Dear lovely readers,
The recording for the latest Mother Animal installment, “Into the Manger” is now embedded in the original post. Just scroll down to the photograph of Esther Strauss’ sculpture of Mary in labor, and you will find it below.
Do feel free to share your thoughts and reflections in the comments there— I know these are overwhelmingly large themes to take on, and I’d love to be in conversation with you about them.
Meanwhile, I have traveled between summers, and am back in northern California with the heather and gorse of the high moor still in my heart. It’s a bittersweet moment when you realize that a life you’ve been trying to make work just won’t hold together the way you’d dreamed it might. A humbling one too. That journey is a story for another day, a story better told in poem-form maybe, a story about motherline pilgrimages and dead ends and romantic love not going the way I had hoped and the tension between the lands that grew me up and the lands of long ago ancestors and remembered dreams— but suffice it to say that I find myself back here rooting again into the land of my birth after seven years trying to live very far away because of a very hard thing that happened starting in that long ago September.
I find myself back here where the stark contrast between millennia of indigenous ancestral stories and the last two hundred of European settlers wakes me up in the morning in tears of both anger at my own ancestors and grief for what the First People suffered not very long ago here, and continue to suffer.1
I find myself back here where I know the calls of the birds and the faces they belong to without looking, where I love the smell of the dry heat and the dry oak leaves and the redwood boughs going orange-tipped with fall. I find myself back here with my family who I love so much. I find myself back here, trying to literally find myself in deeper, brighter ways than I ever have before.
I find myself hollow some days, full others, often tearful, circling a new center, in a water-tower house with a garden where a five-pointed tree grows. By which I mean a tree bearing five fruits at once, just like the one I envisioned and wrote about four years ago in The Venus Year.
Once there was a woman
Once there was a woman
Once there was a woman
who birthed herself again from her own tears
She poured them from a heavy vessel
onto the root of the many-fruiting tree
She didn’t know it then
but only tears like that, love-tears
can make the miraculous tree grow
the one she longed for:
where pomegranate, grape, fig, pear, apricot
grew heavy all on one bough
-Sylvia V. Linsteadt, “The Five-Pointed Tree,” The Venus Year
The tree in this garden is slightly less impossible— all its fruits belong to the same rosaceae family (apricot, plum, peach, nectarine, pluot)— but nonetheless a miracle I could hardly believe when I saw it, and therefore one I am trying to trust, amidst season and years of upheaval.
We shall see what new fruit comes, as I carry in me the dreams of Dartmoor mares and their foals and the stories of Rhiannon, and Cretan mountains and wild herbs and caves where the face of the Mother shines through clear water, but sink my hands back into the earth and roots of my girlhood, as acorn woodpeckers swoop and call overhead, and apricots fall to the ground.
I want to say also — thank you all for being here as readers and friends and supporters of my writing. You make the dancing weave of this tapestry of my work possible as my livelihood, which is a gift beyond saying. This autumn is going to be a time of big new creations as well as the final touches on long-in-process gestations, and I am so grateful to have your company along the labyrinthine way.
IN OTHER NEWS - After just a little over a week of launching, our SOOTH cards are already 35% funded, which is just incredible. Rima and I have been watching your orders arrive with such gratitude and excitement. Thank you all so much. We can’t wait to complete the fundraising and get them into your hands!
Right now, thanks to my friends at Land Justice Futures, who are leading a course on Mother Law and “Complicit No More” called The Motherhouse Starter Series, I am reading Sarah Augustine’s The Land is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery and it is totally brilliant and in my opinion a must-read not only for all US citizens, but all of us connected to the legacy of European colonization.
Dearest Sylvia, what a joy it has been to follow you along on your journey for so many years. Your words have perfectly captured the joys and sorrows of feeling the power and pull of a land so far away, but yet deeply resonating and loving the home of one’s birth. ❤️🍃
Dear Sylvia,
I a,m writing from .chartres Cathedral. I have been leading pilgrimages and workshops in Glastonbury and Wales and just finished teaching “Meeting Mary” here at her house, I so resonate with the dance between the Celtic homelands and .West Marin. I’ve never tried the move here, but have longed to at times. The stories we are both attracted to thrive here. and, yet, their sensibility is so needed in the fabric of the lands of California. I wish you well in your return to .CA and look forward to in person experiences with you and your beautiful work. May you fare well in this new chapter,