Bread and Roses

Of love and of freedom in the quickening of the year

Early March, in Ireland. Month of Lions and Lambs, of ides and days dressed in green. Month of spring fever and snow piled high. Of ice and budding trees, wild winds, and warming soil. Treacherous month, blessed month. Mad as a hare and meek as a lamb. Month to keep those jumpers on over dresses and to keep hearts safe and close least they slip through your fingers and fall through the too thin ice.

This year it came in not like a lion but a lamb. Calm as a lull, cold and clear, nights with every star in the sky. It is not to be trusted. Sleeked (a colloquialism, pronounced “slick-id” in my grandmothers’ mouth, meaning sneaky/untrustworthy, usually followed by an expletive when used to describe a person) month.

The light comes early and lingers late. I lose track of the day. Dinner constantly late to the table because the sun has not shifted low, too used to using its setting as my clock all winter. Every year it catches me off guard, this sudden springing of light. We eat by candlelight these nights, my boy and I. Daffodils plucked from the garden by his tiny hands and plonked in a glass mid-table. My books and his pilled high by our places. The detritus of our days. I count my blessings again and again.

My boy demands I leave the blind up on the skylight above his bed. He wants to fall asleep under the stars. We lie in the dark and watch them before dreams take him for the night. I pick out the asterisms. Orion, that old star-God, his belt Cú Chulainn’s to me now. The deep v of Taurus, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, the great bear, God or king and the starry plough within it. My mind whirls.

I promised you a tale for that moon just past, for the liminal day just gone, of snow and of bears, of love and of freedom in the quickening of the year. It took some time to brew but you’ll find it below. It is a fever dream of spring, of earth deep grief, of soul medicine and of love.

My mind has been tracing a labyrinth all week, perhaps my soul has too. Star spirals of meaning, interconnectivity, and integration. The sacred bleeding through the aching cracks in this world.

The Starlings came back to the garden. Perched up and down the branches in a dying, aged silver birch. Eyeing up the food we leave for their kin. I’m told they’re “On the red list now”, endangered. My beloved jewelled bird. When my boy was still a toddler one fell into the mercifully unlit wood burner and was trapped behind the back-plate. I took the thing apart, covering the entire room in soot, to get it out alive. I caught it flying panicked in our living room and returned it outside to the sky. We watch their murmuration’s nightly across the fields. The information that they may be extinct within my boy’s lifetime, within mine, knocked me for six. It is all too close, too fast, too catastrophic and I cannot understand how the ecocide of our entire planet is not every other topic of every conversation. Make it stop.

Last week I wrote of a fire burning in my heart for what is happening in the world, not twenty-four hours later a young man of great courage set himself on fire in sacred protest against those same horrors. He died with freedom on his tongue. I do not look away. Yeats’ lines “I went out to the hazel wood, / Because a fire was in my head,” have echoed in my mind all the days since. He uses fire here to describe the urgency of divine inspiration. We should be no less urgent in our protest and to bear witness is no less divine. The sacred bleeds through the cracks.

On that liminal day, the last of February, the leap, hundreds died attempting to access food for their starving families. Murdered, gunned down in nothing but sadistic, cold blood. I do not look away. This is the other half of every conversation. The images of starving children flood our screens. And these images we know, Auschwitz, An Gorta Mor,^[1] made again and all the more horrific in full colour in the palms of our hands. Made all the more horrific in the knowledge that the scale and speed of the starvation is unprecedented in modern history and is fully intentional. I do not look away. I dream of the famine graves in this land and my ancestors scream at my back. Make it stop.

I do not know how to write in these times. I wrote months ago of the quote that the job of the artist is to make revolution irresistible. I set my will to this. I do not know what it means to be a banfháithe in such times, to know, see and dream true, save in community. And so, I call my community in. I set my will to building it. Back in late summer I dreamt of war planes overhead, coming from the west, I dreamt of cities reduced to rubble. I didn’t know what it meant until the aggression started, until we learnt that American warplanes were using Irish airports to refuel. The Irish Senate has this week voted to put a stop to that. I vote we put seers and poets back in the senate…

 I do not sleep. Rebel songs of famine echo in my mind^[2]. I talk late to other mothers still awake in the powerless ache of it all. We talk of soul-loss and retrieval. How trauma can fracture us and in the process a piece of our soul can become lost in the infinite folds of the universe. How this loss can show up as chronic or constant illness, extreme exhaustion, or a myriad of other dysfunction. Modern medicine cannot tend to the loss, it can only attempt to heal what remains, but indigenous medicine across the world has practices for making the whole once again. My great-great grandmother practiced such healing. My grandmother recounted how she could lay her hands on a person’s head and discern what ailed them, she would “go a wee bit out of it” (trancework/flight) and heal the person under her hands. A woman down the street could apparently do the same thing but via the heart and divined the issue from knots in a piece of string.

Fire and bread, bears and freedom, love and trauma, generations deep, community building and balm for weary souls, it all wheels around in my mind. And those stars turn overhead.

I return to the bear king from my full moon post, I watch the great bear make a spiral track across the sky. The oldest artefact of human presence on this island dates from the palaeolithic period and is a bear bone. The patella (knee bone) of a brown bear scared with cut marks from a long flint blade.

I lie in the dark and pluck out the asterism within the larger body of the bear, we call it the plough here^[3]. The Starry Plough, a now inflammatory Republican flag, the modern version sees seven stars emblazoned on a blue background. It was once the symbol of the dream of a free Ireland, a socialist republic where the Irish population owned everything from the plough to the stars. Anglophone capitalism slunk in instead as did the imperialist catholic church. Freedom be damned. The land aches with it. An unsung dream. Oh, give us bread, but give us roses^[4]. The land is owned more and more by the few and it is not tended, the gods lie forgotten or worse still, washed over with modern pagan performance. And yet we are proud, to be Irish, of our days dressed in green. One of our most lauded actors was asked recently about his Irishness, he quipped “I don’t know what else to say, should I sing a rebel song?”

Yes. The answer is always yes. For all of us. Sing the rebel songs.

Below is a fever dream tale, an otherworld flight, for these soul sick times. It is of Snow White and her bear, it is Briar Rose dreaming of spring. A song of sorts, in my way, of bears, of deep medicine, of love and of freedom in the quickening of the year. You’ll find it beneath the notes and you can let me know in the comments if it was worth the brewing time.

 From the next Full Moon paid subscribers will receive folklore and fiction drawn from the mythology and folktales of my immediate landscape and being one of the most famed stretches of the Irish coast there are many. The project should run at least a year. Each New Moon we will continue with Writing Down the Weeds; a project recounting the folklore of seasonal plants and then creating fiction inspired by it.

Today’s fiction (the fiction narrowly won the subscriber vote mid-week, I apologise to those of you who wanted a guided meditation, another time) is the last in a year-long Writing Down the Moon project in this space and I’ve made it free to read, because well, bread and roses… I deeply appreciate your presence and support here, as a single-mother and a fledgling writer your monetary support in this space is incredibly helpful in my days but it is also worth far more to me than the price, that you should choose to spend your hard-earned money on my words is an honour I deeply value. However, I fully acknowledge my privilege, I have enough bread on my table, enough to share. The cost of living is an extortion of the capitalist class, and it is squeezing us all, so if you would like to be a paid subscriber (or already are) but the cost is prohibitive for you, please send me a message and I will make you comp (you will receive all the benefits of a paying subscriber for free) for the year because, again, bread and roses…

Grá

Siobhán

Xx

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^[1] Gaeilge meaning The Great Starvation, referring to the forced starvation of the indigenous Irish population perpetrated by the English occupation in the nineteenth century. It is often called The Potato Famine to obscure its genocidal nature.  

^[2] The Fields of Athenry. See also, Sinead O’Connor.

^[3] I believe it is known as The Big Dipper in Modern America.

^[4] I’m paraphrasing both a poem and an American labour rights strike, both of which were about better states of living under capitalism, over one hundred years ago, around the time Irelands socialist republic was an active dream in the hearts of our people. Bread and roses; we must have enough to live on, but we are worthy of beauty too. All between the plough and the stars… I haven’t been able to shake it for months and it is made all the more sharp by watching a deliberately starved people murdered in search of flour for bread.

Bear and girl in red Painting by Elena Pimenova

Of Bears and Bread and Roses and medicine of the deepest soil, in the quickening of the year

The earth is stirring with the light. Soon they will drag a plough across the warming fields. She can smell it already, rich and dark. Broad furrows in good tilth. They spent the winter by the fire. Long nights by ember and smoke. Lovers’ whispers in the low light. As if they would scare the flame out. The memory of his words, hot against her neck brings a rose bloom to her cheeks. The heat of summer on her skin. But today there is snow. And it will freeze overnight. It will make an icy crust more treacherous than either alone.

Today he is chopping wood. The fire will be needed many nights more. But the birds are on the wing and her comfrey has come at last. Pale as spilt milk under the hedgerows. Today she needs yarrow or meadowsweet, months too soon. She is fevered with some spring sickness. It rolls through her body as she lays in their makeshift bed. She listens to the smack and the crack of axe through wood, rhythmic in his hands, a drum to dream by as her hours slip out of time.

She dreams herself awake. In a cave, abed on the uneven floor. A lump of heat at her back, dark brown fur sleeping sound. She dreams a fire flickers small, casting huge shadows in the flame light. Ochre on ancient walls. They dance and shift before her still sleep clad eyes. Tectonic plates slide and crash, mountains form and crumble. Oceans flood in. She dreams the shadows play out the millennia across the walls. Dappled light from fire cast trees and the silhouettes of animal’s flit amongst the flame-light. Hedgehog. Stag. Fox. Raven. Bear. And a long, stone blade.

She dreams the ochre slithers from the walls. Still she lies in bed. The coverings too heavy on her body. She dreams the colour, molten, forms itself into two densely marked snakes. She dreams helpless as they coil into her hair. She dreams they whisper in her grandmother’s tongue. And hers. Back and back, grandmothers of the deepest soil, their words older than the ocean. All a rattle and truth they’ve kept all this time. She dreams they move from her towards the fire, a spiral trance of serpent and flame. She dreams she rises with them. She dreams they wrap around her leg and shoulders; together they shake the mountains when they dance.

And outside, all-the-while the stars whirl holy tracks across the sky.

She dreams on dreamers’ feet she is walking the woods. Hazel and mountain ash. Oak and holly. Willow. Birch and alder. Their roots a tangle underfoot. Down and down, deeper than the dead. Deeper than the world is old. She dreams they beckon her between them, they show her paths curving into the darkness. And she dreams they are each on fire. Each intact, unharmed but ablaze none the less. She dreams the fire makes no sound. She dreams the sparks rise to form the stars. Gods all in their circled round.

She dreams her hair is aflame. She dreams she walks on, painless and silent as the trees. She dreams the fire whispers to her. Filling her mind with its chattering in ancient tongues. A flicker song for the darkness. A song of frost to come and forests long felled. A song of those stars and the bog, its beloved black. It sings to the night and that far off summer wind. It sings to her of all she should know. She dreams it licks hot at her skin and makes a crown for her weary head.

She dreams she is spinning. She dreams the whorl glints bone in the low lamp light. She spins a thread she pulls from the depths. Blood and fur, ochre and soil. On and on it wheels, down through the centuries, taught and singing. All she has gathered she adds to the strand. Moon picked mugwort, and yarrow dreamt true. Black cats’ paw and ravens’ wing. All the gifts of her line. Round and round it turns from her hands, spun tight.

She dreams she is sewing. A flag to drape across the sky. She dreams the needle is cool to touch and each pinprick is as sharp as the stars. She dreams the fabric night blue and fluid in her hands. The thread luminous and never ending. She dreams she makes the map anew. Asterisms of her land. Of love and of freedom.

She dreams he is ploughing. She dreams he cannot see her watching from the hedge. Still as a hare in the pale morning light. She dreams his broad shoulders strain pushing at the plough as a horse bigger than a beast drags it unbidden. All black and breath like smoke. It towers over him. It takes the field in two steps. She dreams she watches him run to catch up. She dreams the blades cut so deep the dead are loosed from their bounds. A wake of bone and gold left in the furrows on the shawl black earth.

She dreams she follows gently behind him. She dreams he doesn’t know she is there. She gathers each bone, each glint of gold. Sacred bundles from the dark. She dreams she is digging, near rivers edge. Wide and holy, shining clean across the land. She dreams she shifts through loam and silt, down past willow roots and sheer flint. She dreams she buries the dead there on the bank. She dreams they are standing safe on the other side. Already waiting. She wades waist deep in the water before she must go back. She dreams she hears his voice.

She dreams she is baking. She dreams she is past her wrists in flour and water. She dreams she is kneading dough. A steady rhythm under her hands. The push and pull of a wave on the shore. She dreams the room is white with it. Cast asunder, in the air. She dreams it is snow. It is ice. She dreams she shapes the bread like the moon. She runs a knife across its surface. The spiral round.

And outside those stars fall down.

She dreams it is golden. Baked rich and ready. Butter waiting by the board. She dreams of its heat and its too-good smell. She dreams of hunger she has never known. A hollow knot gnawing at her stomach. A pit inside of her, bottomless with need. She dreams the bread is not there. Gone. Melted like the ice off the path. She dreams she is crying, begging for it back. She dreams there is blood on the snow-white floor.

She dreams in red. The moon tide red of her monthly blood. The deep berry red of elder and haw. A red raw scream echoing through the earth, ricocheting off the walls they’ve built. The tumble down red of roses in bloom. Out of season in the springing of the year. A bower of them for her bed. Each thorn knife sharp and glossy. Each petal velvet and silk. Their scent moves like an animal through the rooms, heady and damp, stirring summer on the sills.

She dreams she wears a crown of them. Heavy and fragrant. She dreams she smears the red of them across her lips. She swallows them down. She dreams they bloom where her mouth should be, a windfall of petals from her tongue. She dreams they take root where they fall. Down through the earth, past bones and bears, past the blood-soaked soil. She dreams they draw it to the surface, all that aches. And in the truth of the world they blossom.   

When she wakes her fever has broken and the light pours pale gold through the rooms. When she wakes, he has stoked the fire and added blankets to the pile. When she wakes there is fresh bread and fragrant wild roses waiting for her on the table.