• Luthien Seagull anniversary

    From David Dalton@21:1/5 to All on Wed Feb 23 01:34:55 2022
    XPost: rec.arts.sf.written, alt.religion.tolkienology, alt.fan.tolkien
    XPost: alt.fantasy

    I will note here that tomorrow (February 23) is
    the 26th anniversary of my Luthien Seagull experience,
    described on https://www.nfld.com//~dalton/luthien.html ,
    from which I have said that I take the magical name
    Seagull, or in Irish, Faoileán (I also hope to find
    out what it is in Beothuk), even though Salmon is
    on the title page of my mystic page (but there is
    already the Irish Salmon Fintan and the Iowa
    Dakota Salmon youth).

    For those who don’t like clicking on links, here is the text
    from that Luthien Seagull subsubpage, slightly modified:

    -----------------------------------------------

    Luthien Seagull/the chain that snaps
    Summary: powerful mystic experience, Luthien/Jonathan Livingstone seagull

    A few days after my three days in hospital, on Feb. 23/96, at Lakeview, in normal mood, I had a moving experience. We were in the midst of an unusually warm spell, up to 15 degrees Celsius, much better than Feb/97. I had just finished listening to Sarah McLachlan's The Freedom Sessions and had three books in front of me:

    J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion
    M.Z. Bradley's The Mists of Avalon
    Ursula K. Le Guin's The Fisherman of an Inland Sea,
    which has an elf dancing on the water on the cover.

    I opened The Silmarillion (sort of skimming) to p.165 where it reads "and the song of Luthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke,
    and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed." Oh, and I just (1997) realized 165 is the number of beads in the early longer Catholic rosary again, good coincidence.

    Due to the warm weather there was just a thin sheet of ice on the pond. I
    then lay back on my bed and glanced at the pond and just then a large white seagull landed on the very thin ice and paused for at least a minute. As the bright seagull took off, the neighbours' dog with the Inuit name Akila (or
    Kila or Quila? I later thought Akila because I made a pun about Achilles
    heel) howled, and the ice all melted/broke up simultaneously, leaving just ripples on the pond in the gentle wind. From this Luthien (or Jonathan if
    male) seagull incident, if Alan MacLeod is Raven then I am Seagull, which covers the world well, especially near fish (the whales would laugh). :-) I wrote this in the margin of The Silmarillion, ending on p.171. On that page I crossed out with one big X everything in the poem after "the chain that
    snaps" (where the chain is the chain of abuse and intolerance, and is also, along with the Wild Rover "no nay never" and Raven's "nevermore" in my Wild Rover Poe-M (https://www.nfld.com//~dalton/screech.html) title) to leave

    He chanted a song of wizardry
    Of piercing, opening, of treachery,
    Revealing, uncovering, betraying.
    Then suddenly Felagund there swaying
    Sang in answer a song of staying,
    Resisting, battling against power,
    Of secrets kept, strength like a tower,
    And trust unbroken, freedom, escape;
    Of changing and of shifting shape,
    Of snares eluded, broken traps,
    The prison opening, the chain that snaps.

    I later put a Lit From Within bookmark (Lit From Within is a compilation CD
    to raise funds for rape crisis centres) at that page, snapped the book shut, placed it between my hands in Namaste position, then pressed the circle of
    the front cover of the book to the centre of the circular calendar poster The Folk Arts Council sells here. This was supposed to break the chains of abuse and allow songs of healing to work.

    --
    David Dalton dalton@nfld.com https://www.nfld.com/~dalton (home page) https://www.nfld.com/~dalton/dtales.html Salmon on the Thorns (mystic page) “‘And if I shed a tear I won’t cage it/I won’t fear love
    And if I feel a rage I won’t deny it/I won’t fear love" (Sarah McLachlan)

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