Tag Archives: Sylvia Linsteadt

Matrilineal Magic

21 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in Earth Medicine, Inspirations

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kabyle woman weaving

A Kabyle woman weaving Algeria 1973 (credit National Geographic)

There is a thread that runs through the long tapestry of time. A line that connects us back to our grandmothers and great grandmothers and the lineage of womyn who came before. On a loom, each downward string is called a warp. Like time, these warp strings are the backbone that holds the weaving in place. But it is the generations of mothers and aunties, the horizontal weft woven in-between, that fill the loom with life. It is these weft strings, the threads of connection that travels across the space and time, that pulls everything together.

It is from this continuing weft of women that we each come into life.

Science has shown all the follicles (unripened eggs) a woman will ever produce are already present in her body when she is in the womb. The spark that is you was born long before you came into the world. And if you quiet your blood, you can feel a flame that reach back even further. Inside every one of us is a long and often unsung history of women. Fire makers and clay shapers, priestesses and caretakers, those who walked long miles and withstood many centuries of silence. Those who kept the old songs alive.

Asia basket Gila

Photo by Juliet Blankespoor

Connecting back into the power-held lineage of our female ancestors isn’t simply a flight of fancy or genealogical curiosity. To remember the women that came become you, and call upon that distinctly matrilineal magic, is an act of deep reclamation. By calling back we continue the weaving begun from the fingers of our female ancestors, that very first spindle-spun weft.

Long before the tides of Christianity swept across southeastern Europe, there was an ancient Matrilineal network of cultures called the “Old Europeans.” Matrifocal (woman-mother orientated) civilizations with sacred script and professional ceramicists. Cultures that planted seeds and built temples several stories high. Peoples that wove sophisticated lives and prayed to the Goddess(es). According to archeologist Marija Gimbutas, the threads of these largely egalitarian, peaceful and female-centric societies stretched across much of what we now call Europe.

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A fired clay Cucuteni figure, from 4050-3900 B.C (credit Marius Amarie)

Archeologically speaking, the memories of these cultures are found in whispers. Empty temples and old village sites filled with ritual ceramics. The famous Venus figures and surviving burials. Each unearthed item, a thread that help us to understand what it would have been like to live in a culture in which women held the chalice of their own power.

In our own blood, however, the remembrances of this culture still rings like a temple bell. We can feel it when we pick berries with our fingers or when we are kept up late at night by the moon. We feel it when we dance, uninhibited and when we sing together. We feel it every time we plait back our hair and squat low to build a fire on the ground. We feel it in the fierceness that surges up through us and the bone-deep anger as well. We feel it when we look in the mirror and see a new wrinkle a gray hair, and we think “Good.” When we welcome growing older because we know a Crone is a woman who has come into her power.

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Though it has been a long time since matrilineal cultures flourished in our world, everything moves in a circle, like the round of a harvesting song or the curve of a well-coiled vase. A world in which we value the power of blood that flows with the moon as much as blood that flows from a wound has already seen its wane and its new moon. Now, we are in the time of the waxing.

It has been many generations since every woman was recognized as the vessel of power that she is, but even now our women ancestors remain close, whispering to us of the waxing to come. Matrilineal magic is a deep and ancient kind of craft. One that will never be forgotten as long as we continue to seek and honor the threads that connect us back.

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From the House Painters in Zalipie

<< When the Grandmothers came to Visit >>

The grandmothers never disappeared. They are with us, still. They are helping us to weave the new weft.

Several years ago I set out to make an ancestor altar in my room. A space in which I could honor those that came before me and give thanks for my life. Earlier that day I had spent a totally unexpected sum of money. I was in the midst of a challenging health issue that was asking me to face some pretty overwhelming feelings of isolation and scarcity. On this evening, I tried my best to simply set my worries aside and breathe. I began by reaching up into a worn wooden box for one of my grandmother’s old handkerchiefs, a delicate and lacy swatch of thin cotton. I was shocked when my hand settled upon a softly folded piece of paper. Nestled in the box was an envelope with my name on it, and inside that envelope was a stack of bills– almost the exact amount of money I had spent that day. It was such a moment of unseen assurance; I sank to my knees for a few long minutes to weep.

Many months ago I had kept a small stash of cash in this envelope. But I had since spent every penny, I even had a memory of throwing the empty envelope away. But here it was, full again. In a place before words I instinctively felt my grandmother was there. She was there, cradling me, supporting me, assuring me that I have never, not once, been alone. As I folded onto the floor, time creased as well and I realized that my grandmother has always been here. And the grandmothers before her. And those before her as well. I could feel them, surrounding me in a circle, blessing and cherishing, holding me like the women of old used to do around their wells.

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Our female ancestors and the cultures of magic they created has never left.

The grandmothers are here in the shape of my eyes, my long flat feet, the yearning drum I feel in my heart when I hear throat singing, or the way I might pause to touch the first opening cherry blossom. They are here – in childbirth and summer fields, in breasts full of milk, a faded envelope of bills, and flower bulbs.

Matrilineal magic never died.

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<< Weft Vessel >>

Every once in a while we meet a woman familiar in our life who reminds us of our own strong heritage and the profound magic that can be sparked between two sisters who are seeking their own Weft. A few years ago I met Sylvia Linsteadt and such a flame leapt into life. Ever since the beginning we knew there was important work to be done together. Medicine to be realized, experienced and offered together. A thread we were meant to weave.

Now, after a year in creation. We are delighted to offering such a sister-woven creation to the world…

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WEFT is a journey through plant, stone and word back into the long threads of your matrilineal line. Across ancient Europe there were ceremonial spaces created just to initiate women into the mysteries of life and regeneration, places that held the rituals of remembering and the sacred pottery of women who knew how to heal with their hands. With Weft, we offer both a thread and a vessel. A spindle-spun way to connect back into the powerful lineage of the women from which you came, and a richly embroidered place in which we can remember how to initiate ourselves.

Like a coil pot, WEFT was woven throughout many cycles with a single thread. It began in the spring softened hills of Appalachia where Asia Suler, of One Willow Apothecaries, created an elixir from the shades of ancient medicine there. Crafted from violets, wild iris, aquamarine and feldspar– the elixir was brewed from a spark of insight and a feeling of the women ancestors rising to be heard.

Once created, Asia sent the bottle of Sylvia Linsteadt of Wild Talewort. There, over many moons, Sylvia created the story portal that makes up the landscape of Weft. Ignited from her own experiences with the elixir, and from the kind of synchronistic magic that springs up every time two hedgewitches call back to the ancestors, the story unspooled itself over the course of nine months, a full gestation in which archaeological research, a ceramics class and a table loom all played unexpected parts.

Now, a year after the first spark caught, the first Crone song was sung—we offer this WEFT vessel to the world.

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Comprised of….

The Grandmother’s Elixir: Crafted from the spring-softened medicines of Western Appalachia, Grandmothers is an elixir to invoke the initiatory magic of the womyn ancestors and our collective matrilineal line. Once upon a time we were all born from women who understood the mysteries of herbs and roots and death and beginnings. This elixir is a gateway to help remember our place in this continuum of hedgewitches and healers.

Hand gathered from the early April coves of these grandmother mountains— some of the oldest on earth— this medicine contains the seeds of findings ones destiny as a power-filled woman and recognizing one’s place as a vessel of wisdom in the lineage of all things to come. Created from slow simmered violet syrup, wild iris essence and an elixir of aquamarine + feldspar stones, this alchemical medicine is an invitation to open ones womb-deep intuition like the first folds of spring. An elixir of becoming, remembering and embracing your destiny— this purple hued medicine helps you to realize that the wisdom of the ancients still lives in your blood. You must only quiet yourself to find the inner song.

Weft: A Story – The tale of a girl, a drought, an underworld, and the most ancient roots of the Baba Yaga, set in partly historic, partly imagined Neolithic Transylvania around 6500 B.C.E. At this time, settled agriculture brought by small bands of Mediterranean travelers (and their grains, goats and sheep) was taking root across southeastern Europe, woven relatively peacefully into the framework of indigenous Mesolithic hunting and gathering tribes. Out of this union, a matrilineal network of cultures called “Old European” flourished across southeastern Europe, leaving behind temples and villages full of an astonishingly beautiful array of ceramic work that was largely ritual in function. These ancient village sites full of offering jugs and sacred ovens, at the edges of mountains and woods, feel like indigenous ground in me. On a pathway of my own ancestral blood through Austria, through Hungary, through Poland, through Russia, I can follow a part of myself back to a source, a place of balance, a set of ancient lifeways to look to for wisdom, for strength, for wholeness.

This story is a celebration of the deep beauty and power of ancient women’s work: weaving, spinning, pottery, child-bearing, plant-tending, medicine gathering. It is a hymn to the dying we undertake every moon in the underworlds of our own bodies, even if we no longer bleed, and the process of being reborn. Imagine that it is an ancient clay vessel, dug up in a dozen shards from the earth. These are the warp, the structure, of the telling. It is you, the reader, who must weave the weft of their meaning over-under, over-under, using the shuttle of your own soul to make out of it your version of wholeness: the offering jug left out at the edge of the known field, full of milk.

Ancient Vessel Meditation: An audio journey to guide you deeper into receiving the medicine of this matrilineal weaving.

Weft Voices: An audio soundtrack of the songs and sounds that guided our creation of this vessel, from Hildegard von Bingen to the folk songs of mountainous Bulgaria.

<< Order your WEFT >>

 

Weft Bear

Tatterdemalion: The Juniper Tree

13 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in Earth Medicine, Inspirations

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Two winter’s ago a bit of mycelial magic reached out and touched me. Through the webs of the internet, and the crossing lines of one apothecary parcel and a hand-stamped bundle of written tales, I met one of my dearest friends and ever-source of inspiration in my life: Sylvia Linsteadt.

Sylvia Linsteadt Point Reyes

We all hear stories of familiars and soul friends, past life connections and the fact that we are all made from the same stars. But every once in a while it actually happens, you meet someone who stirs up something very ancient, very old and very familiar inside of you, and the concept of our interconnection ceases to be a concept at all. Suddenly the unseen meaning that binds me to you, and you to me, is as real as strands of wool tied within a single nest.

Sylvia is a keeper of such wisdom. Both shamaness and wordsmith, Sylvia is a writer whose work is nothing short of revolution, and magic. Her stories, woven from ancient folklore, ecological exploration and land-based knowledge, have become gateways for me to remember. What strikes me most about Sylvia’s earth-nourished writing is her ability to re-connect. Human to hawk, heart to stone, past to the future, devastation to hope.

Sylvia &amp; Irises

It’s in these encounters, these moments of such transcendental connection that we remember who we really are. That we need the seals and the poems and the iris patches and the mythologies. That we need stories to help us reimagine a world so whole. That we need each other, after all.

In celebration of the birth of Tatterdemalion, a book written and woven from Sylvia’s connection with our storied world the mystical work of artist Rima Staines (and what a lovely story of stardust and reconnection this is!) I am honored to be hosting Sylvia, and her words, on this month’s blog.

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Sylvia Linsteadt walking point reyes
 

Stories are everywhere, waiting to be gathered up like juniper berries, dusty and blue, in your hands. Stories are waiting in the flicker’s call, in the eyes of the elk bulls about to drop their antlers. They are waiting in the mica-flecked granite. They are waiting in the spray of gray whales, migrating south to birth their calves. Stories are waiting just there, under the surfaces of mole hills, in the hands of fresh green nettles, in all the places where you and the world touch. Wherever you are touching, there they can come in.

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We live in a world that defines “story” as something solely of human making; an invention that defines us apart from the rest of the living beings of this planet. But what if story is really the thing that weaves us back in, and always has been? All the wise old cultures of this earth call stories medicine. As Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko writes in her wonderful novel Ceremony—

 

“[Stories] are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off illness and death.
You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.
Their evil is mighty
but it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.”

 

When stories of interconnection, stories that belong to flickers and junipers and elk as much as they do to humans, are lost, so too are those connections, and we begin to believe that the things we do tell stories about are the only things that really matter. I am passionate about bringing the voices of the more-than-human world back into our stories—not only our news articles, our essays, our poems, but our fiction. Despite a robust and blossoming ecological consciousness coming of age in the world right now, the novels we read, the films we watch, the stories we tell, still most often treat animals, plants, stones, waters, as beautiful backdrops at best, as objects secondary to the plots of human characters. Well—and look how it happens: that’s the true story of our treatment of the natural world too!

 

Lookingouttosea

Three years ago, I started writing a book called Tatterdemalion. It was born out of the figurative doorways I found in the paintings of the magnificent English artist, Rima Staines, and it features fourteen of them, the bones that shape the stories in the novel. Tatterdemalion explores a post-apocalyptic future in a wildly re-imagined Northern California, from the coast to the Sierras, but it does so in a folkloric way, rooted in the stories of Old Europe. In a ruined world, what survives are the tales we tell, and the characters in Tatterdemalion share these tales one by one with the reader—from Poppy, the boy who speaks the languages of newts & ravens, to Molly, the woman so desperate for a child she wears her own death in a needle around her neck, and will dig a baby up out of the earth if she has to; from Martin, who discovers the thumb-bone of St. Francis of Assisi, and an ancient magical salmon, to the Juniper Tree who tells the boy Poppy (through her wise and dusty berries) the story of the mysterious & revered Anja Born of the Buckeye, and thus the story of his whole world. These many tales are stitched together to create a whole mythology: a story of hope, of a new world where wild places are protected by Wild Folk (part human, part animal/plant beings who serve as guardians for every stone, stream and species left), and where old ways are followed with care.

 

AnjaInTheHorseChestnutByRimaStaines

Anja in the Horse Chestnut (Artwork by Rima Staines)

All the way through the process of writing Tatterdemalion, the stories seemed to come from dandelions and towhees and newts as much as they came from the paintings, and from me. Writing about the Juniper Tree in particular felt like an act of transmutation, of transportation. When I wrote her chapters for the first time, I had yet to meet the actual juniper trees of the Sierras. And yet, I knew them. I knew this tree, deep down inside her dark roots and ancient lightning-struck caverns. Then, about a year after completing her chapter, while hiking in the Sierra Nevadas with my family, up near a high mountain lake in the Desolation Wilderness, I found her. I stopped dead in my tracks, then ran and climbed right up into her arms, tears in my eyes. I’d been savoring and praising the sight of junipers all the way up the crags and talus slopes, marveling at the way they grew straight out of granite, beautifully wind-scored. But this Juniper, she was ancient and enormous, half silver deadwood flanked by healthy growth, and I knew her immediately. There were openings in her bark, suggestions of a far-deep-down underworld. I wanted to weep. Poppy had been here. The tree had found me, or I had found the tree. We had been touching all along, mysteriously, miraculously. She had given the story to me.

JuniperTree

I don’t know how these things work, not in a way I can articulate with words. I only know that the land around each of us—whether it’s the trees and mourning doves on your city block, or the humus-rich fir-forested hills and their stillness— is heavy with stories, and that these stories are in desperate need of being told. That they want to be told. We all can tell them, starting by simply by going out to listen. By bringing gifts (a few beautiful and heart-felt words; a cup of tea; a poem scrawled and buried). By returning home, and letting them come in with us.

Tatterdemalion is one such story, a novel that offers a new way of imagining our relationship to the more-than-human world. And it is being published by the revolutionary publisher Unbound, who puts the fates of books in the hands of readers by having them raise the print-cost via pre-orders before publishing. This means that right now, Tatterdemalion needs each and every one of your help to be born into this world.

Tea&amp;ABook

Just pre-order a book (link: https://unbound.co.uk/books/tatterdemalion), and you will be helping us on our wheeled & wild way! Every book purchased is a cobblestone laid on the road to publication! Better yet, give yourself Tea & A Book —a special edition hardback of Tatterdemalion that comes with a Forest Campfire Tea, to be sipped with your back to a tree while reading, or listening to birds, or roots. The tea is a blend of Russian caravan black tea with boreal chaga mushrooms, bishop pine tips, and California poppy petals—to transport you to ancient northern campfires, to soothe and uplift you with the fresh and hearty flavors of California. There are only 25 available!

You can learn more about Tatterdemalion, watch the film, see more of Rima’s beautiful paintings, and order your own book, here.

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I am so grateful to Asia for letting me share these words with all of you beautiful souls. Asia is one of my very favorite writers and medicine women in all the world, and it is an honor to step into this space today to introduce you to Tatterdemalion, and to share some of my thoughts about story, land, and our relationship to both. Happy story-gathering to all of you.

With that, I will leave you with words from the boy Poppy, and his first encounter with the Juniper Tree…

ByRimaStaines

Artwork by Rima Staines

“I went alone. Nobody noticed me going. I had just my silver coffeepot hitched on a string over my back, like always. Lyoobov stayed, eating the embers one by one, letting smoke spell poems into the night from her coiled trunk, her ears. She let the women come and rub her gray skin with the oils of pine nuts and wildflower essences. The shadows from the fire leapt onto the wind-shaped pines. I held that red seed and I walked through the dark, feeling ahead with my feet.

It wasn’t hard to find the tree Sare meant because it was ancient and its trunk silver as all the stars, as time. The hard blue-dusted berries were thick, everywhere, a thousand blue earths. I picked up handfuls and stuck them through the top of my coffeepot, impulsively. The whole tree in my ears thundered like a fast heart. It creaked in the wind. It wanted me near, under the rounded spires of branch, up to the trunk, my body a warmth to keep company through the night. I set the red bead into a crease of the trunk. I smelled the bark. I found that to the left of my feet, in the shadows, was a darker shadow, like a hole. I crawled to see and it was just as wide as my shoulders, gaping, darker than any night can be dark. I went in because Sare told me that I would be able to hear the stories and bring them back.

I’ve wanted, I’ve always wanted, to do one single thing you all approved of.

The bear tooth Sare gave me glowed. I saw the inside of that Juniper. Time had carved waterways of lines, the color soft as firelight or amber. The patterns of stars seemed to be glinting wherever I looked in that hollow of bark, which went deep down below in root tunnels, and up further than that glowing tooth could shed light. That’s when the voice started. It unpeeled from the layers of bark and echoed. It was, and was not, human. It was juniper berry blue in my mind where I held it as it spoke, in my hands where I felt it, dusty, weathered. Steeped and smoked with the centuries of Juniper growing, Juniper seeking water, Juniper breathing and releasing the thin air. It was her, the tree, whispering.

“Little child,” came that voice, and a smell of soft smoke. “Little child. You are only a little child.” All along the inner bark, stars gleamed, in familiar and unfamiliar constellations, from the old stories which I never paid much heed—the one in the shape of a wheel which we call Wheel, after the long ago Fool; the one like an owl, for Margaret, with a bell in its claws; the one like a fiddle, for Rose; the tiny cluster, for the Holy Beggars. And more, gleaming and shifting all around me, ones I couldn’t name. I felt I might have clambered into the beginning of a world.

“I’m Poppy,” I said, deep inside the tree now, in a ruckled chamber whorled with bark. “I am little, it’s true.”

“You have come to learn the true story of Anja.” This time, the voice was nearer, and I turned. In the shadows, on the walls of her trunk, was a woman. She was all hunched up, rounded like the blue berries I’d stuffed into my silver coffeepot. Then she seemed to peel right off the wall, a dark shade. She came and she sat opposite me. In the glow of the juniper bark around us, I saw an ancient little lady with a dozen spindly arms lined as juniper branches, with a spiking mass of hair like spired juniper needles. White hairs grew on her chin. Her eyes were all patched with cataracts, but she had a good set of teeth. I noticed this, I don’t know why, maybe because they flashed.

“Yes,” I stammered.

“But do you even know your own?”

“Well enough,” I replied, staring into my coffeepot because her eyes were too strange, and clear, and the silvery inner bark of the juniper tree too alive with its own stars. “My mother found me in the earth, only really I am part of Lyoobov, and Lyoobov is part of me—”

“But who is Lyoobov, and how, and why?”

“Lyoobov was born out of the dream of Rose, a long time ago, Before the Fall. But what have I got to do with Anja?”

“You were there at the beginning, because Lyoobov was there. You are here now, at the end. But what about the middle, little child, little Poppy, little heart? How can you ask for Anja, without everything that came before? How can you know a whole world, without every tattered thread?”

“I—”

The silvery bark of the juniper’s inner trunk was shifting, the stars scattered there wheeling, like they might across a whole night, not a single moment.

“Did you know that some stars are only memories of light, already dead? Like the voices of people, echoing long after they are gone?”

There were figures gathering against the bark, the way the Juniper-woman’s had, ghosts that one by one peeled away, edged in stars. Rose. The Holy Beggars. St. Margaret, with owl wings. Wheel. Martin. Ffion.

“When you hear a story, little child, it has been folded and unfolded a hundred times in the mouths of its tellers. But the truest stories come right from the source.”

 

The starry ghosts gathered, and waited, glinting.”

 

{{ Tatterdemalion, from the chapter titled “Poppy.” }}

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p.s. Read deeper into Sylvia’s world + the medicine of heartfelt relationships in our interview from 2014

Interview: Sylvia Linsteadt + Elk Lines

05 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by in Earth Medicine, Inspirations

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Processed with VSCOcam with c1 presetThe rugged and fog-softened beauty of the California coast. Myths, mysticism and re-wilding. Warm pots of tea and delightful trails through time-warn fables. This month I am delighted to be sharing an interview with one of my favorite authors alive– Sylvia Victor Linsteadt. Sylvia is both shamaness and wordsmith, a creator and collector of gorgeously spun tales and deeper states of mystery. Each one of Sylvia’s stories is as glitteringly unique as a songbird’s nest. Woven from ancient folklore, ecological exploration, land-based knowledge and the enduring webs of mythology, Sylvia’s tales are nurturing portals to a new world. Almost a year ago Sylvia and I stumbled across each other’s work at the same time (fated re-meetings seems to work like that, I find!).

Sylvia Linsteadt and Asia Suler

Sylvia and Asia

The first time I read one of Sylvia’s stories it felt like climbing back into the great tree of who I was… that ancient, standing, growing being who was intricately connected to the living world around me. I am forever grateful to Sylvia and her tales– not only for their sweeping vistas and sensuous detail, endless inspiration and intricacies– but for what they incite in me. Within her stories is the flicker of the ancient, the glimmer of a thoughtfully re-imagined destiny. Through her tales I can see, once more, the cradling mystery of everyday being, the endurance of this beautiful world existing, always, around me.  I am so thankful for Sylvia and her story medicine, her Wild Talewort.

Drink deep from the following interview and enjoy. If you find you are thirsty (and I think you might just be) head over to Sylvia’s gorgeous blog and website to find out about how you can receive tidings from her brand new project, Elk Lines, hand-stamped and sent to your very own postbox.

Sylvia Linsteadt Point ReyesYour stories are such a jaw-droppingly vibrant mixture of ecology, naturalism, mysticism, and myth.  You are, in my esteemed estimation, a truly exciting boundary bender! If you had to define your writing style (or that stories that most want to come through you) what would you say?

This question has always been a challenge for me, because in this world of ours we so enjoy making boxes around genres, severing the bonds between poetry and prose; we delight in calling a thing “Nature-writing” or “Romantic Poetry” or “Literary Fiction,” but have trouble when Literary Fiction becomes streaked with the fantastic, a lyric voice, and the wild lives of trees. Is it fantasy? Is it nature-writing? I’ve always felt that writing is the loom upon which I can weave the many strands of wonder, sorrow, beauty and story I see in the world—poetic, ecological, folkloric, downright magical, whatever it may be. So my writing style is all of it at once. Sometimes I think I’m really a poet wearing the patched and furred coat of a storyteller, so even “fiction” can be tricky for me as a category to place myself in. Anyhow, I’m rambling on here, but in a nutshell I’d say this style of mine is some wild country where poetry, magical realism, myth, animism and ecology meet.

Elk Lines Sylvia LinsteadtThe easiest. The hardest question… Why do you write?

Indeed. And it is a long and a short story. Writing is my way into the heart of the world—its wildness, its strange magic, its beauty, its terrors, its sadness, its joy. Metaphor (a favorite of mine) is an act of shape-shifting, of remembering that each thing is hitched to the next in the great cyclical transformation of energy, from sun to seed to doe to cougar and back to worm; the line between ourselves and the wild world is thin indeed. Writing (thick with metaphor) is the means through which I can praise the wild mystery of this world, and also explore its unseen realms—the realms inside the hearts of bears and granite stones and buckeye trees; the lands just the other side of the moon and the fog, the lives of men and women long ago or just around the corner. If I were buckeye tree, then writing would be the buckeyes that fruit at the ends of my limbs come late August. In other words, writing is the thing made in me from all the waters and winds and soils and stories that come through my five senses (or six), and it feels very inevitable, like the buckeyes at the end of summer.

Also, I have always been an avid reader; especially as a child I devoured books that told of magical worlds and lands, lady-knights and healers, the everyday peasant life of Old Europe (especially Scotland & Ireland), talking animals, caravans of camel nomads, druids, long adventures on horseback. Such books literally shaped and changed my life. They informed the way I see the world today—as a place much more mysterious and full of wild magics than we tend to believe, where everything is alive and everything speaks. So I write because writing is even better than reading in the sense that you really get to go to those places in your imagination, and give them to other people. The stories we tell ourselves and each other form the world in which we live, and so I write both selfishly—shaping my own way of seeing the world—and because if I can give single ember to another like the tales I have read have given to me, then I am happy.

Point reyes 1So many people dream of supporting themselves through their craft, but in our culture it’s assumed that making a living through ones arts is not only daunting, but entirely unattainable for all but an inspired few! What has been your relationship with such commonly culturally held beliefs? How have you been able to cast aside such (if any) doubts?

Stubbornness, a dreamer’s heart, fierce love. These are the three things that keep my feet on this path, this wild and difficult and beautiful way. I think that especially in the age of this great strange internet, it is much more possible for independent artists to make their way, because we can circumvent the usual channels and reach out ourselves to our readers, our listeners, our viewers. This also means that we have to be creator, secretary, office assistant, publicist and marketing specialist all in one, but when you are doing what you love, and the thing you love is touching the hearts of other people, somehow you can just manage it all, juggling five different work-hats. (Though sometimes this means that things like weekends or work hours stop existing, and you may find yourself working Sunday morning, Tuesday night at eleven, etc.) In the end, it is actually very simple, in the sense that you must simply decide for yourself that this is just what you’re going to do, and then stubbornly, doggedly, hold to that promise with all of your heart and soul, because it is what you love, because this is your life, your path, your chance to be here, and the world deserves what it is you are best able to give. This is not always an easy thing to believe, or to hold to, but it can be done. Personally, I’m simply stubborn as a mule. Once I got the taste of this path, I knew there was no going back. Oh—and that dreamer’s heart. You have to believe in it, despite all the voices; you have to believe in the way that dreamers and children believe, your heart a balloon of hope. It’s hard to believe like this all the time, but if your heart is a balloon of dreams and hopes at least once every day, it sure smoothes the way.

Sylvia & IrisesTell us a bit about your new project: Elk Lines!

Elk Lines, my newest Wild Tales By Mail project for adults, is a rewilding of the old Hungarian version of “The Handless Maiden” tale, set on the Point Reyes Peninsula of Northern California. Each of its eight installments make up one continuous novel, and are mailed to my subscribers—wax-sealed, in lovingly hand-stamped envelopes!— to arrive upon the eight seasonal festivals of the year, in the old Celtic tradition: the Autumn Equinox (September 21st); Samhain (November 1st); the Winter Solstice (December 21st); Imbolc (February 1st); the Spring Equinox (March 21st); Beltane (May 1st); the Summer Solstice (June 21st), and Lughnasadh (August 1st). My own hand-drawn “map” or “songline” of the season accompanies each installment, to further root readers into the landscape of Point Reyes and the lives of the plants and animals who dwell there.

Elk lines logo 2

Artwork by Sylvia Linsteadt

Elk Lines is a roving, ambling novel about the power of our walking feet and our story-making hands. At it’s core, it is the tale of Eda Crost and the re-growing of her lost hands, but it is also the tale of the mythic Elk People, who roam Point Reyes with herds of tule elk, emerging from the Peninsula’s sudden fogs, and who show Eda how to follow the songlines, the hooflines, the feral palmistry of the land: the way to dig a root, trail an elk, gather a bulb, tend a seed to blooming, and to laugh long and loud into the ragged, airplane plumed night. Elk Lines is set in the world we know, with its highways and telephone wires and lightbulbs and gas-stations, but it is also set in the mythtime that has always, and will always, interfuse our every moment: in the place bare-foot touches dirt, the place just the other side of the fog-bank, the place inside the eyes of elk, who have known us longer than we have known ourselves. And don’t worry—amidst all the elk and the foot-prints, the wandering and sparrow song and summer-gold dawns, there is a love story, there is the birth of a little boy, there is an orchard full of pears, there is a childhood, and violin music, and the ringing, laughing kindness of strangers.

As it happens, now is a perfect time to come and subscribe in time for the autumn equinox, September 21st, when the next mailing arrives in post boxes all around the world! Please sign-up by September 12th to receive your Elk Lines by the equinox. All subscriptions begin with the first installment, of course!

Elk cows in Pt Reyes

Photo by Sylvia Linsteadt

Elk Lines pile

Photo by Sylvia Linsteadt

What are five things/places/people that always inspire you?

Besides you, dear and wonderful Asia, Mistress of One Willow? (Seriously, you would be one of my five if you weren’t doing this interview!) Okay…

The Point Reyes Peninsula—I’ve been visiting this “Island In Time,” since I was a little girl, and it has thoroughly stolen my heart. Land of fir and alder, oak and bay, land of great wild beaches and coastal prairies, tule elk and pelican. If I could call one place my muse, it would undoubtedly be Point Reyes. It seems to have claimed me, in a sense; I find I must write about it. Nettle, mountain lion, bobcat, fence lizard, woodrat, coyotebrush, lupine, seal; muses, all. (That’s more than five right there!)

Point Reyes 2

Rima Staines— I blame Rima for inspiring me to leave the realm of office work two years ago in order to whole-heartedly pursue my own art. The first time I came across her work and her writings about her life and the world, my heart flipped up and then down and then up again with such relief, I think I might have cried—because she reminded me that yes, it can be done. Your feet can follow the wild path you most love. You simply have to start walking. Rima is an extraordinary artist of paint, wood, puppet, wheel, song. She lives in Devon, England, where she paints the most earthen and otherworldly beings—human, animal, outcast, wanderer, jester, tree. Of all wondrous things, we are at this very minute working to get a book we created together out into the world (my words “illustrating” Rima’s paintings)! Stay tuned!

Rima Staines The Alchemist

Artwork by Rima Staines

Nao Sims— beekeeper, dancer, tender of the wild homestead land of Honey Grove, on Vancouver Island, Nao is a very dear friend of mine and also one of the most extraordinary people I know. She was one of my early subscribers to the Gray Fox Epistles, but I had known of her previously because of a beautiful book she wrote called Moon Mysteries about reclaiming women’s menstrual wisdom, and because of a very wise and wonderful blog of hers called The Teatime Traveller, which lifted me up during a rough patch and reminded me of the bounty of beauty in every moment. So of course, when I found she was a subscriber, I was overjoyed! We got to emailing, and found a very old & uncanny sense of familiarity. I went to visit last fall, and the rest, as they say, is history. To me, Nao embodies the character of Juniper in Monica Furlong’s Wise Child, a favorite book of mine—keeper of the wisdom of land, woman, bee, flower. I am inspired by Nao every day! Oh, and as it happens, she and her husband Mark have a very wonderful vacation cottage on Honey Grove Farm, so if you are in need of a good steep in beauty, I recommend it highly!

Juliette de Bairacli-Levy— I daresay this wonderful woman needs little explanation from me, considered as she is the mother of modern herbalism. Born in the 1930s to a wealthy British family, she cast Veterinary School and aristocratic life aside in favor of learning from the gypsies and peasants of the world all they knew about the healing herbs. What an independent, joyous, wild spirit this woman was! For a taste of her voice, her knowledge, her adventures and her spirit, I recommend her book Traveller’s Joy. And it was a small and beautiful film about her called Juliette of the Herbs that inspired me a year ago to finally embark on a dream I’ve had since I was a small girl—to learn the medicine of plants. Oh, and as an aside, Juliette de Bairacli Levy is a partial model for the character of Eda Crost in Elk Lines.

juliette0-james Gary Snyder — the deep-rooted, muscular, wildly Californian poetry of Gary Snyder was the first true piece of inspiration in my adult life as an artist. When I found his work, I felt all of these little old locks and keys and wheels clicking and turning and what have you in my heart and my soul. I finally felt that my writing had found its voice. In particular, his philosophies about wildness, bioregionalism and rooting in a place—choosing a place and learning it deeply, deeply, as just as valuable a life pursuit as this incessant need for change we seem to have acquired as modern humans—changed my life. Somehow Gary Snyder led to animal-tracking, which to me has become my own “Practice of the Wild,” both spiritual and intellectual; I trace my writing “lineage” directly back to him. I’ve been known to call him “my hero,” which has garnered more than a few laughs, but I do mean it!

Bobcat paw

Photo by Sylvia Linsteadt

You’ve recently been sharing visual maps of the shifting seasons around you in your gorgeously hand-drawn “Feral Palm readings.” If you could draw us a palmistry map of your inner season right now, what would it look like?

I decided to go ahead and paint one for you! There is a rabbit and a grizzly bear and a mountain range at once Carpathian and Sierra Nevada, for I just visited the latter, and the former has been strong in my imagination and my writings these past weeks. There are hawthorn berries, ripe, and juniper berries, just turning dusty blue up in the mountains. There is a teapot the color of a hawthorn berry, because there is always a teapot in my inner season, I believe! There are aspen trunks, white-dusted, which grow up in the mountains to the east and bring me great calm, and a stag I dreamt of, with a buckeye tree growing like a third antler. The buckeyes are dropping their leaves now, at the end of summer, because our summers here are so dry— this is their defense against drought. All that’s left are the planets of their buckeyes. This is a sign of autumn to me—the bare buckeyes like planetariums. There seems to be a movement toward fall in my heart, though the sun is still strong, the days dry and long. My painting looks positively wintry! I love winter, so all the threads of its coming fill me with joy. The plants love winter here too—it means rain. It is, unlike the seasons of the East Coast, the time of flourishing.

Artwork by Sylvia Linsteadt

Artwork by Sylvia Linsteadt

What is one mystery you are aching to explore?

There are so many ways I would like to answer this question! But for some reason, one thing keeps floating to the top of my mind—nettle processing! I would love to really dive into the mystery of turning stinging nettle stalks into the flax-like material I know my Northern and Eastern European ancestors used for many millennia in place of linen. I’m a spinner, felter & knitter on the side, and ever since I wrote a story last spring called “Our Lady of Nettles,” a retelling of the Seven Swans fairytale, I’ve been itching to really delve into this process from start to finish. Nettle is my favorite medicinal plant (if I had to pick)—I drink her almost every day, and I love that she was also such an important textile plant for so many thousands of years. I think this qualifies as a mystery—because I am sure the process of retting and scutching and all the rest of those arcane words used to describe flax-processing (not to mention the spinning, the weaving, etc) would take me into a place of very deep connection with both the nettle and the ways of my ancestors long, long ago. I also believe that this process might be a very useful thing to know, down the line, when the world is no longer this crazy overseas network of sweatshop labor-commerce. (All empires must fall, after all…)

Sylvia Linsteadt walking point reyes

Stories have power, words create worlds. When I read your writing I often feel the burgeoning of a new earth underfoot. In your heart of hearts, hopes of hopes…what do you feel is being birthed through your work?

Above all things I hope that through my work a renewed sense of the tenets of deep ecology and animistic thought can be re-infused into the world of contemporary human literature. The stories we tell shape the world we see, and the world we see is one of terrible environmental and humanitarian catastrophe, degradation, and extinction, both of animals and plants, and of human cultures and languages. I hope for my writing to convey a sense of the animism of all beings; that elk and alder and lichen and stone, bear and lizard and fog and oatgrass, are all subjects, characters, integral players in the stories of our lives and this world, not the objects we have made them into with our cultural narratives. For when a deer or a tree is a subject and not an object, it is not as easy to destroy it without a care. I also hope to keep the old human magics and beliefs surrounding this wise old world of ours alive in my writing—the ways of weedwife and hunter, wandering jester and gypsy and shaman and witch. And if my tales can be wild woodrat nests which lead to the other worlds inside this world, all the better. If they can somehow gesture at the weedier, wilder, dustier footpath which leads us back into what it really means to be human (and not the big tar roads)—well, that would be grand indeed.

wild notebook

Photo by Sylvia Linsteadt

As someone who works for herself (doing what she loves!) what does a typical “work day” look like for you? 

Rise early. Feed Hawthorn the rabbit. Gather flowers and leaves for a little wild art left in my garden patch to greet the day—its birds, its soils, its winds, its sun, its four-leggeds. Tea, breakfast, an hour of writing (often my favorite hour of the day). I go to a dance class almost every morning, and when I come back I write again until noon in my little loft office. A quick break for lunch, which often involves gathering Hawthorn various greens and herbs and letting him have an adventure through the garden. Then I write again until about 3, at which point I generally experience an afternoon slump (the hours of 3 to 5 are really not my strongpoint). I try to work on non-creative things during this time—emails, various social media updating, queries, etc. If I can’t stand to do so (or don’t need to), I like to spend some time making with my hands in a different way—felting, embroidering, gardening, medicine-making. Around 5, I may have a last surge of creativity and write a bit more, or I might spend the time until about 7 editing or reading for research. At 7 or thereabouts, my love returns home from work, and this is the signal that my own work-day is over, thank goodness. Having him home, I feel I have an excuse to stop and savor the evening. Otherwise, I will work off and on until bed! I try to spend every Wednesday out on the land of Point Reyes, tracking (alone or with friends) the lives of plant and animal, tracing the songlines of that beloved wild place, so that my work remains infused with its many voices. This isn’t a schedule I always hold to—sometimes it’s more fluid, for better or for worse, because things come up, sudden deadlines arise, the creativity just isn’t flowing. But I find that keeping a bare-bones schedule is a life-saver. We can flourish better, it seems to me, with a few boundaries, markers up to help us find the way.

Day in the field

Photo by Sylvia Linsteadt

The obligatory question: what books are on your night stand? 

This is a bit embarrassing, as it shows how indecisive and eclectic my reading has been these past few weeks, on top of the fact that I tend to hoard books by my bed for a while. I think they must comfort me.

The Reindeer People- Piers Vitebsky

The Others: How Animals Made Us Human- Paul Shepherd

The Steppe & other stories- Anton Chekov

Marcovaldo- Italo Calvino

Momo- Michael Ende

The Short Works of Leo Tolstoy

Coastal fir hills

Photo by Sylvia Linsteadt

What is some advice you can give to anyone who is thinking about launching further into their creative flow/work? 

This doesn’t sound immediately romantic, but the first thing that comes to my mind is—give yourself a schedule. I don’t mean this in a boring way; I like to think of it more like bones. An animal without bones cannot stand or walk. Similarly, it feels to me that the creative flow requires structure to flourish. So I love deadlines and scheduled tea-breaks and that sort of thing. At the same time, of course, too much structure can kill inspiration. One thing that really helps to start my own work in the morning is a sense of ritual, which is structured into my day. If you’re just starting out, make the time and space for your creative work sacred. I like to burn rosemary and light a candle when I start. Give yourself an hour every morning for a week, candle lit, tea at hand. It’s not so long as to intimidate, and not so short as to be useless. Get your computer and phone away from yourself, by god! (These can be the great killers of flow.) If you tell yourself, “I will write/paint/sing for this set amount of time every morning, for seven days, and see how it goes,” instead of “I am now a working artist and I must work 8 hours a day and be extraordinarily brilliant and productive for all eight hours, etc. etc.,” you will feel as though your goals are actually manageable. With the latter attitude, I daresay one might never begin. Another very important piece for me every day is to get out of my own way—don’t think of your reader, your viewer, your editor, as you let the work come out. This is why I am adamant about writing by hand. I hardly look back as I go. I just go. There is always time to edit, but you can destroy your flow by going back over too early with critical eyes. After all, it needs to come from a place of joy and passion, or it won’t really be your true voice.

Fennel stars

Photo by Sylvia Linsteadt

All of your words are such a blessing. Would you mind leaving us with a wee prayer?

For some reason, what immediately came to mind was the very first poem I was ever proud of, the first poem that really seemed to come from this place of flow — “Order of the Machine.” I wrote it when I was sixteen, sitting on the back steps in the garden of my childhood home. It came down through my pen as if from elsewhere. I’ve changed it to second person here, for it feels more prayer-like, thus. Here’s the very last stanza.

Even as our futures buckle straight
do not let the woods
relinquish your heart
nor the fog your soul.
Do not let the Order of the Machine
steal the waves, crush the wildflowers
starve the river stones.
There is yet hope
in the foam of the full moon
in the green of apple leaves
in the light between two palms.

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SylviaSylvia Victor Linsteadt is a writer and a student of local ecology and ancient myth. She likes to follow gray fox tracks through the brush, gather wild plants for dye and medicine, dream up and write down poems and stories, short and novel-length, all in one way or another concerned with the relationship between human beings and the more than human world (bay laurel, barn owl, bobcat). She is the creatrix of Elk Lines, the Gray Fox Epistles, the Leveret Letters, and all projects associated with Wild Talewort.

She is a wanderer of the wild spaces of the Bay Area (where she was born and raised at the base of Mt. Tamalpais), a spinner of yarns (literally and figuratively), a felter of felts, and an animal-tracker. Good strong black tea with milk and a little honey is her fuel. Pennywhistle music, a hearty fire in the hearth, fog, fairytales and myths, all the voices of the birds in the morning in the black walnut out her window bring her joy.

For her official blog of musings, scraps of tale, track, dye, myth and wander, please visit The Indigo Vat.