Casting A Circle of Selves

Birth and Death Day Celebration

Digital self-portrait. 1999

Click on the image for the recommended musical accompaniment for this post:

I was born in the time approaching bear moon, the dark moon (or new moon, for those afraid of the dark). This is when bear began to emerge from her deep sleep. Sadly She is long gone now and only walks the land in spirit.

It is a time of hawthorn flowers opening, aside inches-long sharp thorns, the fuel for many a fairy tale. Rooks gather branches for nest making, while the crows seem to be fighting over whose nest is who’s. I have seen the first eggshell, belonging to the pigeons, it’s still bitterly cold for little featherless ones.

The woodpigeons have decided to nest again in the Cyprus tree, ignoring last year’s drama of their eggs becoming snacks for the crows and magpies.

Light lingers until six pm now and will continue to grow until summer solstice and the glorious twilight which will linger long after 11 pm.

I want to dissolve into a defining silence. I’ll crawl deep under the skin of the landscape. cocoon myself deep under the skin of the landscape. Cocoon myself deep inside the mountain. I want to disintegrate completely

Minus. Extract from: Minus 31. J Lally. London, Glacier Press. 1999.

A collection of selves

Under the Bear dark moon, a time of preparing to come out of the dark of the cave I hold my annual ritual, inviting all my past and future selves.

My horse-obsessed pre-teenager, who wanted nothing more than to gallop away to a time that no longer exists. The feral teenager with moss and sticks in her hair (photo above wearing the Icelandic jumper). The older teenager who has always searching for that something she could taste and feel but was always just out of reach - and practised dipping a toe into the otherworld.

There’s the me in my 20s all electronica and glaciers. Who traveled far and wide. Pockets full of lines of poetry.

I shed away memories. Push them outside. They accumulate in layers. Slowly, creeping down the mountain, following contours. Inches first, soon thousands of feet thick.

Minus. Extract from: Minus 31. J Lally. London, Glacier Press. 1999.

Among the many selves, all welcoming each other and laughing at the things we wouldn’t tell anyone else. The crone enters last. There’s always a haze around her, her face obscured by a great hood. It always leaves the others wondering whether she will exist in this world or not.

While they ponder her, she knows the others intimately, for they don’t see that they have been the same person all along. She is a shapeshifter, after all, and has taken many forms and many lives.

Eventually, someone will shout out and a date and month will be picked - the date and the month when we’ll gather again - the date to celebrate our death.

It’s an interesting annual event as we will all dress up and attend our funeral. There’s no formal dress code, fox and bear masks are acceptable. Dresses of moss and lichen are appropriate. We will meet on a hill or mountain to be agreed upon. Each will tell the story of their life, while others will finish the story with details of their eventual death and rebirth. But most of all this funeral rite is a deep gratitude for life and living.

A radical act indeed in a world that Francis Weller describes as grief-phobic and death-denying.

I recreate the landscape, make new mountains. Unconquered, uncharted, your maps will be useless.

Minus. Extract from: Minus 31. J Lally. London, Glacier Press. 1999.