Tamara Rendell > Quotes

“WINTER'S GHOST:
Autumn moon
incautious in the dark river
Winter’s ghost walks
with a covered face
and silver bones wait in all animals
to be bone cloth upon her shoulder
wait for her happiness in that they are silver”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“Dreams are like the old stories where wolves are seekers always running, and women carry fire in their bare hands and light the dark paths before them.
Old stories hold that the birds will fly all the miles of the world to tell your secrets to the rising moon, and men will walk over oceans of ice to find one truth.”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world
not quite ready to live
but so tired of its own imagination”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“The fires of night
through distance dance
ghosts who still know how to sing”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“We are all of life
who stepped from the sea
trading weightless journeys of the currents
We are all of life
who build and tear down and build again
to find gold and silver
to find scars that weep and bleed
to step from the sea
to stay with the sea”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“The storms inside uncoil
into sky held calm by far seeing eyes
Memories dressed in the translucent
trickery of the mind,
so as to wear life upon themselves,
give up their tired dance and run
into free frequency”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“Body of Earth, body of woman
call unto the stars
Carry –
as the river which carries the touch of the forest
– carry Earth unto sky
Enliven within my body of woman
union with Earth, union with sky
I am daughter of stars
a clear river of light
My soul, it is flowing
unto body of woman,
body of Earth woven with light”
― Tamara Rendell, Lahana

“The oracle’s mirror
waiting for the earth to unveil her
The wolf’s howl over snow
The quiet place inside you –
the vast knowing of the soul”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“The Moon,
a white basket
for my prayers”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“Sea Hags*
Sea Hags are curious creatures, particularly as they have no need for us.
“Who needs a husband?” they ask in chiming voices.
“Who needs a mother? When we have Poseidon as mate and the great Ocean herself to hold us.”
Cascades of laughter behind the sparkling scales of their hands in a manner to call to question both their good sense and their sincerity.
Sea Hags – one could study them for fifty years and find no answer.
(*Shamelessly inspired by Kafka’s Sirens: another creature entirely.)”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“You were the ocean
and we were the land
You lay down unflinching
You lay down forgetting
And you were the ocean
and we were the land”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“THE STAGE:
The stage is empty, and you watch as the figure of Medusa steps into the gas-light. Her body is dressed in a crimson traversed by the golden branches of willow trees, colour and light held into shape by sharp black borders. Lifting languidly her hands, she reaches towards you. Her emerald vipers, in the cohesive movements of unseen mechanisms, weave loops about her head. Music is beginning, and from the shadows off-stage the narrator speaks. “Medusa had a beautiful name and a lovely voice, though no one cared to listen; seeking only the gaze of those famous eyes.”
Perseus walks onto the stage, cloaked as though he were the blazing sun. Now what you have to understand is his voice – it is like nothing you could tie down. It feels peaceful to hear it, to see him flow into the song with his fine, clear looks and his finer, clearer voice. Is the head quite forgotten? Not quite but the horror exists alongside the beauty and they flow like twin rivers, and neither is able to wash the other from you.”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“Drink in the heat of an ancient sun
held in the cold fire of water rising
from earth and rock
Spilling over your cupped hands
and drawn to lips and tongue
Pouring water’s memory
of the azure mist it fell from
into the chalice of your flesh
Turning your eyes skywards
with desire
for the freedom it was born of”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“A far horizon
embraced by cloud
like a nameless God
beautiful and evaporating”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“Beneath the gentle gaze
of a god turned in stone
holding the dreaming wish
of safety in our arms”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“A pearl, a tear,
a drop of sky
the Weaver spins a net
so fine, unseen
until the breath,
the sigh,
the veil of night
reaches across all known things”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“My silence –
this gentle frost turning slowly far beneath
the skin”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“Strange to feel in flesh
weaker than the skin of water
hung over the long bones of the shoreline
To feel as though drowning,
still breathing, moving
into logical tides and daybreaks”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“The delicate totems – saints floating
on their seas of incense and candlelight
wounded bodies and silent faces”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“Past the azure mist, out into the deep sky pierced with stars. They who watch our path as surely as they did our ancestors, as surely as they shall our descendants: watching all the small stories weaving across the vast journey of time.”
― Tamara Rendell, Lahana

“feeling all the moods of the ocean. Crystalline in a still morning, beckoning under the midday Sun, a mysterious and ancient divinity at dusk, wild and unconquerable in storms. Always a new tide coming in, and an old tide leaving on a new journey. I feel like the ocean remembers the touch of every place it has been to and washes our skin with it, takes part of us with it when it goes.”
― Tamara Rendell, Lahana

“My own heart
neither so brave nor so willing
– leaving no lines on the maps
yet silently evolving”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“Tears fall like liquid leaves
into the streams and full,
autumn-coloured rivers of our blood
And liquid leaves become crystal
in our winter fortress
before they flow
shifting, changing
rich red by grace of autumn
and fertile in the spring”
― Tamara Rendell, Lahana

“SELKIE
Alone, the cold body of the selkie man lay upon the sand, so like the drowned one the widow had called for.
For her longing, he was hauled upon the sand, exposed to the moonlight.
The selkie strained in fraught movements and human form broke from the gleaming seal fur.
Undeniably he bore the image of the widow’s lost husband and spoke with the sounds of the dead man’s voice.
She hailed back from the rocks.
Shadows accumulating beyond the moon’s ability to reform.
Colours were washed from sight and silver crashed through her, colder than snow dreams of being.
In the dark, the ocean became the rolling flanks of a great beast drifting back across the horizon.
Out deep soon, the land’s drop sharp.”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“The night like ink it stains the surfaces it spilt across the words as though some poet bearing veins of indigo they asked you once by day to bind before the night like ink dissolved within them and the words returning to their wordless state become the beats that take all paths leading from the heart returning to it the night dissolved like ink in the veins of any poet”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“I feel you calling, in the autumn sweet transformation.
I have reached my brightest green to the gold burning sun.
I have folded my colours into the wind,
bright colours taken to the sky.
My silk has gone to moisture in the rising atmosphere
and I am your colours again, deep and warm.
I hear your calling and I answer,
I come back to you, to slip inside the dark.
Will I be found by the decaying things?
Will I be found by the roots and drunk by tree and flower?
Will I slip and mingle and roll along,
find my way to a river and with it dance,
and give myself in a sigh to the ocean?
Will I scatter, a few fragments of sand –
my body to glisten beneath a caress of moonlight
as I make my way towards no more
as I find my way to forever”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“She felt as though an immense, unending sky lay within her heart. A sky with no lightning, no thunder – an empty sky of banished stars.”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“The late afternoon Sun threw amber and gold across the deep body of the ocean, breaking into unseen luminance across the horizon. She listened to the crashing distance in the waves: formless and curving into the Earth, reaching for the wide basin of the sky. The ocean’s longing to embrace – not understanding stillness or the way others might be tied to the ground.”
― Tamara Rendell, Lahana

“She closed her eyes and could feel the Earth talking, could hear it talking itself into being. The generosity of this energy – pure in the darkness, pure in the cold air and in the hot smell – it flowed into the glyphs as it flowed so generously into all of life. It filled the polluted incantations here as the pure river continues to flow unguarded into the polluted bay.”
― Tamara Rendell, Lahana

“The war came as I took a step outside
and my mother knelt whispering to my ear
When the war came
the soldiers carried faces painted with stars
and they fell to our footsteps,
riding without a shadow into the light
Without heat, the sun”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides