Trilogy

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

by Erin Holtz Braeckman

Recorded by author

Chorus

A choir holds within itself the signature of our shared story: to entrain. Despite our disparate voices, when sung together the body follows – heartbeats and breaths pooling into one song-well of coherence, echoing the crest and fall and thrum of the once-ocean that belonged to us all, still tasted in our tears. This is the estuary the birds make of the dawn. Within their chorus we daily surface to a ground swell already awaiting us, where we might remember our own small inlet of sound. And if we apprentice ourselves to this constellating, taking it up and turning over the size and shape of it like a rock weighing in our hand, then we will have placed our verse amid it to be healed, like a river stone returning to a stream.

 

Recorded by author

Initiate

I come to you as Owl. Reaching down out of the bardo of night, I drop my bidding at your feet – a hunted hare, slack on the snow in a quiver of starlight. You stop stride-stunned, look to the bough I have taken, more of shadow than of feather as our eyes meet. I have lain before you this pelt of all the riches I know under the blunt thorn of Winter. It is the song upon which I hang my bones on to tell you this: grief needs a vessel to pour into. So rebuild your shrines, if only in the silent vigil of the mind. Let loss keep you alive to the moment, moving one step ahead of you on your storied path. You left this eve on what you thought was a walk but now returns you as an initiate.

 

Recorded by author

Bring your songs

Where we are going, you will need to bring your songs. Not those you rehearse, but those you remember in the call and response of sunrise. The ones that come by way of the body where, in its rapt encounter with birdsong, the seership of reverence that once made honied altars of stone can still be heard. Gather them, like you do the dropped feathers and bleached antlers of dreams in the roundhouse of morning, for these are the bone myths and old names from the last ancestor whose heart could still bear the beauty of this world. Offer them, as the seed does to the Earth, for She will know the ritual of your open palm like She does Her own salt. Bless them, in that storied tongue from the borderlands that tastes of cry and croak and carol for, where we are going, this is what will heal the place you find yourself; this is how you will become animal again


Recorded by Carmen Rumbaut

As an observer of the sacred in the everyday, writer and educator, Erin Holtz Braeckman seeks to make “the embodied inner life” a daily spiritual practice. She holds a B.A., B.Ed., and an M.A. in English Literature (Public Texts), as well as certification in Spiritual Counselling and a background in World Religions. She is a part-time faculty member at Lakefield College School, a reiki practitioner, and an E-RYT with Yoga Alliance, teaching Hatha and Qigong out of her home business, The Village Yoga Studio, in Ontario, Canada. Erin is the author of three published books, and leads online programs that explore rewilding the Earth-based ancestral wisdom traditions of the Deep Feminine. When not with a book, her garden, or beloved family, Erin can be found leading her annual Sacred Travel retreat through the South of France. For more information, please visit womenswisdom.ca and thevillageyogastudio.ca

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.