Inner Landscapes Characters
- The Old Mermaid
- The Rabbit Sisters
- The Teacher and Her Wife
- The Night Priestess (revised and extended)
(I never thought people would be that interested. Thank you so much!)
More coming soon
Inner Landscapes Characters
(I never thought people would be that interested. Thank you so much!)
More coming soon
Okay. So. Here we go.
I will stop answering questions about how to connect to your inner landscapes, or if this thing is alright or that thing or whatever, okay?
This is NOT a spiritual thing (if you want it to be than go ahead, make it your own).
THERE ARE NO RULES.
THERE IS NO GOOD OR BAD.
It’s just a simple way I have found to explain how I connect and see my own creativity, my own inner life, my own creative process. How I see these things in others. Actually, I didn’t even come up with the concept. I read about it from Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman and it resonated with me and made sense and I thought it was the perfect way to explain it and then I rolled with it, changed some things, and MADE IT MY OWN.
And if it resonates with you, if you find that it works to explain how you process your own imagination, world, life, then good, use it. If you don’t, then fine, find your own way. And that’s okay. It’s all fine.
STOP LOOKING FOR EASY RECIPES. I don’t know you, I don’t know how to connect with you. How you connect with your own world. How you see it. I do believe that everyone has inner landscapes, that’s how I explain people’s individuality and craziness and boldness and creativity and everything else that makes them who they are and what they are and more.
I CANNOT EXPLAIN THIS TO YOU
I CANNOT GIVE YOU AN EASY EXPLANATION
I CANNOT TEACH YOU HOW TO CONNECT WITH YOUR OWN SELF.
I am not, and this is not meant to be, a self-help thing. It just…is.
It’s not a THING. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s not like “meditate on this and you shall know your spirit animal” or “do this and you will open doors in yourself”.
It’s just a way to explain in words an INSUBSTANTIAL CONCEPT.
It’s big and beautiful and it’s your own. You are your own person and I want to know you. I want to learn about your inner landscapes and the people that live there (or not).
But you can call it whatever you want. You can connect to it however you want. It doesn’t have to be cute or deep. It doesn’t even have to be artistic or anything. It doesn’t have to be made of places and characters. It can be colours or sounds or music or anything. And you connect in your own way. I mean if what you like to do is play soccer than chances are you connect when you play. Simple as that.
And there doesn’t even have to be a specific image or specific characters or anything. That’s just how I personally deal with it. That’s all.
I’m sorry if this come off angry, it really really isn’t my intention.
I just want to share what’s inside me and how I see the world, but I cannot help you by giving you “5 easy steps to your inner world” or anything. I just can’t. It’s not how it works.
xxx
p.s. sorry for the all-caps.
Oh, those sisters! I don’t know much about them because they are always so fleeting.
They are twins with warm brown curly hair and rosy cheeks. Tall rabbit ears on their heads. Like all animal-girls, they weave in and out of things, fast and teasing. They are playful and laugh a lot. They have their own code, though, their own language, hundreds of things said with the simple movement of their heads, or hands, or the twitching of a nose.
Nobody can really understand an animal-girl, except another animal-girl. These sisters are not as nervous and skittish as other rabbit-girls are though. They are observing and see more than anyone thinks. I’ve caught the knowing looks once or twice: the looks carefree people keep secret because it’s far better to let everything thinks you’re a bit of an idiot. You can learn more this way.
They are nice girls, these sisters. And infinitely loyal to each other. I’ve never been able to really talk to them. I usually see them while I’m having a picnic on the grass with other people and they come running out of the woods, half-naked in thin white shifts, running barefoot and grabbing at some bread or fruits from the food laid out on the ground. Laughing at someone’s comment, kissing boys and girls briefly on the mouth, possibly stopping long enough to plan meetings with some of them for later, when the moon is high. But I’ve seen them one, sitting calmly at the kitchen table of The Boy in the Cottage by the Cliff. Just chatting away, a strange calmness and peacefulness in their limbs, though they can never stop the slight twitching of their ears.
Animal-girls are both wild and tamed. They belong to the In-Betweens. They are hard to grasp. The Rabbit Sisters are no exemption.
They met in the ways that people meet sometimes: a bit by design, a lot by luck.
The Teacher was out on one of a rare walks outside the walls of the Library. She wore her customary 1920’s three-piece suit, all brown and striped and clean lines. Her short black hair cut straight right above her chin. There were ink stains on her fingers.
She saw her smoking cigarettes on the park bench by the West entrance. Her trousers’ legs rolled up beneath her knees, as were her shirt sleeves to her elbows. The red of her hair in the sunlight was blinding. She knew a surprising amount about 19th century poetry and all the lyrics to all of David Bowie’s songs.
The Teacher took her back to her room, in the fifth floor of the tower rising above the Library. She showed her the dissertations she was working on and, for the first tie in her life, babbled more than explained about Greek architecture and the inherent values of knowing how to brew a good cup of coffee.
They made love over the clean white sheets.
I go and visit them sometimes, if they’re not working down in the Library. You need a mask to go there. A mask to hide your features, because it should never matter what you look like, only the knowledge that you have and the one that you aspire to acquire or impart has any importance. I haven’t got a mask yet.
But I go to their room and lunge around the carpet in warm patches of sunlight, the light coming through the large windows bouncing merrily on the cold stone walls and illuminating all the books and tapestries and weird collections scattered around the room. Mostly I like that they always have a bowl of blackberries on the small table on the balcony. I lay on my back and look at the crystal-splintered lights on the ceiling as I eat them and squashed them and stain my fingers and face with the juices, listening to them discuss philosophy, literature, or if they should have strawberry scones for dinner.
Inner-landscapes are the worlds and places and people that live inside of you. They are unique to you and you are the one who can travel through them and explore them. You only can choose to show them to the world, though it is possible that they seep through the cracks in your skin and people can glimpse at that inner you. They can be bright and beautiful, dark and ugly, they can be filled with happy characters and sad one and mean ones and kind ones. They are everything that you are and more. They are you, and you are them, but they are also more than you, and you are also more than them. They might complete you, or they might just be a nice companion that holds your hand when you need them. They are in constant flux as you grow and live and learn. Some have the life-span of a second, a day, a week, others will last all your life.
Yes. Everybody has inner-landscapes. There are thousands of worlds living under-skin.
These days the place and the person I visit the most is The Old Mermaid that lives in a cabin by the lake. When she was young she left the sea and found her legs. She explored the world. She looked at the sky and loved it and cherished the stars. She relished the way the hard ground felt under her feet. She liked to listened to rock-songs and tree-whispers. The earth made its way into her skin and into her spirit. Though at night, she still dreams of waves and underwater cities. Her breath smells of salt and algae. And her voice tugs and pulls at you like the tides.
She lives in a log cabin, deep in the woods, by a deep lake whose waters are still and brown. She has a garden and she takes walks everyday along the deer paths. She listens to the birds and tries to mimic their songs. Sometimes she goes by the shore and swim naked in the lake. At first the water was so foreign to her skin, lacking salt and movement, but she liked the deep still depths of the lake. When she floats on her back, her ears immerse in the water, and closes her eyes, she can hear the faint voice of the sea, as all lakes are connected to the ocean somehow. That’s the closest she goes to her home-world.
I go and visit her frequently. She has a special type of wisdom, which I find comforting. She is a bit rough and she likes to make fun of me a little, as old people like to, sometimes, when young people are being foolish. Her face is full of wrinkles and laugh lines. She smokes pipe after pipe of sweet smelling tobacco and bakes an inordinate amount of cookies. I sit in a chair besides hers on the veranda, and sometimes all we do is look at the lake and the trees and the birds dipping in the water. She smokes, and we drink tea or liquor and we eat cookies.
When she is a bit inebriated she tells stories of her youth, when she lived in a water-world far from dried dirt and open-skies. she has scales from her old tail sewn in the linings of her clothes. I find that talking to her is calming. She has a no-nonsense way of looking at things and she never lets me indulge too much in my own self-pity.
Recently I’ve discovered that there is a sailor. A man who arrived on the shore of her lake in a magic boat. A boat that sailed from the sea and up the rivers and stream of its own freewill until it stopped there, at her house surrounded by woods and mountains. He smelled of sea wind and fish and I think she loves him. But I have never met him.
We are friends, the old mermaid and I. I cherish her most of all. I think I could be her, and maybe she was me. Or maybe we aren’t what we seem while we sit and look at the sun dip below the mountains and bat at mosquitos and run indoors to sit at the kitchen table telling tales of worlds we have visited, worlds we have loved, worlds we hope to see.
Isn’t it nice?
I always felt like I had all these worlds inside of me, you know? Imaginary worlds most people would call them, but I guess it never really fitted as a descriptor for me. It didn’t feel right. Imaginary/imagination always makes me think of the mind, the head, something in the air, light and outside somehow. I’m not sure how to describe it. But my worlds they feel like they fill my ribcage, my lungs, my stomach, my heart, like they are at my core.
It clicked for me when I read this quote by Neil Gaiman:
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”
and it was also something mentioned by Charles de Lint, in a quote or a novel, I can’t quite recall.
That felt right.
Like we all have all these worlds inside of us, all these inner landscapes we travel through. Anyway, I do. I travel through them and I meet people there, and they are me and I am them, but they are their own as well. They are independent and a part of me at the same time. They live and breathe. And it’s not just people, but places as well.
Well, places are their own characters, aren’t they? they breathe and live too. And sometimes, these people and places are kind, and sometimes they are dark, sometimes they are dangerous, or evil, or sweet or anything, really.
This is the most fascinating thing for me, to discover and explore my own inner landscapes, and maybe share part of it with the world.
I find that art, any kind of art, is also a window into the inner landscapes of others.
Oh the things we have living right under our skin.
