Skywoman Falling
Sometimes, things don’t work out at all. Other times, everything just lines up perfectly without a word; a crowd of passengers filing tidily onto a bus, zipper merging.
I have been thinking about starting this blog for a long time.
I admit that I have had blogs before. It’s an idea I keep coming back to, because writing is a release for me. Writing even feels joyful at times. And I am most confident when I am writing: everything just lines up. Or it doesn’t - reality is my reality, after all. But either way, I have the desire to choose the right words. And I hope you will have the desire to understand. The words are the key.
To begin, below, I will share some words by Robin Wall Kimmerer, from her 2013 book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Sweetgrass (a plant native to Canada, and long used as an Indigenous medicine) has a Latin name, as most plants now do.
In Latin it is “Hierochloë” – sacred bloom.
Skywoman Falling
In winter, when the green earth lies resting beneath a blanket of snow, this is the time for storytelling. The storytellers begin by calling upon those who came before who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers. In the beginning, there was the Skyworld.
She fell like a maple seed, pirouetting on the autumn breeze. A column of light streamed from a hole in the Skyworld, marking her path where only darkness had been before. It took her a long time to fall. In fear, or maybe hope, she clutched a bundle tightly in her hand.
Hurtling downward, she saw only dark water below. But in that emptiness there were many eyes gazing up at the sudden shaft of light. They saw there a small object, a mere dust mote in the beam. As it grew closer, they could see that it was a woman, arms outstretched, long black hair billowing behind as she spiralled toward them.
The geese nodded at one another, and rose together from the water in a wave of goose music. She felt the beat of their wings as they flew beneath to break her fall. Far from the only home she’d ever known, she caught her breath at the warm embrace of soft feathers as they gently carried her downward. And so it began.
