Knowing Your Yeats from Your Philpotts: Intellectual Integrity and the Fight Against Mis/Disinformation

This week, I have been planning a post about a lovely little quote about the universe and how it wants us to sharpen up our wits. It has one of my favorite words in it–magic–so you’d think I would use this line to invite you to find magic in the year to come.

Actually, no.

Instead, I was going to tell you all about how this sentence is mistakenly attributed to W.B.Yeats (all the time!), when, in reality, it was written by another 19th century white guy who you have never heard of.

I was going to tell you how even my university’s Irish Studies department slapped this quote under a photo of a young Willie Yeats on Instagram. I was considering telling you how I know my Yeats so well (thanks to that same department) that I was sure he wouldn’t say such a thing in such a way. I was going to tell you how all kinds of smart people don’t know their dead Irish poets and clearly haven’t done their research, because this misattribution has been propagating for years (and it has driven me crazy all along).  

But honestly, who cares? 

This obsessive need to nail the citations, button up all the grammar, and perfect the formatting is tiresome, don’t you think? The not-so-subtle self congratulatory nature of pointing out that I am a well-educated poetry geek who is smarter than a social media manager is kinda gross, isn’t it? And don’t we all have better things to worry about than the feelings of long dead dudes who were born in British colonies?

Before we go on, since I know you’re dying to know who said “The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper”: it was Eden Philpotts, an Indian born British writer who I only know about because of Wikipedia. I did track down the original source of the quote (because I am insufferable and enjoy procrastination techniques that involve using the search feature in PDFs of obscure manuscripts). I will never read A Shadow Passes, but I did read the entire paragraph on page 19 that includes the quote.

 Once again: so what? Ultimately, instead of sweating the small stuff, isn’t it more important to engage with the idea that the universe really is waiting for our wits to grow sharper so we can see all the magical things? I mean, research is all well and good, but what we really need is to see the world through the eyes of the soul and navigate according to our dreams, right?

Well, yes, of course!

And, well, not exactly.

In 2022, we need to know the difference between truth and belief (and it’s even more important than knowing your Yeats from your Philpotts)

We all know that we live in an age when “facts” seem debatable. It’s old news to hear that lots of the news is fake news. “Science” is a kickball and the arguments being waged over that word have nothing to do with peer review. And then there is truth, which means something different to nearly everyone, especially when you spell it with a capital “T.” 

That last example? Where “truth” becomes more a matter of personal conviction than the opposite of a verifiable lie? Yeah, I have been guilty of tossing that word around and helping to render it a little more meaningless. And I know I’m not the only writer/healer/transformation professional who is contributing to substituting “personal truth” when we really mean “belief.”

I think we can all get better about making those distinctions and continuing to ask questions and offer answers accordingly as we move forward.

So yeah… I am not writing that post because, in the grand scheme of things, mixing up a Nobel Prize winning poet and a minor author, both born in the 1860s, is a laughably minor offense. If anything, it shows the college professors and librarians their own enduring value, even with the world of knowledge available at the other end of a search string.

Here’s the real question: how do we tell the difference between the data we need to verify and the ideas we can share with impunity? 

Obviously, if it’s a matter of life and death, like public health or an attempted coup election security, we should verify our sources and proofread all the names, dates, and figures.

Oh, wait, it’s the 2020s. “Obviously” does not apply in such cases. At least it seems that many folks with microphones and social media platforms don’t think so as conspiracy and conjecture get passed along, emotionalized, and amplified.

I’m with you: I don’t know how to take on the disinformation, the endless arguments, the cognitive dissonance, the torrents of bad faith. 

All too often, I sit with the great lie we learned on the playground: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. I just get sucked into the constant questioning… Are we going to be OK or are we doomed? Are we treating a paper cut when the patient is in cardiac arrest? Are we all fighting over place settings while the kitchen is on fire?

As we all struggle with the most impossible social divides, let me stick to what I know today: literature, the construction of ideas, and the role of the creative. 

Remember, Anonymous Was a Woman

Ok, so the internet seems to recall that Virginia Woolf expressed this now iconic idea in A Room of One's Own. At least, we all agree to the snappier paraphrasing and appreciate that she said, "I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

When we stop caring about who said what or we just accept the Instagrammable meme version of a quote or a statistic, we lose something. 

It may just be an Irish Studies department losing the respect of its alumni. We might lose some of our own intellectual integrity. After all, we would hope that when we say something quotable, draw something sharable, or create something meme-able, we get a shout out and a link to our Insta.

We might lose something even more valuable, if, for example, we believe or share unverified theories or outright lies about what really matters, like climate change, vaccine safety, insurrection mobs, or voter suppression figures.

What if we build out intellectual integrity by seeking proper attribution and getting the damn quote right?

‘And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.’

Those are actual lines from Yeats, from his poem “Tom O’Roughley.” I’ve long held this idea close to my heart because I hate to see “superior” knowledge used as a weapon. I think we all know what it’s like to be both the bird and the prey, and I think we recognize the suffering that comes to all in such situations.

We don’t need to get all nasty and pedantic in this quest to do better. Instead, in this age of mis- and disinformation, I invite you to join me and advocate for just a bit more intellectual integrity. 

It doesn’t have to mean jumping into the scrum on your cousin’s Facebook feed or calling out the wellness influencer you used to love who has started to call the Covid-19 vaccine a bioweapon. (But really, the vaccine is not a bioweapon and maybe more people need to hear that.)

You can begin this quest for integrity by looking a little deeper before you share a cool line from the Facebook feed or from that first page of result on those crazy quote directories.

Besides uncovering misattributions or realizing that the line really did have a source and wasn’t written by Anonymous, here’s what you may discover…

• The person who actually said this wonderful thing was/is a Nazi sympathizer, an abuser, a total creep. (Warning: you may uncover things you didn’t want to know. Coco Chanel, Marian Zimmer Bradley, and Gandhi all spring to mind immediately.)

• The context of the line “everyone” loves to quote makes a tremendous difference and reading the whole piece, or at least the rest of the paragraph may alter your decision to share that one line that caught your fancy

Getting Maya Angelou quotes right matters

Here’s one last story about my quote sleuthing hobby (and proof that I worked at a college library throughout my twenties and was learning the trade when I wasn’t in my office blogging about epiphanies).

There’s an oft-quoted line by the legendary Maya Angelou: "No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.”

You’ve seen it. I promise. It’s used by brilliant, well-meaning people to brilliant effect all the time. I just came across it most recently in Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.

Here’s the slightly more complete version that is often shared only during Black History Month or articles specific to the Black experience: “For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.” 

My gods, it is a powerful line and it does speak to the entire human experience, but everyone’s first favorite Black woman poet (besides Amanda Gorman) wasn’t talking about the journey of life, she was talking about the (forced) journey from her ancestors’ particular homeland. And that matters.

It takes some patience to actually find the source of this passage (which is always attributed to Angelou with the ellipses, but never actually names the source).  It’s an article from Section D, Page 15 of the New York Times from April 16, 1972. But, again, so what?

Well, I find it pretty damn revealing to note that the name of the piece is “For Years, We Hated Ourselves.”

Angelou is reviewing a four-part documentary series, “Black American Heritage,” by Eliot Elisofon, a white photographer who sounds like an utter egomaniac who also had a deep respect for the people and culture of Africa.

In the course of the review, Angelou gives us a glimpse of her own experience of being a Black American, who grew up learning how to act white and dread pagan Africa until the massive changes of the mid-1950s that inspired folks to ask “If Black is Beautiful, where has it been all this time?”

I encourage you to read the whole article and marvel that it was written fifty years ago, to sit with all that has changed, and to reckon with how few things are different.

Because, indeed, to paraphrase the great Maya Angelou in the hope of providing her words the context and respect they deserve, we cannot know where we are going unless we know exactly where we have been and exactly how we arrived at our present place.

And that is true in the deeply specific and personal, as well as the collective, universal relationship to this whole swath of human history, experience, and future.

We all have stories to tell…

The Winter Solstice, the Cailleach, and the Struggle With the Light

This is a damn strange time to make plans for renewal.

Today there is scarcely 

a dwelling-place I could recognize; 

what was in flood 

is all ebbing.

- The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare

‘Tis the season to read ninth century Gaelic poems.

Oh, wait, is that just me?

Well, I always told my mother I would never be popular because I could never be like the other girls.

That’s what I said thirty years ago as a middle schooler with (undiagnosed) depression. Now, I’m the mother of a middle schooler, and we’re wiser about what depression is and we’re watching for its signs in ourselves and in loved ones as 2021 fades into 2022.

This year, I am aware of a heaviness in the air that seems to mute the lights on the tree and makes my old favorite songs sound a little off-key. I’ve been trying to push it away and stay busy, to keep smiling and keep planning so that mom’s optimism can carry my spiritually eclectic family through our sacred cluster of holidays: the Winter Solstice, Christmas, the College Bowl games, the New Year, and the Feast of the Epiphany.

And, of course, as an entrepreneur who offers what has become an annual event to reflect on the passing year and envision the year to come, I really need to find the joy and possibility and turn on my megawatt grin in the midst of the “bleak midwinter.”

But really… do I? And honestly, can I?

Are We Ready for the Return of the Light? 

This December, the tears are closer to the surface than they have been in memory. (You may be feeling the same, even if the gratitude and the hope are right there at the surface, too.)

It’s the usual grief and longing that comes with the holiday memories. In our house, this is the first Christmas my husband and I will have with both of our moms gone.

And, of course, it’s the news of the new variant and how ill-equipped our nation and our global community are in the face of it. It’s the deepening divisions as public health becomes a matter of personal belief, rather than devotion to collective well-being. It’s the long weekend I spent in bed after my Covid booster, feverish and achy. It’s the call that family members were exposed and cannot be here on Christmas Eve.

And, it’s this time of year when we are all ready to celebrate the return of the light. 

The question is, are we just that jazzed up about the lengthening days or are we just yearning for relief from a darkness that has become too long, too dense, too real? 

To make our celebration of the returning light into something meaningful, we need to be willing to see the reality all around us. We need to acknowledge the darkness and reckon with the fact that none of this is just a story about the color of the sky. 

Because really, what’s the big deal about a few more minutes of daylight in an already well-lit room?

At the time of the Winter Solstice, we’re supposed to be feeling the hollowness, and even the sorrow and the uncertainty at this time of year. (And this is when we remember we live in a great big world, and our friends in the Southern Hemisphere are having a distinctly different and yet utterly related experience right now.)

Here, where nights are long and days are preoccupied with last minute work and preparations for holiday cheer, the difficult feelings are more accessible than ever. 

And yes, we need to give ourselves a chance to acknowledge and speak them aloud, even when we’re more afraid than ever before that the hollowness of sorrow and uncertainty will take over if we dare stop smiling.

A Different Way to Look at the Solstice In What’s Another Very Different Year

The business as usual, festivities as expected, planning as proscribed model just doesn’t seem to work any more.

This isn’t admitting defeat or refusing to try to put on a brave face. 

Taking a moment (or more) to pause and be with the reality of our current darkness feels utterly necessary right now. It’s the only way to be in integrity. It’s the only way to make way for magic and renewal in the new year.

Here, for those of us in the midst of the darkest point in the year, this is the time to sit with the weight of the shadows and in the presence of our fears.

For me, that looks like pouring an extra cup of tea and revisiting an ancient poem by an Irish woman from West Cork who went by the name of Digde. This is a time to listen to the sad song of a woman who declares, “I have had my day with kings, drinking mead and wine; now I drink whey-and-water among shriveled old hags.”

This is the voice of the Cailleach, the goddess of the Celtic world who danced through centuries of youth before she sat upon a great stone by the sea to contemplate the painful mysteries of aging. She’s worn out after having done all that work, shaping the mountains with stones from her apron, and playing Sovereignty Goddess and sacred consort to so many kings. Worn out, but still longing for those days when she sat in the center of the light.

This is a deeply human look at the Sacred Hag. She doesn’t always feel like an intimate friend, but at the Winter Solstice, she’s holding up a divine mirror and allowing us all to pause and be with our own laments and our longings. She holds space for us as we mourn what has ebbed away, even as she still holds space for the memories of the “flood” of energy and possibility that used to fill her life.

A creature who has seen so many seasons, the Cailleach reminds us that all of that light, energy, and possibility, of course, will fill our skies once again. And yet, also being the ultimate elder who is reaching the close of her long life, she also reminds us that even the greatest parties eventually end. 

This is a time of great contradiction, when light is so scarce here in the Northern Hemisphere but when holiday abundance (and excess) are even more obvious than the sun in the sky.

We Can Welcome the Light When We Also Make Space for the Lingering Darkness

The wise folk I’m talking to all tend to agree: it’s hard to trust someone who just wants to play the “good vibes only” game and ride their eggnog buzz right into the “best year ever” on January 1. 

There is unfathomable hope, light, and possibility in 2022, but the days are still short, the night is still long, and there’s a staggering amount of uncertainty wrapped in the years to come.

It’s in that spirit of hope for the light and awareness of the darkness that I offer my end-of-year online retreat, A Sovereign Way.

I couldn’t believe in any visioning for the future practice that wasn’t grounded in our both our power and our pain, and I don’t think you could either.

When we gather together to imagine the year to come, we’ll begin by grounding into who we are now and who we have been throughout 2021 and through all the years before. We ask the sparks of “the world as it is” to light the new blaze of “the world as it could be.”

And we’re going to call on the Cailleach, the wise, ever-changing, earth-shaping Cailleach to be our guide.

Would you like to join us?

The half-day event is happening at noon ET on Wednesday, December 29. 

I Sent My Kids to School Today

I sent my kids to school today.

Because there was a terrorist threat on social media, what is (finally) unremarkable, sending the kids to school, became a conscious choice.

My twelve year-old, who isn’t on TikTok and didn’t know that every kid was “supposed” to be afraid to go to school, casually mentioned her fears about atomic war as the bus screeched over the hill at dawn.

She disappeared into the next stage of her heroine's journey before I had a chance to respond. She stepped into a day that, thanks to a terrorist with a smartphone, is not just another day.

My friend, a teacher, texted about how scared her colleagues were to go to work.

She’s at school now and half her class is out today. But that might just mean that there’s another virus going around. And because we live in the age of Corona, that is remarkable in an entirely new way.

My husband, an engineer, was nearly speechless with stress as he tried to recreate plans for machines when global supply shortages mean they can’t get most of the parts they need.

He’s working from home in our dining room and trying to track down simple bits of plastic and metal from China and across the planet, sweating and swearing as he’s constantly forced to redesign components and redesign his days based on an endless chain of uncertainties.

My seven-year old collected bits of quartz from the driveway on the way to her bus.

For once, my mystical, anxiety-prone child didn’t seem to have a care in the world.

And then, my dear ones launched into the day, I walked around the edges of our land where the half-green lawn meets the brambles and the brush, and I held them all in my heart and sent prayers to all the gods I can believe in to keep them safe and sane.

I return here, to the page, and write through all my optimism, all my fear, all my helplessness, and all my devotion to what is mine to do.

Much of my story has already been written. It is not the story of a scientist who takes on a virus that has paralyzed the globe, a political leader who takes on endemic violence that has terrorized our society, a teacher who takes on every social problem while they try to teach kids to read, nor an engineer who keeps building the stuff that builds our economy.

We are all living our own stories that may or not take us to any of these front lines.

I am a writer. I am a holder, a healer, a re-weaver of stories.

I am someone who writes for the scientists, the politicians, the teachers, the engineers, the children, and all the rest of us trying to do good and trying to get by.

I am trying to be brave enough to be an artist rather than a mere wordsmith. I am trying to live into the hardest questions about safety and fear, about sustainability and blind progress, about devotion and what transformation really means. Maybe today, I’ll succeed.

All of my most honest words are a prayer, knotted with worry and and woven with dreams.

The first layer of prayer, “may this just be another Friday.”

And deeper than that, “may we all have the courage to change everything about this violent, inequitable, too-hot-to-handle world.”

Ultimately, the prayer is that we can all live our own stories with bravery, with clarity, and with the support we need to get through, to grow, to thrive.

But first, the prayer that we will all get through this day.

A Time to Tell Your Story: Look the Ghosts of Past, Present, and Future in the Eye

When I was a senior in high school, I put on a bonnet and heavy black Victorian gown and took the stage as Ebenezer Scrooge.

It was 1996. Our school auditorium was under construction, so the drama club took over the empty Woolworth’s store, assembled a stage, and put on a show. Looking back, it was all a little ragtag (in later productions at the new theater our wizard of a director had the ghosts of A Christmas Carol flying through the air!), but I don’t think it occurred to us to feel deprived. Instead, we were caught up in the wildness of putting on two shows a night for most of December and the privilege of taking up residence at the Cape Cod Mall.

It was certainly a wild time for me. I remember vividly when my mother tracked me down near the food court between performances, waving a big thick envelope and unable to contain her jubilation: I’d gotten into Boston College on early decision. At points, it was hard to be in the moment and embody one of Christmas’s most iconic characters when I was so busy imagining myself walking across my dream campus on an autumn afternoon.

And then, on closing night, a former drama club guy, now a sophomore in college, came to the show. We were dating by mid-January and I spent the next couple of years losing myself in crazy love.

Here we are in the present.

I’m telling you a story from my past and inviting you to wonder with me about a collection of moments that created the future.

At Boston College, I’d pursue my dreams of Irish literature, spend my junior year in Galway, and eventually win a BC fellowship that would enable me to get my MA at University College Dublin. Though I would set aside those passions and allow them to become a mere hobby for the first act of adulthood, you might say that writing and publishing The Sovereignty Knot was the beginning of my second act. Now, I am reviving and deepening those dreams with the KnotWork Podcast and planning my future accordingly.

As for the love story, I wouldn’t end up marrying that first real boyfriend (though that was the plan for a while), but I still hope my girls have “a practice relationship” with someone who shares their interests and passions the way I did. I lost a great degree of my wild princess sovereignty for the sake of romance, but then, sovereignty is something that you have, and lose, and find again, at least a dozen times over in life. I don’t think I could change a line of that story and be who I am now.  

Every personal story has these elements of past-present-future time magic

The personal history stories we tell are crafted based on the preoccupations and passions of the present. And, when those stories make it out of the daydream or the journal and into conversation or onto the public page, there’s a chance to shape the future in a new way. 

As you read these words, learning a little about me and my origin story, it may shift the way we relate to one another next time we meet, online or in person. 

Even more importantly, it may shift the way you relate to the stories of your own past. Maybe you’ll retrieve a memory of your almost-an-adult self. Maybe you have a Christmas play memory of your own. Maybe you’re having a flashback to your teenage days at the mall!

What we learn about story, healing, and the way we weave time from Scrooge’s Christmas Eve journey

Enough about me. This is actually a story about your story and about one of literature’s most beloved curmudgeons. (Damn, was it liberating to be seventeen and to have permission to look and sound as unbeautiful as possible!)

With this past-present-future “this is your life” morality story, Dickens invites us to explore our own lives through that fogged glass of the holidays.  The nostalgia, the grief, the denial, the fear, the joy, and the regeneration. Throughout our lives, and throughout every December, these emotions permeate the air, looping back to the past, entwining through the present, and swirling on into the future.

Peering, Gently, Into the Past

You know the basic plot of A Christmas Carol, right? The old miser Scrooge is visited by the ghost of their business partner, Jacob Marley, and is told to expect visits from three spirits over the course of Christmas Eve.

(We used the feminine pronouns on “girl nights” and the masculine on “boy nights” as the two casts of our high school play were basically divided according to gender. I love that the use of neutral pronouns and our evolving understanding of gender makes this casting choice make even more sense than it did in the 90s. And seeing as years of theater history have shown us that Ebenezer is not defined by masculinity, I am adopting “they/them” throughout this piece to refer to the character.)

Though we didn’t all work for “Old Fezziwig, bless his heart,” we can all look back to past holidays (and any moment from adolescence) and either get caught up in the good old days or utterly overcome with regret for past mistakes and sorrow over past hurts. Either option can make looking back feel fraught, as we tend to be wracked with longing for what we believe was lost or we spiral into blame or self-recrimination.

When you go back to past events because you want to share the story with others, you must look at the glittering and the shadowed, the perceived perfection and the sources of trauma. This honest look at the past is a vital part of Story Healing, and it’s what I help folks do in my Healing for Heroines sessions. 

Ultimately, we review our own history not just to replay the old tapes, but to make sense of those old stories in order to create meaning moving forward. We seek out what’s true then and look for how that truth can help construct a grounded, empowered present and future.

Acknowledging the Present

Next, of course, Ebenezer meets the Ghost of Christmas Present and watches the tiny feast at the Cratchit house. Seeing the world as it is, Ebenezer has a chance to reckon with both the delusions and the hypocrisy that lurk within. 

Few of us are as misanthropic as Scrooge, but we all feel the burn when Ebenezer, shocked to learn Tiny Tim will not live another year, must endure the pain of their own past words, “If he is likely to die, then let him die, and decrease the surplus population!”

We know how it hurts to have our own limited, ignorant opinions reflected back to us. It’s what keeps us from looking unflinchingly into the past. To live and tell a story of transformation, we need to be honest about the darkness of what was so the light of what is can shine bright and true.

When we can anchor into what is really happening around us, refusing to let the narratives be warped by our own fears, or twisted by conspiracy theories and what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls “the overculture,” then we can move beyond delusion and hypocrisy into awakening and recognition.

Peering Into the Future

For Scrooge, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come was the most terrifying because there was nowhere to go but down after a life so limited and devoid of compassion.

Telling a cautionary tale, Mr. Dickens surely assumed his readers would be called to pause and evaluate their own lack of charity and compassion. Repentance counted for something then. Surely self-examination and a dedication to constructive change haven’t totally gone out of style in the 21st century.

Even for Ebenezer, who gets to look beyond the veil of time, the future is all unknown and unwritten. All we can really do is set the groundwork for growth and connection by looking to the past with clear eyes and dedicating ourselves to seeing and speaking to the present with a radical dose of fierce, loving clarity. 

Weaving Time, Healing Stories

Clinging to what you wish were true or what you think ought to be true and then trying to force that story into the world simply doesn’t work. Not if you’re really interested in bringing more beauty, healing, and truth into your own life and into the collective. You risk feeling and sounding as cruel and hollow as Scrooge—woefully, willfully ignorant of the reality of suffering (and the simple joy) that permeates the everyday. 

And so, you’re invited to compassionately begin to weave time, calling on the strength and wisdom that are available to us from our past, present, and future selves.

When we seek out a story, when we sit with a story, and when, perhaps we tell and share a story…

We stand consciously in the present to reach back to the past.
We weave together what was with what is.

If we share this story on the page, we touch someone in an unknown future moment.

We knot time together (not in a tangle, but in a sacred pattern).
We weave our stories. We strengthen ourselves, build relationships, and create a legacy.

We weave time and heal our stories to do our part to make this world more beautiful, more honest, more whole.

Want to Put this Past-Present-Future Work into Action?

Join me for the half-day end of year retreat I'm offering on December 29, A Sovereign Way. We’ll anchor ourselves in the present, look back on the year that was, and use these insights to imagine a new year full of presence, beauty, and healing.

Hear, Heal, and Craft the Stories that Connect Us

In the KnotWork Podcast, we’ll share stories from ancient mythology and folklore, particularly from the Celtic world, and explore why they still have resonance for us today. The show debuts on 2.2.22, but you can get a preview of what’s to come.

Are you feeling the tug of your own past stories? A Healing for Heroines session can help you access your past experiences and give you a fresh perspective. Whether you want to craft a story or are on the path of self-discovery, when you see yourself as heroine of your own story, you can transform the next chapter of life.

Excited to begin writing your own stories? The Sovereign Writers’ Knot will welcome new writers for our next 13-week session on March 2, 2022! Registration will open soon, but you can get learn more and get on the interest list so you’re the first to know when applications are open.

The Mythology of the Land Beneath Our Feet

A quick but mighty storm front moved across our stretch of the Hudson Valley on Monday night. 

The temperatures had been in the 50s and the earth was reminding the sky it was meant to be December. Enough of the sweater weather, it was time for hats, coats, and mittens. And so, an argument was had in the space between here and the heavens and, inevitably (for now), the seasonable cold air won out.

Considering so much of my passion and attention are devoted to Ireland, I can believe for just a moment that these were the first breaths of Storm Barra, which engulfed the country on Tuesday. But, of course, the Atlantic is wide and even a fairy wind probably couldn’t travel so far so fast. 

On that stormy eventing, while we were out in the dark, ensuring the chairs didn’t blow across the deck and the cushions didn’t sail into the neighbors’ yard (we’re having trouble letting go of the trappings of warmer weather as well), we heard a tree split in the woods behind the house. Since the swing set still was standing and nothing came close to the deck, we didn’t dwell on the mystery and simply got back to the endless business of being human in the stillness of the indoor air.

Tuesday morning, after the school bus left, I put on my boots and went searching for what we’d lost.

I was looking for what we’d lost on our land, but I soon realized I had no idea what we had.

I crunched across the grass, all frost kissed by the almost-winter chill. There was a spectacular scrap of bark nearly five feet long lying on the ground. It would have been stripped from one of the dead ash trees. Those old sentinels lose a little something in every gale, but their naked trunks, fragile yet unyielding, still insist on challenging gravity and clinging to the last of their past glory.

Maybe that noise we’d heard in the night was simply the stripping away of ash skin. The sound had carried over the wind, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of explosion that rips through when the forest loses a long time resident. These woods came back from clear-cutting more than a century ago and it seems they’ve created a close, thriving community since being left alone. Certainly the bears, fishers, and coyotes seem to like it.

This wasn’t a day for tracking wildlife. I was here to speak to the trees.

That’s when I noticed the birch.

When we moved here thirteen years ago, there were two birch trees at the edge of the new lawn. I loved those trees almost as much as they seemed to love one another. One shone with masculine energy, the other with the feminine. It felt like we were being greeted by an old couple who had lived on the land for ages, even though our house was brand new.

Perhaps there had been an entire family of birches here before they bulldozed and blasted to place a home made of sticks and vinyl. Perhaps I interpreted the sway of their elegant branches as waves of welcome, when really, they were performing a dance of mourning. 

We lost the tree I still think of as “Himself” years ago. When he fell, his trunk disintegrated into neat, symmetrical pieces. The were scattered evenly down the hill that leads to what we call Blackthorn Alley. It seemed a regal, intentional way to be laid out and I took it as one more sign that this patch of the planet was enchanted in its own small way. 

On this particular morning, I saw the tangle of white branches just past the bramble of the eastern wineberry patch, and I gasped. Had we lost his lady, Herself, in the night?

It’s the time of year when we can remember what it is to ramble and explore. The ticks all ought to be sleeping. The poison ivy is dormant as it plots the next season’s revenge. As I do near the end of every autumn, I recover my sense of bravery and take to the wild wooded acres beyond our property. I wonder why we ever spent so much time on that boring old lawn. We’ll have this freedom til the sap starts to rise in the maples and the specters of Lyme disease and skin rashes loom large again.

Unafraid of the beasties in the brush and ready to offer my prayers to our fallen tree sister, I tramped over to the long stretch of her body. She’d split twenty feet up at the unique twist in her trunk, the shape of which looked like a nipple on a nursing woman’s breast. Unlike Himself, she had held together well when she came to rest on the earth.

A Friend Long Gone

And then I looked more closely at the intricate network of trunk and branches that lay on the ground. I realized that a brown-gray poplar was tangled with the birch bark. The break in Lady Birch’s trunk was faded and soft. 

We’d lost that tree, a tree I have no right to name, a tree with whom I can claim no special relationship, ages ago. Apparently, I was a fair weather friend to Herself. 

I have romantic notions of living in relationship with nature and the land. It’s nice to consider myself to be singularly connected to this bit of hill that runs between the ridge and the river. When sitting at my cozy desk looking out to the five-way crossroads in front of the house, I like to imagine I’m a worthy caretaker now that this land’s original inhabitants, the Esopus people of the Lenape Tribe, are gone. 

But then, I cannot even be relied upon to know whether my friends, the trees I claimed to know and love, are dead or alive.

Recommitting to the Story of Place and the Mythology of the Land

All I can do is promise to do better, be better, and walk the talk.

I can actually read the book of Lenape stories I found used online.

I can keep fulfilling that promise I made to walk the natural boundaries and speak to the whispering trees, the sleeping stones, the spent gardens, and the distant ridge.

I can look to the horizon every morning and ask my ancestors’ distant goddesses and the local spirit guides to help me see clearly.

I can linger instead of instantly coming in from the bus stop to get swallowed by the screens and photos of other people’s views of the planet.

Mythology Connects Us to the Land, Both Distant and Right Here

As I prepare to share a season of stories on the KnotWork Podcast, I keep reminding myself that mythology was never meant to be mere fodder for psychologists and story nerds. At its core, mythology isn’t about the quarrels between gods and heroes or about which clan claimed a particular swath of territory. At least, mythology isn’t just that.

Mythology is the account of the land and the people’s relationship with nature and their quest for survival. Mythology offers us insight into how ancient people grappled with the unknown, be it storms in the atmosphere or storms within the human heart. 

The stories that speak to me and through me tend to be from Ireland and other parts of the Celtic world. These are the stories are in my blood and hold my soul. It has been half a lifetime since I lived and learned on that tiny island, however. I make my home a few hundred miles from where I was born, on soil we now call “American.”

When I look out to the Shawangunk Ridge, it may look a bit like the rounded mountains of County Sligo, but I can’t populate this piece of New York with Queen Maeve and the warriors of the Fianna. As those two fallen birches taught me, I cannot rely on romantical visions about myself and this land.

I am called to root in, open my eyes, and ask the stones and trees, plants and creatures what I can do and what I must learn.

We are all called to root in, open up, ask, and listen to the stories that come up from the soles of our feet

The stories we carry with us, which may come from halfway around the world can help us pause and tune in. Characters from distant myths, like the Celtic Cailleach who made the land by throwing boulders from her apron, never set a foot on the granite of the northeastern US, but they remind me of the power of creation and the sacredness of a tossed stone and a rotting tree. I can transfer that awareness to my own backyard, my own valley, my own understanding of the global ecosystem.

Mythology describes the deep, enduring relationship that existed between the spirit of the land, the plants, the animals, and the spirits of the people fortunate enough to coevolve beside them.

Mythology helps nurture that relationship still as it reminds us to open our ears to hear and our eyes to see the non-human narratives constantly being woven around us.