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Writer's pictureSara McFarland

The dead speak

1.9.2023, 1 day past the Blue full moon in pisces

Hazelnut, Nettle, Elder and Wind strengthening, dancing as I sing prayers at the Dolmen of ancestral peoples. I turn to go, but stop myself from ghosting after I’ve made my request to the ancient ones who have become the elementals, to help me to re-member that which was meant to be forgotten. On the Elder threshold of death and life, I catch my habit of escape and return to listen. I put my hands my forehead on on the capstone...


"Death, transformation, loss and grief. You must speak about the death and dying (that is happening now). Not with blame and guilt, but with humility, with humbleness and the ability-to-respond. Tell the stories of the dead, tell the stories of death, tell the stories of transformation. Of the dying that is afoot, that is always afoot. There is no life without death and dying, no feeding of life without someone’s death required. There is no hierarchy of purity and goodness, at some point everything is eaten.

It is dying into the death, that is Life that we have always worshiped. It is the great miracle mystery of transformation that is Holy. It is the surrender into the great mystery of life: That is the death and the dying. Remember, the cosmology, remember the cosmogony of your people before whiteness".


I am given a hazelnut, lying at the entrance to the grave. I give my thanks and promise to return with offerings of song and bread. I walk back to my car through the freshly harvested fields, the freshly turned soil and the absence marking the death of the body of the grain god of the neolithic farmers. Wish I knew the Gaelic word for thank you, but I whisper the German, Dankeschoen, as I return to this time and place...




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