Eco-Mythic Kinships

Rituals of Listening

collage by me

Beneath the skin of the land, something stirs. A slow hum, a breath older than doctrine, a pulse underneath the roads and records. I walk where the rivers thicken and the stones vibrate, tracing the echo of a grammar that was never written but always known. However silent it seems today, it is still dreamt and whispered.

Over the past months, I’ve been working on a number of different eco-mythic unravelings, paradoxical thresholds to be crossed. Or maybe they are guiding me. In the folds of forgotten Iberian chapels, under the weight of saints with borrowed names, I meet the ones who never left: Mouras with serpentine spines, Madonnas made of ash and root, bone-dark goddesses who remember the world before fences. The feral sovereign world of wild sacred ceremonies. The ones not over the living, untamed world, but with and through it.

This is not research in its modern and reductive sense. It is a ritual, a prayer of screaming collective memories. A slow undoing of modernity’s grip, thread by thread. Skin by skin. I follow the scent of burnt herbs and saltwater, reading the land as one reads a body marked by time—scarred, sacred, and still speaking. Humming, howling, chanting. These tales, and their whole ecology, come with teeth and milk, with blood that rises through the wellspring of memory. This is not a place for solace. Presence is demanded, the kind of listening that cracks you open, a devotion that knows how to kneel on moss and speak to stone without demanding answers. Just here. Body-in-place.

Here, eco-mythology is not theory or metaphor, but kinship and shapeshifting. I’ve been working with the re-print and review of Lady of Orada, the Iberian Black Virgins, the river-bodied ones, as living entities that are the landscape itself. Invitations to remember our feral lineage, returning to the subsoil of psyche and place.

To let the grief come.

To let the myths breathe.

To let the mountain speak through your ribs.

This work is not safe, for it shakes bones and long-forgotten echoes.

It is urgent to recover the artifacts of how to be a relational human again.

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What I’ve been working on:

• Re-print and review of Our Lady of Orada—Eco-Mythological Lineage of the Mountain — A shapeshifting guardian of thresholds and rivers, Orada is the chthonic pulse of a land that remembers through water, stone, and story.

• Researching, writing, and editing the new The Crone’s Wheel—The Speech of the World — All about Eco-Mythical Tales. In the burnt hush of old tales, the Earth still whispers, each myth a ritual echo calling us back to kinship through wounds, weeds, and mystery.

• Researching, writing, and editing the new The Bone Needle—Weaving of the Black Virgins in Iberian Territory — Threaded with bone and breath, these prayers mend, stitch, and pierce through the fabric of forgetting of how whiteness is being assembled.