28 Aug WHAT WILL COME WHEN THE WILLOW RECEDES INTO OBLIVION?

As we experience acute climate crisis and face cascading species collapse, have you imagined your own extinction? The annihilation of your language, culture, kin…and species? Here is my imaginal wander in Neolithic Europe at the moment of the Indo-European “Kurgan Horde” invasions which, according to eminent feminist archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, destroyed the prehistoric culture of the goddess and instituted patriarchal norms of domination that are the foundation of our “civilization.”

Early autumn, I went to the stream to collect willow for weaving. The yellow leaves had fallen but first frost had not yet tarnished all the summer sunshine they held within them. I collected armfuls of gold from the ground to make a cushion for my baby to rest on while I worked. I unwound the binding that held her small body against my back. The breeze hit the sweat between my shoulder blades, sending a shiver through me.

I laid my child down in the leaves and began cutting thin saplings with my stone knife. My fingers slipped dexterously over the smooth fibers, manually assessing the bare leaf nodules on each piece. Then I arranged long bundles on the riverbank.

The steady song of the creek, the must of willow, and the angle of the sun. Sempiternal. I wondered, “Are the hands working my own? Are they my mother’s? Or her mother’s?”

Wet sand squished between my toes. I looked down and a stone in the water caught my eye. I picked it up and saw the form of the Life-giver, the Life-taker, the Mother, her voluptuous breasts, belly, buttocks, and vulva. I thought of my own mother; she went back to the dirt last winter.

Rhythmic thunder came up from the ground and broke my reverie. “Was it the heartbeat of a subterranean dragoness? Was Mother coming for me now?” I placed the stone and my knife in my basket on the bank and went to gather my child.

The rumble grew stronger as I tied her to my back. Strange men shouting unfamiliar sounds, astride large antler-less stags, descended swiftly into the canyon, stirring up clouds of dust.

The stampede crushed my body. The hordes raped and subjugated my kin. Their inferior ceramics shattered our intricate designs of spirals, meanders and chevrons. Their foreign tongues obliterated our mantric prayers to the Goddess which had evolved from the cluck and coo between mother and child.

But they never eradicated the wisdom of the stream, and the willow, and the stone, and the clay. If you listen with tender ears and touch with tender fingertips, they will speak in long lost languages and they will teach you how to reassemble life.

But what will come if the rivers run dry and the willow recedes into oblivion?

– Catherine Brooks, 2022