ANOTHER SWAN SKELETON

A brief visit to the Land of the Dead

The tender Wilding in grief and the loving work of living. I honor your honoring. You do such work… such work raw and in the open . I know many of us feel the answering force rise in ourselves , drawn forward by your devotion. -Robina D’Arcy-Fox

Deaths bookend Life but Life also bookends (or brackets) Death.

Life and Death are primordial sacred twins. Like Day and Night, or Sunrise and Sunset, they are engaged in a mysterious dance of cosmic forces.

The day I discovered that I was pregnant with our third child was also the day that I heard that my father had cancer. He lived for five more years and our youngest son has (a few) memories of him.

My mother nearly died giving birth to me. I sometimes wonder about the dynamic that the near death experience set in motion between us. (I will explore that in a future essay).

Monday was the second anniversary of my mother’s death. I wanted to mark this occasion in a powerful way and step well outside my comfort zone, do ceremony in one of the wildest and most inaccessible places I know (but without having another serious accident!)

First my sons and I performed a small ceremony, by the Cairn of the Bone Mother, here on our own land. We shared favourite memories of Oma (Grandma) and we all spoke some words directly to her, in both Dutch and English.

For myself I had a strong vision of utiseta (Old Norse for sitting out in a place of power to receive guidance from spirits, deities or ancestors). I decided I would sit out between sunset and sunrise, in a place that does not belong to human beings. I wanted to step into the Land of the Dead briefly, at least with one foot. My mother loved birds!

In the archipelago on our doorstep there is an island I call Bird Island. (It has a proper Swedish name on the nautical map, but I have no desire to “direct more human traffic there”!) It is one of my favourite places on Earth. It is ruled by birds and belongs to birds. Human beings feel like brief and insignificant visitors there. You can only get there using private transport: meaning a kayak or a small boat.

I am not known for my kayaking skills (especially in open sea!) and one arm is still not at full strength so I hired a skipper I trust. I asked my husband to take me there in his little boat. He was up for the task, even though it was going to cost him a night’s sleep (now that is true love, right?)

We arrived at the island well before sunset. It is difficult to make a safe landfall there, due to cliffs, rocks, eddies and shallow water. The Skipper kept saying: There are no guaranties! To do this we need a balmy summer night without any wind or big waves. But I absolutely promise to take you to some uninhabited island where you can be alone and sit out. I petitioned the weather spirits, ancestors and spirits of place. I asked my mother for a blessing from the Other World.

When we arrived, the weather was perfect, like a dream or a scene from a movie. We had no trouble casting out our anchor and climbing ashore. From afar we saw a bird skeleton suspended on a natural “shelf” carved (by erosion) into a cliff. Look, there is another swan skeleton for you! Said Husband. More swan bone flutes?! A gull, more like, I replied.

But no, it was indeed an almost complete swan skeleton. The skull had long dropped into the sea and washed away (we spent time cliff-combing, looking for it). What an extraordinary gift! It is important to note that found the previous swan skeleton only weeks after my mother’s death, in 2022 (see picture below).

2022

My Husband returned to the boat and left me alone on the island while the cloak of darkness descended. The guidance I had received (in advance) from my spirit allies was to contemplate deeply that we are surrounded by death all the time. We walk on the bones of our ancestors (human, animal, plant etc.) Other beings (life forms) die daily so we can eat (this true even for vegans!) Water is a Memory Keeper so even the sea is awash with ancestral memories, including the memories of other times and other species. In the Forest, animal bones and skulls serve as a source of calcium for other animals. Rotting tree stumps become insect hotels. This in term attracts specific birds to the area. Animals hunt other animals in a cosmic dance of predator and prey. In our local area two wolf packs are currently failing to keep the deer population under control. “Too little death” creates serious problems, dangerous imbalances in the eco system!

I watched the sun curve down slowly and eventually drop below the horizon. This is Scandinavia, where Nordic twilight lasts a small eternity! My painter’s eye noted how the colours changed. Different palettes occurred until Darkness finally came. And about two hours before sunrise colour started returning to the world…

At some point during the night, the trustworthy Skipper came to get me. According to the forecast, the weather might change. I am going to take you to a more sheltered place, a nearby lagoon, but I guarantee I will bring you back here, well before sunrise!

We scrambled off Bird Island and floated around this beautiful nearby lagoon. I “inhaled” the Return of the Stars, another Big Moment. I had not seen the stars for three months (because of the Midnight Sun!) Ursa Major (The Great Bear) was splendid, twinkling above a nearby island. However, another constellation was directly overhead, positioned right on the Milky Way. Can you guess which one? Yes, it was Cygnus, the Swan!

Husband slept for a while. I listened to the songs of the stars, blended with the murmur of inky waters. This is a wisdom teaching: the dead do not speak but they murmur and whisper, all the time. (Inuit people used to believe that the stars whistled loudly whenever a shaman was born!)

I observed how the Familiar became “Other”. The Known touched the Unknown. The reflections of trees danced by starlight in the water. I was right at the threshold. A gossamer bridge between the worlds appeared and briefly granted access. (But don’t go too far, because you will not be able to return!) The Land of Fairy Tales opened its portals and I could see trolls going about their business while Giants slumbered in the rocks and cliffs.

We think of twilight or mist-walking as liminal experiences, but really our entire life is bathed in liminality. Just think of the way our skin marks the boundary where Earth and Air (or Water) and other people start. The Sun has many manifestations in a given day. The Moon models all these different phases (and faces) in an even more obvious way.

This was the night of the crescent new moon, by the way. I looked for a "luminous fingernail” rising briefly above the horizon - but no, I couldn’t see Máni.

The entire night was dedicated to my mother, but also to my own death. To knowing and accepting that one day I will follow in her footsteps and enter the Land of the Ancestors.

The magnificent star constellation Cygnus whistled and promised me cygnets! I had not yet seen any this year (though I did swim with swans recently, in the lake by our house). As I watched the night sky rotating slowly overhead, Finnish words and ancestral beliefs came to mind. (I spent two years learning Finnish, in my relentless greed for accessing ever more Nordic knowledge!)

Finnish people used to believe that our world was created from a bird’s egg. There are different variants but in the Kalevala* one bird lays seven eggs (six of gold and one made of iron).

*The Kalevala is a 19th-century compilation of epic poetry, compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology.

The spinning (or slow whirling) of the stars was believed to be caused by the sky dome rotating around the Pole Star. This spinning action creates a whirl at the North Pole, a vortex if you like. This vortex acted as a portal and road to the Land of the Dead: Tuonela. (Some of you will be familiar with the famous piece of music by Jean Sibelius: Tuonelan Joutsen - The Swan of Tuonela!)

At the “edges” (meaning where the sky dome meets the Earth) was a mythical place called Lintukoto, “the Home of Birds”. The Milky Way is called Linnunrata, “The Pathway of Birds”. Birds were believed to follow the Milky Way to reach Lintukoto and return to our (everyday) world. (Modern scientists have demonstrated the birds really do navigate by the Milky Way on their great migrations!)

Birds were also believed to deliver a human soul to the body, in the moment a baby is born. They collected the soul again in the moment of death. In some locations people kept a wooden bird statue in the bedroom, to prevent their soul from escaping (and not returning!) during sleep. This “Soul Bird” protected the human soul from getting lost in the Land of Dreams. Source

During my ceremonial night mother did not speak to me in a regular human way. She did not pass a message in words. However, she did send me an(other) swan from the Land of the Dead (Tuonelan Joutsen!) and she was all around me, in the inky mirror of the sea, the song of the stars, the whispers of the trees, the bird calls at sunrise.

On the way back to our forest harbour, we encountered a swan couple with three cygnets. Star constellation Cygnus had kept her promise! We also watched a cluster of nine swans swimming our to open sea. Nine is a very magical number in the Northern Tradition! The boundary between sea and sky had briefly dissolved, so those nine swans appeared weightless. They looked very otherworldly and mythical.

Oma knows the secrets of the universe now. Something I can only aspire too. Very briefly I stepped into the Land of the Dead, with one foot only. This essay describes some things I learned (but of course there was much more). And thank you Robina for the quote!

I try (but sometimes fail) to get out one essay a week, due to travel, international teaching commitments and family care responsibilities (our family lives with Alzheimer’s and I have written several posts about that). If you would like to see regular posts about about sacred art, Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch (and of course short videos of all the wildlife here!), please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!

Imelda, Forest House and Forest School, Sweden

Ceremony for the swan who gave me two swan bone flutes

BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST

Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) was published in June 2022.

The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.

Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.

Imelda is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings, which can be watched any time.

Website:                           

http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/

YouTube Channel:             youtube.com/user/imeldaalmqvist

Online School:                  https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/

Facebook:                            https://www.facebook.com/imelda.almqvist/

Instagram:                          https://www.instagram.com/almqvistimelda/