Hares on the Mountain

a song & a new writing workshop

                                             h a r e s     o n      t h e      m o u n t a i n
                                     morning singing over my tea & the late winter sunrise 
                                                  with venus & a waning moon in the east 

I love this song. I’ve loved it since I first heard it about a year ago, crouched over something I was writing or sketching on my studio floor in Point Reyes. I remember pausing whatever it was I was focused on at the words “if all you young men were like hares on the mountain…” and then sitting transfixed amidst my books until the song was over.

I love the bold, pure, animal playfulness of the girls and their desire in this song, and the singer’s cheek, countering all the approaches of the young man who’s after her. I love the undercurrent of animal shapeshifting— in some versions not only the boys but the girls too are blackbirds, hares, thrushes, back and forth. The words are simple but long after listening or singing it I can still see swift silver salmon in water, and the young women undressing to “dive after”; I’ve hardly encountered a more beautifully compressed image in a folk song than that line — its purity of female desire, and a thousand old love stories held in a single graceful dive into summer water.

The version I’ve shared here uses the lyrics and melody of Shirley Collins’ 1959 rendition from her first LP, Sweet England, which is very similar to the most well-known original version collected by Cecil Sharp in his 1904 Folk Songs From Somerset. Some say it’s connected to Child Ballad 44, “Twa Magicians,” from much further north, with its classic shapeshifting chase between a blacksmith and a lady— as she becomes an eel, he becomes a trout, she a duck and he a drake, she a gray mare and he a saddle, she a hare and he a greyhound...

… “She turnd hersell into a hare, To rin upon yon hill”…

Wherever the song came from first, and however it has evolved, it makes some part of me dance when I sing it, and laugh, and both of those things are precious to me these days, when the world seems so utterly dark.

I think I’m always seeking an undercurrent of song in my writing, and in my reading too. A melody, a tone, a rhythm and pitch— these guide and inform how I go about the process of writing itself. It often feels like I’m listening for some silent note inside myself, waiting to hear it clearly so that it can guide me to the right words. I think silent words on a page can be songs that run their melodies through us even if we never hear them aloud. When they aren’t this, when they don’t have some song under their surface, I don’t like reading them very much.

When I was going through a personally very frightening and dark time a couple years ago, and found it impossible to write anything at all, I clung to the Cretan lyra and to the traditional songs I was learning on it like a literal rope out of hell. I still know without question that those songs saved me. That memorizing a new Cretan melody by ear weekly was my warp-thread; it kept reality together, it directed me back toward the “country they call life” as Rilke once wrote.

So, all of that to say— here’s a spontaneous Sunday song for you, first of all simply for the sake of singing, and letting the singing feed me which it always does, vibrating through my head and chest and hands and feet til I feel animal again, and hale; and second of all as a way to introduce a new writing workshop I’ll be offering at the end of this month….

"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe."

-Gary Snyder, from “Myths and Texts” (1978)

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"the free animal has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in front , and when it moves, it moves already in eternity, like a fountain"

- Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Stephen Mitchell, from "The Eighth Elegy”

                                                      V O T I V E     A N I M A L 
                                      

Come write and dream with me in the animal den this winter season, between solstice and twelfth night, when all is quiet and still and the fire is at its deepest.

Come explore the idea that the animals themselves light-bearers…

In this mythic writing workshop, I will guide us along animal trails using poetry, natural history, folklore and wildlife tracking principles, exploring how we might make votive offerings of our words to the animals we share our waters and trees and seasons with, in each of our bioregions and also in our imaginations.

Poetic inspiration will include work by some if not all of the following—Louise Erdrich, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Galway Kinnell, Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, Rainer Maria Rilke and Jean Valentine (and maybe some others I haven’t thought of yet). Folkloric and mythic inspiration will most likely include flashes of bear-lore from the Finnish Kalevala, the story of 7th century Welsh abbess and hermit, Melangell of the hare, elements of the Scottish borderlands ballad Tam Lin, and possibly more!

All of these logs on the fire will build up a great heat, around which we will create our own pieces of writing that speak in some way to the animals, and leave room for them to speak back...

You will come away from the class with your winter den full of new inspiration (I'll provide a reading list after the workshop that includes the pieces read as well as other books to pursue), your own pieces of animal-devotional writing, and hopefully a renewed sense of the living world around you.

IN PREPARATION: Please take a little time before our workshop to acquaint yourself more deeply with the animal species of your immediate ecosystem, within a 6 mile radius (as far as a honeybee goes foraging). Skim a field guide or two. You don't need to make a catalogue or a comprehensive study. Just see who catches your eye, and why. Write down some Latin names, some little notes about behavior, coloring, habitat. This can take as little as 10 minutes, or as long as you want! Bring these notes, and your writing utensil, and whatever you need to be comfortable for a two hour class, to our time together. I look forward to seeing you all there.

                                                            - REGISTER HERE - 
                                                  december 30th from 6:30- 8:30 pm 

"When I can’t sleep, when the dark is swallowing and vast, I turn my thoughts to the animals around me on the land. They are close, warm and breathing inside that darkness too. I think of the thousand thousand songbirds, beaks under their wings, perched on their sleeping branches in the coyotebrush.

I think of the snakes in the earth, moving slowly, all the snakes of Point Reyes at once, garter and rubber boa and king and the occasional shy rattlesnake, their sinuous movements over the ground, their tunnels. All of them right in this moment, moving gently.

I think of all the bobcats and the soft pads on their feet, all of them at once this very second in their willow dens, their noses with that touch of pink, their unfathomable pale green eyes, the tufts of their ears, how quiet everything goes when one turns to look at you from the brush.

I think of the owls, the specific tree branches that their claws are touching, the way the night is on their feathers. I think of gray whales in the tide, I think of gray whales in the tide, I think of gray whales in the tide, and somewhere, a dolphin.

I feel them all shifting warmly and steadily about in the dark. Every single one of them a votive glowing, every heart with its oil and wick. I find the bigness of the night isn’t lonely at all, but furred, starred, and looking back at me tenderly."

-Sylvia V. Linsteadt from "Votives Hung at the Hour of the Animals"

NOTE- all ceramics in the photographs in this post are my own creations, from my animal votive firings over the years