What We Move Into
Narnia, Cicadas, Columbia River Goddesses, and the permission to step into what we need to step into.
As a kid, my family had a rope swing behind our garage. A lot of stuff existed behind that garage. A two-leveled fort my mom helped us build, an abundance of stinkhorn mushrooms every spring that did, in fact, stink. Their orange foam stalks and brown slimy tips were fascinating to look at. Many a hole was dug and water reached, old clay pieces found, letters buried. There was no shortage of things to do behind the garage.
I’m not sure where the rope swing came into play timeline wise, but it hung from a maple branch that spread across the back edge of the yard. I also don’t know how it got tied up there. But as a kid, none of that mattered. It was just accessory to imagination.
We didn’t swing on this swing all that much. It sort of just sat there, dangling. Swaying with the wind. Sometimes tugged on. The backdrop of kickball games played with mom’s exercise yoga ball. It wasn’t until I stepped into the land of Narnia that my way of engaging with the swing really found purpose.
As a kid who spent endless hours escaping to different worlds while seated cross legged in front of the floorboard heater, Narnia offered a full fledge deep dive in the practice. I was hooked from the onset. Meticulously analyzing the maps on the first page of each book, imagining my own questing, and perhaps most earnestly, trying to fathom different ways I could access the faraway land through the terrain of my day to day.
Amidst all the daydreaming of stumbling into a new world, my 9 year old self also recognized the need for proactive preparation. Always having been one to balance ideation and strategy, as a kid, I knew I certainly didn’t want to end up in Narnia and have my skills be mum!
The goal was to be a Peter, not a Eustace.
So one day, I went into the backyard with a hammer, knocked off a picket on the picket fence, took it to the garage, cut out a slice of the bottom with a handsaw, taped hockey tape around the handle, and voila! I had myself a sword.
You can get away with utilizing hand saws and hammers as a 9 year old when you’re the second of four children. Too much other stuff going on for the parents to worry about.
Then, with sword in hand, I moseyed back to the rope and tied knot after knot at the base of it to give it some girth and weight. The bulk of the rope now at around chest hight. Then, focused and ready, I’d sling the sword around, jumping to and fro as the rope swung back and forth, chopping and hacking and working my feet. My imagination making the rope no longer rope, but turning it into Minotaur and Hag.
I knew that when that door finally did open, I’d be ready.
But the door didn’t open in the way I thought it would. But it did open. Both ways. Having just reread the series for the first time in 20 years, I realized that there is a world on page to escape to and a world for reality to imagine within. You can step into either.
The Cicada Bloom
There will be more cicadas this year than there have been in a long while. Two broods of cicada, different subsets of the insect, will emerge around the a same time in May. It’s estimated their numbers will be in the trillions across the Midwest and Southeast. Of these two varieties, one has spent 13 years and the other 17… underground. That’s where they hatch. In that over decade long span, they nibble on roots and other subterranean snacks to survive.
I used to find the exoskeletons of cicadas around my neighborhood. My friends and I would circle them around apples from crab apple trees to make it seem like they had left their former bodies while worshipping the sacred fruit. It was a bit creepy, but, in retrospect, not too faraway from my now 29 year old worldview…
I digress.
Have you ever heard a cicada? Their song is varied across different subspecies, but the noise is immense.
Cicada Song
A 13 year cycle cicada species and a 17 year cycle are having their emergence year overlap this year. And although the specific classification of the 13 and 17 year singing insects don’t have much overlap in their geographic regions, a tiny patch of woodland around Springfield, IL is expected to be the point of intersection. Their song will be immense on each their own. But in that forest, it will be deafening.
What spent so long in silence will certainly sing.
The Whisper of the Goddess
Not many people know this, but there is a water goddess that is seated at the point of confluence between river and sea in Astoria, Oregon. The salmon know this goddess. Because salmon, as you may know, venture from stream to river to sea, and then return back again. This is their migratory habit. They pass by her on their quest. Her nurturing presence yielding precisely the message they need.
As you can imagine, the point of sea entry is quite daunting. Although adolescent and bold, even the bravest of salmon can find this transition quite overwhelming.
But that is where the water goddess comes into play. She whispers across all the waters and her words seep into the fish,
I am your entry, and I am your return. I am your quest and I am your comfort. I am your river and I am your sea.
The sound of her voice is so soothing and so immense, that although a whisper, it finds the hearts of all salmon, regardless of where they are on their migratory continuum. As far inland as the streams up in the Wallowa’s, all the way out to the waters of deep Pacific. In some great mystery, each salmon hears what they need to hear. It is from being woven within her gentle and soothing whisper that salmon venture and salmon return.
There is a world to step into on this side of the page and a world to escape within on the page.
There is a bug resting for 17 years beneath the soil and a bug singing a once every 17 year hymn above.
There is a whisper of questing invitation sent upstream and a whisper of welcome return sent out to sea.
It can all be welcome, it can all be right. It is certainly all its own kind of magic.
A spirals is simultaneously going inward and outward.
There is possibility if possibility is willing to be seen, heard, felt. But what that possibility is doesn’t need to be prescribed.
January gets its name from Janus, the Roman god of gateways, doors, entryways. With January, there is invitation to step into something or out of something. An entry can also be an exit. Both sides of the passage have their place.
It could be on the couch within the page of the book
In the yard swinging the sword
Buried underneath the ground
In the forest singing the hymn
Receiving whisper to rest
Receiving whisper to quest
Perhaps the question really is…
What have you exiled from your permission?
What can you allow yourself to step into or out of
Without prescribing the shameful should
Holobiont
I learned of a new word recently and I liked it so much I made an instagram from my writing around it. Hark the Holobiont IG
Holobiont
; an assemblage of relationships that constitute a greater whole.
In the recognition of the spectrum of story, bug, river goddess and their varying possibility, we have a holobiont. Each piece of a part comes together to create a whole. It is through an assemblage that we find fullness. It is through pieces we recognize realities.
The problem I often had with organized religion as I got older was its desire to make parts wholes. Make a piece dogma. Categorize the singing cicada as right and the sleeping cicada as wrong.
Life is more dynamic than that. The entry can also be an exit. The subterranean can surface a hymn.
What if, in allowing the door to swing the way it needs to, in affirming the possibility on either side, we learn to see that worlds come from books, songs come from soil, and becoming occurs from sources both proximal and beyond?
The Kids Get It
Deb Wilenski is an advocate for early child outdoor exploration, particularly in forests and welcoming the unknown and disorientation they can yield. She works with an organization in the UK called Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination that state their vision as, creating a society of individuals and communities for whom creativity is such a valued and accessible part of their lives that it empowers them to become more fully themselves, more richly alive and more responsive to the challenging, difficult and beautiful world.
Back in 2010, Wilenski did a project with early elementary school children in the UK. Her and her team took the kids to a patch of forest every Monday morning for the first half of a school year.
From her research2 she posits that one of the ways children make lasting connection with landscape is through “imagination and invention” and she argues for children to have the “physical freedom to explore landscape” and “freedom of their imagination” to make meaning while doing so. In part of her research, she had the children imagine doors in the forests they were exploring. They asked author and wilderness explorer Robert McFarlane to look at the data and add his observation. He shared the following on the doors the children created:
“To young children, of course, nature is full of doors — it is nothing but doors really… What we bloodlessly call ‘place’ is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance.”
He continues,
“None of the doors these children drew had locks. The doors appeared and disappeared, but the doors always opened both ways.”
The doors, the place imagination allows itself to step into, always opens both ways.
Which stirs two things in me…
First:
let there be magic.
The magic can be on this side of the wardrobe or on that.
Can be a 17 year development underground or a summer of song
An upstream reprieve or an open ocean expedition.
But go find a door in the forest.
Let their be magic.
And secondly:
Let the door, what soul and spirit need, always open how it sees fit.
We need not put pressure on ourselves in terms of what the door must open into.
I may be stepping into Narnia, I may be stepping into my life
I may be beneath the dirt, I may be in summer song
I may need the stream, I may need the ocean.
But the door, what I can allow for myself, always opens both ways.
The paper of Deb Wilenski’s that most of my reference comes from ends with a passage from Susan Cooper’s book The Dark is Rising. It seems an apt passage to also start wrapping this piece up.
Will [name of the character in the story] set out down the white tunnel of the path, slowly, stepping high to keep the snow out of his boots. As soon as he moved away from the house, he felt very much alone, and he made himself go on without looking over his shoulder, because he knew that when he looked, he would find that the house had gone.
He accepted everything that came into his mind, without a thought or question, as if he were moving through a dream. But a deeper part of him knew that he was not dreaming. He was crystal-clear awake, in a Midwinter day that had been waiting for him to wake into it since the day he had been born, and, he somehow knew, for centuries before that. (Cooper, 1973, p. 31)
So in summation, and as some form of benediction, I offer the following:
What is possible for us
Is never a one way street
But a journeying between
The world of page and the world of our yard
The sleeping cicada
The singing cicada
The home stream
The ocean.
The whisper is reminding us
That where we need to be
Is okay
The doors in our midst
Can open both ways
And our life
Has the ability to decide
The way we most need to walk.
May we wake into the day,
the door,
the entry way,
that our bones and spirit ache for.
And may give ourselves the permission to walk through.
https://soundlab.cs.princeton.edu/listen/cicadas/
https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/forum/vol-56-issue-1/article-5754/