Potential

Summer Solstice,
the standing still of the sun
after expansion
before contraction
uncomfortable uncertainty
emptiness
chaos
potential

anything can happen
in the heat of the longest day
in my dance with our fiery star

nothing could happen
my dreams,
plans,
creativity,
I
would not exist
without the sun

illusions of solitary stardom dissolve

I console myself with my solar soul mate

anything
more than I could ever dream on my own
is possible


Bríd Wyldearth Summer Solstice 2012


I have had a perfect day. I wrote two poems before I got up and then joined Twitter to write the following poem which describes a perfect evening I had last night with my friend Irene who has agreed to co-ordinate music for my Rainbow Labyrinth poetry celebration.

Starry Juice

by Bríd Wyldearth, National Poetry Day 2012

I have just listened to a divine piece of music,
A thousand names of the Goddess,
The most beautiful song I have ever heard.
I walk the moonlit beach in sheer bliss.

As I let the music wash over me,
I lost connection to time and space,
To my friend and her dog and her caravan,
I felt utterly alone and at peace.

My eye is drawn to a white pebble,
Smooth and round as the moon,
Cold in my fingers as mountain streams,
As perfect as the heavenly tune.

My cat miaows and I raise my head.
I cannot see her eyes or her motion.
In the unpolluted sky the milky way
Pours her starry juice into the ocean.

I am like a star: alone and self contained,
Yet held in a galactic dance.
Is my existence fated destiny
Or accidental and random chance?

I pocket the pebble to remember this night.
When I get home I play the divine cd.
I write down all the names that I can recall
Of goddesses from every culture and her story.

The Sisterhood of Branwen

I should be heart broken and despondent. The women who supported me for more than eighteen months have all left Cardigan Woman's Aid who are under new management. I went to their leaving do this week and wrote this poem for them. As with many of my poems it rhymes but stretches the limits of scanning. It does however say it all. It gives a taste of the magic these women have worked in many lives and I have no doubt that they will all continue their important work in another context. I do however feel intense anger at this government, the cuts it is imposing and patriarchy in all his forms.

THE SISTERHOOD OF BRANWEN

by Bríd Wyldearth 2012

The sisterhood of Branwen are a ferocious bunch
You wouldn’t want to meet them if you like to kick and punch
They hide women from their husbands and help them to claim their dues
And you might be mistaken in blaming them for the end of traditional family values

They get women addicted to their subversive freedom programme
And show them how to tell between a bully and a real man
They sit around and chatter with cakes and cups of tea
And they say that all they’re doing is crafting jewelry

And on the feast of Brigid, goddess of healing and creativity
They make eyes and crosses for protection and dolls for strength and liberty
They weave labyrinths to envision futures of comfort, calm and peace
And they make masks and art and lanterns to empower and beautify and please

And they congratulate and applaud every woman’s achievements
As they rediscover their creativity, courage, strength and confidence
And deep within the earth they meet at each full moon
To plant seeds for new beginnings and to celebrate their creative wombs

And every time they meet they light a candle in remembrance
Of all the women and children who have not survived domestic violence
And although the tentacles of patriarchy still seek power through domination
The sisterhood of Branwen know that true power comes from within and liberation



THANK YOU SISTERHOOD OF BRANWEN FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART FOR GIVING ME MORE SUPPORT, UNDERSTANDING AND AFFIRMATION THAN I HAVE EVER KNOWN

Celtic Women Fest 2012

Thank you Cheryl Beer for these photos from the CW12 Blog:http://celticwomenfest.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/cw12-monday-early-evening.html

Chez has just suggested we do this at the end of each festival. I am always amazed and happy when what sounds beautiful to me sounds beautiful to others particularly when they are as good singers and musicians as Cheryl Beer :)

I had such a lovely day on Monday, hearing new to me and wondrous singers and poets and reading my poetry to a warm and appreciative audience before gathering the stalwarts together in a circle to co create a garland of sound sculpture flowers. The result was completely different to what i had expected and far more beautiful and flowery :)

Slow Dance on Radio Tricoed

Talking about Celtic Women Festival 2012 happening this weekend. I am reading and sound sculpting there tomorrow:)

Celtic Women Festival 2012

I think I have been a little tardy in posting about my commitment to co-ordinate a sound sculpture at the close of CW12 at 6.45pm this coming Monday. I will also be doing a poem or two between music sets.

Here is the interview Cheryl and I did about it:
http://celticwomenfest.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/cw12-at-radio-tircoed.html

I have had the most life changing weekend of my life so far. I am cautious about my enthusiasm and optimism because I have tried so many things and been so disappointed so many times but I do believe that it is possible that I might have found a healing that will work for me at last. I have spent the weekend learning how to Throat Sing with Dr Vladislav Matrenitsky, http://www.un-hun.com/un-hun_en.html , a Ukrainian medical doctor who learned from a Tuvan Shaman in Siberia. I keep getting told there are no coincidences but I don't know what other word to use. Four years ago while I was visiting Mum in hospital every day, I saw a concert advertised near St Andrews. It was a three hour drive but I knew it was important to give myself a treat. The singer who I went to see, had come to one of my mask workshops many years ago and I had always wanted to see her live - she sang celtic ballads and Indian music from her dual heritage and she was brilliant. However that night she shared the bill with Hun Hur Tu, a band of Tuvan throat singers. I sat on the floor at the front of a barn by the sea and balled my eyes out silently as their music washed through me and I saw the land and spirits where the music came from. I am not sure if anyone saw or was embarrassed or discomforted by my tears - I felt quite private - aware of a full auditorium behind me but feeling completely alone with the music and my grieving heart.

Then last week I saw a flyer about a workshop teaching Tuvan throat singing and I woke up far earlier than usual on Saturday, in time to make it for a 10am start. Anyone who knows mw knows that this is a miracle in itself. Vladislav is a methodical teacher with a warm heart. He was completely confident that we could all do everything he asked of us and showed no surprise at all as each one of us managed each of the three types of singing, producing sounds that I imagine is something like the sounds angels make.

I still cannot quite believe that my voice, which can barely hold a tune, can make the sound of angels singing in the cavities of my head and body and that these sounds can dissolve chronic pain that I have had for years. The owner of the house we worked in kindly gave me huge clumps of Mombrisia, a flower that my mother loved, which needed to be planted the next morning. I was up at the crack of dawn, wide awake, but needing a bath to ease aching and tense muscles, and after some singing was miraculously able to start planting. However, I was too enthusiastic, as is my wont, and got very hot and sore and unable to move long before all the planting was done. I was so upset that I swore and beat myself up and envisioned a load of dead plants lying in my garden. My guest heard me and offered to help after her yoga and I suddenly realised I could sit down and throat sing. Within a few minutes I was able to finish planting in the back of my cottage and after another rest and throat singing, my guest and I planted the rest and got some serious weeding done into the bargain. Later that morning, a local crow called to me and I replied in throat growls with overtones.

Potential

Summer Solstice, 

the standing still of the sun
after expansion
before contraction
uncomfortable uncertainty
emptiness
chaos
potential

anything can happen
in the heat of the longest day
in my dance with our fiery star

nothing could happen
my dreams,
plans,
creativity,
I
would not exist
without the sun

illusions of solitary stardom dissolve

I console myself with my solar soul mate

anything
more than I could ever dream on my own
is possible

Life is getting more and more surreal :) I am now watching this clip of a talk that I was in the front row of the audience for. I was still shell shocked from seeing myself on the big screen so I did not contribute from the floor as it were but I wish there had been more time to hear more from the contributers...

And here is the link to the bbciplayer where you can watch the film again:http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/p00kqz5p/

Britain In A Day - an aftermath

SLOW DANCE by Bríd Wyldearth 2006 slow down, slow down, slow down, and listen, really listen to the land lie down on her soft belly and feel her breathe she is a wild old woman who will not be rushed and if we can slow down and listen long enough we might also gain the courage not to rush the courage to dance with her our hearts beating time with the timeless heart of this wise old woman who will not be rushed we might hear the secrets that she holds the thousand daily miracles that she unfolds in every cell of her magnificent body slow down, slow down, slow down, and listen, really listen to the land In my effort to upload my footage to youtube in order to take part in Britain In a Day, I did find I had uploaded this, my first ever clip. Youtube had told me I had been unsuccessful and so I eventually submitted my footage by dvds and snail mail. However, now that I have watched Britain In A Day for a second time, this time on the small screen for which it was originally intended, and because at least three of my friends have said that they wished the editor and director had included more of me, I am attempting to embed the video in this blog along with the version of my poem Slow Dance that I use in the clip by way of subtitles. This is how I started Saturday 12 November 2011. I am faerie sound dreaming, channeling the voices and song of our pre historic faerie ancestors. My dear friend and musician Elf pointed this out to me last night after she had watched the film. She insists that I am not, as I have been told, singing out of tune. She says I am singing in quarter or inter tones. Sounds and intervals that sound foreign to ears more used to western and classical music. Ever since, in 1999, the original words to Slow Dance were given to me, I have been slowing down and listening to the land and her sacred places and now I am singing with her too. In my next blog I will show some of the journey we made via sacred places on our way to watch the premier of Britain In A Day in London. - see previous post. Meanwhile, I can understand why the director did not use this clip in his film, which was for the most part fast paced and city based. He did however use the clip where I said that I knew that I, like every being on the planet, am unique. I feel that that statement encompassed a through theme of the film and I also think that the film asks us to listen to Britain in all her multi faceted eccentricity. Being part of the film has helped me to accept my eccentric Britishness which is a healing effect that I never expected when I first sat down at my webcam at midnight on November 12 2011

At midnight on Saturday November 12 2011, I turned on my webcam and recorded myself speaking for the first time. I then went to bed and got up to film myself next day. I recorded my thoughts and feelings and spiritual practice of sound dreaming at Pentre Ifan.

I ended my days filming saying that I felt it might have been one of the happiest of my life. What was best about it and most fulfilling was that on watching the footage, I had not cringed once. I thought I looked and sounded good which was very unusual for me.

I then spent a very frustrating few months trying to upload the footage first to youtube, then a nasty iphoto library eating Filezilla. Britain In A Day team must have really wanted my footage because they kept trying to get it uploaded too. Finally last week I heard that they had used some of my footage and I made a pilgrimage with my friend Mandi and canine companion, Sputnik to the NFT to watch the first public screening of the film. Mandi, myself and my cousins went to The Blue Room for drinks before hand and I was immediately recognised. A number of the production team came up to me to introduce themselves and I tried not to let this go to my head and assume it meant there would be lots of my footage in the film. After all I knew I was only one of three hundred contributors chosen from thousands.

We sat front row centre and listened to an introduction which emphasised that this was our film no matter how small a contribution of footage had been used. The film was beautiful and quirky and very British. There was a lot of footage of the St Paul's protest which I was surprised and pleased about. If I hadn't known that the director and editor were men, the juxtaposition of a human mother breast feeding with a milking parlour would have told me. There was some very brave footage of self injury scars and a young man visiting his mother after a long break. There was touching footage of weddings, proposals, and a meditating man interrupted by his children. None of my morning footage appeared and I was almost lulled into watching a film in a cinema that had nothing to do with me, when I was physically shocked by seeing my face filling the huge screen. They used two clips of me sound dreaming and two spoken sentences, one of which was : "I am aware that I am wyrd" That got a laugh, presumably interpreting wyrd as weird. I cringed and regressed instantly to the self conscious teenager who everyone laughed at and bullied for being different. Then there was a tiny clip of Pentre Ifan with the dancing faerie light of the setting sun. It was over in a matter of seconds. None of my musings about spirituality or quotes from my poem Slow Dance were used.

I could not enjoy the rest of the film much and I was furious that for all the big wigs saying it was our film, the credits for the big wigs were big and prominent and first and the contributors flashed past in a text box without time to even read all our names. In the Q and A that followed, by far the most interesting contributions were from a few contributors given a meagre fifteen minutes at the end.

The first person who came up to me outside was another contributor who seemed genuinely to have enjoyed my contribution and my mood lifted somewhat. My cousin's neighbours said "Oh she was good. She got a good laugh." The further I got from that embarrassing moment of seeing myself magnified in all my weirdness, the more the film has grown on me. It is an unusual and beautiful picture of the place I have made my home. Next morning, I realised that they had managed to edit my hour long footage into a few seconds of it's essence. I am wyrd and weird. I sound dream. This is probably the most original and unique thing about me. I drum and sing in communion with the land and sacred places. The sound is not necessarily beautiful or tuneful, not by conventional western standards, but in a picture of Britain the director made room for unconventional and completely unique music.

It was as I listened to the dawn chorus under Uffington white horse, that I remembered the last time I captured dancing light on film. It was by the sea near where I live. I was lead to understand at that time, that the dancing light was faeries. Now I know that I can never prove this and that there is probably a perfectly logical scientific explanation but I choose to believe that the faeries and angels of Carn Ingli were dancing with me that afternoon in November at Pentre Ifan and that they are to be seen by those who choose to see them in the dancing light at that sacred ancestral pile of stones in a film about Britain that thousands of people will watch. Alternatively, I will now forever be known as "that weird woman on Britain In A Day who is away with the faeries".

A love song to Earth on May Day

I WORSHIP THE GROUND THAT YOU WALK ON by Bríd Wyldearth 2007 I worship the ground that you walk on, the grass beneath your feet, the sand between your toes, Gaia, earth goddess, on whom we meet. I worship the ground that you walk on. She is the love of my life. She is my soul mate, my life support, my partner, my lover, my wife. I worship the ground that you walk on. She is with me wherever I roam. She feeds me and clothes me and cradles me. She is my goddess, my spiritual home. I worship the ground that you walk on. My heart sings with her beauty and love. My whole being dances to the beat of her heart. When we kiss, I feel the earth move! I worship the ground that you walk on. When you touch her wear a kid glove. Look after her like your own mother. Tread softly for she is my love. Inspired by art work by Shaula Groulx, p.203, Wemoon ‘08

In honour of the ancient Goddess on the festival of Beltain

SHADOWS OF AN ANCIENT GODDESS by Bríd Wyldearth 2011 An ancient woman squats above an old church door. She holds her vulva open, impossible to ignore. Weird witch Síla na Gig, powerful, daring and rude, I wish I dared sit on a church wall wicked and wanton and nude! Eerie faerie Síla na Gig, bathing your quim in the sun, your holy hole outrageously obvious, your mouth fixed in a mocking grin, you might as well be shouting to pilgrims rich and poor: “I am your mother, your sister, your wife, your daughter, your lover, your whore." Orgasmic dancing Síla na Gig, are you just prehistoric pornography? Or do you have something to say to the twenty first century? "I will not collude in your big cover up. I will not clothe myself in your shame. Uncensored and open and honest and proud, I show the world who I am and why I came." Why do you sit on a church wall? Why do you show us your cunt? Why did the stonemason carve you? And what exactly is it that you want? “I was here before the church was and I’ll be here long after it’s gone. I honour the place of original magic the place from which we all come I open the gate between worlds the doorway to life and to death this gesture is just as important as any gesture to pray or to bless I am your ancestral goddess. I am swollen and violated and raped. This is the result of your violence. I will not disappear without trace. When you seek to disempower me, you invade me against my will you build churches over my temples and groves and convince my children that I am evil. Remember where you originate. Remember your spiritual roots. Remember that god is a woman as well. Remember deep, radical truths. Womanhood is as sacred as any church or holy place. We give birth, we give pleasure and we give love, we give comfort and healing and peace.”

SEVENTH ANNUAL BRIGID POETRY FESTIVAL

And with the festival:
https://www.facebook.com/BrigidPoetryFest
it seems time to post on my blog again. The first poem I want to post is one I feel to be my favourite at the moment:

Still I Rise
You may write me down in history 

With your bitter, twisted lies, 

You may trod me in the very dirt 

But still, like dust,
I'll rise.



Does my sassiness upset you? 

Why are you beset with gloom? 

'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells 

Pumping in my living room.



Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides, 

Just like hopes springing high, 

Still I'll rise.



Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops.

Weakened by my soulful cries.



Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines 

Diggin' in my own back yard.



You may shoot me with your words, 

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness, 

But still, like air,
I'll rise.



Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds 

At the meeting of my thighs?



Out of the huts of history's shame 

I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, 

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

I rise 

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave. 

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Maya Angelou