Juniper tree

"The juniper tree began stirring. Its branches parted and came back together again though it were clapping its hands for joy. A mist rose from the tree, and right in the middle of the mist a flame was burning, and from the flame a beautiful bird emerged and began singing gloriously."

from the Kay Nielsen illustration





song: art as gift and truth

giving voice to the unspeakable

will not be repeated without reward/payment

in turn, payment provides tools for singer


story-telling, the oral tradition. song


phoenix: a unique bird that lived for five or six centuries in the Arabian desert, after this time burning itself on a funeral pyre and rising from the ashes with renewed youth to live through another cycle. (OED)

rebirth/return
destruction/creation


The Aberdeen Bestiary

shape-changing
trickery
non-recognition
hiding

butchery
flesh-eating
dismemberment
fragmentation

Isis
Black Madonna

fire
tears

journey
homelessness

wholeness
restoration

"Fairy tales are up close and personal, mixing fact with fantasy to tell us about our deepest anxieties and desires. They offer roadmaps pointing the way to romance and riches, power and privilege, and most importantly to a way out of the woods, back to the safety and security of home. Bringing myths down to earth and inflecting them in human rather than heroic terms, fairy tales put a familiar spin on the stories in our collective imagination. ...Cutting across the borderlines between high art and low, oral traditions and print culture, the visual and the verbal, they function as robust nomadic carriers of social practices and cultural values." Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts, xiv