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Writer's pictureSara McFarland

The memory of ancient waters

Samhain 2024

New Moon


We arrive in these days of flooding and fear, of beauty and power, of longing and grief at the veil between the worlds. This liminal time when paradigms and ways of being are dying, when we are listening to the whispers of the ancients in the lengthening nights of the year. We are praying in the caves, singing to the rocks, moving our bodies across the land in memory of ancient movements of Earth, Water, Fire. We are still breathing cells of dinosaur and of just extinct ones in each breath. This mass extinction, this dying time, is felt ever more and even more poignant at this time of the year. And I am praying for a change, a dying of polarization and the binary of political parties and hate and exclusion and right and wrong. I am praying with every breath for peace. I am praying with every breath for us to remember our original instructions. I am offering my breath in prayers that we might remember Earth-centered consciousness and the long breath of Earth’s timeline. Loosening the hold of the human centric shortsightedness of these last thousand or so years.



One way I do this is by putting my body in landscapes of ancient beauty, where I feel and see signs of indigenous humans, the sandstone rock memory of oceans, the hugeness of desert and mountain and sky. I offer my body, my breath to story and song. And invite others with me to tell stories of a renewal, a remembering, a culture of regeneration with Earth. In the ritual space of community story, it is possible to dream together, to envision what might be possible. It is the place of the artist, the poet, the visionary, the mystic - of which we are all. It is a place of the deep imagination, where our roots drink from the ancient waters of memory and deep time. It is the place where Earth can whisper to and through us as we stand here, in the liminal between the old story and the new. Let us share our finest words, speak poems aloud, sing calling songs to the future ones and tell our dreams to one another. May the future ones remember us as those who dreamed with Earth, the new story.


A Vision by Wendell Berry


If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow-growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,

if we will make our seasons welcome here,

asking not too much of earth or heaven,

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

there, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides, fields and gardens

rich in the windows. The river will run

clear, as we will never know it,

and over it, birdsong like a canopy.

On the levels of the hills will be

green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields.

In their voices they will hear a music

risen out of the ground. They will take

nothing from the ground they will not return,

whatever the grief at parting. Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibility.


Images of the canyons of Moab, Utah by the author.

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