BENDING REALITY

The Forest version of Schrödinger's Cat!

First of all a BIG warm thank you to all of you who responded (with kindness and reciprocal vulnerability) to The Scapegoat! I promise you all that I will return to that topic (but also take breathers from “deep dives”). Keep an eye out for an upcoming essay titled The Changeling!

I try to alternate pieces about heavy topics, such as recent essays about The Scapegoat or the Israel-Palestine conflict with uplifting essays about the mystical experiences of a Nordic Forest Witch. I hope I get the balance right (let me know in the comments!) but the stats show unequivocally that the heavier pieces get more opens and pull in more subscribers.

We live in a culture where (as a friend of mine once said jokingly): “If something does not appear on Instagram, it did not happen!” Playing the Devil’s Advocate, I will say that there “might well be something in that”, because Physics acknowledges “The Observer Effect”. In plain English this means that the presence of an observer changes the outcome of an experiment. For more information about this I direct you to the famous Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment.

In short: the famous physicist Erwin Schrödinger  came up with a thought experiment in 1935, in discussion with Einstein. A hypothetical cat, placed in a closed box, may be considered alive and dead at the same time. This is because its fate is connected to a random subatomic event which may or may not occur

In my own work (using shamanic techniques to facilitate powerful group ceremonies and rites of passage) I know without any doubt that being witnessed by others (with an open heart, unconditionally, soul-to-soul) brings immense healing and transformation. Any therapist knows that part of the healing is being witnessed, being listened to attentively, being seen properly.

In an era where every i-phone (mine is a smartphone) now has an excellent camera, it has become the norm to take large numbers of selfies. (I remember the days of a film roll having about 30 exposures. You could stretch this to 32 or 33 if you inserted the roll in a very economical way, but that was it. You would not even see the pictures until a photo-lab had processed them - and then there were all the red eyes!)

We see people with selfie sticks everywhere, pouting, grinning and twisting, showing their best angle to the camera. Choose the best one, pop a filter on it, and you are ready for Instagram!

“This really happened!”

The author drumming at Luttra Passage Grave - Picture taken by Husband

I often ask my husband to take some pictures of me, when we are visiting a Stone Age site, petroglyphs or rune stones here in Sweden. He used to “cut off my head”, but over the years his “eye” has improved. He now even remembers to put his glasses on before pressing the shutter! However, during a recent period of of prolonged solitude in the Forest, I had no photographer present but I felt a strong desire to shape-shift and bend reality. I wondered whether selfies could capture that process, or whether this phenomenon was “only happening in my own mind”. I was in for a surprise!

I am woman “of a certain age”, as they say. I am 57! I have discovered that photography is one way of interrupting temporality, moving the slider back and forth on the timeline, blurring boundaries between older and younger selves; also blurring the boundaries between me and and my surroundings. On a more advanced level, taking selfies can be a way of inviting otherworld beings into everyday reality and then catching glimpses of them on camera.

My selfie experiments started off with a desire to photograph Baba Yaga in the Forest, as she is one of my great role models, my Formidable Forest Mother, the Cosmic Mother in her Death Goddess manifestation. I wrote an entire essay dedicated to her: BABA YAGA.

I thought I that had captured myself (in the Forest, at the exact moment of sunset) as Baba Yaga but other people saw Baba Yaga as the ancient figure embracing me, in the “web” of roots with the small opening as her “eye”. Both perceptions are valid!

Next I took animal skulls out on the land and took black-and-white photographs of myself.

Though the picture above is a selfie and therefore shows me, it also shows The Other or Not Me. This is my mythical or fairy-tale self, where I become the Feral Forest Mother who inhabits Eternity with grace (and does not act on her urge to strike down loggers with a sudden bolt of lightning). In a sense, I am alive and dead at the same time, in a state of unity consciousness with all creatures, (this is the Forest version of Schrodinger’s Cat!)

I felt that these selfies captured something ephemeral and ineffable, something beyond words. I decided to (try to) push things even further.

One night I sat out on the cliffs (by the Baltic Sea) in a forested area. An extra layer of liminality was added by the sun slowly curving down in the Nordic night.

I set a strong intention to capture otherworld beings: tree spirits, trolls, elementals... Whoever was present and up for it! I told the spirits of the land (landvaettir) that I made myself available for this to occur. (Please note that I am not speaking of paranormal “ghost” photography, or tricks and props, only about a type of photography that briefly dissolves boundaries). I tried to merge with the trees around me and mirror them, meet them halfway.

Tree Spirit

As Sunna (the Sun) descended to sea level, the landscape became ever more “trollsk” (a Swedish word for magical, with some involvement from trolls). The elementals also came out to play: water spirits, the spirit of fire, beings of earth and air. Suddenly my hair was “on fire” in the light of the dying sun.

In one picture a mysterious woman appeared, made from strands of my hair and the contours of my face in profile: a “woman within a woman”! Can you see her? Can you see my face at the same time?

In other pictures (from earlier that same evening) I experienced time travel to the Viking Age (one of the periods I teach, as a teacher of Seiðr, and therefore know well). I was a woman standing on the shore, waiting for a longship to appear, waiting for my husband to return. Hoping that we would still recognise each other after an absence of half a year. I was younger and seven months pregnant with a child he did not (yet) know about. - Is he the same man I am married to today? Does history repeat itself? Who knows!

As a child (growing up in the pancake-flat Netherlands) I was perennially homesick for Scandinavia. I told everyone that I was going marry a Scandinavian man and live up north! Understandably everyone said: stop fantasizing, why would some Norwegian or Swedish man ever come looking for you? But he did come, when I was 19!

For decades I resisted taking selfies. I was more comfortable behind the camera, I was the family photographer. My husband and children were the subjects! While working on my current series of photographs, I am consciously releasing imprints from childhood. They involved being told I was “different, ugly, a stick insect with the crooked nose of a Roman emperor (people are creative in their descriptions, right?!), the girl who didn’t belong, who lived outside the norms of a seaside town in the Netherlands in the 70s and early 80s”.

I stake no claim at all to conventional beauty but I do truly feel that every body part is the gift from an ancestor. They have already passed over but I still have the privilege of breathing, laughing, kissing and of blood running through my veins. I have full mobility. I certainly have quirks but no disabilities. When I find faults with my own body (and by extension my bloodline and lineage), I also talk down (and drag down) my ancestors. That is not OK really. It is RUDE! To have a fully functioning human body is a HUGE gift and privilege! (And who can live up to the fake, filtered and manipulated type of looks we see on Instagram? I can’t!)

Therefore one further portal that opened was the one of acceptance and gratitude. This is me at 57. I know and deeply loved people who didn’t make it to 57. I still miss them and hold them close to my heart. I always remember them in my prayers and ceremonies.

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 amazing wildlife here!), please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!

Imelda, Forest House and Forest School, Sweden

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/

Twitter: @ImeldaAlmqvist