Hello Still Tender Ones, Again, Big deep loving breaths. Here. Now. And later. This might be the most potent, powerful and profound pod in this series…my whole body is still ringing from Carter’s audio offering. Wow…and if the story I shared on the last full moon stirred and touched you in some way, this deeper dive through Carter’s art and voice is a feast. If you are reading this before you listen to this episode a few things to know; these notes will refer to two previous post. The first is the story of the Cailleach at the End/Edge of the World which I told at the last full moon. The second is a short episode just before this one you might want to listen to as an Introduction to Carter and this pod. Thank you for your patience as I navigate the audio editing obstacles. My desire is to continue to offer the emergent collaboration podcasts on A year & a Day, and I just don’t know how that will work out. Until it does I shall be pivoting and making lemonade and swearing, maybe crying and for sure employing all my creative resourcefulness to find a way through. And the recording quality might suck…that will change. And…starting with this post I’m asking now for dedicated patrons for upcoming episodes. If you would like to sponsor any of these episodes taking us through the end of this 13 month cycle. Suggested donation is $250/episode. Upcoming pods in need of sponsorship, email me to arrange this tlchipman@gmail.com * 2/1 - full moon in Leo * 2/17 * new moon in Pisces * 3/3 - full moon in Virgo * 3/18 * new moon in Aries * 4/1 - full moon in Libra * 4/17 * new moon in Taurus Thank you, thank you! And if you are a paid subscriber here on Substack, thank you! This experimental, experiential project is way under funded, and it’s still fully free to anyone who’s keen…and your support is wildly meaningful and helpful. The transcript of Carter’s recording is below. Thank you for your bright listening, Love, Tracy Carter McKenzie (she/her) is a poet and activist, whose most recent collection of poems, The Book of Fire, published by above / ground press. Through imagined voices, often based on specific court cases, this chapbook is a remembrance and exoneration of the victims of the Scottish Witchcraft Act 1563-1736. Of the nearly 4000 accused under that law, 84% were women and girls. These poems are a bridge between the living and the dead. They serve as a way to grieve and understand our connection to those whom the forces of the Reformation attempted to erase, as if they never were. To order Carter’s extraordinary book, The Book of Fire, please email her directly at cartermck@gmail.com. *** Carter McKenzie, speaking about the Cailleach, the Crone…. “I’m so glad to be joining Tracy for this focus on the Cailleach for A Year and a Day. Thank you so much for having me, Tracy. I’m going to begin by reading a poem that I wrote in response to Tracy’s telling of the traditional tale of the Cailleach in her cave at the end of the world. I Am Not Alone Here What stirs beneath my closed eyes but a desire to attend to this passage of dark and light. Patience. The moon’s face waning again, the soft shadow erasure shaping light, my 62 years in this field of earth and sky. *** I believe in the possibility of a return of self like the Cailleach at the End of the World in her black cave, after the descent of the raven while she was not looking, while she was stirring the elixir over the fire, the broth the essence of every living thing, What makes the grain, the deer, the stones, she had almost let burn, so bound had she been in her weaving, Her back now turned away from the loom, the raven waiting for just this moment, bringing ruin heaped on the cold floor, a tearing. A tearing of her weave holding the world together, the warp and weft remembering the harvests, the birds and stags, the many grasses, the green, golds, and earth red before the gray of winter, the mountains she had made, and lichens and blossoms, heather tops, breath of the tangible born upon the loom, ravaged, no longer visible. *** Yet the thread she found through grief, the crimson light of it. She held the loss in her hands, the thread reflecting fire. She held it up in the light among the shadows, a way of making a way within her, she didn’t know she had. *** from The Book of Fire by Carter McKenzie (order directly via her at cartermck@gmail.com) This poem about the Cailleach, the goddess of winter, who must remake that which has been torn to pieces when she looked away, is placed at the end of my collection of poems in the chapbook of poetry, The Book of Fire, published by Above Ground Press in 2024. It is a collection of poems dedicated to the victims of the Scottish Witchcraft Act that was passed in a reformation parliament in 1563 and finally repealed in 1736. During that time, nearly 4,000 people were found to be accused of witchcraft. 84% of those people, at least, were women and girls. This is just in Scotland. There were hunts going on as well in other parts of Europe. And the percentage of women was similar there too. In this case, Scotland had the highest number of people accused during that time of anywhere in Europe and the British Isles. And so this was a female crime, this crime of witchcraft. And two-thirds, it’s estimated, were found guilty. And since it was a capital offense, those found guilty were mostly executed. Their bodies burned after the people had been strangled, or sometimes people burned alive. So mostly there are no graves. I wanted to bring attention to this history, which I had not known anything about until I found about the story of Lilias Adie, who died while imprisoned under accusations of witchcraft in Fife in 1704. That story became known because a forensic artist had created an image of her face based on a photograph of her skull that was on exhibit at a university in Scotland before it was stolen, the last of her bones disappearing. It was that story that became the portal for me to write these poems for these people, mostly women, for those whose lives were considered to be worthless and expendable, and it seemed right to close the book with the Cailleach, seeing her weaving torn to pieces and then finding a way to begin again, to close the book with her energies. Because though she is known as the Queen of the Dark months of Winter, she does also have the qualities of protection. And it’s that duality that really draws me to her. I wanted to think about that and share those thoughts with you today because it is about, what is expressed in a Scots word, smeddum, smeddum, S-M-E-D-D-U-M, which is resilience and resourcefulness, and a lot of the women who were accused of witchcraft had smeddum. Smeddum was not a good thing in a patriarchy for women to have. It caused them to be troublemakers, perceived troublemakers. And the Cailleach certainly is connected to that energy. Also, I want to say that most of those accused in Scotland were in their 60s, late 50s. Most of them were not young. Most of them were not very, very old, but they were in the age of an older woman, an older woman’s tendency to say what she thinks. So the Cailleach, again, is representing that time of life for a woman that is not respected in a patriarchy, that is disdained in a patriarchy. All you have to do is look up the word hag and find out just how much hostility there is to an older woman, as we know our society to be, because patriarchy continues. So I wanted the Cailleach, the idea of what had been torn apart, to come to her own strength and hold these stories for a renewal, a remaking. As I look at the word Cailleach, I think it’s important to think about the root meaning. And
