Once Upon A Time
Edited for a reading at Black Box (Belfast) Open Mic
County Down N.I. Image by the author- illustrating the fact, that stories with one straight line, a beginning and an end are only representations which are flattened, compressed into our consciousness as ‘real’. It would be tiring to go around adding ‘this is an image of’ to every scene we reproduce, but, remember how we (mostly) learned to read, the word and image together. Early years learning omitted ‘this is the symbol of’ and also forgot the intention framing the process of learning to read.
Hello
I’m a bit tardy with the monthly post.
I’ve been busy, resistant and away on a road trip, really, waiting to shrug off the ‘should’ and allowing the desire to point to what’s to be shared this month.
Now, I’ll tell you a wee story; I’m familiar and grateful to the archetypes who arrive through story and allow me to weave between my own personal material and the collective imagination.
I wasn’t long back from a week with long drives and knew I wanted to take part in Black Box’s monthly open mic, which is run (mostly) by the fabulous Jessie, and, if I wasn’t in such a rush I’d be posting links, but, if you’re keen to know more about Black Box Belfast, Google will help you.
Id felt such a strong urge to tell a poetic story written around 2010- it was the first epic-feeling download Id received, and it took me and my poor ego into various places and shapes, feeling an urgency to ‘do something’ with the material.
Tale of the Tower took a few months to shape into a form that scanned easily. I ended up self-publishing and doing 5 or 6 readings of the piece, a gory, gothic piece that left me feeling very uncomfortable, as it portrayed some cliched roles; crone, maiden, hero.
Knowing how those stories will move and change, it hadn’t been a surprise- more of a relief- when an additional piece of story arrived a few years later, which initiated onward journeys for the three characters.
I’ve lost the piece I wrote down, but, abruptly on Tuesday night, a few lines spoke themselves which determined I read from the little book I published, then from the notebook I’m using, in order this expanded story be shared.
My word, I wriggled and dismissed this imagined performance. I leant into anxiety that the piece wasn’t appropriate for the occasion. I came upon the piece I’ve included below and felt something like a flowering in my system, yes, this piece was good to go.
What I didn’t do was take account for a listening audience wired up for poems and songs. I might have acknowledged the commitment needed to stay with the piece, but I gave it no formal introduction:
‘This is a story about a woman who decides to turn into a tree.’
And then, of course, where do I begin to talk about my own experience with transformational stories which see humans become animals as punishment, or escape, or exits them from the narrative and so (to me) devalues the life of that animal, as if it has nothing to say, no sovereignty in its capacities to feel. The stories I’d read immediately centralised the human form as the way forward and ignored the liminal, non-physical world which, to my knowledge, is both all-encompassing and central to existence.
So, I have, under my hat, a gothic tale which has expanded the context for its actors to step out of the patriarchal disharmony of a line cut to form beginning and an end, into the cycle of death and rebirth, something of which I feel I have been denied in my Protestant upbringing, but, I can’t leave blame at the door of any Christian church, as gatekeepers were put up around Heaven and Hell long before the collating of The Bible, in fact, the refusal of acknowledging a conscious and coherent world before The Bible mirrors this self-birthing, all-powerful masculine god who has no body of their own…I’ll leave that there and maybe it’ll prompt some commentary…
Anyway, the tale I chose to read on Wednesday evening was scribed in the same manner as Tale of the Tower- a kind of download experience, and, it was included in The Belonging Tree story, which came a little later. I haven’t told that story here, either.
The following story also has a little ‘afterwards’ which came during a phase of drawing tree people in biro on my notepad.
I once fretted about my chaotic documentation and cataloging. I used to start methodically writing admin in one book, diary in another, stories.
That was before it had really sunk in, that the stories have a life of their own, that they are portals, not discrete objects. What does not want to be found will not be found.
The stories belong in a timeless realm. Their own mystical, or cosmic orbit, itself a key to unlocking some process- and my, we are in process right now.
So, I might include the afterwards, afterwards:
Once Upon a Time
A woman woke up
On this morning at dawn she tip-toed from her bed
Left her bed unmade, stepped out of nightclothes and put on a dress
Left a mess
She left no note
Hair not brushed
Fire not set
She continued to leave
Left all the doors open, not one glance back, the woman’s feet were wet with dew and thorns pulled her dress and marked her legs as she pushed through a gap in the unkept hedge
She walked through fern and low growing fir, through their brown, cast off needles and scared a few birds
She found the path made by deer and stepped over a tangle of fencing
The ground greened into sods of drenched moss cushions
Troughs of black water flashed their mercury sheen
Her dress darkened as it soaked up the wetness
Breaking into a clearing where Birch stood calm and slender, white and peeling, she paused, holding her face to the sky
Standing in the rising sun, the woman began to worm her toes into the ground.
Took in the view
‘Yes’, she said, ‘this will do.’
It’s here, she takes off her dress
Her gaze towards the horizon
Something inside her drops
She falls inward
Through the back of her open mouth, her throat, her heart and her guts, her womb and her thighs, down to her feet and below; all hollow
She grew roots; white and naked and tentative, they touch and are touched by each grain of salt, ash, and clay
Wrap around stone
Her core ripples and undulates open
Her knees soften and she sinks into the ground to her hips
One last glance and she gives up her eyes and the sun turns her skin to crinkled bark, and her fingers sprout twigs
She feels everything around her, feels everything feeling her
One final backwards-facing thought, and she gives them all up, gives up thinking in exchange for photosynthesis, for the bliss of transformation at the most matter-of-fact and intimate of levels
Oh, the joy of osmosis!
And why not?
She can hear her cells singing ‘hallelujah!’ as nuclei erupt with ancient information; her arboreal ancestry meets the sun once more
Her skin and bones dissolve to reform as heartwood, sapwood, stem, and too, her capacity to regret, resolve, intend, forget, remember, and doubt are no more than inspiration and expiratio
There is no relief, no afterthought, no leaving any more, no ‘from’, no past, no word, there is no echo of a door closed behind her
Reaching outward, she reaches inwards and her hollow, empty core is full
The blackness begins to sparkle and the ringing chimes of life itself invite her- not to disappear, once more, but simply to be
‘She left all the doors wide open…’
Might it be a possibility that they would thank her for that?
Think again
She won’t
Not in words
In rivers of rain running down the bark upon her trunk; and in the touch of many creatures, the brush of skin and fur and tickle of insects- and in the soil, the living, breathing soil
Her roots kept reaching and searching and feeling
And, in answer, the earth reached up to her
Her cells tingled in response to the buzz of the biome and pulsed in the awareness of her process being known
Being welcomed
And she didn’t stop there
She just felt more
The sun shines in the sky and birds light in the tree and sing.
Breathe in and it is day
Breathe out and it is night…’
The End
So, I’d been drawing densely-packed trunks of slender trees and begun to sketch one which became gradually quite human. Having spindly legs and twigs for hair. She crashes back from the woodland to be met in horror by her sister, who, in fear, takes an ax to her, believing she’s been consumed or possessed.
Is this what we are conditioned to do?
Cut ourselves off from the liminal, from doing what we need to do to answer our soul aches and gut feelings?
So, this is a story of turning away, of becoming, and being willing to become something, as yet unknown. Maybe the fear of the sister only comes from the unconscious knowing that our ancestors, our elders and our kin have been so abused in mans’ efforts to be bigger than creation? Maybe there’s a belief that one’s surrender manifests in total alienation and unrecognition?
We’re mostly conditioned to abhor such things.
We love the familiar, even if it’s the very thing that needs to change.
Then again, shall we continue to imagine that it’s us who is responsible for the timings and the rate of our letting go of the old, comfortable and familiar? That, what we let go of has no life, no sovereign journey of their own?
If you happen to read this aloud to someone or share it another way, please do credit me, Sarah Silvermoon as the story keeper and point them here, if you can.
Thank you
Sent with love
Sarah Silvermoon