The Green and Leafy Tongue
Rune Language of the Ash
Dream:
I am deep in the brambles, close to the gurgling water of a stream. The world is alive in the greenness, but the dun browns and greys of winter still hang under the new growth. Fallen into the gripping pillow of blackberry and nettle is a great Ash tree. Its thick trunk encircled with great limbs still reaching skyward. Where I can see the bark of the great tree through the moss thick like fir on its trunk it is cracked and traced with acres of shapes, and symbols. I begin to circle the tree, up and over the trunk and under the branches all the time with honed intent on the scrawling script on the trees body. My body hunches, close to the ground, and in this wolf-like shape I begin to speak in a guttural, creaking bark language. The speech scrawled into the great tree channeling through my trunk and given wings by my breath.
In Havamal, the words of the one-eyed, we are given a glimpse into how the rune’s were plucked from Yggdrasil by Odinn. Odin hung himself from the great tree, gallows style, piercing his side with a spear and hung for nine-days. It’s the rapture of death, and sacrifice that calls forth the strange shapes out of the potentiality. He looked down, at the roots, at the soil, at the trunk, and saw the power shapes, the wyrd shapes from the very tree itself, the runes are ash-tree speech. Odin learned the runes, gathering them into himself, a magic script, a myth-in-motion from the very substance of the earth, the very Anima Mundi. As he dropped from the tree pregnant with the rune magic he screamed, an echo of the scream of Ymir at the world’s origin.
This story became a question for me, a goading projectile from the deep past: If the runes are speech from Yggdrasil, then what speech of the ash could I find here on Turtle Island. How can my rune songs, all filled with fjord air, ice melt, and the old-gods sing in harmony with this place?
So I set out, day in and day out roaming in the hills to find my own ash, a world tree to hang the practice on. I could feel it, before I saw it. Those trembles of magic in the air that signal that something is about to happen started, as I turned the corner from grass and mixed Oak woodland, right at the edge of the mighty Redwoods. As my feet carried me to the edge of the bridge I looked up at the shaking leafy bower of the Great Tree. The world’s winds dancing the green leafs this way and that, and the croaking of two ravens. After weeks of searching my feet carried me to your feet. It wasn’t anything like I had designed, I imagined a secluded ash, in a deep wooded grove somewhere I could don my cloak and sink into the mysteries. Instead the great tree looms large over the intersection of three trails. Its massive trunk a way post in a hot spot of travel. With trepidation, and feeling exposed, I set to work.
Runes from the Unconcious, Runes from the “Others”
Between 1914 and 1930, C.G. Jung descended into the unconscious and was awakened to the reality that all that is in us, is not us. To speak on the Liber Novus, what is called Jung’s Red Book, is a piece of work in it’s own right and for our purposes here only a brief introduction serves. This text is a record of his journeys, mythic and symbolic scribing from his journeying into the depths. During the process he was given runes, in some ways much like Odin, but in one way distinctly different. Jung’s runes from the unconscious came from an extremeness of introversion, he peered into his depths pulling away from the world, and was given these visions. In the case of Odin’s ordeal, he looks deep into the world at the feet of Yggdrasil, and catches the runes from that vision.
There is a parallel and a break away from Carl Gustav Jung’s uncovering of the runes of his unconscious which intriguingly have no symbolic or linguistic connection to any other know writing system; they are utterly “personal,” from Jung’s deep interior.
These ash runes are not gathered by introversion and incubation as such, but by a process of extreme extraversion and a tuning of the eye and the imagination outward holding to the intent of seeing with animate and meaning filled gaze. I have come to call this meaning-filled gaze the the mythopoetic eye which is a tool to re-valorize the “others” of this world. What Jung called the incubation comes in the form of staying with the shapes, sounds, gestures, and sensations shown and evoked by the “others” which ultimately builds kinship and deep rapport with the other than human a shift into animate ecologies of perception.
This is a radical act in a capitalist culture that is fed by our discontent, this is an act of decolonizing ourselves + returning to alignment with our earth based ancestors. As the mythsinger Daniel Deardorff writes in The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture and Psyche:
“From the perspective of civil-society, that which is not proper, or normal, or accepted is deemed to evince a social or moral “disfigurement, ugliness, or crookedness.” Plants become weeds, animals become vermin, ideas become heresy or treason, and become infidel, outcast, misbegotten. This deeming and damning perspective seems immoveable, yet many of the old stories speak to a magical shift: the loathsome beastly shape transformed by a “blessing kiss”- an act of fidelity, love, and valor…. Yet, one must ask, is this magical shift a transformation of form or of perception? And is it possible that perception alone can alter form?”
Story is the great alterer of perception, a horse to ride into the territory of re-animating our relationships with place by re-storying them, restoration and restory-ation going hand in hand. So I started to tell Ash the old stories.
Asemic Writing
Another tributary that feeds the tree language praxis is the asemic writing movement. The term “asemic writing” was first used in 1997 by the visual poets Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich but the root of this movement in art goes back much further. The two earliest ancestors claimed by the asemic writing movement are two Tang Dynasty (c. 800 CE) calligraphers Zhang Xu, and Huaisu who both are known for their wild and illegible cursive calligraphy. The tree of this art form travels through the Dadaists, artists such as Cy Twombly and Mirtha Dermisache.
As a style of art Asemic writing defies traditional forms of written communication, instead employing abstract marks, lines, and shapes that do not have a specific semantic meaning. The very nature of asemic writing allows this meaning to arise in the reader across linguistic understanding, these pieces can often be “read” regardless of the reader’s language and culture of origin.
Satu Kaikkonen, a Finnish asemic writer and artist, says of his work; “As a creator of asemics, I consider myself an explorer and a global storyteller. Asemic art, after all, represents a kind of language that's universal and lodged deep within our unconscious minds.”
Ancestralization and the Tree Behind the Tree
I returned again and again to the tree’s feet, approaching slowly each time my bag filled with libations and my mouth with verse. I poured offerings of cream and honey from the bees I was blessed to keep that year, I poured mead we had made in ceremony building relations through the gifting. Right there in plain view, of all the passers by, I gave my gifts and chanted quietly or loudly these re-imaginings of the verses from the Voluspa:
The great old ones, torn and shackled
Until Ragnarok sleep
Hidden in the living land, waiting to dance.
Before sun and moon were given their course
Skinfaxi, and Hrimfaxi tethered to their charges
Odin, Vile, and Ve wandered on Ymir’s worked flesh
They came to a stand of trees,
Ash and Elm trees without tongues,
Green and wild branches stood still
Odin breathed spirit into waiting trunks,
Vile a face carved too,
Ve their fragrant flowing hair.
Filled with breath
Humans from trees born
Spirit filled, their plant bodies birthing
Our very first ancestors,
Asc and Embla.
These daily chantings, and offering of libations became an experiment. The hypothesis, could magical language and ritual truly change my perception. Can storytellers be magicians of language, enchanting people and worlds to open up new ways of thinking, previously uncharted territories within hearts and minds? Can language woven from meter, improv and dream weave a dragon-road, a serpentine labyrinth path from the dayworld into the realm of soul.
So I set off riding on the wings of Image.
After the gifts, the waiting. In the stillness of the surrounding redwood forest, the deep quiet of those tall trees' sounds and symbols began to slowly emerge from the tree. The branches forming angular runes, the leaves engraved with letters. Overheard the susurrations of the diablo wind tearing through the canopy a galdr, spirit riding through the leaf and branching script making song. Every day I would arrive with my note book, and scrawl rune after rune. But not only this occult language emerged, in the restorying of the ash as one of the pair of human/plant beings that we are descended from I was brought into an ever deeper sense of kinship with the place. It became then, and is to this day The Meadhall of the First Ancestor. The beams of the hall carven with ash-rune magic, the hall fills with wind and raven song.
Elder Pen, and Ash Ink
As my little pocket journal began to fill up with the ash-script I turned toward a need to figure out how to scribe the language in a way of beauty that honored the gift I was being given. I could not write these magic scripts in any old book, with ink from department store pens. It was clear to me that notating the language of place had to be an ecological affair from bottom up. I began to experiment, asking the trees permission to harvest bark, twigs, and leaves and boiling them into inks at home. The pieces that you see here are drawn with ink alchemized from the stripped bark of an ash wand, the inner bark of an old-growth oak tree. The Oak brought the dark rich hue of the ink forward aligning with the Oak medicine. All of the writing tools I used for the project were harvested and carved from Elder trees, ones I have known and tended since they were planted. The magic of the old woman of the woods for good measure.
Widening Circles
Out of my head, and thoroughly convinced of the wyrd magic I was bumping up against out there in the woods I endeavored to widen the circle of kinship by inviting others into the experiment. At the time I was reading To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest by Diana Beresford Kroeger. A deeply impactful book on the weaving of scientific acuity and ancestral wisdom that Diana received growing up spending summers in the valley of Lisheen’s Ireland. At one pivotal moment in the text she begins to question why there are no trees, except one great Ash, to be seen in Lisheen’s, and stumbles into reckoning with the history the English colonization of Ireland and at the same time her Aunt Nellie’s deep relationship with the Ash.
“Later, I gained a fuller understanding of the communion between Nellie and the ash. To the Druidic mind, trees are sentient beings. Far from being unique to the Celts, this idea was shared by many of the ancient civilizations that lived in the vast virgin wildwoods of the past. The Celts believed a tree’s presence could be felt more keenly at night or after a heavy rain, and that certain people were more attuned to trees and better able to perceive them.”
This special capacity to feel the sentience of the trees she calls mothaitheact in Irish. A feeling often felt in the heart as a series of loping waves. She then points out that modern science has picked up infra-sound, a sort of sub-audible soundwave, emanating from large Ash trees similar to the waves emitted by Elephants and volcanoes. Provoked, I set out to find this vibrational galdr.
As I was experimenting on widening the circles of kinship phase of my strange occult work I invited a youth that I was mentoring at the time to join me for a day in the woods. We walked and talked about all the normal things: video games, school, parents, and fantasy novels mostly. But as we approached the bridge, I stopped us turning the conversation towards this theory of Infra-sound. I asked him if he was interested in an experiment, and with his consent blindfolded him and began slowly walking with the invitation tracking the felt sense. I didn’t point out my ash in advance, but simply walked with him slowly. I felt the tree, that long loping wave form a warm sensation in the chest and then waited. A few more steps and we were just beyond the canopy of my Ash and he felt it, the explosion of joy and wonder were drops of the purest water. What was my Ash, suddenly became our Ash.
I started to be more audacious, inviting magic minded adult friends to come meet the Ash. We would leave home at dawn, walk into the woods and I would have them observe the Ash cold. After greeting the tree, and the period of awareness we would leave the Meadhall, and out of sight chant the sections I had adapted from the Voluspa:
First Father,
One not fallen
Every youthful Yggdrasil
In those ancient days,
Nine giantesses, and nine worlds,
The seeds of Yggdrasil sprang,
A great tree,
A high tree, speckled
With star light;
Dewdrops fall from it
Upon the valleys;
It stands, forever green,
Above the well of Memory.
The green and leafy bower,
Stretching wide into the boundless
Leafed and branchy tongues tremble
Whispering the worlds into being.
From its great branches,
Like silver apples, and golden apples,
Hung the nine worlds.
Strong heart grant,
Deepest roots growing
A shelter for shimmering suns
Roots diving deep into mystery
Unknown depths meeting
One deep in Urth’s still-wet well
Where stand three wise women
Urth, the elders, an ancient one waits
Verdandi, the supple-supporting bough,
Skuld, the branches flower
Three chthonic women, soil brown, fathomless.
They tend our fates, as they tend the tree,
May Urth feed the tree, with sweet and sorrowful memories.
In the shaking leafy head,
Stands the gods gold roofed home
Where they grief-full gather in shimmering sun.
The spell having taken full hold we would return to the Meadhall, and behold the tree with new eyes. Some days the blowing leaves would become beaten gold shields shining in the dawn light, others the low hanging branches hands reaching out for connection, but as we were learning the dance steps of attention and praise our tree responded in kind.
Speaking with the Trees
Dream:
I approach, two figures bent with intention over something, their backs slightly turned to me, but the light of some strange magic on their faces. As I approach I see two women, whose faces swirl old as the forest, young as the spring hard too trap with perception. They stand together one chanting un-translatable rune song that brings forth rich dark soil into their gathered hands, the other singing in harmony rivulets of crystal water dropping into the soil. They invited me in, urging to “grow a tree with the chant.” I breathe deep, and sing. A single rune over the water and earth and an Ash tree grows, a new Yggdrasil springing from its seed.
In his book Apocalyptic Witchcraft, Peter Grey writes “ [myths] come from the very substance of the earth.” As a storyteller these kinds of musings have led me to search for the earth, the plants, the mammals and birds in all of the stories I tell. To let them be more than shadows of these living breathing beings, but instead anchor them to the flesh and blood strangeness of our wild neighbors. The research that goes into my tellings moves back and forth between archaic texts, archival recordings, conversations with my mentors like Andreas and extended trips to roaming around the woods courting synchronicity. This essay is a record of one such journey. It revealed to me what I later heard put in by Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen and Einar Selvik in an interview at Midgardsblot 2022, that we can view the “Runes as pathways, runes as questions.” The same applies to the Old Stories, instead of searching for answers in these tales, or static knowledge in the occult face of the Elder Futhark rune row, I’ve gone seeking the questions and the provocations.
You do not need to be told that we are in the midst of an intersecting crisis that are changing the face of our planet, and demanding that we question all that we have been taught about being humans on it. The stories, and the old magicks could be a flight of fancy out of the mess but I posit a different route. I propose that living the provocations of myth asks us to meet the unfolding and unraveling of these times with full attention, and the full power of our imagination spiraling deeper into kinship and reciprocity with the beings of this planet.
This kind of practice asks us to go slowly, to realize that Trees may in fact speak in a long slow speech as they do in Fangorn. To find the fidelity to hear even a phrase of the Treeish language asks us to reclaim our attention, and halt the addiction to quick and easy extraction of meaning. The Ash has asked me to slow down to the pace of trust, to reckon with what it means to be a settler on stolen land and realize that the language, magic, and abundance of animacy of a place is not free for me to take but instead something that is revealed at the pace of place and through fidelity to our wild neighbors.
We implore you, look around and find your Yggdrasil, every meadow has got one. Maybe it is the tree that has been following you your whole life. Looking back I now realize my childhood home was shaded by the Ash, the playground at my first school likewise, my first sit spot, and my most recent home. The trees are calling us, we only have to tune our eyes, hearts, and ears.
“So bury me beneath the queen, below the Ash with the birds and the bees resow us back into the green. Island bouncing on the sea, Island bouncing on the sea.” - John Joe Reilly by Lisa O’Neill
Doorways to the Wyrd Speech
Find a place that you can spend time outside, it doesn’t need to be deep in the forest or the most idyllic location. Attention and fidelity make any place holy.
Bring gifts, whether that be poetry, dance, song or something crafted by hand to build relationship through offering.
Now pay attention, what shapes in the ecology call to you bark cracks, the flight shapes of birds, the arc of the sun and moon. In the watching, find a way to scribe the shapes, gestures, or sounds. Sometimes the meaning hits like a bolt of lightning, others bringing the scribed shapes into meditation or other contemplative practice reveals that face. Your body knows even if your mind doesn’t yet.
In my process it was important to move from listening, and seeing to speaking. This was challenging, but to begin speaking with the tree uttering strange bark galdrs, chanting the Voluspa, telling other stories. Speaking back wove a mantle of meaning and potency between the warp of what we heard and the weft of what was said back.
Be bold, be humble. When you feel like you are projecting onto the beings of the place go easy, and also remember that Jung’s original word for projection was rapport: “a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate well.”
Ecologies are webs, not static points. Notice how what has called your attention is woven in with the other beings of the place. What birds perch on the branch, what clouds cross the sun's path, who throws shadow on the patch of ground?
References:
Beresford-Kroeger, Diana. To Speak for the Trees: My Life's Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest. Timber Press, 2021.
Crawford, Jackson. The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2015.
Deardorff, Daniel. The Other within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, and Psyche. Inner Traditions, 2022.
Grey, Peter. Apocalyptic Witchcraft. Scarlet Imprint, 2013
Jung, C. G., and Sonu Shamdasani. The Red Book = Liber Novus: A Reader's Edition. W.W. Norton & Co., 2012.
Rasmussen, Rune, director. Midgardsblot with Einar Selvik. YouTube, YouTube, 28 Dec. 2022, Accessed 22 Mar. 2023.
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