I’ve been thinking about Water these last weeks. But this past Tuesday was the Solstice. In Celtic traditions, the Summer Solstice is — like Samhain (our Halloween) in late autumn — a Fire festival associated with the lighting of great bonfires and the opening of thin places between worlds. Still I kept musing & wondering about Water. Then I found a story of the relationship between these two Elements as told by mythologist Michael Meade and quoted in Terri Windling’s blog https://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2021/08/water-wild-and-sacred.html:

“Of the elements (which some people count as four, and others count as five), water is the element for reconciliation. Water is the element of flow. When water goes missing, flow goes missing. The ancient Irish used to say that there are two suns in the world. One you see rise in the morning. The other is very deep in the earth, and it’s called the black sun or inner sun. It’s a hot fire in there; no one knows how hot. The earth is roughly seventy per cent water because of that hidden sun inside. When the water goes down, the earth heats up too much – part of the global warming that’s happening everywhere. It happens inside people also, because people are like the earth. People are seventy per cent water like the earth, and people have a hidden sun – or else we wouldn’t be ninety-six degrees when its forty degrees outside. Everyone in the world is burning, and the water in the body keeps that burning from becoming a fever. What happens literally also happens emotionally and spiritually, so when people forget how to carry water and how to use water to reconcile, you get an increasing amount of heated conflict, as we’re seeing around the world today.”

So — it is, as always, a matter of Balance. I was able to celebrate both Fire & Water at the Summer Solstice.

*******

I was born in the U.S. Midwest & have visited but never lived on the NW coast of North America. My brother and two women I have known since our earliest childhoods in Iowa have long lived there. My niece & nephew were born there and stayed. My sister has lived in Oregon & is now a short ways south, near majestic (and perhaps mythical) Mount Shasta. And I often find my heart drawn to the great forests, beautiful island-studded coastline, and native arts & myths of British Columbia — the home of Raven and Salmon, who people my dreams.

Somehow, Raven and Salmon have both lodged more and more firmly in my heart over the years. I have, hanging in my studio, a set of prayer flags I made many years ago in a workshop with the eco-activist Julia Butterfly Hill. We were given 3 prompts for the flags:

I recently came across a poem, written even further back, that intertwined Salmon & Language (and is used to close today’s post). While looking for that poem today, I came across another old poem of mine that I’d quite forgotten:

SALMON SINGS OF HER RETURN

Suddenly I felt a change, a shift
in the wide dark salt, 
narrowing my world from 
flash of chase and feast to
strict path clenched
by desire more ravenous for
movement than for flesh.

No longer consuming but
consumed by some austere 
pulse, my every sense alert to
the pulling and tugging steering me
through vast and briny plain until

at last — familiar somehow —
the faintest of traces in the tide, then
a new sweetness surging,
insisting, freshening.
A beautiful current presses my snout 
and I answer with thrust and 
plunge of tail, spine against 
the spate, channeled, bound, 

devoured now from within as
my skin reddens, flesh flames. 

Let me swim higher up, deeper in. 
Let me leap past rock, talon, teeth. 
Let me dig nests in gravelly birthing bed. 
Let me pour out from my belly 
	ten thousand fiery suns.

Only then 

Let my body be given to raven, bear, river silt. 
Let ocean feed mountain.
Let my next body be in this place  
	a tree --
        rising, rooted, and green.
 Let my roots inhale water to 
 breathe out 
 once more into this
 circling and radiant world.

	                             ---  MCK

This week I’ve been weaving the doll I mentioned last time — curious to see what she would teach me about the colors I’d gathered and about myself. For such a small piece of weaving, I’ve been amazed and amused by how many missteps, lessons, and stories she contains!

When I took her off the loom, I saw not only the long warp ends but also the many many weft ends streaming off her body.

As I sewed in the ends, I found myself collecting even the smallest pieces of yarn I cut off, thinking “Not a drop should be wasted!” She is now filled, along with a water-worn stone & 5 seashells, with these bits of yarn — “drops of Water” from the weaving of her body.

As soon as I saw her, I knew what offering her arms would hold. Two or three years ago, I wove an amulet bag & placed inside it a long-treasured ceramic salmon button to which I had added her golden roe being laid in the river. Now, that salmon has swum into the arms of my prayer.

She is a Prayer for Earth's Waters & for the Salmon,
messengers between sea and stream, saltwater and fresh

PRAYER

What is prayer but the
unbarring of the heart,
the freeing of its rivers for return to the sea.

Sometimes it is not enough to depend on seepage through the old hidden cracks.
Sometimes it is not enough to let the concrete spillways do their job.
Sometimes it is not enough to open the floodgates.
Sometimes you must turn off turbines, abandon irrigation ditches, just
	dismantle the whole damned thing.

Let the rivers run free:
rainfall, snowmelt, even the ancient glacial ice from distant peaks.
Flood, drought, the ups and downs of season upon season, heading
always home.

And after a long, long time, the sweet water may
call back the salmon to spawn again in the furthest pools.                                                                                
Let them come in silvery leadings, insistently struggling
upriver against all odds to the place they know is their own.

Words are salmon, prayers returning.
And if they are as certain to die in the safe pool of your page
As salmon are to die in the riverine shallows, remember the
fertile eggs they leave—minute, perhaps unnoticed, yet desiring life.
Then, too, their flesh is
in any case
sweet.
 
                                                                      - - - MCK