| This is a section of an article that I'm currently writing. You'll notice that it ends abruptly... Hey! That's the breaks! Like I said, it's in progress. By the way, all of this actually happened. Stalking Soul Above the Treeline April, 1998 Exactly a thousand years ago the Vikings came to these shores, to these jutting crags of black lava covered in the softest, thickest pillows of emerald moss, spilling down to the waters of Thingvatn, where I traverse the rifts and valleys of where Earth has split apart. Literally, the tectonic plates of the planet divide and separate here along the Trans Atlantic Ridge, allowing me the unique experience of standing with one foot in Europe and the other in North America. It was here in Thingvellir, Iceland, that the Vikings formed the first Parliament, The Althing. There is a tiny chapel, a graveyard and a circular earthen mound to mark the spot, but it is overwhelmed by the strange intensity and elemental beauty of the Arctic landscape all around it. Deep, green grottos of volcanic cleavage plunge into the earth, revealing bracingly cold, clear, glacial meltwater, so transparent and vibrantly blue as to seem otherworldly. The place is home and haven to the elemental and devic beings, I feel certain. I can sense their presence palpably, even if I have not the clairvoyant sight to apprehend them directly. I am here because I am compelled to be here. Because something unnamable has me in its grasp and will not release me from its pummeling, insistent drive to be brought into the fullness of expression, like some plaintive song pouring down the long, thin tube of my soul. But what is it I'm even looking for? Years before, I had a lucid dream so clear and penetrating as to remain with me like the memory stamp of an actual event. In the dream, I am vacationing with my parents at a lakeside travel lodge in New Zealand. I wander off into the forest to do some exploring and find myself in a clearing where to my great surprise, there were several Maori power totems, each about six inches in length, and carved in dark wood, which I immediately understood to have been laid out for me. Then, in the middle of the clearing, the most inexplicable vision appeared. A funereal cart, with two ancient riders, sat as if magically extracted from an Iron Age burial mound, built with reverence by some unknown race of primitive people a thousand years ago. The king was fierce, a blonde Viking with long streaming hair, breastplates, armor, and an air of barbarian nobility and regality. To his side sat a beautiful Nordic queen, richly adorned and wild, defiant in the face of the eternity into which she had been cast. They were proud and strong even as dried cadavers, so exceedingly fragile as to crumble into dust at the hint of a breeze. Big wooden wheels with a trace of the original decorative paint supported the cart, which was filled with clay urns of ancient wines; baskets of grains; crude, knotted breads, bolts of cloth; metal axes; leather items and other amenities fit to accompany the best and strongest representatives of a long forgotten tribe on their journey into the vastness of the infinite. They seemed brave, defiant, compelling. A simple, tiny people in the context of the wide arc of the cosmos. A dark, russet canopy shielded their impossible faces from the blazing New Zealand sun. * * * July, 1998 We stepped out of the helicopter and it was like being on the moon. No place that I have ever been, in all of my travels, has felt so starkly alien. The oldest place on earth, These gray, snow covered mountains were formed as the first solid mass of land at a time when the universe was young and the earth no more than a fiery ball of liquid magma hurtling through space without continents, without oceans, and without an atmosphere. 3.8 billion years later, it has the world's deepest fjords, a massive ice cap that reaches a depth of three miles at the center, and the Narwhals have tusks reaching up to 21 feet long. Despite the fact that the Inuit have lived here for over 5,000 years the margin that allows for the possibility of human life here is as thin as the ground hugging, 6 inch Arctic birch– the only tree to grow in Ammassalik, Greenland. They carve these dreadful little shamanic totems here, tupilaks they're called, once only the province of the shaman or angakok. An amalgam of human, seal, whale, bird, and bear, the bone sculptures speak to a web of interdependence and magic, which speaks to a way of life long antecedent to our own. Though settled by the Vikings a millennia ago, the Ammassalimmiut remained undiscovered until just over a century ago, making theirs the youngest civilization on the planet. It is summer here above the Arctic circle and along with the enigmatic midnight sun, the valley is alive with the short, intense growing season, exploding in a rich array of delicate flora, even though the Tasilaq harbor is full of weird, towering icebergs and the wide, roaming sheets of polar pack-ice. There is a quality to the quietude, a penetration of peace and emptiness, as we walk in the enormity of the cold spread between the mountains. Amidst the clear banks of the giant lakes, covered with silence and tiny purple blossoms, I sink into unending vastness and levels of cellular consciousness not possible with the substrata of white noise that emanates from human activity. Layers upon layers of civilization rising, peaking, and being subsumed into another epoch is the long story of the world. Yet, even for it's ineffable longevity, this place is so singular and spare that one can open endlessly into an infinitude of space, an elemental cathedral of psychic structures older and more powerful than the very idea of humanity. The archetypes that emerge are non-human too. Rather than prospecting the ethers for Paleolithic beings of antiquated worship, more subtlety and patience is necessary to hear the signature and story of the ancient Arctic soul. Pervasive and revealing, it appears in the sense of unifying space present in the soft grasses and moss of an impossibly green and lush glade, midway up the side of the mountain. There is the quiet intimation of the Goddess, a presence understood as feminine, nurturing, even erotic, merely by the qualities of the space and it's wild verdancy. Lying down in her boudoir, there is a strange rock formation visible along the crest of the mountain's edge. A sentinel, no– a sphinx, but not one carved by the hand of man, rather it's form and suchness has arisen out of the earth itself. But there is a strange quality to its nature that I can't quite put my finger on, then it hits me. I realized it was not the lion-bodied sphinx such as I have seen in Egypt, but one far more appropriate to oversee this Greenlandic shore. A sphinx with the body of a seal. * * * October, 1998 After 26 hours on the bus to Kathmandu, Nepal, I've had about as much as I can take and then some. It's still dark, and not even 5:00 a.m., yet here at this last-stop-before-Everest, but it's as clear and crisp as you might expect from a place referred to by the many transplanted Tibetans as the "top of the world." I'm part of a traveling group of women assembled from all over the world on a pilgrimage to present a new interpretation in dance of a prayer dedicated to the only female bodhisatva in the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology, the goddess Tara. She, in all her 21 aspects, has been praised by way of a dancing mandala all throughout India and Nepal, to audiences full of monks and nuns of all ages and lineages, whilst I fervently strum the Afghanistani musical instrument called the Bulba Tarang (not a body part) as part of the show. We performed in the sweltering heat of Bodhgaya, India, under the very boddhi tree where Buddha reached enlightenment. We even took it to Dharamsala to hang with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. But now, after ascending the foothills of the world's highest mountains, we arrive in the pre-dawn gloom. Stir-crazy and restless, I burst out into the streets and am surprised to find myself in a village square buzzing with a great throng of Tibetans, all coursing in a vast circular tide, swinging their prayer wheels, and droning the refrain of a thousand whispered mantras. So many people! Amazed at the great herd of worshipers, my gaze is captured by the enormity and power of the object at the center of their orbit. The massive and majestic Boudanath Stupa, largest in Asia, luminous white in the waning moonlight. A the pinnacle of is a great, crown, towering in cascading tiers of gold, with two omniscient, watchful eyes surveying the whole of the complex. Add to this the exotic splendor of thousands of prayer flags streaming their multicolored messages in a great outpouring of banners radiating from all directions, converging up at the apex of the crown, high enough to reach to the heavens with the thousands of supplicating voices echoing those of the flowing circle below. May, 1999 White on white, an almost unnavigable environment, but the thrill of speeding across the vast swelling bosom of the Ice Mother herself, and on a snowmobile besides! I'm way above the Icelandic lava plains at this height, high enough to see the white frost clouds parting to reveal Mt. Hekla, quietly capping it's boiling fury before another eruption. might be published in an upcoming issue of Obsidian themed "Scandinavian Magick" |