The Summering Library
for your mountain tracks, your berried lanes, your seasides
Four days ago, our starry planet Venus— maker of the sky’s roses in her eight-year motions around Earth— climbed up out of the celestial underworld and became the evening star again. This happens about every nineteen months. It is my favorite time in Venus’s cycle. Evening star months are new love months, to me, reminding me that all things are mysterious and growing. I say this prayerfully today. I’ve yet to see her on the western horizon. It may be a week yet until she’s visible.
I say this prayerfully because it feels to me these days that there is a fever pitch unleashed upon the Earth. It has been mounting since October. It has been mounting since long before that, but made unbearably acute since then, on ancient holy ground in Palestine, on the bodies of men, women and children there. Things have not made very much sense to me since then. At the same time, my heart has become far, far clearer to me. My heart has been asking me to change in ways that have been very painful, and frightening, and also clear as spring water. Veils are falling everywhere I look. Calypso stands bare, and what she saw for millennia in her pool we are walking now.
So I remember Venus— I reach out to her and hold on with all my might— because Venus as evening star helps my heart, and it is through our hearts that the Living Water pours, every one of us right where we sit or stand or run or sleep. Find her in the west, and let her remind your heart of all of this. I promise you, she will.
Meanwhile, due to a rather wild workload at the moment — final progress on a novel six years in the writing, among other exciting things, one of which I’ve shared at the very bottom of this post!— I’m going to take a little holiday from Substack posting as well, until our next Mother Animal installment on August 11th, as the new moon grows beside the evening star, and we cross the the midway point between summer solstice and autumn equinox.
As I mentioned last month, because August is the big gorgeous holy month of the Panagia across Crete, and all of Greece (the panigiria start at the end of July, each village celebrating her abundance leading up to the big holiday on August 15th of the Dormition of the Theotokos), my theme is going to be the pregnancy of Mary herself. After all—guess what? As it happens, at the heart of Christianity is one of the most detailed and beautiful and complete stories of a woman’s pregnancy that we have in mythic form like this…. I’m looking forward to sharing more in a month.
Meanwhile, I have gathered together a collection of pieces from the archives here for your summering enjoyment and nourishment. Among them are three stories spoken and sung aloud, perfect for your road-trip or garden-weeding listening pleasure. They are probably my three favorite creations thus far in this space, besides Mother Animal…
A SUMMER SELECTION FROM THE LIBRARY
STORIES TOLD ALOUD
Morning Star Woman & Ivan the Youngest Son
.... But then a few nights ago, this little story about Venus walking down into the Earth shifted, and became a version of the Russian fairytale of the Maiden Tsar** and her love for Ivan. It became suddenly far more human. A story of swan women, and eggs, and fishermen, of wise old men in huts and the oldest woman in the world who lives in the moon, of how to mend broken things, of figuring out how to love, and love well.
It became a prayer for friends of mine enduring sudden heartbreak, or long heartbreak, a prayer for fatherlines and motherlines and heartlines, a prayer for all the people I love, a prayer for the women in the streets of Iran standing and fighting for their freedom and the radiance of their lives, a prayer for something we perhaps all together have nearly forgotten, a prayer for what we cannot afford to lose, together on this Ark, our holy ground, our home..
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The Six Swans
White swans of midwinter— tundra swans who have just arrived back in England from Siberia this past month—may you go forth and come back to your human cousins who so desperately need your help to become whole people, whole hearts, whole daughters and sons of this Earth, again.
May you forgive us.
May we kneel at the edges of your great marshes, at the edges of your holy nest where a precious egg rests, and do everything we can to protect the song that sleeps within it.
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Tam Lin
Practiced, sung and recorded through the winter solstice, new moon and now the edge of Christmas, as the Virgin Mary swells with child and comes to the eve of birth, I offer into this moment of celestial light and earthly dark a faithful rendition of the old Scottish borderland folk ballad Tam Lin (Child Ballad 39), accompanied and mixed by my brother Simon Linsteadt on guitar. You might enjoy listening to the song with a good pair of headphones before reading the explanatory notes below. Or read on and then listen after, as you wish.
OF PALESTINE & HOLY MOTHER
Holy Trees of Life
And I think I speak for many of us when I say, I have no idea what to do anymore. I call my representatives, I watch and share as much as I can while also trying to remain semi-functional, I talk about this with people in my life, I write, I pray, I scream, I cry. I want to turn away, but my heart won’t let me. My soul won’t either.
We are one body. May this change us all. May the lives of every civilian lost in Palestine at the hands of Israel and the US, and every civilian lost in Israel by Hamas, crack us open all the way, into whatever deeper love and clarity we were meant to live from. May this not crush our spirits. May the veils come off our eyes.
Calypso sat for ten thousand years at the spring fed by waters from the six directions, keeping veiled the heart of the world on her Ogygia. Unveiled, she is Apocalypse. May we rise to meet what she is showing us as sons and daughters of God by whatever name we call that God, each of us responsible in our small ways for being faces of justice, of solidarity, of understanding across religions and races, of love and of courage.
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The Bells of Good Friday
I am in Oxford this Good Friday, perched near the High Street with the bells tolling each hour and its half, for a small research trip to the Ashmolean to see the exhibit about Knossos and its excavation by the infamous Arthur Evans. Old friends will be there in the glass cases, and I’m sure I’ll cry— ceramic friends I mean, on loan from the Heraklion M…
BOOKS & TALES FOR THE BEACH
The Basket-Witches of Farallone
I dreamt of Comfrey and Tin several nights ago, the characters from my 2018 children’s ecological fantasy novels The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising. In the dream, I had dreamt of them. They were dreams within dreams, and yet viscerally real. I suppose this is how fictional characters are in the minds of their writers; dream-like, yet intimately known…
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Bull: Poppy: Star
BULL : POPPY: STAR by Sylvia V. Linsteadt © 2018, Hedgespoken Press
At the heart of her darkness is a bull with eyes of star. O earth, why is he trapped, why is he caged there at the dark’s deepest point, why is he full of such unholy hunger, why does his hunger threaten to shake the city to the ground? Before he was caged, before she was the daughter …
In other news, TOMORROW JULY 15th I will be in lively conversation with Ruby Reed of ADVAYA in a free webinar called “When Women Were the Land: unearthing European myths and histories.”
In this webinar we will discuss how myth, archaeology, ecological study, and creative practice are all pathways into connection with the matrilineal root-systems of Europe. We will talk about Marija Gimbutas, the brilliant Lithuanian archaeologist who first described, based on archaeological evidence, a pre-patriarchal "Old Europe," as she called it; about how European fairytales still encode indigenous motherlines of Old European memory; about how attentive ecological study and nature-connection practices help us orient to the stories held in the land we live within— both human, animal, vegetable, celestial, and more; and about how Sylvia's personal creative orientation as a writer and artist inform the way she connects with both Earth and myth.
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Do join us! Registration is entirely free. And, guess what… if you join us you will be the first to know about a proper full length course on this very subject that I will be curating for Advaya this coming winter.