And Jupiter today is “White Dove descends bearing a message of peace,” (hence reversal of gloomy Caesar fate, although his assassination on the Ides of March did precipitate the fall of the Roman Empire…)
(“the Ides of March once signified the new year, which meant celebrations and rejoicing”)
Yo Team – We are lucky enough to haveHélène Ramosjoin us again tonight for more end of Winter Journeying!!!!
Diving to prepare for Equinox, to retrieve our gifts, our allies, our grief metabolized into the arts of kinship….
Sun quintiles Mars, opening portals for “Oasis” in back-stage ancestral download – 8th house in Gemini realm of troubadour bards…
The Moon 25+ Aries be “a person bursting with gifts, more than they can hold…” translating the light from the new Moon in Pisces, just behind us (March 13th)…
For us all to give fresh liberating expression to old guiding Beauty with which we resonate…
square Pluto, all the redemptive tales of Underworld journeying…
11 year old Turkish shepherdess, Hamdu Sena Bilgin, who led her family’s goats through a snowstorm (used backpacks to carry newborn and mama goat) & all arrived home safely
and here, a nutrient posting from a young mythological ally- Sophie Strand (my radio guest this week!)
Orpheus surrounded by animals. Ancient Roman floor mosaic, from Palermo (Picture: Giovanni Dall’Orto)
Orpheus Guides Us Through Climate Grief
Solastalgia and the Earth as Wounded Beloved
Before you read this please listen, at the link provided at the bottom of this essay, or on Youtube, to the final song of the last member of the Kauai o’o bird species, singing to a mate that will never arrive. Listen to the plaintive lilt and questioning descent of the song. The void space that shows you the shape of the lover that no longer sings. Feel the vibration in your ears, the wave in your mind, and then the hunger in your body for the missing song.
This is the song of Orpheus. The song of the lover whose Eurydice is gone and will not return. This is the music that is raucous with frustration and longing, while also celebrating and delighting in the mate that no longer exists. Music that can convince the god of the underworld to relinquish the linearity of human time. Perhaps Orpheus can bring his wife back to life. It is important to note that in some of the myths, Orpheus does in fact succeed. What is important is not Eurydice’s resurrection so much as Orpheus’ ability to surrender himself to an act of grief that transforms time, opens the underworld, and finally drives other people so mad they must tear him apart and scatter his body as compost for the future springtime. His music catalyzes animal-like behavior that, ultimately, fertilizes and regenerates the land. His song serves three purposes: to memorialize, to mourn, and to agitate into relational action. When we think of Orpheus we think of sweet harp music. I invite you now to hear the howl, the bark, the moan, the keening bird trills. The polyphony of animals surrounding their beloved musician, resonating with his bottomless grief.
Solastalgia is a new term for a new type of heartbreak. The term was coined by scholar Glenn Albrecht to describe a form of emotional distress caused by environmental change. Homesickness for a home that no longer exists. Eurydice is the green slick of glaciers already melted, the old-growth forests chewed into sawdust. Eurydice is the crumbling coastline of Louisiana. In her incredible book Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway describes a Bee Orchid that’s flower is designed to look like a specific female bee to attract a male bee pollinator. That bee is now extinct. And yet the flower, increasingly unable to reproduce due to its missing bee, remains as a type of visual mourning song, to the lost bee. As more and more species disappear every day, their relations also fray. None of us are disconnected. Each death opens up a wound. And a song. Haraway writes, “Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing. Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think”. If we do not acknowledge the massive, system wide losses that are opening up across the landscape, we will become frozen. We will not be able to release and surrender like Orpheus, to the song that could create new, complicated connection. Haraway urges, “There is no avoiding the necessity of the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning. This work is not opposed to practical action, rather it is the foundation of any sustainable and informed response.”
The death of Eurydice transforms Orpheus into an underworld traveler who brings subterranean wisdom back into the daylight. But most importantly, it brings him into greater relationship with the world itself. With the dark of the soil, and the piercing song of those who have also lost and mourned. Suddenly everything is alive. Orpheus is famous for having made even the stones dance with his music. The secret to this, I think, is that he knew the stones were alive. They just needed the right rhythm. His wounding opened up a space for cocreating with a more-than-human world (to steal the phrase from David Abram). How can we, men and women alike, acknowledge the lost songs that haunt our days? How can we, like the bee orchid, begin to flower with new creative approaches to becoming and composting and reconnecting with the more-than-human world?
Orpheus asks men to remember to sing. He asks them to acknowledge all the lost songs. He asks them to go to the bee orchid and to ask carefully and respectfully, “How can I honor the pollinators that no longer arrive?” He goes to the Kauai o’o bird and he sings back as the lost beloved.”
Youtube reference:
Duet with a Lonely Bird (Kauai o’o) by William Benckert
You hear the last member of the of the Kauai o’o bird species, calling for a mate that will never come. The music was created through comping keyboard to the sound of a calling Kauai o’o bird. The Kauai o’o’s melodic, astoundingly beautiful call and heartbreaking story is the inspiration behind the music.
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