Impatient with the demands of the world, craving caves and the letting-go of form, of shape, she lurched through the daylight hours with little grace and just enough presence to pretend, to those it mattered, that she was fully here.

When night fell she knew she needed the quiet time in the dead….no, in the aliveness of the small hours. Waking while the household was quiet, she rose and dressed and attended to the stream that was making its way through her. Giving herself up, immersing herself in its eddying waters, she wondered how she would land - if she would land - later that day.

Art by Olaf Hajek

She wondered if she could stand again and walk with willingness back to the bright shore of things. Things of the world that needed attention, things that clamoured and pressed and insisted.

Yet this was the practice, this was the walk, the steps she needed to practise. Seeing the veil, passing between with ease, hearing what needed to be brought into this world from the other world, breathing and speaking and dancing daily on the thread-thin bridge amidst noise and clamour of the world around her.

After a time, she came to a stream. Boggy in places, the path by it ran over knolls and around tree roots, following the watercourse doggedly. From time to time she stood in the stream, cooling her heels, hearing the flow through her blood.

More and more she stepped into it, finding that its silvery slip fed her.

Until she found herself walking through it, shifting from land dweller to water creature effortlessly. The bones she cradled in the bag at her waist sighed to receive the welling up of liquid nourishment, and quickly settled to her new rhythm, a swaying rather than a striding, a shimmer more than a step. On and on she was led by the stream, finding her chatter and bubble to be a dear companion to her own journey, until far off she heard a different sound, a more confident bubbling, and she wondered what lay ahead.

Not for long did she wonder, for soon she found the stream quickening, all life within it rushing, and she too was swept towards a horizon that seemed to cleave the world ahead.

Rounding a curve, the stream pushed her up against high rocks. Beyond was nothing. A ledge, a freefall into another world held by the susumnation of the stream, by deep and ancient rocks, but nonetheless a seam-place. For here was a choice. Water-dweller as she now was, she had come to a threshold, and like all such places, there were many paths around, and one path through.

Gathering herself, she knew fear. Nesting her bone bundle close to her she rested awhile against the rock, calling on Knitbone for her fierce holding, and Owl for her keen seeing. She knew she did not need to jump. Yet the urge was insistent, like the drumbeat of life itself, running through her hot blood. To go around, to climb down, would be possible, but the journey would be undertaken alone and would be arduous.

To simply let go, to allow the friend that was the stream to carry her, would be delicious freedom, an adventure that her parched spirit craved.

Tethered to the world by the calls of motherhood, mucky with love and mired by choices she had willingly made, she heard the call to remake those choices, daily. To call out clear, to announce her place in things, to be heard by the birds. And with the other hand, with the other beat of her other heart, she chose the dark place of unbecoming. A river of tears dissolved her peeling skin so that she was left with her bones, and for a long while she stood holding them because if she didn’t hold them then who else would?

Growing tired, she set them down, carefully. Balancing one on the other, nestling them close against each other so they would not feel lonely, so they could continue to talk to each other, she created a cairn of her bones. And she sat down beside them, surprised to find she still had form, and sang to them because she remembered someone telling her, long long ago, that bones breathe slowly, so slowly, and that as they come to the end of their inbreath, they like to be coaxed to let go of their stories. So she crooned and she keened and she sobbed and she wailed. She sang soft lullabies to the babies in the bones, she sang wild songs of power to the adolescent in the bones, she sang resonant songs to the open-throated mother in the bones, she sang querulous songs to the matron in the bones and to the crone in her bones she yowled in wonder.

Art by PJ Lynch

All the while the tears and the rain washed through her, around her. All the while the soft winds blew through her and around her. And at last she heard the cairn of bones give up their stories to the rocks and stones that bore them, finding kindred voices there, finding ancient ears here, and knowing looks passed between them and the rocks of the land. The whispered yarns of a lifetime’s tales swelled to a clamour. Wild melodies rang out to the sky, a howling, a growling, a yelp here and there. A seeping of songlines, a rich seam of bloodline began to carry her spirit softly home.

It was to be a long, wild and passionate journey.