The Cailleach's Cauldron

Monday - Tales from the Studio

I feel that I have lost my footing, and a little adrift. Some of this is with dealing with both parents having cancer, and some just having moments of not quite being lost but - untethered is a good description. I find it hard to focus, not deciding what comes next and what needs to be focused on, and yet I am grateful for these small things as my life hasn’t been ripped apart by war, or washed away by hurricane storms.

There are lots of analogies I could reach for that might bring some comfort or just give me a story that I can adopt.

Cailleach dolls by Jude Lally

The Cailleach

I have made more Cailleach dolls than any other figure - over 100 Cailleach dolls, a great crone circle spanning the far north of Canada, over the US, UK, Ireland, Europe, Australia and the Philippines.

This is funny as I rarely see this old crone as having human more, she shape shifts into deer, seagull, holly tree or raucous crow. I engage with her in the land under my feet and while she might not have a shared folklore of holly tree or wren - this is my local experience.

The most alarming of all is when she’s not there. I remember an instance of visiting my favourite local hill and she was nowhere to be found. Was it me? Had I done something wrong? And yet on the way back down the hill I managed to trip over something that wasn’t there. I can see it now in slow motion, I turned around to look at a single standing tree trunk which had been scorched in a summer wildfire. As I fell, which felt like minutes rather than seconds - I was awaiting a crack or some noise from my ankle. I lay still on the ground, face down in the peaty earth moss with a mouth-full of star moss. There was no crack, no sound and I gingerly moved my ankle, and was glad to feel no pain., although there was an odd crone cackle ringing in my ears.