From Earth’s Sinew
A Photo Essay & Poems Inspired by the Power of Earth Skills to Weave Us Into Life
We are tied to life
Our very fibre twisted
From earth’s sinew
A chord twining down
From the starry mystery
Through our crown
Into our nerves and muscles
Spreading lace-like
Mycelium through our limbs
Into our senses, hands
Heart and feet
We are woven
Fur, bast, and wool
We are spun, retted
Twined
Down into the earth
Our home, our mother
Upon whose face we lightly tread
Each of us fibre, strand, and thread
Into the story of life
Or, so, it is said.
My Kind of Bondage
Belinda White
Travel back with me through the elements and wild kin at last Summer’s Firemaker Ancestral Skills Gathering. I share a few poems interspersed with photos of earth arts and hands of participants weaving themselves into deeper relationships with the wild beings.
There are many other aspects to the Firemaker Gathering, not pictured here to honour the privacy of participants. These too are powerful stories: the ways we hold each other up, mentor children and youth, circle together around song and story, around grief and praise, play in the arms of forest and river, how we learn to train our bodies and grapple with our strength, and even how we bless the lives of the ones who feed us with their bodies. How we join the great give away.
I have been attending Firemaker for over fifteen years and have had the great honour of being able to observe the beautiful story of reweaving. I discovered there my life’s work: coyote mentoring, earth arts, reVillaging, story telling and grief tending. The Firemaker community provided a yearly anchor for my son and I over the years. It is impossible to express my gratitude.
I hope the bark, bone, skin and stone, the forest and river, blossoms and fibre, the counsel of all beings, the making hands, ancestral skills, the praise words and images I share of them weave you into their earthy ways.
(Click on gallery images for full view)
Seeking the counsel of all beings
The gathering of hidden ones
Brimming at the edges of knowing
Trembling leaf, weaving spider
Squirrel who scuffles from this tale to the next
Oh ancestral spark who flew brightly into life
Was embraced by the waters Mnemosyne
And came to settle on this earth body now
Solid but yearning like a crab confused about the stone and ocean
Soften me with your hard tumbling
Sideways said the old ones
This takes time
You will loose many parts
You will take many shapes
The counsel of all beings
The hidden ones will come speaking
In images and songs and weather
Trembling, weaving and scuffling
Nature that you are
Great transformer of all, carry me
Earth body, water soul, fire spirit into my next
Call me to my best
Bring me to my test, nature
That you are
Great transformer of all
You Will Take Many Shapes
by Belinda White
Time is not an arrow
Progress not linear and upwards
Nature shows us that without a doubt
With her spirally rhythms
Her cycling waves filling and emptying
For as long as humans have danced in her arms
They have tracked her patterns
And woven cosmologies
From her designs
These co-created meanings
Stories of ancient belonging
Painted, carved, threaded
A mineral knowing
As old as the mountains
As old as the star dust
Are still in our bones
In the rivers rushing over stones
The ripe fruit that releases its seed
To the dark trust of earth
Where the wild leaves its track
For us to read
Bend down low
To follow with wide eyes
Sniffing the coming storm
Awe-filled Into the mystery
Still In Our Bones
by Belinda White
Still In Our Bones was written on a day I told my Coyote School students parts of the story of Jon Young (of the 8 Shields) and how he met Tom Brown Jr (of the Tracker School) and how Tom was mentored by Grandfather Stalking Wolf. We’d been weaving, making shelters, carvings bows, and learning some basics in tracking through animal forms and awareness games. I told that Tom Brown Jr was like a stone in a pond who’s life passion sent out ripples that reached all the way to us, ripples that keep going even after the little waves reach the shore. I think the story grabbed them.
As these things do.
I was writing these words a few days before Tom Brown Jr left his time here in a body as if somehow his parting was felt. I honour his massive contribution to the nature connection movement, to my life, though I never met him, through my many years at Firemaker Gathering where I came to know about Jon Young, Tom Brown Jr, Stalking Wolf and their teachings.
Such is the power of mentoring, awareness, tracking, survival skills and earth arts.
Such are the ripples the spiral out through our weaving deep connection with the land.
The stories we tell, are the stories we live by.
May the stories you tell be woven with your hands, your body, your tending, your choices. May the sacred be felt through your senses, your dreaming with the earth, and may the songs of praise be on your lips, in your heart, and rippling in the spaces among you.
Blessings on The Twining Trail
With love,
Belinda White
All photo rights reserved to Firemaker Gathering and Apple Star Photo.
Curious about my photography work? It has taken a back shelf these past 4 years as I have travelled through a series of very challenging life circumstances, you can expect a slow re-emerge of earth arts, reVillaging, Wild Being projects. You might like more photo essays, nature connection, poetry:
Growing Our Hands Back, The Hard Work of Softening, We Are All of the Earth, Around the Fire, Raise a Tent of Shelter, Woman, My Kind of Bondage
Visit me on FB m Apple Star Photo