While Temporarily Shipwrecked with the God of the Dead
Meeting the Irish God Donn & Preparing for Perdita Finn's upcoming class
I’ve been quiet these last weeks.
Well, that’s only when you define “quiet” in terms of public conversation, of course. When you’re fully enmeshed in the modern world, and days are full of mothering, earning a livelihood, maintaining a network of connections, and keeping a house from totally coming apart at the seams, it’s still a rather raucous life.
As spring has given way to summer, there just hasn’t been the extra breath to craft the sentences that can speak eloquently of myth. My meaning making has been a deeply private affair. I’ve been too caught up in my own personal mythologies to say anything of note about the old stories that hold us all.
After all my talk of the Wasteland in recent months, this is inevitable. But it’s not just a garden variety case of burn out that kept me from showing up in your inbox.
I have been tossed about in what I have come to know as the Bermuda Triangle of Grief. From experience, I can gratefully say that I’m about to round the third point in this particular constellation of time.
Before I share this story with you (just below), I want to be sure you know about a free class coming from my friend and KnotWork Storytelling guest
. Its timing is remarkable for me, and I think it’s going to be a remarkable experience for everyone who attends.The workshop is called Reclaim Your Connection with the Departed and it is happening on July 12.
I adore Perdita and her wise, witty way of teaching. I know she’ll offer something quite magical in our time together, and I am most excited about how she’ll be teaching us how to reclaim the suppressed wisdom of the ancestors
Sign up for Perdita’s class here.
Lost in the Hinterlands, Adrift in the Waters of Grief
My mother died thirteen years ago this week.
All who loved Jeanine have had to navigate the sharp rocks and empty, brutal expanses without her. In all this time, we’ve had a chance to learn how to plot our own course and grow in ways that we never might have had to if she had been there to take care of it all.
In my book, The Sovereignty Knot, I dive deep into how the loss of my mother reshaped my own story. That book came out in early 2020, and my grief has continued to take new shape in the strange hinterlands we’ve all crossed in the last three years. Though permanently altered, much of the landscape has been restored. I am no longer lost at sea.
Except, that is, during this tricky trinity of months of May, June, and July: Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of May; our shared birthday on June 17; the day she died on July 13.
During this season, there’s no land in sight. The triangle of grief, somewhere far into the Atlantic, is made of shipwrecks from a shared life. I see traces of who I was when I was the well-loved daughter of a woman who possessed equal measure of peace and passion.
Over the years, this period of mourning has become less sharp and all-consuming, generally speaking. The gift of time and all that… But this thirteenth year has been something different. The number thirteen is always one of transformation, just as it is the tarot card of Death and Rebirth.
And then, John Moriarty Speaks of the Donn, the God of the Dead
When I haven’t been caught in the blur that is mothering kids through the transition from end-of-school to summer, I have been chewing the end of my pen while reading John Moriarty’s Dreamtime.
This mystic philosopher weaves Irish mythology with the European traditions of the Greeks, the Bible, and the Enlightenment and calls out to Eastern thought, Vedic wisdom, and Aboriginal knowing. It’s a dense and potent mix, and it will likely take me years to feel I’ve even begun to digest it all.
Moriarty drops names of gods and philosophers and holy places like a mulberry tree drops her fruit. In passing, he mentions Donn, who is sometimes considered the Irish god of the dead. Donn was the first among the Sons of Mil, the ancestors of the Gaels and sixth and final wave of invaders to take Ireland in the Lebor Gabála Érenn
Caught in this triangle of loss, I felt the tug of this Lord of the Dead, who I’d only read about in passing. Until now, I hadn’t felt called to do the research or and follow him to his house on the rockiest fringe of County Cork.
According to Alwyn & Brinley Rees, Donn was a difficult cantankerous sort, fighting with his brothers and insulting the Ériu, the Queen the Tuatha De Danann and the goddess who gave her name to the land.
I was already deep in this nautical metaphor when I read that, after being sent beyond the ninth wave, Donn died in a shipwreck. The folklore still associates the old death god with causing ships to founder and run ashore.
Oh, brother, you know what it is to be lost beyond the breakers.
It was said that Donn’s brother, the legendary poet Amergin, decided that the dead man should be buried on a remote island and it would be called Tech Duinn, the House of Donn. Stories say that the dead would gather there, and depending on the storyteller, those folks were either on their way to Hell or to one of the “happy islands” of the Celtic Otherworld.
Though Donn is sparking something deep in my storyteller’s imagination, dormant since the long marathon of crafting and producing a season of KnotWork Storytelling, I am not yet sure if and how he’ll appear in my work. For now, he is a worthy companion with whom to spend a rainy Hudson Valley afternoon. He feels benevolent enough as we’re separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. In fact, he even feels like something of a friend, well-traveled in the territory of death and wise in the wickedest ways of the sea.
Stay tuned for how he may take shape in the next season of KnotWork Storytelling, returning this fall.
Though it’s unlikely that Donn will make an appearance in Perdita’s class (though you never know - she has much Irish ancestry and synchronicity seems to gather around her ankles like the way rose petals gather around a Mary statue), I do have a sense that something magical will happen on the evening of July 12.
I know I will be there, certain that the night before the thirteenth anniversary of my mom’s passing is a time for potent insight and connection.
Whether you’re hoping to tune into the energy someone in particular or you’re simply feeling the call of the vast realm of those who have gone before us, I hope to see you at Reclaim Your Connection with the Departed on Wednesday.