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quiet mountain
29 August 2021 12:16i've been struggling for a while with how little Landweird there seems to be round here. after all, i live within the circle of five mountains, mere minutes away from my choice of waterfalls; out of my window, all there is is sky and trees.
For a while, i thought it was the mountains. mountains are Stellar (Lunar-Stellar), big old things from deeptime - and like all stellar things, they absorb, absorb and diffuse and muddle until nothing remains.
(And it took me a long time to figure out why they were reading as Lunar-Stellar, a path that comes to me first as a vision of waters and weather; because the mountains are made of weather, the slow mastery of the stream. I am now wondering whether the other kinds of mountains are on the other Stellar path; the ones that are made through earth and fire)
but it isn't quite that, because while stellar absorbs - stellar presences are, shall we say, noticeable and quite disorienting. instead, it reads to me as scrubbed out.
& i think its because everything around here is dead. for a while i've been wanting to know the name of a certain, sinister plant by the riverside - something not quite ordinary about the ghostly purple orchids on bamboo-like stalks haunting the riversides; and between my growing suspicion it was not a native plant, and how much it was flourishing, i took a bunch home to compare to my book. Yes, it's himalayan balsam, and we have Victorian travellers to thank for it being bloody everywhere.
from my window i can see forests, but i know they are conifer farms. now, these are stellar - row upon row of identical pine, you get lost in moments among the sameness. there is no light, only the insistent swaying of trunks in the wind; an intense coming together of earth-and-water (i'm experimenting with an elements system) where everything is carpeted with moss and strands of tree-moss, something Mirkwoodish about it. Where the water runs down the mountainside, it cuts deep channels in the pine-needles and roars. rather like rockpools, these channels are not always underwater, so they are alive with green freshness of things that thrive in the occasional soak. Where it is wet, it is boggy; where it is dry, your leg can go straight through into the fragile roots so as to need rescuing before the forest swallows you. there are no animals living here, but there are presences. deep strangeness amidst the rot.
someone i admire on twitter talked about the shock of travelling from a celtic rainforest, back to the empty sheeplands of the mountains that look very much like these; and i've been reading up on the Highland Clearances, that transformed the living culture of Regency Scotland into these stark, haunting emptinesses fit only for sheep. I've been looking at these bare mountains in a new way; for sure, they are very large, but are they alive. Where I live is post-industrial; the locals laugh when i tell them we came here for my husband's asthma. round here, there are very good respiratory clinics - but all halfway up the mountain, all above the line of coalsmog.
what is the Landweird? the land's strange memories of itself. the dreams of the old gods in the fen who lie sleeping. a great haunting of the land. i'm not all that certain, but my focus thus far has been more on things that are dead and made strange than on things that are alive. encountering A New Author recently who wrote about animism in a blisteringly vivid fashion has made me want to reconsider that which is alive. is there, in the great twittering and scuttling, something which is also landweird. and i find that there might be (after all, there's nothing wild or inhuman about those conifer forests)
& i find when i look at this world around me that, on second glance, it is more like a picture of a mountain than a mountain that speaks; that perhaps the grandeur of something big and old is insufficient for magic, when the bioregion as a whole is not healed.
i've got in touch with some people, and some gardening gloves, and i am taking on the balsam. its too big a task for one person, but it is what i can do.
For a while, i thought it was the mountains. mountains are Stellar (Lunar-Stellar), big old things from deeptime - and like all stellar things, they absorb, absorb and diffuse and muddle until nothing remains.
(And it took me a long time to figure out why they were reading as Lunar-Stellar, a path that comes to me first as a vision of waters and weather; because the mountains are made of weather, the slow mastery of the stream. I am now wondering whether the other kinds of mountains are on the other Stellar path; the ones that are made through earth and fire)
but it isn't quite that, because while stellar absorbs - stellar presences are, shall we say, noticeable and quite disorienting. instead, it reads to me as scrubbed out.
& i think its because everything around here is dead. for a while i've been wanting to know the name of a certain, sinister plant by the riverside - something not quite ordinary about the ghostly purple orchids on bamboo-like stalks haunting the riversides; and between my growing suspicion it was not a native plant, and how much it was flourishing, i took a bunch home to compare to my book. Yes, it's himalayan balsam, and we have Victorian travellers to thank for it being bloody everywhere.
from my window i can see forests, but i know they are conifer farms. now, these are stellar - row upon row of identical pine, you get lost in moments among the sameness. there is no light, only the insistent swaying of trunks in the wind; an intense coming together of earth-and-water (i'm experimenting with an elements system) where everything is carpeted with moss and strands of tree-moss, something Mirkwoodish about it. Where the water runs down the mountainside, it cuts deep channels in the pine-needles and roars. rather like rockpools, these channels are not always underwater, so they are alive with green freshness of things that thrive in the occasional soak. Where it is wet, it is boggy; where it is dry, your leg can go straight through into the fragile roots so as to need rescuing before the forest swallows you. there are no animals living here, but there are presences. deep strangeness amidst the rot.
someone i admire on twitter talked about the shock of travelling from a celtic rainforest, back to the empty sheeplands of the mountains that look very much like these; and i've been reading up on the Highland Clearances, that transformed the living culture of Regency Scotland into these stark, haunting emptinesses fit only for sheep. I've been looking at these bare mountains in a new way; for sure, they are very large, but are they alive. Where I live is post-industrial; the locals laugh when i tell them we came here for my husband's asthma. round here, there are very good respiratory clinics - but all halfway up the mountain, all above the line of coalsmog.
what is the Landweird? the land's strange memories of itself. the dreams of the old gods in the fen who lie sleeping. a great haunting of the land. i'm not all that certain, but my focus thus far has been more on things that are dead and made strange than on things that are alive. encountering A New Author recently who wrote about animism in a blisteringly vivid fashion has made me want to reconsider that which is alive. is there, in the great twittering and scuttling, something which is also landweird. and i find that there might be (after all, there's nothing wild or inhuman about those conifer forests)
& i find when i look at this world around me that, on second glance, it is more like a picture of a mountain than a mountain that speaks; that perhaps the grandeur of something big and old is insufficient for magic, when the bioregion as a whole is not healed.
i've got in touch with some people, and some gardening gloves, and i am taking on the balsam. its too big a task for one person, but it is what i can do.
