I keep ritual.
I keep peace.
You had the buck skull in your old room, where you skulked the winter through and slowly faded from being, turned to sepia and blurry actions. Eventually you left, dragging yourself through.
and the skull did not go with you
I left it there, to gather dust and be nothing much. Not a sacred being or an ancestor, the remains of a relative that was taken young on the Wicklow mountains to the next life. Yet one night as I sat smoking in a bar, wondering how it was that I was never vital and that life felt like an advertisement for something I could not afford and thought was tacky anyway; the deer called me.
I had since moved from the abandoned garage, one Winter and a stunted Spring without heat, power or a hot water in the hellmouth of the swamping city had ripped me apart and sewn me back up, limp and vacant like a ragdoll on a pavement. The owner had threatened the squatted building and the rising insanity of living in endless liminality compelled me from the place, thick with memories, old arguments, pain and rage.
This night though, the deer called me back. I knew as I rose from where I was sitting that what came was greater than sentimentality. It was a call to the sacred order of things. So I returned to the three storey garage and entered your room and took the skull. I took the blanket you had brought me from Mexico also. The air of that place was putrid with shame. I won’t waste my words on it.
Since the time I sought the skull, he spent a while under the stairs, in a sack of soil. When at last I had a space to stay I set him on the altar. I began to heal him of the transgressions that us profane animals made against him. I set ablaze a paper sachet of mugwort on his crown and sat breathing in the smoke, so I might purge his dreams for him. I asked forgiveness for your sins. I asked forgiveness for my own with each act of recognition and reverence.
In a room of thirty others still identifying as youths, we received teachings from a man whose hair was beginning to gray. When asked of many things he dismissed the questions, calling out their vanity and obsession with human ways. Once asked why it was that those who still practice reverence for all creation are those who carry the most devastation for plant and animal, culture and dreaming, he replied;
‘It is the deer that dies for us, so we may see what it is we have done to the forest.’
On the day of the longest eclipse in a century I sat with the deer skull and a birch tree grown in a box in the garage on a bus. With a friend we carried these things on the verge of the road. We thumbed a lift the rest of the way to a waterfall. We asked permission and sang songs for the birch tree that we planted next to a fallen Elder. We asked permission, and entered the holy space of the crashing waters. We asked permission and dipped our bodies in the freezing water that was dancing with the rain and spray. We asked permission before we shed what we would not longer carry and called our souls back to our bodies. We gave offerings of sweets to the trees. We gave offerings of songs to the luminous beings, the breath in our lungs and the soaked rich soil that was nourishing us through the tender skin on the arches of our feet. I gave offering of the deer skull, returned to the elements, no longer left a sad lament on an altar on a shelf in a suburban bedroom.
As I submerged my body holding the skull three times I spoke to the Great Mother whose song came from the cave to my left hand side. Shivering and naked I cried out and told her no more would I allow the deer to die to protect those who cannot love themselves from their own lies.
The day is coming and it is time for the truth to rise.
I told you there was a forest within me.
You never could handle the wild.
Sionnachaí 