Into Manannan's realm

I sing of a voyage, and a voyager, sails furled in the dusk, yet ready to spread before a favoring wind.

---The black goose sails before, into the fire below the sunset rim of the world. The way leads to the sunken lands, and to the earth beneath the sea that land-bound men will never touch.

---Watch how the waters turn and swirl, opening a tunnel between the elements. Let yourself flow through the passage.

---You are entering the realm of Manannan mac Lir, most unknowable of the Old Ones, one who escapes definite and conventional forms. Your kinsman.

---You are at home here. You breathe where others drown. Sea-born, sea-girt, salt blood in your veins, coral sprouts from your marrow.You surge with the horses of the sea into a rare kingdom.

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Away, away come away my love

to fields of coral and pearl

Away, away come to me my love

to she who once was your girl

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I heard the siren song though I had long since turned my back on the sea and lived in a tamed country, in a gentle valley.

---She found me there, as surely as a kelpie finds a lone fisherman in a curragh on a lonely night with the whisky in him, or the fire of the stars.

---Something out of memory. But whose? The memory of the cell, a current in the blood? Something held in the mirror of dreams without bodily substance, yet alive in the silvered deep of the glass, in suspension between the middle world and the worlds that escape form?

---Do all such visitations come from the past, from those beneath the earth and sea? Or do they come from the same time, but a parallel world of being? Why not from the future?

---Questions, questions, while her lilting song echoes in my inner ear.

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Away away come away my love

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Set this down. Etch it on stone, mark it for memory:

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There is one time, one art that encompasses all. Look through the hole in the stone. The Holy Man knows. See through his single eye the oneness of things. All created things, all that is past, or present, or to come, can be seen in this lens without a glass.


Photo (c) Wanda Easter Burch