I played with prescribed cultured (as in nourished) archetypes and myth for a while, years ago, but soon got quite bored with them. 1
For today and to celebrate the last week and the ending of another Gregorian calendar 2 year, I decided to reassemble my own herons in time.
These majestic creatures started to appear at times of profound changes. They just flew by, slowly, reminding me to pay attention... and in the vice versa, of course, they flew by and I, in complete charge of my utopias, did not pay any attention.
I remember a visit to the North country, in Michigan, many years ago, when I first saw the art of the Ojibwa people, where the heron is venerated as a guide.
Soon I stayed enchanted with the poetry of Anita Endrezze, a Yaqui poet.3 It included a short poem about herons, an ancestral story retold about medallions of patience... I have a printed copy somewhere and maybe someday I will find it again. The feeling, the action, the images, the causalities, though, remain. Medallions of patience.
Not an exiled, returning home hero, nor any rediscovered queen heroine, no prince or princess, no crown, no savior, no activist, no search, no utopia... for now, just herons...
gliding the flat waters of Miro’s drawing signs4
communing with the white ibis
standing tall above my head
and young in the soft season, in the regality and permanency of steel.
Reminders of solitude
and the magic of dawn.
did I?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_calendar
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anita-endrezze
"Poet Leslie Ullman, reviewing at the helm of twilight for the Kenyon Review, commented that Endrezze’s “collection … is luxuriant with fragments of myth, the voices of different personae, striking visual images and always, as a backdrop, metaphors interweaving the natural world with the landscape of human emotion.”
https://www.foreverbarcelona.com/joan-miro-icons-symbols/
"...our" that is...
What a lovely accompaniment to the new year, the shorter nights and the gathering in of pour beloveds.