Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Death and Dragons

 


Death was beautiful that evening. Wearing a silk robe with white dragons swimming slowly over the fabric. Her collar and wrists were neatly covered with spider web thin embroidery. Her feet were bare, apart from one night-blooming jasmine attached to her right foot big toe. She wiggled this toe, as if to show me that there was no way for me to figure out just how it was attached. The petals of the flower moved slightly. In her hand she held a tall delicate crystal glass. Something sparkled in it.

“Soooo,” she said. Waiting for me to take a sip from my own glass, filled with not so sparkly cheap wine, and the glass itself not so elegant, bought at Family Dollar. (Though I did like the color of the glass, an ice blue verging on turquoise.) Death’s glass glimmered into an ice blue and then turned crystal clear again. She was teasing me. Nevertheless, she seemed to accept my state of being exhausted but not able to sleep. She simply gently nudged me on.

“Here we are,” she said casually, words dragging out at every syllable. “You, me, and the porch. Or, should it be the porch, you, and me?”

I knew I was impolite. Not that she cared. It was more a matter of honor. My personal expectation of how you treat anyone who visits your home, regardless how short or far they have traveled to spend time with you.



“I never travel far,” said Death, wiggling her night-blooming jasmine adorned toe once more.

A surge of sweet fragrance came floating my way. The scent brought me back to myself. The self who didn’t want to miss out on a moment.

“Let’s talk about love,” I said. Thinking this could be a curious subject to discuss with Death.

She nodded somberly, staring out into the nothingness, or perhaps into memories. If Death collected memories I did not know.

“Ah, yes, love,” she said. “A worthy subject indeed.” No hesitation, and – for her – an unusual emphasis.

“Can you love?” I asked, well aware I sounded like a child who asked about why the sun rose every morning, or why grandmothers seemed to have a thing for strange tasting candies, such as lemon drops. Death was still. Just for a moment. Then she replied,

“Oh yes, I can love. I do love indeed.”

Her cut-by-the-knuckles, off-white, intricately-embroidered gloves twisted softly around her hands, and she did the slightest movement with her ring fingers, as if she was pushing something away, or reeling it in. I could not tell which. She knew I noticed. And pretended not to have.

“Love,” she said, “surpasses me. Humbles me. Not a lot of things do.”

It was a simple statement. Void of pride.




“Will we make it then?” I asked. Ignoring the feeling of becoming younger and more ignorant by the second. “I mean,” I said, trying not to stammer. “Humans, Earth, society, us …”

She turned to me, her face growing younger, until she appeared no older than a fourteen-year-old girl. Then, for the first time, she winked at me. I did not know that Death had it in her repertoire to wink and was somewhat startled. It was like seeing a shooting star in her closing eye, just to have it opened again and seeing the deep night sky. She smiled her typical corner-of-the-mouth smile.

“Honey, sweetheart, heart-of-mine,” she said, mimicking my very own love’s half-joking pet names that he used for me. Then she added,

“Don’t you know? You already have.”

By Sofia Karin Axelsson - first published in the November edition of The Echo World 2020


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Wednesday, July 8, 2020

The Medicine Man - A Ghost Story


This story is part of a collection,
tentatively called “Ghost Whisperer:
Stories from a Nordic Witch Stranded
in the South.” They were mainly written
during my first year in the Appalachian
Mountains, having moved from Sweden,
living at the end of a road, with no green
card to allow me to work and my husband,
Michael, working at the Monroe Institute.
Being a stranger in a strange land those
days, ghosts started to talk to me.


Spider Old Woman walks among the stars. She was the one who helped me make peace with the kingdom of crawlers those first months after I arrived. Not in the form of the two inch wide, fat spider who sat on the bathroom wall close to my face and scared me half to death; that Michael killed, accidently rubbing purplish goo in his eye, leaving me laying awake for hours watching his face, fearing his eye would disappear into a tennis ball of swelling; but as the thin legged slow moving creatures Michael called Daddy Long Legs, and I sometimes called Mama Long Legs. Watching them carefully testing their surroundings with tiny feet before they took a step was calming. And that is how I was inspired to talk to Spider Old Woman when I sat in the swing chair, rocking back and forth.

She is ancient, and native. Therefor I trusted her. With her came another new and unexpected friend. Unexpected as it is more or less forbidden in the circles I usually move in to claim a Native American guide, out of embarrassment from earlier overexploitations of Native American people's culture. Nevertheless, here I was, a guest on Native American land, so it would have been highly impolite to ignore the presence of this ghost because I came from a country with unresolved, collective, cross cultural relationship issues.

I was thankful when he accompanied me on my long walks. As far as ghosts go, he was less intrusive than most. He had no immediate needs, but simply walked beside me in soft deerskin clothes and the most impeccable hair I've ever seen, talking loosely of the dreaming mountains, deer tracks and the incomparable virtue of turtle soup. Sometimes we didn't talk at all. I just heard his footsteps beside me, and that made me feel safer. Because as hard as it is for me to admit, those first months I was afraid.

There are different kinds of fear. This was the stomach-turning fear of being on a thread of life where the only way is forward. It came from knowing I'd made all the right choices, but not trusting that I had what it took to measure up. It was the fear of having lived half my life and knowing that the trial period was now over. Whatever happened for the rest of my life was entirely up to me. It was a fear enhanced by my location, far away from all familiar distractions: a draining job, friends to gossip with, well known toys to play with, intensified by the shame in realizing I was more dependent on these familiarities than I cared to admit. It was the fear stemming from having a roof over my head, food on the table, of being showered in love, of falling asleep to the music of crickets and having oceans of time to create all I ever wanted to create: in short, to have all I ever wanted.
"You’re a weaver now," said Spider Old Woman, as I rocked back and forth.
"Keep the balance, all you have to do is to put one foot in front of the other," said the Medicine Man,", as he walked beside me.

I didn't know his name, so I called him the Medicine Man. I didn't dare to ask, with the deep-seated anxiousness, when faced with the risk of doing something inappropriate, that only people raised in Sweden can understand.

The Medicine Man suited him. He healed my most urgent needs effortlessly and discreetly. So inconspicuous was his presence that I might have missed him altogether had I not been told of the Native American ghost family who lived close to the house. First, they lived in the house. Or rather, where the house happened to be built: their dwelling place forerunning the cabin. To be even more specific: their living quarters happened to be just where the closet of the cabin was placed. When Michael had his first round of Rocky Mountain fever, he was almost delirious from the disease and his efforts to try to work at a new job regardless. He suspected there was ghosts in the closet and cleaned the closet repeatedly with smudging sage. Finally, two local healers took pity on him and came over to the cabin armed with herbs, therapeutic sprays, big hearts and clear seeing.
"There is a family living in the closet who wonders why this crazy man insists on running into their living quarters and smudge sage around them time," one of the healers said. A deal was made that the Medicine Man and his family would move to a suitable spot just outside the house, and Michael would stop smudging their home.

The Medicine Man's family consisted of a wife and a child of indeterminate gender. The few times I got a glimpse of his wife she always leaned over a cooking pot: content, lean and quiet.
"She doesn't talk much," confirmed the Medicine Man.

The silent, constantly cooking, humble woman created small jolts of uncomfortable electric shocks along my high-strung feminist nerves. The Medicine Man rebuked me. It should be beneath me to interpret silence as weakness or cooking as unimportant. His wife did more in her stillness and silence, than he himself did with all his walking and words. When he spoke I started to understand - on a much deeper level than ever before - silence as an active agent. Stillness as a necessary force to move the game forward. To change the game.

Silence.


I had not gotten around to replace my Swedish cellphone and its connection was stone dead by the cabin. Neither did I want to overuse our data plan, which we had ended up paying loads of money for as a result of our Skyping sessions before I arrived. I didn't care for news, not having decided if I were to read Swedish news or news from the States, longing for none of them. When Michael went back to work during the days all of this made me feel a bit isolated. Now, I deliberately began to enjoy the silence. And the walks. And even cooking.

I looked up the tribes who have lived in the area or nearby, out of both curiosity and curtesy. With my usual inability to limit myself I covered the timeline of 50 000 years until now, tried to understand the movement and development of at least ten tribes, that of course intermingled and changed course over the years. The only thing I found out for sure was that turtles used to be a delicacy consumed over many thousands of years, the animal having the practical inclination to hibernate just under the sand in the creeks, ready for plucking even in cold winter season. Apart from curiosities as such, details have never been my strength: years, numbers and names often tumble around in my brain with nowhere to anchor. What stays with me has always been the stories, the heavy, sweet sap stories that flow over in all directions: Coyote: beloved trickster, Turtle: foundation and prosperity bringer, and Spider Old Woman: grandmother, weaver. 

She taught me how to shoot threads directly out of my own body, out of my own life experiences. Creating life from life.

I didn't do much those first months. I had been under the illusion that as soon as I settled in, which shouldn't take me more than a week or two, I would use the time being in a constant flow of creativity. This did not happen. Even to think about opening a sketchbook, or edit a text, made me unbearably and unexplainably tired. I wrote something here and scribbled something there, but with little or no evident result. Instead I walked, cooked: adding to the household by making tasty vegetarian warm soups and casseroles that cost almost nothing. And I talked to Spider Old Woman.

I worried sometime that I was turning into some kind of housewife, even if the concept was as alien to me as talking to ghost are to many other people. But in Virginia the homemaker concept seems to be a real thing undertaken by real people. What if it was contagious? Michael managed to convince me I was in no way in the risk zone of waking up one day longing to make apple pies. The Medicine Man said nothing about the subject.

I asked him one day, on a walk that gave us breathtaking views over the mountains, why him and his family stilled lived by the field. Where there no place they wanted to move on to, somewhere their families and friends where?
"We lived in the best of times, in the most prosperous of places: game everywhere, boundless of things to pick and eat. Everywhere were materials for art and games. The whole of nature was our garden. There was no shortage of land, no strife’s there. We stayed for this. But also, for the ones that came after us ...".

I didn't ask what the last sentence meant, and he did not offer to explain it.
It was a mystery far beyond me, interrelated to his people and their faith. Though in my soul of souls I knew it was interrelated to all of us.

And the small woman leaning over her cooking pot was a key player. When nature rests and the stars glow bright and cold, she is the listener, the source, the cooker, the weaver, and she is walking over the stars with Spider Old Woman. Changing the game. Creating the world anew again, while her husband, the Medicine Man, heals it.


The Medicine Man was first published in July edition of The Echo World 2020.

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Trust Your Doodling


"Trust your doodling," said an artist woman I interviewed for The Echo World some years back. So I finally did, and realized that while I will never be an artist per se - doodling is one of the best self-healing techniques I've found so far. No prestige. No need for perfect results. Just doodling away ...

Eir - Old Norse Healer and Medicine Woman

Inti - Familiare of Creativity

Hel - Old Norse Goddess of the Underworld

The Echo World Magical Extra: Power Animal Song for Troubled Times




This is a song I wrote many years ago, about the magnificent animal Bat. A grand helper in troubled times. Translation below. // Stay cool Sofia The Bat Song: Hanging up side down in the cave and I'm dreaming x2 Bones in the soil, dancing with skeletons, laughing at Death, and know that it is right. Hanging up side down .... Finding the woman in pale green clothes, she's sitting by fabric, needles and leather. What will she mend, what will she sow, what will she cut, what will she make anew? Hanging up side down .... Falling and flying, falling and flying ... over city, over land, over waters, over moors. Hanging up side down ... Dancing with the woman in pale green clothes, dancing with skeletons, dancing with the clan's mothers and fathers. Falling and flying, falling and flying ... over city, over land, over waters, over moors. Finding my Soul.


Friday, February 7, 2020

Lullaby for Heathen Children of All Ages


Wolf Song

I recorded this song by the creek with my Iphone. My only plan was to send it to Vidar Jonas Freden, my great-nephew, and a selected few other magical children of different ages. Somehow I failed in every attempt to get this recording to niece/mother Emelie Freden. So finally I gave up, and decided to upload it as this week's The Echo World Magical Extra. The song is from Ronja the Robber's Daughter by Astrid Lindgren. Music originally by Björn Isfält. Translation of song can be found below:

Wolf Song The wolf howls ferociously in the woods by night He can't sleep for hunger And his den is bitterly cold He lusts for fat sheep O Wolf, o wolf, don't come hither My child you shall have nevermore The wolf howls ferociously in the woods by night He howls and laments for hunger But I give him a pig's tail That shall fit in his stomach O Wolf, o wolf, don't come hither My child you shall have nevermore O Wolf, o wolf, don't come hither My child you shall have nevermore The wolf howls ferociously in the woods by night And can't find a bite to eat But I shall give him a cockrel's comb That shall make his throat burst O Wolf, o wolf, don't come hither My child you shall have nevermore Sleep, my child, in mother's bed And let the wolf howl away For if none before has taken them I shall give him some chicken legs O Wolf, o wolf, don't come hither My child you shall have nevermore O Wolf, o wolf, don't come hither My child you shall have nevermore Translation: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/wolfsl...



Thursday, January 16, 2020

The Echo World Magical Extra: Sofia Drums for Skadi


In this video of The Echo World Magical Extra Sofia talks about the winter goddess Skadi, and take you on a journey so you can meet Skadi yourself, using song and drum. The video is lagging somewhat especially in the second half. But the sound is ok, so this should work anyway.








Word of the Day - Rain train

Rain train, meaning - (simple google search): b asically a storm that forms from the conglomeration of smaller scale thunderstorms  but is n...