Fairytales of Light and Eagle and Bear
A tiny film, QAGOMA Fairy Tales, Aotearoa, and your final Invitation to The Saltwater Songlines New Dreaming.
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And:
I made a short film ‘Eagle and Bear’; duration 3.15 minutes.
This film is what it feels like to me, as I walk the lagoons; child-like, innocent, playful, imaginal, in another realm. Like a fairy tale. But in essence: the Real.
As I’d walked at sunset filming, I ‘d seen fields of flowing light - which, I often meet in the estuary as I walk. I’d seen tiny shells; a river of stars, twinkling.
Later, as I edit:
I saw Bear emerge from dark rainbow’d waters.
I saw my Friend revealed in sculpted tidal flood of black-gold sands: Eagle!
This is the littoral quantum field of pure potentiality. Ever shifting.
And I am so in Love with it.
Tell me, what do you see?
As always, viewing of the film is enhanced by toggling ‘full screen’.
Headphones offer a more immersive soundscape.
The music is by Björk, ‘Frosti’.
Click the image below:
How it happens: I’m finishing my walk along a beach of lagoons and sandbars, shorebirds and seagrass at dusk. Just as I am leaving, heading off the estuary, threading my way through stingray feeding depressions, feet bones tumbling over hard mud ripples, I hear the cheeky call: ‘over here!’ I see an outflow of sand patterns and waters from the last tide. But it all looks pretty innocuous, and I hesitate. ‘Come on!’, they’re laughing now.
So I sigh and I dutifully trot over.
I know there’s something there in the sand, I can feel it.
More precisely: some One.
But I don’t see Who until later, as I’m editing the images in the car:
Eagle!
Most beloved.
My Protector. My Animal. Formally given to me at age ten.
Flying with me, on Quandamooka Country.
Not, a Fairy Tale
A month or so ago, two Eagles hovered above me as I walked these lagoons.
One was intent on, and made sure of, eye contact.
My breath stopped.
He swooped. I swirled ~
He called at me. I sang ~
We moved and sounded together like this for about ten minutes. Intimate.
He in the salty humid air stream, me on the exposed tidal sandbar.
Then his mate rejoined him closer and they flew off - writing calligraphy,
into the mangroves ~
Fairy Tale Exhibition at QAGOMA
(Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art)
Last Monday the electricity people decided to turn our power off for five hours. In the 40-48 (yes) degree heat. They’d given us two weeks warning.
So I decided I’d go on a little excursion in air con. The Gallery!
Yesss!!
A day of Art.
There’s currently an Exhibition at QAGOMA: Fairy Tales
I read the online write up; they speak about three themes of Fairy Tales.
The first, “Into The Woods”, I know as an Underland journey, often into a scary forest. Always, it is a solo Journey. I read between the lines and I feel the resonance in my own tissues and cells. I know this as a sacred space of Initiation. A Rite of Passage, of pilgrimage. Of a subterranean labyrinth of mythology where there might be dragons, or Minotaurs. Or both. There might be treasure! There is often something to be recovered. There is always danger. It is a place of deep Transformation. I know this place very, very well.
But I also know the second theme they speak of; “Through the Looking Glass”. For this is where I walk, on the luminous liminal sand fields. It is, to me, the sacrament and the holy and the place where in fact, I return to myself.
It is my native tongue. A place of multi-dimensions all at once; a fluid field.
The third theme makes me sad, for to me, it speaks of the Great Deception.
At least to all women. Titled “Ever After”, is about what is sold to girls of ‘love’ and ‘relationship’. It is the powerless female being rescued by the Man.
(Well, that’s my take on it). It’s also about the binary, but that’s another story.
I didn’t venture in, yet. Already, there was much to process.
The film, above, was my co-arising. A natural upwelling.
I plan to visit ‘Fairy Tales’ later this week.
Finishing Room 1
Which I have left until last. Because it is challenging. It’s actually a very joyous Room, Images from a long misty beach at Te Henga, Aotearoa (Bethells Beach, New Zealand). Black sand, purple sand, gold sand, iridescent silver sand.
Jade tide pools and sacred womb caves. Yet there were other voices here.
A particular Voice that was still surrounding me.
An excerpt from Room 1: Inception ~
It was also on this beach, that the premise of the Saltwater Songlines Project landed, in my body. One of those obvious realisations. An electric kerr-thump as the switch got thrown. A very ancient contract, remembered. Something I hadn’t quite understood decades earlier, constellating clearly. Despite, or perhaps because of, an incessant ringing; sounding an alarm bell in my ears.
Listening. Hearing. Landing: The Inception (Room 1, Hall 1).
Walked and filmed at Te Henga, Aotearoa, 2018-2019.
I’m writing this on Monday March 4. Poised. Trepidatious. Excited. Present.
For this is the stepping off place, into our journey together through:
The AnteRoom
Hall 1: Rooms 1-4
The Altar
of the 2024 Saltwater Songlines New Dreaming, beginning Monday March 11.
There is less than one week to go.
Such a journey to arrive here.
Its own “Into the Woods”.
Certainly, a magical “Through the Looking Glass”.
The Galleried Rooms are like jewels: they glow.
The Stories speak to us all.
All of the Galleries and Lessons are within a secure private Members Area.
The Lessons themselves are housed in an elegant Classroom Area, enabling ease and clarity of engagement and navigation;
And of course, there are your three Individual Mentorship Letters, with me. Deep, personal, pivotal. We open ways to identify, clarify and create your own map of this experience, as it relates to you, and perhaps, your work. Your own process and Story. We quietly mine the depths of this Journey as it is uniquely relevant to you as Wayfinder, and as Ancestor.
Know that:
This is the final email you will hear from me about this initiatory experience.
I appreciate your patience as I have midwifed and birthed this body of work.
Thank You!
And Remember: your Registration now, gifts you participation in the Galleries, Stories and Lessons of I Am Estuary and Hall 2, during the 2025 live Session of The Saltwater Songlines New Dreaming. That’s quite the offer.
And, you’re welcome.
Whilst you have full online access to all of the materials for the lifetime of The Saltwater Songlines, the 2025 journey is an 11 month Program and includes,
The AnteRoom
Hall 1: Rooms 1-4
I Am Estuary
Hall 2: Rooms 5-8
The Altar
When the full 2025 Saltwater Songlines New Dreaming becomes available for Registration in January, it will naturally attract a higher reciprocity (being twice the number of Rooms and a total of 4 Individual Mentorship Letters).
You are a coastline of consciousness, experiencing Itself.
Great currents and tides breathe you into form.
Arising from the amnion, of Ocean.Sand your skin, streaming kelp your muscles,
soft bellied anemone,
undulant stingray - your organs and diaphragm.
Phytoplanktonic lungs.Estuaries, interior wetlands;
gush and trickle of blood, and
cleanse and flush of lymph and
timeless suspensions curving space
in cerebrospinal lagoonsBony escarpment cliffs;
trabecular star maps in Shell and Salt ~
who are you?Rippled language etching the luminous littoral;
Story
songlines
HomeYour Body.
Sea.
Earth.
OneWelcome,
To the Saltwater Songlines.
“I experienced an elder who gave me the space and deep listening needed to mirror and amplify the more-than-human impressions upon my consciousness. I feel the consistent spacious depth of listening was unavoidably therapeutic.
Narelle's capacity, based in deep listening and at times facilitative, arresting, prosaic, makes for both a seat in the comforts of the world-spirit and a foot on the edge of the transformative growing-challenge cliff of personal-mytho-social eco-centrism.
The Mentoring was an essential component for my engagement with the material and one of the things that sets this Course apart from many others. Narelle's generous time offering of direct listening consciousness.
This Program may be for you if, you are intrigued with the natural world, recognise the greater-than-human presence and seek to find your own threads to accessing it. If you are open-hearted enough to bring your own ecology of inter-embodied, ecosensory, ecospiritual experiences to her listening table, brave enough to gaze into a gravitational mirror wanting to pull out the vision of the world that lives inside of you, latent or active, that may otherwise struggle.
Whether you are at home, basecamp or the summit in your journey.
Expect only what you are capable of bringing and are willing to be transformed.”
- Chris, Gibralta and Berlin. Saltwater Songlines Participant
Two places remain.
Special Note: If these places fill, it may be possible to simply join the Program by immersing in the Gallery-Stories of the Six Rooms, and enjoying their accompanying Lessons of invitations, practices and provocations, without the three Individual Mentorship Letters. Whilst your Letters witness, support and guide you on the journey, anchoring and integrating the work in your life, this (late, and post filled) option does enable you to soak in the ecosystems, their voices and engagements. If this interests you, please do reach out to me.
From a kind Colleague:
“The artist Narelle Carter-Quinlan, has developed an arts practice from her perception of our embryological origins in work she calls ‘Embodied Ecology’.
Already gifted with an ability to somatically experience her ‘body’s waterways’, she has researched how this directly connects her to, and communicates with, the flow of waters outside her body - her local ocean, lakes and rivers.
Her long practice of refining sensitivity to the permeability of fluids and fluid patterns and forms outside the body and those within has become a detailed, anatomically sound understanding of the ‘interface of spirit and materiality.’”
- from Chapter 6, ‘Wandering the Beautiful Trail: Ecopoiesis in Ecological Art Therapy’.Beverley A’Court, contributing Author in Ecopoiesis, A New Perspective for the Expressive and Creative Arts Therapies in the 21st Century.
Edited by Stephen K Levine and Alexander Kopytin 2022. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, UK.
A little PS
Oh, and by the way, if you received an email from ‘me’ on Sunday/Saturday (depending on your timezone), offering you a 20% discount on subscription here, please know: it wasn’t me. It was an AI generated Substack email.
As you know, I used to email you about once a month, and of course, with the Saltwater Songlines New Dreaming finally being ready for you, that’s increased for this short time, to once a week. Know that I would never send out a random email about Substack subscriptions. I’ve contacted Substack.
Let them know I’m not happy about their accessing my family of email subscribers for their own purposes. And I’ve been assured it won’t happen again. Thank you for your understanding.