Gwendolen
Photo of the Pembrokeshire coastline: a rough, grey rocky cliffedge with a blue-green sea before it. There are lots of small caves in the cliffs. A blue sky and grey cloud above.
Gwendolen lived in this Pembrokeshire cave: she was part woman, part crow, part rock. She decorated her glistening black body with kelp, and collected bird’s foot trefoil and celandine stars to place around her cave as night lights. This way, the deep darkness of her home was always studded by a warm yellow glow, even when storms raged outside it.
Gwendolen lived in this cave for a great many years longer than any human can remember. She lived a not-quite-immortal life in silence, listening to the sounds of the waves crashing against the edges of the world. It is said that she loved how her eye would land upon infinity when she scanned the empty horizon of the sea. That her hands knew the rough dragon tooth edges of the world as if they were its maker.
Gwendolen lived in this cave for just less than forever and she marked time by the sand martins. Each year they came to her with stories of the wing. Tales of desert heat and mountain passes, their calls mimicking the melodies of the newest kora songs they had learnt in the months they had been gone. The birds would dive and swirl for Gwendolen, and in their swoops, she would read where in their journey there had been abundance and where there had been famine. Who they had lost along the long and perilous way to nest once more in her presence.
Throughout her long life, Gwendolen would take sailors, jackdaws, and flowers for lovers. The men came to her to learn about the waves so that they might live long enough to make their fortune on the seas. They left her in time to take their human wives and rear their human babies and she was always glad to see them go. She went to the jackdaws to practice how to move in synchronised flight, following their bodies wheeling up the edges of the cliffs, and then dropping down low over fields and pastures. The flowers, they bloomed and then lay themselves down upon her body, gifting to her eternal sediments of perfume.
When Gwendolen was young, the earth was still forming. Over and over the seasons washed the edges of the world with change. Layers of earth built up by the bodies of insects breaking down the green about them. Flowers made multiple year after year by a wind and a wing shifting and sharing their seeds and pollen along the shore. When Gwendolen was young, she too was forming and would move between shapes – rock, bird, woman.
When she was rock, she would secrete minerals so that the wildflowers, mosses, and lichen which landed upon her would grow into lush, low forests of colour. Forests of campion, foxgloves, and thrift which still grow in abundance here at the edge of the world. No need for a lighthouse in her rock periods, for the colours of the risen flowers would steer ships safely to shore. In those years, the sand martins would roost amongst the folds and holes of her body, seals would bask on her back, and swallows would briefly alight on her shoulders with gossip. When she was rock, she learnt what it meant to hold up the world, even though there were pieces of herself missing. She learnt that to lose part of yourself was to gain a space for things to flow through you. Loss always precedes flux.
When Gwendolen was bird she was crow and the keeper of the world’s magic. It was then that she learnt the spells which keep her celandine and trefoil glowing throughout the long nights of her human life. She would take her black eyes up into the skies with her wings and watch the world, assessing everyone and everything, learning the true names of things through a calm observation. When she was done knowing, she would come back to her cave and rip the heart out of facts, so that the truth spilled about her on the floor.
When she was woman, she stood on her former body and sang songs to the firmament which whirled above her. Stars which rained down drops into her open mouth and heart, causing her to shimmer from the inside. She would take herself to a clifftop, sit down cross legged, upend her hands, and cause the shimmering to re-emerge from her palms. She would blow it like pappus into the night sky and watch it until it became part of the blackness.
Now Gwendolen was old and at the end of forever she didn’t fly any more, as she had started rooting down into the earth. When she looked down into the water, she saw her toe-claws spread out amongst the rocks and sand, giving her a stability she never had before. She became all the possibilities of her forms at once, offering up the holes of herself to the wind and the sun so that the creatures of the air would have a forever home, and she, too, with them. She become none of the things she could have been but instead, some new form, some other, some giant and complete being, here at the edge of the world. A new form the world does not yet have words for, but here I am, trying to do justice, providing her with honour, remembering how to speak her name.
I saw Gwendolen once. No one believes me, but I did. I saw her standing at the edge of her cave and recognised her at once as woman. Yet, even as she stood there, I saw bird ascending from her shoulders, rock spreading out wide from her hips. Her body seemed to shimmer between all three existences as if she couldn’t choose who she was. I saw her there, at the mouth of her cave, a cluster of lesser celandine in the palms of her hands which were also the tips of her wings, kelp strung about her head and neck, over her human-crow breast, her black hair-feathers shining purple. I saw her there until she felt me looking and retreated back into her cave.
I want you to know that I saw you, Gwendolen, and I will carry your story forward. I will let the people know that, on the wild, westerly Welsh coast, somewhere near Pwll Deri, is a woman with a song. That there, at the margins of the world, is a way we can bring the world back together again. That we can take the corridors of our lives and we can fill them with long grasses and waist-high flowers, with dry stone walls and empty spaces. And in those cracks and crevices, we can create a fusion with the past to take us forward into a new age. An age wherein, giving up and letting go, we can find so much more. An age of sharing with all the hidden things we don’t notice but without which life is not much more than barren rock. In the end, we have to go back and give up our human centring, in order that we might go forward in peace.