My favourite names for this moon are Wolf Moon (pagan); Great Spirit Moon, New Winter Moon (Anishinaabemowin), Someone’s Ears are Freezing Moon (Oneida) as reported by our global information source, Google.
However, it’s an unusually warm, many would say unnaturally warm, winter. No-one’s ears will freeze in much of Canada this January.
Which is a perfect seque into my topic for this blog. I have a piece forthcoming in the next issue of the wonderful online literary journal, Dark Matter Women Witnessing. This issue will go live Friday, January 12, 2024.
Dark Matter: publishes writing and visual art created in response to an age of massive species loss and ecological collapse. It is a home for dreams, visions, and communications with the non-human world—especially those with messages for how we might begin to heal our broken relationship to the earth.
The issue my piece will be in is titled: Bodies In (and Out of) Place: Part 2. In preparation for each issue Lise Weil, the editor and founder of Dark Matter, holds a zoom conversation with those contributors who are available at the scheduled time. She then edits this conversation into an editorial.
This issue will contain powerful essays, poems and images. I hope you will dip into it when it is available, not for my sake but for our sake. The creators are writers, artists, activists, and people living in specific geo-political and geo-cultural situations.
To whet your appetite I have created a sort of ekphrastic piece with quotations from the submission of each author who participated in our zoom conversation.
There will also be amazing visual art! Enjoy.
THE KINDOM die Gestalt, the form, Diane Raptosh In stillness is the wild stuff… World in its robes, the universe circular I came to just sit here being the kindom. My Body—An Eco-terrain, Carole Harmon tick in the night how my lover clung to me four shooting stars My blood is a river that transports food supplies and medicines wherever they are needed. My journey is guided by herbalists and homeopaths, inspired by shamans, witches, and wise women of old. Some maps were prepared in ancient times, some are charts of routes only recently discovered…I negotiate with the world within. It is populated by beings who live in ever-fluctuating relationship with my blood and organs, nervous system and brain. To them I am home. I am their colony. Living on the Edge of Devastation, Alex Eisenberg I need to keep remembering. I need to keep associating—finding association and kinship—and staying in living, dynamic relationship with this place and the world at large. Even if it is no longer what it was or what I want it to be; even if more of it is going to be lost. If I don’t do this I might as well have died with the forest. Gardening in the Motor City, Elena Herrada I became a gardener out of rage… The man said: What do you do to heal yourself? I had no answer. I was a single parent, a union representative for SEIU and was engaged in battle at every turn: ex-husbands, bosses, grievances. I said sometimes I garden. I read. The stranger told me to garden as if my life depended upon it. Refugia, Yehudit Silverman The night of a thousand stars won’t keep you safe as you run on desert sands… There must be a place a refugia where both of us are welcome. Too Much Sky, Kristin Flynz The morning after my mother’s wake…I watched the sun rise over the distant hills with fiery insistence, pushing over the horizon like a baby crowning between his mother’s thighs until at last, he is free—visible and fully formed: I am here! Such as It Is, Joe-AnnHart “Nature’s not all birdsong and blossoms,” Liliana said. “It’s a violent game of chance.”… We all looked out the window, a reconstructed woodland of soul-breaking beauty. “Welcome to the world, Robin,” I said. “Such as it is.” pelicans in exile, nan seymour …we saw the sea diminish until the tide did not return, we witnessed the end of our protection… Even as we teeter on this precipice of unfathomable harm, our movement to restore and replenish the [Great Salt] Lake is swelling. We are learning to love more robustly and visibly. We are transcending our tired divides. We are gathering on behalf of everything that matters. What it Takes to Breach, Michaela Harrison Whalesong glitters the endless saline solution with astral technology through notes both audible and beyond my capacity to perceive with my ears; only my soul can hear the deeper utterings. Whales in the Desert, Nancy Windheart I learned that her name is Ethyl. Short for Polyethylene. She is life-sized, 82 feet long, and is made entirely from recycled plastic. Her creators hope to raise awareness and inspire action around the plastic pollution crisis in our oceans and on our planet… I’ve been meditating with plastic as I meditate with Ethyl, and I have noticed that my own relationship with plastic has changed. Rather than viewing it as something “bad”, a problem to be gotten rid of, or trash to be disposed of, without consciousness or life-force, I recognize that plastic, too, has an energetic frequency, an essence, a vibration that I can be in relationship with, in some kind of way. Blow, Lise Weil A Somali friend of mine told me the most horrible moment of her childhood—and she lived through mass killings—was the first time she looked at herself in the mirror. She was five or six years old. It was not that she didn’t like what she saw. It was that until that moment she had lived in the world as a purely sentient being. Now, she said, all was localized perception. Then, it was her whole body that perceived and the world was completely alive. Whole-body perception. Here, with the whales, I had an inkling of what she was talking about. To Love What We Love, Deena Metzger Loving with our whole being is what I am thinking about tonight as the moon rises…When is devotion to loving the most profound political act?… This is the task: to remain engaged and compassionate in the face of brutality, cruelty and overwhelming circumstances we are afraid we cannot meet…When it seems impossible to bear it or go on, to turn rather toward loving fiercely: fervent, immoderate, impassioned love for earth, for our land, for our people, for the moon.
Carole, I read your entire piece in the online journal and it was absolutely exceptional. You made me imagine my own body in a way I hadn't thought of before. Brilliant!
"No-one’s ears will freeze in much of Canada this January."
On the contrary, I think *everyone's* ears will freeze in much of Canada this January! But there's no reason why your previous prognostication should be any better than Environment Canada's ;-)