Dear friends and wild hearts, I have a glorious thing to tell you this Imbolc morning. Today, a Book is Born! <| theindigovat.blogspot.com
<Mother of the World, by Nicholas Roerich 1937>| The Gleewoman's Notes
A field vole (c) Barrie H. Kelly| The Gleewoman's Notes
Fog walking on light feet across Abbott's Lagoon, Point Reyes | The Gleewoman's Notes
Earlier today a dear friend asked me about poems that have to do| The Gleewoman's Notes
There is a language the world speaks, and I think I have been listening for it my whole life. For a long time I thought it was only something that existed in the fantasy novels so beloved to me as a girl, where women spoke with birds and knew the whisperings of plants and the medicine they carried. But I know it for something real now, of this world, the one I live in, the one my body moves through every day and every starry night, the one that feeds and sustains me in every way. I know it fo...| The Gleewoman's Notes
Quail, the lady of bronze and smoke, she died midmorning. Neck snapped, not a mark.| The Gleewoman's Notes
Greek lekythos (oil jar) detail of a woman in the Garden of Hesperides, feeding one of the sacred snakes | The Gleewoman's Notes
The following is a sequel to the essay titled “Riding on the Back of the Bear King,” posted today on the Dark Mountain Blog as part of| The Gleewoman's Notes
Written for my dear friend Nao Sims of Honey Grove, inspired by a conversation about her dance class series of the same name| The Gleewoman's Notes
For a long time, the mythology of dismemberment has fascinated me. The Vegetation Year God, cut to pieces out in the fields, scattered to bless the earth, reborn at the lip of the winter solstice, when the light begins at last to return. How potent an image of healing, of rebirth. How layered, the word re-member-- to bring broken pieces into wholeness. Of self. Of world. It seems we find ourselves teetering on such a moment, here beyond the doorway of the winter solstice, as the light begins ...| The Gleewoman's Notes
Modern Rome; Campo Vacino, by J.M.W. Turner 1839| The Gleewoman's Notes
Despite the dystopia America has awoken to in the past month, this is one of the most beautiful winter seasons I can remember here on the coast of California, where the fir trees find their southernmost range, and the black sages their northernmost. I have always loved winter in California, and by winter I mean the rainy season, which normally (in the past) starts in October and lasts until the end of March. I have loved it ferociously, almost desperately in recent years, when drought dried t...| The Gleewoman's Notes
Yesterday at dusk I lit two candles for the women and men protecting the waters at Standing Rock, standing up against all odds to the powers of greed and hunger and hate that are closing in upon this land. I prayed for the right words, any words that might do good and be of use. This story is what I wrote. I look at it now and fear it is too hopeful. I look at it now and fear it is not hopeful enough. I am a student of history, and long have been. I fear what has come before and the patterns ...| The Gleewoman's Notes
From the beginning, Tatterdemalion has been its own creature, a being of instinct, of old mystery, of the magic lands that lie just beyond our dreams. All throughout its creation, I've been following a thread that I can hardly call my own. I followed it to England last autumn, where I met Rima in person at last, and found Unbound. This autumn I followed it again to Dartmoor, to the 2016 Dark Mountain gathering at Embercombe. There, we gathered by the Hedgespoken hearth to share fires and tea...| The Gleewoman's Notes
Looking north from a tower in the Byzantine citadel of Agios Giorgos, gone wild with capers and mullein and mint| The Gleewoman's Notes
Surely on another autumn day like this, the acorns swelling green on the trees, the earth dark red with rain, the sky elaborately patterned with the tatters of a storm, another woman stood here on the behemoth limestone wall of the ancient acropolis called Kranea, looking north across a fertile oak valley at noon.| The Gleewoman's Notes
Things in the world have been growing darker and darker for a while now. But last night, upon hearing news of the Nice attack, something shifted inside of me. A new layer of horror, of sorrow, of fear—this is no longer becoming a reality. It is a reality. This unbounded, rampant hate. We opened Pandora's box a long time ago, and then forgot what it might mean. Now, I fear, we are remembering, and it is terrible. The level of uncontrollable hatred is reaching a mythic pitch, and I am taki...| The Gleewoman's Notes
In the end—through all the struggle and strangeness and beauty and sorrow of the world we navigate today—I think we are each of us just trying to create the story we truly want to live in. Not the story we think we should live in—our souls know better, and maybe that's what causes so much endless inner strife, disconnect, depression. Our souls (or hearts, or spirits, or true selves, whatever you want to call it) know what story fits them best. What lilt or drum or ship of language carr...| The Gleewoman's Notes
My dear Indigo Vat has at last undergone a long overdue Naming. For a while now I've been aware of the fact that I appear to be running a natural dye website, when in fact I am a writer of fantastical and ecological fiction and essays. I do now and then mention natural dyes, but I think this has become confusing. I've been waiting for the right time, and the right name, and now both seem to have come! Welcome to my Gleewoman's Notes. I plan to be using this space more often, shifting my focus...| The Gleewoman's Notes
I've always believed that when you make something with your hands, it comes alive. Hares and bears and mountain lions and roses and hearth-homes and strange wheeled vehicles, they all wait inside the iron-dark clay. Our hands know how to pull and coax and sing them out. It is, in no small way, magic. At least that's how I find the process of working with clay, the act of sending a bisque-fired creature off into the kiln, to be engulfed in flames, to come out bright-skinned, umbered, new. I al...| The Gleewoman's Notes
My sweet brother| The Gleewoman's Notes
I've been reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin recently. I won't hesitate to call it an obsession. But maybe the better word is an apprenticeship, or a hunger, or both. I've apprenticed myself unconsciously to her words, because they are full of something I am hungry for, something I didn't know I was hungry for until I found it. For a while I couldn't articulate what "it" was. Only that the way she made worlds, and words, filled me up with a sense of both light and dark, a sense of rightness and ...| The Gleewoman's Notes
Almost exactly a year ago-- one journey around the sun-- my dear friend Asia Suler (of One Willow Apothecaries) and I began the collaboration that would become WEFT. In the mountains of Appalachia where Asia lives, the wild violets and irises were up, and she dreamt and then brewed up a potent violet elixir, purple with the medicine of those dark petals, stirred over the stovetop to the hymns of Hildegard Von Bingen. With the intuitive dreaming unique to her old heart, Asia then began addin...| The Gleewoman's Notes
There are stories on Dartmoor that come up singing through the stones. There is a silence underneath the wind on the tops of the granite tors that is ancient with human song. I could feel it, just underneath the skin of green. The wind and the stones and the pulse of story came in like a hallowing, and I was changed.| The Gleewoman's Notes