Our Liminal Inheritance, part II
A Tale of Wild Roots and Belonging
This is part two of what some might call a ‘Fairy Tale’, which will be told around this Story Hearth in four parts. You can go back and read part one here.
‘Our Liminal Inheritance’ was born as a small tale within a much greater Story, a novel I am currently incubating, slowly and in increments, as it keeps revealing to me layer upon layer of a complex web across dimensions and parallel realms…
This Tale had its own mind about how it wanted to be told; more than once, it wrestled with my mind and pen, surprising me with curious shifts in narrative voice & the strange pathways it lead me down… I did my best to surrender, to let it have its way with me. And now, it is done. The Tale is ready to be told, ready to go out beyond my hearth and cozy corner, and do what tales are meant to do. That part, I know, is not for me to meddle in.
If you feel drawn to the magic and warmth of this little Story Hearth in The Mystic Corner, you may, in time, encounter more secret tales and glimpses, backstories and myths from that Greater Story, which has yet to tell me its True Name. At least, that is my hope. Though I am merely the messenger, and alas, can make no promises…
If you know the way of the woods, the woodlands know you also. The recognition of like amongst like creates its own kind of ripple; it opens cracks that barely exist and whispers in a language almost forgotten in a world that turned its back to that which cannot be explained, never realizing the size and weight of its loss.
Noleen feels it, the loss.
It’s in the way that good women hang their clothes out to dry without ever thinking to give thanks to the spirits of the sun and the winds;
it’s in the cloying heat and stink of an alehouse, where loneliness is chased to the corners and hangs, like old sweat, unbidden and shameful;
it’s in the forgetfulness of hearts that speak and hear out of accord and have lost the memory of keys.
It is in the twisting of stories that should have been bright guiding stars, but became like bog lights instead, wily Will-O’-The-Wisps leading travelers astray to drown in murk and decay.
Noleen knows the loss of the world, but the world has turned its back on her, too, and she feels no obligation to bridge an emptiness never mourned. She knows how to find her way back, her heart knows the song that will open the doorways that have been shuttered and closed for centuries. She cannot feel the pain of leaving one world when the next world that embraces her recognizes her so fully her soul cries out with joy. Noleen knows only the intoxicating flutter that tells her she is welcome, she is loved; she belongs.
She lives her life for this, and this only, for certainly without it she would die, die the way the world has died and turned hollow and stale, without meaning, without magic.
Noleen has tasted the inebriation of aliveness, and she craves it to the very core of her being.
When she leaves the confines of her great-great-grandmother’s croft, Noleen picks up the scent of the forest and follows it to its dappled embrace.
There is wisdom in the scent of things, alive with knowing and intimacy;
there is the feckless, sharp green redolence of springtime, somersaulting heedlessly on capricious breezes and storms, in love with its own swelling fecundity and desire;
the acrid, wheaten tang of summer’s heat, or, on humid days, a riot of berries and grass on the blue expiration of rain;
there is the musty spice of autumn, a whiff of ripe apples and fermenting danger blending with the mushroom-breath of earth’s exhale as she readies herself for rest.
Winter has its very own, clean smell, unburdened by the tangle of frenzied lavishness obscuring the rest of the year.
Noleen loves and fears the scent of winter. She fills her lungs, white gulps of hoar-rimmed breath, and feels alive and pure. There is a simplicity and straight-forwardness to winter that resonates deep down within her very marrow. Her bones find kin in bare branches starkly reaching for the skies. No excess, no pretense, no frivolity. She loves this face of winter, loves it intensely with a heart more honest for the lack of heated buoyancy.
The scent of winter carries the strong backbone of tree trunks and metal, and something else, something infinitely more subtle and indescribable. Sometimes it smells like a warning, or maybe a promise, it is hard to tell. But always, it speaks of uncompromising honesty and rawness. It pins you down and won’t release you until you loosen your grip on any outward pull of gravity and turn to face the shadows within.
Anyone who keeps secrets from themselves fears the smell of winter from time to time. It is unavoidable.
Winter nights indoors by the hearth fire show a different face altogether. Noleen envies the fury and ardor of fire; she longs to be that spark, rising up the chimney and into the cold skies on spirals of heat and passion to lose herself in the eternity of it all. Born under a dark moon on the edge between autumn and winter, she understands and admires the silence of stars.
The soundless voice of celestial stars is like a hush of harmonics that shiver through your soul and invite every part of you to participate in the great, cosmic dance.
It is a stillness utterly unlike the silence that wraps around the three women in this tiny, sweltering cottage; theirs is a silence both personal and inherited; it is a thick shroud covering the ache of absence, an ancestral pain accumulated and blunted, like a fire banked and subdued to glimmer tamely through the cold hours of night.
Theirs is a silence of suffocation.
Each of them wears it in a style uniquely her own.
The old woman has collected her pain like the uncountable years she has been on this earth; each year a new burden to carry, a new chink in the outer armor deflecting life. She is a strong one, and so she took the pain of those she cared for along with her own, and in this way, she managed to preserve a sliver of love to nurture her through time.
She wears her pain like a shawl of exhaustion that sucks all heat from her bones and has shrunken her once tall and sturdy frame to a frail bundle of skin and sinew all curled around itself.
She is blessed now, for advanced age has taken from her not only her strength and unceasing vigilance, but also much of her clear sight and mind; she finds a refuge of sorts in the misty fog of forgetfulness that blankets her from the sorrows of her progeny, offspring of her offspring, those who have not yet left her behind like all the others. It has been a long, long time since she has whispered words of love and ardor in the dappled green of the wild woods; and yet, in her twilight hours, it is all returning to her now, a sweet and guileless smile that flirts with her heart but does not quite manage to make its way to her thin, pale lips.
Her great-granddaughter, Neela, has found her own kind of truce with her inheritance of loss and grief. If the world that calls to you is not the one you were born to, you owe it to your fate to deal with what you have been dealt the best you can and don’t look over your shoulder in hopes of catching a glimmer of what could be.
Neela persists by sharing the inner light she was born with with a world which does not recognize its own dimness. She knows how to keep the circumference of her sanity alive by nurturing those around her; a deep, abiding affection for the old one who raised her, for her goats and chickens, the barn cats, the creatures of the wild and all things of the earth, help keep her anchored in the place of her birth.
The love for her daughter, child of her soul, sprung from the union with her one true lover, makes this life worth every aching breath and lonely step towards a future that does not always reveal its plan and meaning.
Like every mother, Neela has the intuitive wisdom to know that Noleen will one day leave her; judging by the distracted look in her eyes, it may not be long now. She carries this pain, too, wrapped up alongside all the others, and lets it be. It is all you can do at times, when fate has claimed your life and heart for its own unfathomable purpose.
Noleen is unimpressed by her mothers mildness, her easy acceptance of the ways of a world that has so little to offer them.
It is not that she is insensitive to the fact that her mother and great-great-grandmother hold their own particular pains close to their chests - on the contrary. In Noleen, the ancestral gift of sensing and knowing the sorrows and joys of those around her is amplified so acutely that she is convinced she carries a curse rather than a blessing.
Energy and emotions roll off people and fling themselves at her like storm-waves at the shore, pulling her under and out to sea. She is intimately familiar with the soreness of hearts that have been measured, found wanting and left to deal with an angry emptiness that keeps gnawing away at any scrap of love and self-worth, until all that is left is a bright red or, worse yet, a dark grey scar the size and shape of yesterday.
She is well acquainted with the driftwood heaviness of floating and drowning in grief and loss, the riptide violence of betrayal; she chokes on the black, bitter bile of hearts who have never known some of the most basic of human needs, like being held and seen and cherished.
Noleen feels all this and more, but she lacks the wisdom that comes only with long years of embracing the inner and outer highs and lows and upside-downs of life; she is blind to the embers of dreams and passion glowing deep within her mother’s heart, knows nothing of her past, the fervent sojourns out in the green wood amongst those she loves and yearns for still, or of the lead-chain weight of making choices that honor another above your own desires.
In her youth, Noleen is blithely and selfishly ignorant of any but her own immediate impulses and desires.
Finding little in this world to draw her, Noleen has pulled everything she is, everything she holds dear, inside of her, until she feels as small and as full as an acorn, yearning to fall far, far from the tree that gave her life, to root and grow according to her own nature.
She has become one with the edges between things, like a wild wolf slinking in shadows, soundless and out of sight.
Noleen knows about being invisible, in so many more ways than one. But she also knows the ways of the wild world, and of the natural, rising heat of blood that will show you the way when nothing else will warm you…
I'm finally catching up on the next parts of the story! Beautiful, as always 🧚