The Moon By Itself

a lament, and the story of the bird-women

Sesklo “Bird Goddess,” Thessaly 5900 BCE

WAITING
by Linda Gregg

When I chewed a bay leaf and rubbed
sage on my hands and arms, I believed
it was in order not to scare the deer. 
Which was true. Later, I thought it was
so my soul could be read by God. 
Now I suspect it was a way for me
to become hidden. When you came to court me
for my body and hair, I was not there, 
even though I was washed a dressed 
for the occasion. Did you see me stare
beneath the courtesies? I was waiting
for someone to want that. To want 
the moon by itself. For the quiet
of the herd. Of the stones under the water
in the creek flickering. Seeming to move,
but not moving. Together with everything
that's here.

(c) 2008, All of it Singing (Graywolf Press)

I’ve been thinking about how at the root of all of this is heartbreak. The really personal kind, not the abstract kind. The someone-you-can’t-stop-loving-who-doesn’t-love-you-anymore kind, the kind where they won’t stay, or they aren’t who you thought they were, or they keep lying but you can’t admit it to yourself until one day you do and your life shatters because you didn’t want it to be true, but it was. I’ve been thinking about where all of this goes in our soft little bodies, in our hearts, in our tear-ducts, and for how many years we can carry it, and how many generations, and how long it will take us to find peace.

And so I’ve been asking —did Eve break Adam’s heart in the Garden? Did Adam break Eve’s? Is that what this is all about? I know God did, at least in me he did when he said to Eve you are the source of this, when he said to Eve you will suffer in childbirth now, you will writhe in pain, when he said to Eve the serpent will now be your enemy, and you will obey your husband in all things. But I am told there was a bird there then too, at the top of the tree, as there had always been in other myths before the Garden, and that the bird looked at Eve with compassion and grief because the bird could do nothing about these new laws of men but teach her to sing.

So I’ve begun today’s post with the song that’s oddly been running in my head since that sleepless Tuesday night last week, when no one that I know in the US slept more than 3 hours for the horror of it, and the shock. This song is an Irish love song from Donegal, based on a translation of an 8th century Irish poem by Lady Gregory and popularized again in 1976 by a performance of the Sands Family. It has also made its way to Scotland and is sung there too. It is the lament of a young woman for her beloved who has left her. A woman who has given her commitment and her virginity to a man who had no intention of staying with her, in a time and a place when such actions ruined a woman's reputation and therefore her future, and if she happened to have fallen pregnant, her safety and potentially her very life too.

This particular lament is the kind of lament women have been singing for a long, long time. I’ve wondered why this is the one that’s been rolling through me. Maybe because singing a love song from long ago is an escape from this week’s reality in the US, or maybe because the melody of it helps all the other grief in me come out, for the direness of what has just befallen America, for the poison that’s been all the way unmasked in us here. I love this Earth and all of Earth’s people, so much. I am so afraid of what my grandchildren will inherit: what kind of culture, what kind of environment. I am afraid that there will be no world for them. And I know so many people are already living actively through such realities far more so than I am. I am so sickened to the center of my being to witness Israel’s continual unceasing violence against Palestine and now Lebanon, and what this kind of voracious, rapacious hate is breeding through the world, and how much poison is flooding into waters and communities from bombs, and how deep in the earth their impact is reverberating, and how Earth must think we have stopped loving her, stopped loving him, stopped loving them, a long, long time ago. I can’t fucking stand it.

And so I turn, in desperation, to old songs, and also to old stories, and to history.

Therefore I’ve been thinking about how beneath the Indo-European warrior burials of the Bronze Age, there are ten thousand figurines of bird-women carved in clay, pregnant women with bird beaks carved in bone, dancing women with wings painted on pots, ancestresses whose breasts pour out rain buried under the hearth. I’ve been thinking about how at the root of all this are those bird-women buried under the funerary pyres of their warrior husbands who stole them as war-booty, whose real husbands had been killed. I’ve been thinking about how what just happened in the US election, and why, is the same story, a story passed down that is a sickness, the sickness of white supremacy that is the same sickness Hitler spread when he became obsessed with an Aryan lineage that is an Indo European lineage, that is the same sickness that incited war-bands on horseback to kill all the older bloodlines of Neolithic and Mesolithic European men within 300 years of their invasions, leaving the Neolithic women open to abduction, rape, and forced marriage.

Still, they kept making their bird-woman figurines in secret, and telling their stories, and dancing their dances.

I’ve been thinking about the Swan Queen in an old Lithuanian folktale with that title, who becomes curious about human life but gets too close and has her wings stolen and her hand in marriage given to a king. I’ve been thinking about her longing, and the day when her swan beloved flies overhead in the garden, and sings to her, and throws her down a pair of wings, and she goes with him into the sky even though she has a human baby. But she is of two worlds now— both swan and woman. Her swan husband is shot by a hunter. Her baby boy is lonely in the castle and cannot sleep. She returns to him in secret and sings him to sleep nightly until the king catches her, and takes her wings once more, and so she is bound to stay.

I’ve been thinking about how dangerous it is to become obsessed with bloodlines. I cannot think of a single example when this has been a good thing. It leads always to nationalism, to racism, to othering, to white supremacy. And yet it matters what our lineages are, it matters where we came from, who we came from, because when we know, we are then empowered to take responsibility, and to sing new stories. To rip open the Fisher King’s festering wound, that wound which still hasn’t healed, in that forest where the well maidens still have not returned to their holy waters, for fear of the violent hands of men, It matters to trace motherlines and fatherlines, and to trace them far enough back that the lines reach ground where we can see beyond our own heartbreaks, or rather, right into the center of them.

I’ve been thinking about all the white women who voted for Trump— and asking myself how damaged are we, and how far back, that so many said yes to this? And I want to say, though I’m sure not many of them would want to hear me— before the divine right of kings, before the law of warlords and bands of young men rushing out of the steppe on horseback to pillage communities and abduct women, before the Christian state that insisted your body was not your own but always your husbands, before absolute hatred and mistrust of our sexuality set in, there were women now buried in the earth of Old Europe who could shapeshift into birds. And I want to say, these are your women. There were women whose power of sight and communion with the divine was so strong that they were consulted by their communities for healing, the kind of healing always in service to the balance of life. These are your women. There was a time when it was known on European soil that Earth’s justice was the law of the land and ordained by elder women, and the goddesses had the heads of waterbirds, and the grandmothers had houses with chicken legs, and they could be ruthless and fierce when needed, in service of life. They were not afraid of the dark, and taught their daughters not to be afraid either, and to paint their cheeks with woad, and their soles with yellow saffron, and their navels with ochre, and dance until the moon I once dreamed had been shot out of the sky was lifted back up to where it belongs. These are our women, these are the mothers our great-grandmothers so desperately needed and mostly didn’t have, and these women would not hesitate to stand for and enact justice upon the one you elected, for they are women of integrity and of peace, and of Earth’s law.

So I want to call on those bird-goddesses of my motherline, of the motherlines of European women, the ones Artemis sheltered in the last woods of Greece, the ones Rhiannon sheltered in the deepest mounds of Wales, the ones Mother Holde hid in her well of souls in the center of Germany, the ones Baba Yaga hid in her mortar and pestle in the vast Slavic forests. I call out to them in a great lament and also great hope saying we need you now. We haven’t forgotten you. There is a story older than the might of kings. Help us remember it in our bones. Help us enact it in our relationships. Help us to remember the songs, and the dances, and mend what has been so damaged. Help us stand up and stop the cycles of harm.

And to the true swan-men, the bear-husbands, the brothers and fathers and uncles and sons of this old heartbreak— I love you. Thank god you are still here. We need you so badly. We believe in you. We are so grateful for you, my god. I know you are there, standing with us, guarding, nurturing, healing. May ten thousand swan-songs pour down over the wounds in you that haven’t healed. May Baba Yaga and the Lady of the Lake praise and inspire your honesty, and guardianship, and courage. May the fathers in you who always knew how to heal the Fisher King’s wound step up and guide you now. May white supremacy be swallowed whole and buried. May every tiniest seed of goodness and of generosity, of humility and of love that have ever been sown become emboldened in you, become radiant in you, grow wings in you, and fly forth, now.

Please— and I say this to myself today— keep singing to her, dancing for her, pouring your prayers into the waters, so that the Earth knows we love her though the rapacious warlords are in power and they are addicted to the sound of a million pounds of bombs dropping.

Because you know Love is still mightier than that. Mightier beyond comprehension. Mighty as stars are mighty. Mighty as oceans. Mighty as seasons, and as the kind of human devotion that endures across lifetimes. You know it. I know it. Let’s fucking remember it, trust it even when it seems absolutely hopeless out there, and live it with all our hearts.

O Donal Óg when you cross the ocean
Take me with you when you are going
At fair or market you’ll be well looked after
And you shall sleep with the Greek king’s daughter

O lad of fairness, O lad of redness
O lad so fair my mind’s in sadness
When I think of another in your name calling
The top and the bottom of my hair starts falling

O you said you would meet me, but you were lying
Beside the sheep shed as day was dying
I whistled and called you, twelve times repeating
But all that I heard was the young lambs bleating

If you come at all, come when stars are peeping
Rap the door that makes no squeaking
My mother will ask you to name your people
And I’ll say you’re a sigh of the night wind weeping

I got the first kiss and from no craven
I got the second atop the stairway
The third kiss came as down you laid me
But for that one night, be still a maiden

The last time I saw you was a Sunday evening
Beside the altar as I was kneeling
It was of Christ’s passion that I was thinking
But my mind was on you and my own heart bleeding

For you took what’s before me and what’s behind me
Took east and west when you wouldn’t mind me
Sun, moon and stars from me you’ve taken
And God as well if I’m not mistaken

- from Al O'Donnell's 1978 rendition of this old Irish song. 

P.S. There are Bird Women in my upcoming course this December with Advaya, part of lecture 5 which I’ve just finished creating this past week (somehow!), called Swanskin. This course is my whole-bodied prayer and offering right now, full of these old histories and myths retold. It’s been a huge labor of love to birth it this autumn, to prepare it for you all. I’d love to see you there.