Last week, I was speaking to a group of fourth graders about the strange paradox of the winter solstice:
The longest night also means the return of the light.
The moment our ancestors found themselves in the midst of the coldest, harshest season was also the moment they were promised that spring would come.
The kids in my daughter’s class have been studying geology as well as the indigenous people of these lands. It seemed more than perfect to share with them a solstice story about ancient stone and ancient peoples and introduce them to the yearly miracle at Newgrange in County Meath.
Ireland’s Newgrange is a 5000 year old passage tomb, and it’s a sort of three dimensional metaphor for the entire cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
The sun makes a great passage into the belly of the monument at the winter solstice each year. Ancient kings were said to be buried there.
As Laura Murphy has offered us in S2 Ep7 of KnotWork Storytelling, Newgrange is the sacred trysting place for the goddess Bóinn and the good god Dagda.
Longest night and returning light, the truth of death and the perennial nature of hope.
The Solstice: An Ideal Day to Linger In the Land of the Dead
is this week’s KnotWork storyteller. She brings us a passage from her new memoir Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World called “The Land of the Dead.”
Each time Perdita and I speak, we find all the ways we’re soul kin - at the spirit level, as well as the geographical level. Both of us were born and raised on Cape Cod. We both found ourselves in the Hudson Valley, and found ourselves becoming mothers in this place of rivers and mountains.
In this episode, Perdita helps us draw connections between the indigenous people of what is now called New York State and the ancient people of Ireland. Five millennia ago, the Lenape and the Esopus people (or those who may have come before them) worked with stone, just like their more famous contemporaries on that tiny island across the ocean. The Catskill Mountains, or, as the original people called it, the Wall of the Manitou, was the place they would commune with the ancestors.
In the conversation that follows, Perdita and I explore how it’s one of those “bad myths” that make Americans (particularly in the northeast) believe you have to reach to other continents, or at least thousands of miles across Turtle Island, to find signs of the ancient past.
In fact, it’s all right here.
Our shared path is cobbled with synchronicity, so I was not that surprised when, just yesterday I came across this line in Lauren Groff’s latest novel, The Vaster Wilds:
“Here there is nothing, only land, all the earth and mountains and trees remain innocent of story. This place is itself a sheet of parchment yet to be written upon.”
Such lyrical prose.
Such a contemptuous lie. (And, of course, Groff knows that and proves it wrong with every page of her tale.)
This idea spools from the mind of an English girl forced to emigrate here four hundred years ago. Funny, sounds a lot like how I was raised, too.
While surely the colonizers who would place their names and roads, governments and great stone structures onto this land would write a whole new American story, this continent was rich with cultures and beliefs, characters and mythologies long before the Europeans came.
With every story from my own known ancestors that I tell, every story from across the oceans, I am consciously trying to weave the oldest stories from that land with the stories from this place I call home.
May Your New Year Be Full of Age-Old Stories & Brand New Visions
As this longest night gives way to the return of the light, as one year ends and the new one begins, I wish you and yours comfort and growth, curious minds and grounded hearts.
I’ll return with more Myth Is Medicine in the new year, and more episodes of KnotWork Storytelling later in the winter.
As you think about the next year, I invite you to consider joining me in the Writers’ Knot Community.
This online writing group is where you can prioritize your writing, reconnect with your creativity, and find companions who are dedicated to story, to spirit, and the weaving of all the visions.
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