Imbas

poems, musings from winter, and a secret!!

Sand

I run my fingers along the textured bluffs of this sea, and I ask him if he thinks we could tell when the last tsunami was based on the layers.

My fingers trace the years, like rings of a tree, and particles of sand trickle off. And I realize that’s what it is.

In a world of up and out, I ache for the experience of feeling small sometimes.

Of being contextual.

Of being a thread in the tapestry of all life.

Of feeling my beautiful impermanence.

So that I might even begin to know all that is the miracle of existence all around me.

This will be one of the pieces that inhabits the poetry book I am *slowly * writing. And there’s been something incredibly liberating about this process. Instead of having a harder deadline like so many other projects in my life do, this one is guiding itself. My goal here is to get to a threshold, rather than to a date. When my notes app is saturated to 30-40 poems or so and that’s when I’ll begin the process of putting it together for a book.

In my experience, writing has always been a part of unearthing and becoming earth all at once. Through this medium, I am unearthing myself, the collective patterns, and the layers of my story and the people I come from. And simultaneously I become earth as I notice the freckles on my face like the markings on trout, as I feel my creativity ebb and flow with the moon, as the fungi invite me into the mycelial network that I belong to and I put pen to paper to remember it all.

Oftentimes, my writing takes the form of songs. And this winter has been particularly full of late night recordings and notebook scribbles. The irish speak of the poetic force that moves through some folk, the creativity, the creative spirit in the musician, this divine inspiration, as imbas. I feel almost as if something is pulling the words right out of me, as if it is a dance between me and spirit. People have asked me to articulate the way that lyrics are written in my process, and the closest I have gotten to explaining it is that somewhere along the lines, melodies turn into mumbles, which turn into words that seem to write themselves. To be totally honest, while it is a part of the process, there seems to be only sprinkles of adjustments and conscious directing, some songs more than others. In song writing specifically, I unearth parts of myself in a way that nothing else really compares to. It’s a more subconscious process than I think people imagine. I’ve had a laugh when I listen back to old songs I’ve written and I think to myself- so that’s what I was going through. In fact, when I’m feeling a lot, when I’m feeling almost too much to hold, and if I don’t know all it is that I’m feeling, I’ll often write the song and then find out as part of the process. My songs are a mirror that hold an image I can’t quite make out yet without hearing it in the melodies and textures that color it in.

As we move into the final weeks of the year of the snake, I am reflecting on the ouroboros. I listen to the song Sparrow by Big Thief, and sing the line that reads “She has the poison inside her, she talks to snakes and they guide her”. I have so many tears lately, a backlog. They seem to wait for the right ratio of tone and volume. I find the edges of my voice in an attempt to let the tears flow, like squeezing out a sponge.

“She talks to snaaakesss and they guiiiiiiiideee herrr!!!”

In my deep ancestry, snakes and dragons were sacred, it was christianity that demonized them. To this day, our culture struggles to reintegrate the medicine that lives here, and this year, I was determined to remember it. In that serpentine way, change was a constant this year, a difficult and sparkling year, and unbelievably fertile ground for writing songs and love letters.

photo by Robert Sisson

Dear readers! thank you for spending time on this page. It warms my heart to think that people feel curious about my little corner of the world and I am filled with curiosity thinking about yours. Keep resting + tending to the slowness, here in the middle of winter. Earth’s new year is still yet to come. For those folks who are choosing to support my creative journey financially right now, I have a special offering for you, as a deep thanks and a peek into the process. Here is a snippet of a demo on an album I am working on…