Prompt 273. Coiled Snakes & a Cacophony of Bones
& Kerri ní Dochartaigh on the hardest year
Hi friend,
Exactly two years ago, I painted my first painting: a self-portrait with a snake wrapped around my neck. As with all my watercolors, the image had come to me in a dream, and I didn’t have much trouble discerning the source of it. I was a few weeks into treatment after learning of my leukemia recurrence, and earlier that day, I had tried on a snake ring that didn’t fit—it was too tight, and I struggled to get it off. Later that night, I dreamed that the snake had slithered up my body and coiled itself around my neck, growing tighter and more constrictive, and when I realized it was never going to come off, I began to panic. I awoke with a start, wracked with anxiety. To soothe myself, I got up, lit a candle, put on my headphones, and began to paint.
Visions of snakes troubled my dreams for the next year. In one, a cobra had laid eggs beside a pregnant woman—though what she carried was not a human fetus but a bloodied egg. I knew the woman was me, but unlike the first dream, I wasn’t sure how to interpret it. Were the snake and I on parallel journeys toward motherhood? Or were we in lethal conflict?
These visions felt ominous for a long time, which I guess isn’t surprising since we often associate snakes with evil. But it’s also true that humans have seen snakes as symbols of transformation, rebirth, and even fertility. And lately, I myself have been feeling like I’ve shed an old skin and been reborn, and I’ve been meditating on these alternate meanings. I’ve been thinking a lot about motherhood and what that could look like for me, not in a way that’s enshrouded with fear and doubt, but as something that’s good and right and, more than anything, something that could be possible—in a world that’s been full of impossibilities.
The path to becoming a parent is fraught for many people. Like so many things in life, it’s full of uncertainty, marked by happenings far beyond our control—something today’s contributor
writes about so beautifully in her new book, Cacophony of Bone. It’s a remarkable volume that spans a year of upheaval, when after moving with her partner to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland, she learned she was pregnant at the same time the world went into lockdown. It gets to the heart of our deepest questions—on family, home, and what sustains us—and I’m thrilled to be sharing an excerpt with you. In it, Kerri writes about things she began collecting in those early days of lockdown (egg shells, nests, bones) and what they came to mean. I can’t wait to hear yours!Sending love,
Suleika
Some Items of Note—
Earlier this week we brought back our custom Isolation Journal No. 1, along with a special new item—a tote printed with my “Surrender” painting and a mantra for getting through. You can get yours here!
We shared small joys in the Isolation Journals Chat this week—and epic ones too! I wrote about the great joy of traveling to New Orleans for the premiere of our documentary American Symphony and having the truly mind-blowing honor of meeting the one and only Michelle Obama. To be boosted by the joys of others and to add yours too, click here!
The year’s last meeting of the Hatch, our virtual creative hour for paid subscribers, is coming up soon. It’s happening next Sunday, December 17th from 1-2 pm ET. Mark your calendar and join us!
Prompt 273. Bone After Bone by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Maybe the events of that year really started with finding the nests.
When I began to brood, not over a clutch but over time.
When I began to try to sculpt it, day by day, alone, wandering, again and again, without scale or horizon, the same field, the same lane, the same stretch of wet, hungry land. When I stepped, in a way, outside & inside, above & below—the flow of it all, the flow of my own blood; enough to really let those objects come. To notice those things and to hold them, give my furry body over to their coming, to stop hurrying through life like a person shamed, by my female body and its traumas, by my past, by what that body could not have, what its parts could not produce.
The objects, when they came, swept me with them in their flow, and rattled my bones.
Creamy-white dove eggs, opened but unbroken; the skull of a badger, too sculpted to even seem real; on Mother's Day (my heart cracked open like a dry seed-head), a perfect, otherworldly antler, from the field's exact middle;
I took, I took, I took.
Bone after bone, porcelain white and willowy: sheep and deer, horse and fox—the pelvic girdle of a delicately bird-like rat—objects so creaturely as to make the longing that had grown inside me slowly, quietly, ease.
There were birds, that year, so many of them as to seem unthinkable.
There was a wren, always a wren; that year was the year of the wren.
And you see, it really happened in this way, and I really can tell it to you no other way than this. At the bottom of that laneway, objects came from everywhere, ordinary and flawed, on days when time and place no longer knew the way, and I took them.
I took every single thing into my arms and hands and home, that year: I was compliant.
I knew at every turn I could not go back to how I lived before the objects came. They were an invitation I could do nothing but accept.
Time did the things it does when we aren't looking, and soon my lover began, while walking on his own, to find things too. Things, you understand, that never once had come his way before that year. His nests were, to my eye, more gorgeous than my own, but I felt no jealousy. It was such sweet relief to speak of those objects, of what I saw them as taking the place of, somehow. We sat, each night, as the names of those we'd lost were read aloud and we mourned for those we did not know, behind the daily count; faces we had not seen but could not turn away from now. A silence took up residence; it lay in circular objects, things we knew had once been crafted by the careful, repeated movements of the bodies of birds.
You lost, too.
You grieved.
You wondered when it all might end; if ever.
The grief, the one I went there first to bury, still came in waves, as we all have known it to; the deep water that none of us will ever fully swim through. It paled, though, so incredibly, in the face of the sorrow of those days. I held it to the sky and watched it fade. I saw its steely greys and charcoals water down. I watched the ache for what I did not have turn chalky, I stood and let the fledglings drink its milk. It sounds formulaic, as though I forced it in some way, but that year came to me like a field of bleached white bones.
I can't go back to who I was before that year.
That time was like no other, all of us thought—but we knew it was exactly like any other, too. The swallows arrived at my new home, found safe sanctuary, and built their nests.
Your prompt for the week:
Write about something you collected and what it meant.
If you’d like, you can post your response to today’s prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals. As a reminder, we love seeing your work inspired by the Isolation Journals, but to preserve this as a community space, we request no promotion of outside projects.
Today’s Contributor—
Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s first book, Thin Places, was published in Spring 2022 in the US. It was an Indies Introduce selection for Winter/Spring 2022, an Indie Next selection for April 2022, and a Junior Library Guild selection for Spring 2022. Cacophony of Bone is her second book. She lives on the west coast of Ireland with her family.
For more paid subscriber benefits, see—
On Failure, an interview with my husband Jon where we talked about reframing rejection and he shares his ma’s red beans recipe
Show Up and the Muse Will Too, where I wrote about being re-hospitalized the week I painted the cobra painting and learning to swim in the ocean of not knowing
Heartbroken Friend, an installment of my advice column Dear Susu in which I responded to a reader who survived cancer, then lost a close friend, and doesn’t know how to move on
A wonderfully descriptive piece of writing from Kerri Ni Dochartaigh. Lovely.
When Covid began, my 89 year old mother went into hospital on March 5th, in Danbury, Connecticut. She died about three weeks later. I was with her all but the last five days of her stay, when I was asked to leave. I watched her take her last breaths on her Ipad, along with my sister, and daughter back in New Jersey. It was gut wrenching. An inspiring woman who walked, trekked, and explored the world over with my father collecting indigenous art and artifacts, she had a keen eye for the tiniest things-particularly four leaf clovers. They were her specialty to find and collect, much to her family's delight. Several weeks after she died, some of her grandchildren and children both in Ct. and in NJ, ALL found four leaf clovers on the same day-- several of us for the very first time. We have found, collected, and saved many since then, all pressed between the pages of travel books of places Mom and Dad have walked.
When Covid first began we all were in lockdown and I live alone in NYC. My saving grace was my balcony. When the weather got warmer I began buying and collecting beautiful red geranium baskets, petunia baskets, marigolds and pink and red anemones. Then I began buying plants-fiddle faddle plant, ferns, wandering Jew, coleus. Why? There was so much unfathomable deaths in NYC and throughout the USA and the rest of the world and I was devastated like everyone else. I wanted the aliveness of these plants and flowers on my balcony and in my home. They also were in honor of all who died. Then the deepest cut my dear friend and loyal assistant, Amy died of Covid and she was gone in a flash. More devastation hitting me in my gut. Amy loved small, dainty pierced earrings, and I collected some, and with the permission of her sister, I mailed the earrings to her sister. Death was everywhere even in Central Park where they setup tents for the sick everywhere. Every day I would sit on my balcony in meditation surrounded by the aliveness and the beauty of the plants and flowers and grieve, pray, cry, and be grateful I was alive and healthy thru all of this horror. I also bought candles to pray over and to shed the physical light in my home. I will never forget!