My last day in Wales was mysterious and bone-deep. I went down to the shores of Aberystwyth in the rain—storms rolling in across the wild sea. I sorted the rainbowed stones on the shore. All of the colors of Earth. I sat and shook my rattle until a chant came through, in a voice that was not my own. Aged and brittle was its sound. A foreign yet familiar tongue making audible a song of Cymru. Long I chanted in this strange voice until a vision began to emerge in front of my mind’s eye: My ancestors, standing along this same shore, staring out across the Wild Atlantic onto a horizon in the West. The terrifying unknown lie before them. With everything they had known since the beginning at their back. All that they loved and all that they had suffered bringing them to this edge. The only possibility of preserving the life they had left, (suspended in that step between the shore and that ship), set lie in stepping aboard that ship, to head out over the unrelenting sea. It was not as simple as a hunger for adventure or manifest destiny that propelled them so. Nor was it a hunger for riches. It was the hunger in their belly that reached all the way into their bones. It was survival. It was a great suffering, and an even greater hope(vision) that their future kin would one day find themselves living a better life—one that their imaginations could only begin to glimpse through the distant mists. One that could only lie on the other side of that veiled horizon.
With broken hearts and hungry souls they stepped off the edge of the known. And for generations there forth, they pushed West. Forgot their native tongue. Told the stories of their motherland until the loss was too great, and those memories faded into the mists. They became accustomed to a new land, ever seeking and ever driven by the unnamable hunger in their souls.
All of this hunger has at its core a severing of roots. An ancient forest cut down. Language and myth buried underneath a commercial forest. Estates established beside ancient stone circles. Walls constructed to ward off the elements. Royal armies marking their territory on newly drawn maps, replacing the aboriginal names that carry the old stories. An erasing of relationships between people and places.
Domination and control. Forced onto single-crop plantations. Blithe, Starvation. The dispersing of villages. The severing of lineages. Mandatory amnesia.
And here I stand, generations later, on this same shore. Staring out across the Wild Atlantic onto a horizon in the West. Shaking my rattle—chanting to greet the waves as they complete their long journey across the sea. Sorting the stones. Sorting the bones. Marking the Equinox as I imagine they might have done.
Did my grandmothers and grandfathers who left this shore ever imagine that their daughter would one day come back to their motherland to honor their journey? Did they know somewhere deep in their marrow that their own hunger and need for survival would arise in me, and somehow lead me back to here again? Leaving an aching in my mouth for their native tongue? Compelling me to escape the walls that shelter me from the earthly elements that made them so strong? Did they envision me returning to tend fire and dreams under their firmament of starlight, and travel, through their old villages at night clumsy in my attempt to sing the songs of their land to the land, once again?
Do they hear me when I cry out for the elements to shape me, like they shaped my ancestors—are they helping me to trust, once again, in the harsh hand of Nature? Are you HERE in my blood, encouraging me to find those ancient forest roots to make the leafing oaks visible above ground as once again?
Thanks to their unrelenting push to the West, my homeland and my birthplace is the American West. The anguish that had them push away from their home shores, has touched every continent of this earth, leaving a wake of severed roots through the wildlands of humanity. The shame of being a kind of invasive species sometimes leaves me feeling like I don’t belong. I know the confluence of perpetrator and victim pulses under my skin.
But In my home, I listen to the wind—pay homage to the storms that move across the big skies and perhaps blow their winds all the way across the North American continent, over the waters of the Atlantic, driving wind and rain to crash upon these distant shores of my ancestral motherland. I am forever indebted to ancestors of dispersant lines, for this opportunity to re-memeber an intimacy with the dance of elements, that they had to leave behind. For the yearning to surrender to the evolutionary impulse to live as a human in love with the dreaming earth. With a rasp in my throat, I too leave Cymru behind in the mists. Traveling on a plane; heading home to the West.
PHOTO by Paul Nash circa 1939
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