Of rags and bones

Mythic snippet from inside a dismemberment

Knowing that she was ragged, skin in tatters against her raw body, she sought a crevice, a wild place with a dark space. It was the only thing she could do, the only place she could go. The light, the noise, the pain, the beingness of the world around her was too much to bear. Tears slid out of her eyes noiselessly, a constant river of weeping as the skies opened and rain fell in torrents. She felt pain crashing against her in waves, heaving up from the earth, washed out of hills by the rain. The soil bled red and ran down to the swelling river. She saw, and she cried to see the skin of her mother laid so bare.

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.