I'll share your time, for a time

Dear Reader,

In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller writes that at the first gate of sorrow, we acknowledge that everything we love, we will lose. From Weller, I learnt that grief is essential to the whole human experience, that we live fuller lives because of our ability to grieve. Grief tells me of the depths of my heart’s ability to love, of opening the heart to another being to enter and find a home within. Grief is the other side of love, and womb song is in some ways an alchemy of grief, transforming and transformed.

For me, grieving was its own death: of the self, of old ways of living and being, of the familiar and knowable. I found myself in an unknown terrain when I lost my more-than-human kin Ealga on 19 March 2022; I had departed from the world of joy, beauty and laughter, and descended into the underworld of darkness, loss and pain. For months, I could only open my mouth to cry out my loss. (“On songs”, womb song,  p. 17) 

I remember reading Mary Oliver’s poem “In Blackwater Woods” about living in this world and only feeling the full weight of her words after Ealga’s death:
 

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things: 

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.
 

Loving, holding and letting go. That is what we share as living beings on this earth; at the first gate of grief, all that we love and hold dear to us, we have to let go of one day. Ealga taught me the lesson of impermanence, an essential theme in womb song.

The beauty of impermanence is that nothing remains the same. This can be quite frightening for some, but it also means that after a time of suffering, we can expect to walk through our suffering into something beyond the suffering. As I wrote the poems in womb song, Louise Glück’s words from “The Wild Iris” (which appear in my epigraph) would comfort me and remind me that “At the end of my suffering/ there was a door”.

womb song is many things. It is a collection of poetry only made possible through the life of my more-than-human kin Ealga, and through our deep bond transcending time, space and species. It is the chaos and confusion of suffering and the terrible grief of losing a loved one; it is the song of tending to my losses with patience, devotion and tenderness. It is dreaming and remembering our interspecies kinships. It is wound and healing. It is burial and birth. Most importantly, it is a new way of relating to Ealga and the more-than-human world beyond the boundaries of species, geographies, life, death, matter, spirit, body, dream.  

Warmly,
Esther Vincent 
Author of womb song and Red Earth