There’s a woman out walking in a dark blue dusk along an ancient pilgrimage route, making her way to the tombs of her ancestors. By morning she will be there. She’s brought a clay pot, carefully coiled with micaceous earth, as a gift. Some of the tombs are in caves. Some of the caves shelter springs that well up from underground and pour down along their floors. She will meet other women there who are also seeking to conceive children. They will bathe in the upwelling cave water, and ask it to give them the capacities of the dark earth, out of which all life unfurls.
Come out of the earth and into me, my child. Earth, make me as you are.
There’s a woman out walking in a copper bright morning with a little bone spade, looking for just the right place to begin to dig. She’ll know it when she sees it, when she feels it underfoot, that this is the place she will find her child, tucked down there waiting for her like a lily bulb.
I will not stop digging until I find you, my sweet.
There’s a woman at the riverbank gathering clay into her basket as the village healer told her to do, enough clay to sculpt a little baby to help her conceive her own, but the rain comes too soon and washes the baby away.
Little mud-child, little mud-child, I’m still here.
Look how you are green-born, herb-mothered, sprung from the ground.
< see below paywall at the beginning of part ii for a full recording of this post >
i. berry juice
A month ago we were in the caves of Paleolithic Europe, walking three-score steps deeper into the symbolism of fairytale red, white and black. Into moon-knowledge and bison-knowledge and bear-knowledge traced in earliest ochre, knowledges that spelled a continuity between earth’s fecundity and the miraculous cycling of the female body from maidenhood to elderhood.
Wonderfully, while doing the research for this month’s chapter (which was originally the second half of “An Annunciation in Ochre,” but proved too long and needed its own moon cycle to complete), I came across an astonishing parallel to the imagery carved on the cave walls of Paleolithic France—halfway across the world, in Anishnabe indigenous territory in present-day northeastern Minnesota, until quite recently it was tradition that all young women went to sacred caves during their first menarche, and “created petroglyphs [in vulva shape] with their own menstrual blood or mixed their blood with berry juice (the blood of Earth) for painting on rocks.”1
One such cave, called Bear Creek Rock Shelter, “abounds with petroglyphs. […] At the entrance to the shelter is an explicitly delineated bison, with another two further inside. […] The walls where they narrow are covered with repeated vulvaforms. […] On the rear wall of the shelter [are] three incised images that are unmistakable bear paws. […] If one sat on the shelf of the rear wall facing the entrance, by extending one’s arms, one could place each of one’s hands into two of the bear paws.”2