About the Maidens of the Wells

in this wasteland time

The Yellow Sail - Odilon Redon c. 1905

It is bee swarm season here in my garden on Tamál-Húye (the Point Reyes Peninsula). It’s wild iris season. It’s osprey mating season. The sky is full of their whistles, and the bee hives casting swarms like spells up into the blue. These three— the bee swarms, the wild irises, and the osprey songs— are threads of peace in me through days that are otherwise fiercely unsettling. Around us all in this country, and in the world, so much is crumbling. The dread, the chaos and the heartbreak of it have lately been close to unbearable. I can’t catch my breath, or fully integrate what I’m reading or seeing. Panic keeps rising.

I hold on to the oak tree where the bees live. I’ve become adept with the drop spindle in the last three weeks, like a craft my hands never quite forgot across lifetimes, and I sit under the tree spinning and spinning and watching the bees as if this will somehow bring order again. It does bring order to my own heart and mind, and I suppose that’s a start. I want to believe that every tiny thing we do that calls us back to the center of ourselves and the place where we are one with Earth has a ripple effect that’s as powerful as executive orders and presidential decrees. I know in my soul such truths are more powerful, of course they are. That Earth’s justice is supreme. But in human time, in human terms, in political terms, I fight back feelings of sheer hopelessness again and again these days.

I kneel down by the salt water of the bay and whisper that I’m so sorry. I wet the fibers of my spindle there. I ache to have someone gather me up in their arms and tell me very old stories for hours and hours until the sky and the earth seem to be in right relation to each other again. I pray that one day I will be such a person for my descendants.

For now, what comes to me there by the water are the Well Maidens from the story of the Holy Grail (specifically Chretién de Troyes early 13th century telling of the tale.) What comes to me is their reminder that we are living at the height of the consequences of the Fisher King and his Wasteland right now. That we are looking it all dead in the face. Maybe the Well Maidens come to me because of all the tears I keep shedding. Maybe I’ve called them forth out of all this water in me. But also perhaps they are here, storied women of my bloodlines (of all our bloodlines, those of us women with European heritage) because they want to say— we are still here. We are still here praying over the water. We are still here despite all the harm done to us. We have lived through worse than any of this, and so we are here for you and will not leave you. But we need you to stand with us now, to heal us in every thread and fiber of your womb and being, to speak with us and for us, and be not afraid.

Right now I am still sitting with this in my spindle, under the oak tree, out with the irises, beside the salt bay, listening, gathering myself together, gathering myself into clarity.

And so for today I want to leave you with a conversation I’ve been revisiting, that I recorded back in the winter with the truly brilliant mystic, musician, and teacher Alana Levandoski about the Maidens of the Wells. This interview was recorded as a bonus resource for students in my When Women Were the Land Course , but it stands on its own, and I’ve been returning to it lately to hear Alana sing her songs to the Well Maidens, and to hear her wisdom and way in this world, at this time.

“Walk softly to the holy wells. And you’ll be fed and watered there, where the maidens dwell… They offer you the plate and cup with their whole wild hearts, and you were bonded to this land like interwoven parts….” Alana sings. I am singing along right now, over the waters, for the sake of the ones yet to come.