‘The Grey King’….. ‘Overstory’ – That’s What It Is – The Over-story…..Taversoe Tuick Update…
by Bernie Bell - 07:37 on 07 February 2023
‘The Grey King’…..
Volume 4 of ‘The Dark Is Rising’….
In the Prologue - Will repeatedly saying ”On the day of the dead”….I’m thinking of the Day of the Dead in Mexico…… https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/top-ten-day-of-dead-mexico
and… https://theorkneynews.scot/2017/06/15/bernies-stories-death-days-past-and-present/
and…. https://theorkneynews.scot/2017/10/31/halloween-musings/
This part of the tale is set in Wales – where I lived from 1974 to 1990. While I was there I picked up enough to understand quite a bit of what was being said - not enough to actually be able to speak Welsh myself. Why didn’t I learn it as I was there? Welsh was available as a course as Part One of my Degree, but – I’d always been very bad with languages and didn’t want to risk failing a course which could mean that I’d fail Part One - so I didn’t - I trusted to ‘playing it by ear’. By now, much of what I knew has gone but it’s good to read…. ‘Sut ‘dach chi?’ ‘Iawn diolch’ ….’How are you? ’Very well thanks.’
‘Cariad’ …’Sweetheart’…I knew a terrier called Cariad, and she was, too – a sweetheart.
I’m going to enjoy reading the snippets of Welsh, and wonder how much I’ll recognize.
I can’t resist telling a tale. There’s a tendency in Wales to tag a person’s occupation onto their name, for example - Jones the Milk for the milkman – Organ Morgan played the organ in Llanbadarn Church – now there’s a place…. https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=st-padarn-s-church-llanbadarn-fawr . For a time, I lived near Aberystwyth and one of the Undertakers there employed a man called David, often shortened to Dai in Wales…he was known, far and wide as…..Dai the Death. Honest, he was.
Cader Idris – I walked up Cader Idris, once, with some people and we got caught in a blizzard near the top. Fortunately the people I was with go up mountains a lot, and knew what to do. We huddled together in the lee of a big rock and waited for the blizzard to pass over us - which it did - the sun shone, and we carried on up. We stood above the tarn, then it was an easier way, down the mountain. What a place, what a day. https://www.snowdoniaguide.com/cader_idris.html
‘The Grey King’ is wakening a lot of memories – for Will and for me.
“It is of no consequence that I am a Lord of the Light, or that my colleague there is a Lord of the Dark.”
Balance.
Someone asked me about this mark – referring to it as a ‘Witches Mark’. I answered that I see these marks as being to do with balance and order in The Universe.
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‘Overstory’ – That’s What It Is – The Over-story…..
I’m converging with ‘Emergence’ again…. https://theorkneynews.scot/2019/06/13/overstory-and-underland/
Kinship, Community, and Consciousness
Podcast
A Conversation with Richard Powers
“This week we revisit our conversation with Richard Powers, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory, which reweaves the fabric of our reality by entangling us within “plant consciousness.” Richard discusses the kind of storytelling that acknowledges the reciprocal, communal existence of all living things, how life-changing these stories can be, and how they might help shape our response to the ecological crisis. “
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Taversoe Tuick Update…
The ‘Tombs of the Isles’ Taversoe Tuick page has been updated with more pictures and plans of the two-storey chambered cairn…..
https://archaeologyorkney.com/2023/02/06/taversoe-tuick-updated/
Here’s what I wrote about our visit to Taversoe Tuick about 12 years ago …..
“Taversoe Tuick is a strange, unique, intriguing little place. The cairn itself is a little gem. Getting to it was very difficult. The land around it was totally ‘poached’, presumably by cattle. It was a matter of leaping from tussock-to-tussock. This was OK for Mike and I, as we were relatively young and reasonably fit-ish! For anyone less agile, it would have been impossible. Ben-The-Dog just saw it as some kind of obstacle course, climbing up and down among the pot-holes and tussocks, and no doubt wishing he had longer legs!
Back to the cairn. It’s built on two ‘stories’, which is un-usual. It also has an off-shoot – an extra little chamber, lying just outside the main cairn. This is an intriguing little ‘cell’. I wondered was it for some kind of rite-of-passage, or initiation? as in, place someone in there, for maybe a few days, and they’d come out crazy, clear-headed, or both! Other cultures, even very modern societies today, have isolation tanks. The idea, as far as I can gather, is to cut off all external stimuli so that the person……goes inside them-self, to their inner world, to ……………….meet them-self. Maybe a similar idea, here? Initiation, through isolation.
We recently attended a seminar at Orkney College, where Julie Gibson ( County Archaeologist) mentioned that there is a small ‘channel’ linking this side-cell to the main cairn. If noises (!) are made in the side-cell they can be heard in the main cairn. Is this part of the function of the side-cell? Changing states of consciousness? It’s a small cell, so you’d have to be a small person to fit in it - or a young person – a teenager?”
https://theorkneynews.scot/2017/05/18/bernie-bell-orkney-walks-with-stories-rousay/
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Here’s one I made earlier…… https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/01/11/same-sex-skara/
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