SPRING STORM

When the Mullets Emerge from Their Wintery Caves

The Lung has been deep in a blizzard for the last 18 hours. It's glorious. I love being home and doing things I normally don’t have time for – drawing, sewing, cooking, building, sorting, writing – while it blasts outside. In my reverse snowglobe world I’m “trapped’ and therefore powerless, or wise enough not to fight the weather. So what to do? The resounding answer was to research interesting things just for pleasure! (Before the power goes out! Haha!)

I started with psychopomps. I think about them a lot, and someone once told me humans can’t be psychopomps. I admit I was a bit crestfallen. I desperately needed to know more. Are they animals that help you solve a problem or show you a path? Or are they the “conductors of souls” to the afterlife”? Yes, they are all of those and many, many other things, it turns out (even SINGERS!). 

As it often happens, I accidentally came across something far more interesting than my original search. This morning I met the glorious Tapio, the old Finnish god of the personified forest. There are jillions of forest gods out there, but the description of Tapio is delicious (this is from Britannica online):

Tapio, the personified forest, was sometimes depicted as being the size of a fir tree, fierce-looking, like a human being in the front, but like a gnarled old tree from behind. 

Wow! What an image!! I can see it so perfectly. It’s at once the most beautiful/scary thing I can imagine and then I ruin it by thinking it also sounds like the mullet personified; “Scary man in the front/grizzled forest in the back. Haha! I can also picture how easy it could be to actually see this deity on a day like today, in its relentless sideways squall. Tapio can be female too (though I am hoping the ancient Finns were less gendered about everything than we are now – less “stuck”?). But rather disappointingly she is a “beautiful woman” and an old stump from the back. I’m sure it was more interesting and dynamic once upon a time. I refuse to believe that people who lived more toward the female energy end of the spectrum were just the same old two-dimensional trope; beautiful and/or treacherous only. Sigh…

I can’t wait for the wind to die down so I can ski out into The Lung and look for all the Tapios hanging around in it, to try to look at the forest through an ancient lens. My dog Jerome can fill the role of psychopomp if I get lost or scared.