The Tangled Hedge

A hedge-hopping awenydd follows the Mother of Life's trackways and brings back what is needed, connecting the village with the numinous wilds.

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Balancing Forces

"Boat Book" by Catherine Nash

     At the approach of the full Rose Moon (AKA the full Strawberry Moon) I have finally found some peace & quiet, having finished school (for now) and begun the slower pace of Summer. I’m looking forward to a great increase in writing time, as I have discovered that writing is a full-on passion and will most likely be my medium of choice for my life’s work. This passion has grown riotously in the past few years, and it seems I get to have a Summer bumper crop to harvest, and I am very happy about that. I have stories and poems fruiting and ripening inside me, and I know that growth is ahead for me, as I cultivate them.

     I hope to proffer green and supple sapling poems, stories, and articles which readers can water with attention, and be rewarded with shade in which to rest, fruits to nourish them, and seeds to carry with them that may bring these gifts farther throughout the beloved world.

     While I haven’t read it yet, the concept behind, “The Alphabet Versus The Goddess,” which is that the invention of writing rewired human brains and shifted them from a right-brained image-based way of thinking to a more left-brained word-based way that shifted culture into patriarchy, gives my love of words a bit of tension, as a woman, a mystic, and an artist. My quest to correct things like patriarchy that have made our societies unbalanced and ill chafes when it rubs up against the thought that I’m using a tool wrought in the unbalancing. But I’m not sure I agree with the author’s premise yet – I’ll have to read the book.

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     Besides, balance is what I’m all about. I use left and right brain skills about equally, and have both masculine and feminine within me. I love and create words, but mine come down on the side of the poetic and healing. Poetry and fiction paint images with words. Poetry breaks the supposed rules, and guides you through the veils back to the creative and primal. It absconds with the Priestly tools to carve unsanctioned beauty and to break mental chains. Fiction uses logos to evoke mythos. I see these as balancing forces.

     Another book along the same vein that I want to read soon is, “Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America” edited by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird.

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     The title seems to refer to Native women using the English language of the colonization, that took so much from their peoples, to find their voice, when it had previously been used to silence their voices. (Like in the boarding schools where they were forced to go, where they were punished for speaking their native languages.) I spotted this while browsing at City Lights Bookstore while visiting San Francisco last week, and got pretty excited. I’m so glad this book exists, and I can’t wait to read it! I hope there will be more like it.

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“Earth Mother” by Angela Babby (art glass mosaic)

     With that, I want to share that I have found that this image of “Earth Mother” helps me connect more than ever to Goddess. It feels so right to me that her face would reflect those of her children who stayed close to her into the present day (there are other indigenous peoples in Africa and Oceania, etc. whose faces would feel equally right to me), and it also feels right as a person who was born in and lives in North America, and who grew up in the still largely wild Western U.S. My sense of the land has always had a Native American flavoring. Doesn’t she feel like Mother or Grandmother to you, when you look at her?

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Lia is an awenydd, writer, journal editor (A Beautiful Resistance), copyeditor (Druid Magazine), hedge witch, mother, musician, OBOD Bard, and anthropology major, living in the wild, enchantingly beautiful mountain west (USA). Her spiritual influences tend toward the ancient and indigenous, with a future-focused hope that humanity will return to a spiritually-rich and thriving sustainability.

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