Come Away, O Human Child...
Reposting this from Facebook & part of a comment left on Fuller's post about Alchemy, with a few tweaks, since I almost forgot I had an LJ:
I'm back from Alchemy, the Georgia regional Burning Man event, and rather sad and missing Home, not wanting to adjust to the Default Camp. I have a head cold and I'm completely exhausted, but I'm still wearing bright colors with messy hair, finding myself unwilling to put my walls back up or adjust to societal "norms." Some people call this Reality Camp, or just reality, but for me, the world within a burn feels more real and more like home to me than most anything in the "real world."
Burns are partly very spiritual for me personally (though not everyone), especially as a pagan, as I see alot of pagan elements in the rituals of burns, though burns themselves are secular events, and I know just as many atheist burners as pagan burners. The reverance for the Elements, the celebration of fire, the costumes and pageantry...it fills my heart, because I think of the old ways and see they haven't really disappeared, they've just...changed shape a little. They're still celebrated, even by those that don't necessarily believe in them, or even cognitively know about them. It's instinctual, primal. That's my personal view at least.
Burns are so intense. I still am struggling to try to even talk about this past weekend yet. So many things happened during Alchemy, I can't pick just one favorite, but two of my favorite moments of the burn were lying on the hill looking up at the stars with stylishgeek , and hugging at the temple burn after it collapsed and turning around to look out over it all. Moments like that are so important, and I think really encapsulate part of what burns are about; they teach us about impermanence, and the hard lesson of finding peace within it and letting go...because all we truly have in life is this very moment, right now, and our memories. So at a burn, we all drop our walls, our defenses, our sarcasms, our masks, all the things that distance us from each other. We all find each other at our most raw, our most honest and true selves, and connect with each other on the deepest, truest, most intense levels...because we have to. It's all we have. This is What We Do.
Burns are very magical places, I truly believe we tap into a very special energy there. It's a fae land, and it's home. It's the welcoming, loving, magical fairyland I've dreamt of since I was a child. I feel so privileged to be a part of it and to have helped lead my good friend stylishgeek into our world this past weekend for the first time. At some point a line from the poem The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats popped into my head at the end of one night...it tells the story of the changling legends of the faeries in the British Isles, where they would steal away a human child to their world. It was so perfect for this experience.
Loreena McKennitt does a beautiful rendition of this poem in song as well, if you'd like to have a listen.
The Stolen Child
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
-William Butler Yeats
I'm back from Alchemy, the Georgia regional Burning Man event, and rather sad and missing Home, not wanting to adjust to the Default Camp. I have a head cold and I'm completely exhausted, but I'm still wearing bright colors with messy hair, finding myself unwilling to put my walls back up or adjust to societal "norms." Some people call this Reality Camp, or just reality, but for me, the world within a burn feels more real and more like home to me than most anything in the "real world."
Burns are partly very spiritual for me personally (though not everyone), especially as a pagan, as I see alot of pagan elements in the rituals of burns, though burns themselves are secular events, and I know just as many atheist burners as pagan burners. The reverance for the Elements, the celebration of fire, the costumes and pageantry...it fills my heart, because I think of the old ways and see they haven't really disappeared, they've just...changed shape a little. They're still celebrated, even by those that don't necessarily believe in them, or even cognitively know about them. It's instinctual, primal. That's my personal view at least.
Burns are so intense. I still am struggling to try to even talk about this past weekend yet. So many things happened during Alchemy, I can't pick just one favorite, but two of my favorite moments of the burn were lying on the hill looking up at the stars with stylishgeek , and hugging at the temple burn after it collapsed and turning around to look out over it all. Moments like that are so important, and I think really encapsulate part of what burns are about; they teach us about impermanence, and the hard lesson of finding peace within it and letting go...because all we truly have in life is this very moment, right now, and our memories. So at a burn, we all drop our walls, our defenses, our sarcasms, our masks, all the things that distance us from each other. We all find each other at our most raw, our most honest and true selves, and connect with each other on the deepest, truest, most intense levels...because we have to. It's all we have. This is What We Do.
Burns are very magical places, I truly believe we tap into a very special energy there. It's a fae land, and it's home. It's the welcoming, loving, magical fairyland I've dreamt of since I was a child. I feel so privileged to be a part of it and to have helped lead my good friend stylishgeek into our world this past weekend for the first time. At some point a line from the poem The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats popped into my head at the end of one night...it tells the story of the changling legends of the faeries in the British Isles, where they would steal away a human child to their world. It was so perfect for this experience.
Loreena McKennitt does a beautiful rendition of this poem in song as well, if you'd like to have a listen.
Click to viewThe Stolen Child
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
-William Butler Yeats