image: bridge to lake
pucksong
You know how the night sometimes sings the moon full and ripe? He was like that. He carried night deep into his feet. He didn’t even know it. He had holes in his moccasins, outworn from summers of walking up and down Black River and Potawatomi Falls. He spent those summers in solitude, for the most part, occasionally hangin’ with friends near the great lake, skinny dippin’ and jumpin’ off old bridges.
Image: black river Potawatomi falls
Eros came again. I didn’t expect him to find me here. Let me tell you, I was already surprised to return to my homeland. The ancestors told me to come home to listen to the stories. I didn’t expect them to blow me to him.
It is wild and unpredictable land. Old growth forests with birch, oak and pine, thimbleberry and trillium. Shadows are dense like the forest. The land speaks in many tones about old immigrants, sophisticated copper culture tribes and the little people who seduced young maidens into woods, eventually turning them mossy green.
Eros invited me to the local coop market.
He was there. He offered me wild burdock and watercress soup after the manager offered me a job. I call him Puck because he smells like grapes. I imagine that his toes resemble the hooves of Pan. He looks like Huckleberry Finn and his eyes sparkle with timeless earth energy.
He is twenty-three. I’m thirty-four. If we were in the West beneath an expansive sky, it wouldn’t matter. Here, shadows like to gossip and words are not often kind. I asked him how his soul was. He looked at me curiously. “Soul?” He asked. No one had asked him about his soul before. His eyes sparkled brighter and he said, “You know, I’m not sure. I’ve been walking near the lake for a long time by myself. I sometimes feel like the stones.”
We spent five hours at lake Superior. We didn’t speak much; we related and interacted with nature as she expressed herself to us in the moment. It was a treat, an unknown wander along rocky smooth shores dotted with the enchanting creations of inspired nature artists. Do you know the work of Andy Goldsworthy? The portion of lake we explored is full of unassuming and complex stone and stick sculptures. I said, “We are at the edge of America”. He smiled and took me into the gnarled, mossy trees to follow eagles. I gave him a handful of moss to smell and I couldn’t help but steal a kiss from his cheek. The other time, he smelled so much like grapes that I thought I might eat him. I wanted to bury my head in his neck, but I was afraid I would scare him away. I don’t think he’d met Cernunnos yet. I’m certain that he will.
Image: Lake Superior
We share a listening language, the kind where words come slowly and from underneath our breathing. I’m not making it up.
We made mandala art in the sand, climbed banks of clay and wandered high into cliffs through birch and pine trees. Eagles flew in the sky and waves lulled stories onto the shore. The stones sang loudly. We hid inside a clay cave with a troll face etched upon it.
We wandered deeper into woods and were startled by a gigantic buck. We looked above and discovered a nest hanging over our heads. He gave it to me and said, “For protection, just in case.”
He gathers wild watercress for me and offers me water from his well. He thinks I have cast a spell on him and I feel he has cast one on me. I feel I’m too old for enchantment, but Puck doesn’t seem to think so.
Today he said, “Do you ever know the words before they are spoken? I think you have to listen more deeply, and they come up from the depth like roots seeking sky.” I have never been with one who listens as I do. It gives me permission to listen even more. It makes me feel happy. It makes me feel curious. It makes me feel desire.
He drifts with the wind more than I. When he is in the wind, I stay rooted to trees. I don’t understand how my soul knows this manboy, or if it is simply a silly girl dream. He gave me eagle feathers and told me to hang them by my pillow, so that my dreams become more true.
I came to this land to find my sleeping teenage voice from the past. I discovered that she has been in the belly of a wolf, asleep for one thousand years. Only the ancestors could have tricked me like this. I never knew that she was waiting for a kiss from Puck, to help words to melt and pour out of her throat.
I caught his smile out of the corner of my eye. I liked the feel of his fingers running through mine turning from water to silk and into sand. I liked touching his neck with the curl of my tiniest finger and watching him flush when I kissed it. We pushed our hands together to see what heat and fire feels like between us. We felt it go from me to him and down into the tree roots beneath us.
At the lake, I found a tree upon which to sit. It was bent like an arrow pointed toward the waves. I have never straddled a pine tree before. I lay my belly upon the tree I now call grandfather. It has strange branches covered in moss that dangle to the sand. I giggled when I felt the tree breathe. I asked my manboy to try it, but he said, ‘No, it is your tree.” He climbed on a cliff above me and I noticed he was watching me watching the waves turn the lake into a sea.
Further down the beach we approached another tree, growing from a stone crooked like the first one. She was smaller. He said, “This is my tree.” He spent time alone while I made a circle of stones in the sand. I noticed he made a picture with birch bark and stones upon his tree after he left.
The stones sang louder yesterday. Not because I was lost in Eros. They sang louder because somehow he draws form out of me that expresses itself in soul words that carry songlines from a dreamtime place. He draws the silent beings louder into form because he sees and feels the world the way I do. It brings reality and I into direct contact with one another.
He dreamed me into his dream two nights ago. He said I had decided to become a milk maiden and had left to milk cows. In the dream, I asked him if he wanted to come and he said he couldn’t leave the forest. His heart was sad, he said, when he saw me go. But then yesterday he had a new dream. In the dream we were touching hands in the store, feeling the energy pass between us. Another man came in the store (the one with the scorpion sting who works across the street). The man came carrying a pizza and Puck tells me, “He brought you hydrogenated oils. I know that you won’t go to him. He won’t know how to nourish you.” Two nights ago, he said, “We are the new ones the world is waiting for. We are the ones that will bring change.“ Not he and I, but us, our collective tribe of young people coming and growing the dream awake. I know it is true but I don’t often have the courage to speak my soul this way. I know that I am one of the new ones regardless of the age of my body. I don’t yet know what it means except that my soul is a dancing star and I know how to discern the dancing stars from the broken ones.
My soul told me that I’m unable to dig any further into the past. I have hit the bottom of the plateau and there is no more digging to be done. I found deer bones and the sleeping maiden. I kissed her. I am the knight that she seeks and this is attracting knights to me. They, like me, are shy and clumsy. They are like deer learning how to leap. It is difficult to walk with a masculine soul. Awkward even. We were clumsy upon the sand. I saw his man ness and he said, “Bite my neck. Now!” And he giggled. I bit him and he became afraid and said, “I’m sorry, Red, I’m not sure I can share this with you now. I’m trying. I’m confused. I’m learning about who I am. I’m afraid of this current. I don’t want to get lost.” And he again became sad.
Timing is awkward. My personality wants it now. My soul isn’t ripe in that way, and neither is his, or it would flow like wine between us. It isn’t flowing like wine yet. Puck is teaching me about patience. It flows like lake superior water. It washes on sand and it retreats back into itself. Back and forth, in and out, inhale and exhale, ebb and flow. In these moments I remember where I am. I am Stacey and he is Ryan. I am thirty-four and he is twenty-three. I am still young but I have lived some things more than he. However, in the language of the soul and desire and love, I feel completely brand new. I have no idea what I am doing and feel like a girl again. And then I remember that I’m a woman and I remember, that I can hold the space for this to see what emerges
He says, “I need to know my “no”, so that I can know my “yes.” I’m curious that he speaks this language which is so completely familiar to me, and which so few speak. Yes, we all need to know our no so that we can know our yes. How wise.
I must climb out of the pit I’ve been in. I can’t continue to carry the old bone stories when a new song is waiting to express itself. From here it starts and grows anew, like a brand new wave. It is time to give my ghosts permission to land and rest and sleep. They need to feel rested now. They need to feel the soil and listen to the song of the stones. There is no more to say about my old story. It is time to begin walking the songline. What I appreciate in my new and unusual friend is that his soul language is honest. He, like me, is learning how to be a human being. I know that it is more awkward and dense bringing light and love into form. I know too that whatever this connection, however brief or whatever nature it takes, it is as simple and nourishing as the bowl of brown rice he offered me today.
He called me and said, “I smell you, I feel you are near. Will you come and visit me at work?” And when I came later, he blushed. It was the first time fire passed between us without using our hands. He caught it in his manbody and it breathed his manness awake. He blushed again and said that he has not felt himself alive and awake for a long time. And then he said it simply, “yes.”
I feel a sense of idealism and romanticism and yet I take it also as a medicine gift. I think that he is sharing the voice of the masculine soul. He is letting me know that the masculine soul is close, but it is not quite ready. I will be patient. I won’t try to heal his personality or make him change, but I will take his medicine language to heart. I know the masculine is questing for me. He has finally glimpsed me. I don’t mean in this boy, I mean, the masculine archetype sees me now. He wants me but he still wants to love himself a little bit more. He wants to prove to himself that he is worthy of the feminine radiance he has glimpsed. He wants to see himself as a mangod just as my feminine sees herself as a womangoddess.
Is this the gift of love? Do I have the ability to discern personality from soul and walk clearly between the two? Perhaps the soul wants to offer me a glimpse of what is possible because I have lived so long in the wastelands and underworld lands. Is my quest really about love? There is a personality and there is a soul of love. I am in love with the soul of love. The personality distorts the soul sometimes. He kissed my cheek with his personality. He tells me he has desire for me, and at the same time, he is afraid of desire. He doesn’t know this landscape of the heart. He knows he is confused by what is coming alive and he doesn’t know which way to go. I like remembering the language of my soul when it can be shared with another human being. We seem to be drawing forth the essence of something deeper, something hidden. He told me last night he has been hardened and closed for a long time. He has never been opened before. He doesn’t know what is happening. He tells me that he knows the ice the best, and has not yet been melted by sun.
Yesterday we fell into a new rhythm together with the waves. He has shown me that he knows how to fly. I want to know if he can walk with the trees and stay in his body.
I’m patient for the masculine soul to find me. I’m patient for the day he will come and remain true to his word. I can’t project this desire onto every man I meet. I know it is there living in the subterranean place because that is where I have been. But like me, he doesn’t know how to find me. Like me, he has been lost. Like me, he is afraid. He wishes to be seen, and he doesn’t know how to move into light. He still likes shadows because they seem safer. If he is to wander into the depths of the feminine terrain, he thinks the shadows are the way in. I don’t know if we will know one another when we meet again in the light of day. Or maybe it is just this, this simple innocent dance near waves and mandalas of stones and sand, drift wood and eagle feathers. Maybe we come to know one another by the simple act of being while nature re-wilds us back into ourselves whole again.
Puck robingoodfellow
You know how I knew he was a virgin? I can’t say that it had anything to do with the way he carried night. You’d have thought he’d made love to a lot of other women.
It was the day we decided to hang out and head to the lake to discover caves and carved out clay cliffs. We noticed, well, he noticed the eagles circling overhead. He pointed them to me and rested his chin, for a moment on my shoulder. He stood strong behind me, his bare toes digging into sand and stone. I had that sensation you have when touched by something new. It was day, but it was the first time I’d met night so early. His moon felt brand new.
I turned to kiss him, but he’d already turned the other way, noticing the crawdads washing upon the shore, quick to point out their blue claws.
He blushed, the way young lovers do, when I reached toward him.
I didn’t push. I learned quick that it is good to hold a stone carefully and let it go after you see the beauty.
He had this thing about building fire. He wanted to grow a hearth between us, he said, for sharing stories. We gathered twigs in the rain and I watched as he poked them into sand, architecting an octagonal structure. His bare toes reaching into sand as he dug knee deep for roots in the dark. I liked the way he stretched. He reminded me of a cat.
I don’t know if you know when you meet a friend who touches you through your skin and passes night into you. I’m not sure how it happens that a once new moon turns pregnant in your belly with wanting. I’m not sure why it is that his touch generated lightening.
We didn’t say much. We gathered sticks and twigs and roots and built fire together. We sat quietly listening to the water push and pull back to the center. It was once and only once, but when it hit, I was terrified. His hand rested on my thigh and he asked what I wanted more than anything, to create in the world.
And then he took it off but the question stayed there, imprinted in my body. We played the word game, alternating back and forth saying a word and giving room for plenty of space in between. Fire. Heat. Touch. Yes. No. Why. Desire. Deep. Wet. Waves. Moon. Night. Black. Heat. Touch. Yes. Me. When. Tonight. No. Wait. Longing. Spirit. Creation. Birth. Death. Spiral.
I don’t understand how it happened, but I actually begged for him to kiss me. I leaned forward and for the first time, he didn’t move away. His breath was hot, or maybe it was the heat from the fire. We stopped breathing for a moment. He looked at me and laughed. It was a trickster grin. The kind that knows precisely what it wants. I saw for the first time, Cernunnos. It turned me into a maiden of spring despite the fact that it was winter.
Image: Looking for Cernunnos, Amanda Clark
Why would I be terrified of a 23 year old boy? I’d experimented and been in long-term relationships and yet something about this one, this virginal moonchild man boy, quickened me.
And then I begged him. “Please kiss me.”
“Why?”
Playful imp, I thought. “Because I want you.”
When it hit, it hit with accuracy. Passion like that comes from the momentum of waves. I could barely breathe. It dove into me hard. His tongue searched for me. I could barely keep up the dance. He whispered, “I want to know what kind of earth you come from.”
His roots descended the way they do, young and eager for nourishing ground. They dug deep into her knees, her shins, her thighs. At night, as she slept, she felt them reaching, longing, digging, and separating. She felt as though he’d turned her into a magnificent tree, her branches extending to sun and moon, earth and sky, water and fire, breath and cave. And when they parted, she longed for him, as though a root had been taken from her, the kind of root that had previously grown a new flower on a branch, now empty and filled with longing. Her longing had a word: spirit.
Image: Jade Goblin
When she went outside the next day a mandala had been laid in her yard. Sumac, acorn and singing stones. In the center, a delicate nest.