope around his heart pulled and tugged and dragged him onwards.

He met a man with the universe in his pocket and danced with a woman who was the midwife of the fairies.
He heard of a girl with a spinning top that kept the world turning and a boy who hugged a selfish giant.

But still the rope around his heart pulled and tugged and dragged him onwards.

He walked through forest and fen, through brush and scrub and over great rocky mountains.
He walked through snow and rain, through sunlight and moonlight following the pull of his heart.

One day, in the quiet darkness of a pine wood, he gazed into a dark pool (where it was said the Princess of the dream kingdom had once lost her golden heart) and realised that old father time had begun to turn his hair grey.

He moved away and continued walking, but slower now - mortality weighing him own as he went. Gradually, the pull of the rope around his heart slackened and fell away.

As he came to a clearing, he spied an injured fox lying beneath an old oak tree. Her breathing was shallow and her leg was injured. At that very moment he heard the rush of wings and feathers - from up above a great, golden eagle flew down with fresh meat in its claws. It  landed by the fox and placed the meat carefully by the fox's muzzle. The fox ate it hungrily and the eagle flew away.

The man was awestruck. This was more than chance - this was the universe speaking to him.

"The universe will provide me with what I need. The search has led me nowhere. I must let the universe provide me with what I need."

Ceremoniously and with great care, the  man walked to a great cathedral of beech trees - their trunks twisting up from Mother Earth as their branches reached up to Father Sky - and sat cross legged in the centre.

"The universe will provide me with what I need."

He sat. He sat waiting for the universe to provide.
Days passed.
The sun burned his skin and the rain soaked his clothes, but still he sat.
Nights chilled him to the very core and winds whipped his greying hair around his face.

"The universe will provide me with what I need."

Gradually, his strength ebbed and his body began to buckle and weaken.

"The universe will provide me with what I need."

As he began to slip out of consciousness and into a deep, black sleep, he heard  voice:

"Why would you be an injured fox when  you could be an eagle?
Why did you become an injured fox when you could have been an eagle."

Copyright Abigail Palache 2013

The tension of A-B and B-A
There's an exercise we teach on some storytelling courses where we explore the idea of moving with purpose (A-B) - identifying a task, completing it, deciding a new task, completing it etc - compared to letting things come to you (B-A) - waiting to see what catches your attention, walking over, seeing what needs doing when you get there, seeing where that takes your attention next. 

B-A is something I really struggle with. I'm the doer, the driver, the director - if I am without a task for a moment, the immediate compulsion is to identify a new one and KEEP BUSY! And that serves me well in many ways - I get things done! It also suits the world we live in and the way we live in it - as a secondary school teacher I felt I had to keep on task, powering through to-do lists and not let myself take a softer view of the world, a 'wait and see what comes' attitude, unless everything was complete and of course it never was. This forceful A-B attitude left me listless, exhausted and ill. 

If we are to take this attitude out of the education system and into the larger world of business, media and industry, there is a greater danger than to the individual. When we are only stuck on completing the task we have set (or been set), we become focussed and blinkered - the rest of the world fades away and the bigger picture or narrative is ignored. We become cogs in a machine, unaware of the machines purpose, just moving in our fixed orbits on our particular task. So is it any wonder that thousands of species are wiped out, people are left starving despite us producing more food globally than ever before, that credit crunches? No-one is looking at the big picture because we are just so busy and focussed on B. 

When I first heard this story, I felt like it was an affirmation of action, of doing and of moving. And it is - the inaction of waiting for the universe to give you what you need is acting like an injured fox whilst the doing, the giving, the acting is being the eagle. We see a misreading of the universe and an irritation with the man for being given the great gift of this magical vision and then acting like the victim! So, I thought, I'm doing it right! I am being eagle-like and making change and keeping moving. 

In August this year I made a pledge to act on what I knew to be true. Since making that pledge, the acting has not being a problem, but I have struggled with knowing what is 'true' - what is the right thing to do? Then I saw this story from another angle - the Eagle's angle. The eagle was not focussed on her A-B task when she went to help the fox. She was flying over the forest with a soft gaze, waiting to see what needed to be done and in doing so she saves the fox. 

Animals are not gifted with the ability (for argument's sake) to make a choice over their actions - this is the eagle of the human spirit. We can choose to continue and focus on A-B with a kind of impossible, unstoppable determination. We can choose to leave A-B behind and sit and wait for the universe to give us everything we need. Or we can choose a middle path (the hardest path some may say) of having that soft gaze to see what needs to be done, to allow B to find us and then have the courage, determination and focus to act upon what we find there. 

What I want should not be mistaken for complete inaction
Life is what it is about,
I'll have no truck with death

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,and for once could do nothing,perhaps a huge silencemight interrupt this sadnessof never understanding ourselvesand of threatening ourselves with death.Perhaps the earth can teach usas when everything seems deadand later proves to be alive.

Excerpt from Pablo Neruda's Keeping Quiet