I moved to Britain. For love.
Inside: Welcome to my Substack, immigration makes me feel like a mammal, & where to find me this summer
Hello friends!
If you’re new here, welcome!
And if you’ve been around a while you may have noticed I have been a lot quieter online lately. This is because I’ve been processing a big and beautiful shift in my personal life. With some shyness and also joy I tell you,
I have moved to the Isle of Britain!
…for love!
I have landed in the Borders, nestled between bonny Scotland and fair England, a liminal place, geographically and spiritually, and home to some of the most enchanted ballads in the English/Scots language traditions, such as Tam Lin and True Thomas.
Thus begins a new period of my life in a new bioregion. This is a change which I celebrate deeply and also find suitably frightening.
I have only just arrived, so if you’re a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, folk musician, etc, in the UK and you want to introduce yourself, or invite me to attend or collaborate in an event or workshop, I would heartily welcome such generosity. It’s a big deal for me to go from living in a small, tight northern community to roving out to settle in an entirely new country one morning in May.
I am happy to never have to shovel a car out of a snowbank again, and I’m frankly overjoyed to to settle adjacent to the great richness of traditional culture that is Scottish and English folklore and song (as well as Welsh and Gaelic and Cornish and Norn, etc etc etc). Of course I will miss my North American friends. But I will be back to visit sometimes, and I hope to provide many an excuse for you to come see me over here on this dreamy isle of clouds (see below for some happening soon)! Let us toast to that possibility.
On becoming a page of Britain
A day after I stepped off the airplane onto these lands, awash in a mix of disorientation and glee, I stood with my palms on the smooth silvery bark of a matronly beech tree by the Tweed, and asked her if she would be a channel for a tarot reading.
I’ve been tuning in with beeches since last summer, so by now when I ask a question I usually get a ready answer: a warm flowing sensation, or sometimes, if feelings are running high, a distinct tingling in my hands and wrists.
That day I asked this mother beech,
“How can I best be of service to this place?”
The answer she gave me, via the cards, was the Page of Pentacles.
In the Middle Ages, a page was a young person who learned by apprenticeship the ways of a knight or a nobleman. And he didn’t learn by book research, but by living day upon day in the presence of that which he sought to learn, and eventually, become. This page is a beginner, setting out to connect with the element of earth afresh, symbolized by the shape of the pentacle, the golden, star-embossed coin.
Unlike the medieval page, I will never become a native British person (though the fact that we are all here speaking English means the Empire has done its best). But by way of food and water and love and riverside and seasons, I can perhaps, in a mineral and bacterial and and biological way, become an integrated part of this place.
My first lesson as a page of Britain comes from the humbling experience of the immigrant. Immigration reminds you you’re an unarmoured mammal with a pressing, daily need for food, shelter, and the kindness of other human beings.
I think of the Latin root of humble, humus = ground, because these early moments here have made me hyper-aware of the ground beneath me in ways that familiarity would otherwise soften. In a Canadian neighborhood, I can walk down the street thinking about philosophy or fashion. As a new arrival to the UK, My mind mainly ping-pongs between two thoughts: “where am I?” and “please don’t walk in front of a car.” (It’s wild to discover how deeply ingrained one’s assumptions about the flow of traffic can be.)
I think of the many migrants who are arriving daily to the UK not by choice, as I do, but by necessity. It’s rather obvious my privilege shields me from the vastly more vulnerable experience of, for example, the refugee.
This became abundantly clear when, while visiting my uncle in Essex this spring, I stepped into a cab and received a passionate and confidently delivered diatribe against immigrants taking “our” jobs and “our” housing. And this was after I candidly, perhaps naively, had shared the fact that I was in the process of moving here. And then, a few weeks later, the same scene played out again, with another dude. I was confused. Why would these two Essex cab drivers tell me I’m not welcome here when I’m literally sitting inside their cab? Aren’t Brits notoriously polite?
And then I realized – they’re not talking about me. They ranted so openly and freely against immigrants because I didn’t fit the description they had in their mind of who that is. That immigrant, I’d reckon, is not fair skinned and dressed in a nice wool coat. That immigrant, possibly, can’t afford to take a taxi.
In many ways that matter for this mammal body, I am not really an immigrant. And just the same, something I have been learning this year past is that there is no point in pretending I am less vulnerable, less tender, less deeply feeling, than I am.
Here is the thing. I moved to the UK for love. And I couldn’t be available to the depth of love one moves across the world for, if I weren’t also available for the other darker shades of feeling that emerge from that opening of the self to life, like the grief of not having loved like this before, like the fear of risking everything and losing it.
I’ve always been a bit of an otherworldly being, with one foot in the world of Faery, and this moment demands a metaphysical reorientation of me. Loving someone enough to make a permanent home with them feels like signing a contract with mortality. To commit in the way that I long to commit requires me to release the illusion that, to paraphrase Mary Oliver, I am merely visiting this world.
Regenerating Welcome
It sounds romantic, returning to the Old World, if you’re a North American like me. It conjures visions of long-haired women weaving an ancient dance between standing stones at twilight, draped in linen and flowers (yes, Outlander). To be honest, that scene’s not entirely unlikely in my line of work. I research folklore and paganism. It’s an absolutely dreamy time.
But moving to another continent, even by sovereign choice, is no joke. The mundane, often tearful, reality is that much of my time right now is filled with the question of basic needs: Where is the food? How do I make the cottage warm? Where can I find a doctor? Am I allowed to drive? Will I be shunned for eating these fries (sorry, chips) with my bare hands?
I find I have so much fellow-feeling for other migrants in the moment of my own migration. It’s wild enough when you blend in easily with the majority. How must it feel, for example, for a person of colour to walk into the grocery shop recently arrived in the UK, to read headlines about the Tories “cracking down” on immigration, as if migration were a societal ill rather than a natural human right? As if your freedom and flourishing were a problem to be solved by “tough” government policy? Knowing a racist dog whistle when you see one?
You don’t have to follow me down this next rhetorical road, but despite my initial horror at what they expressed to me, my heart also goes out a little bit to those xenophobic cabbies.
In my initial conversation with the first of them, before he killed the vibe, I learned that he (let’s call him John) could name every sort of bird in Scotland by region. And, I was surprised to learn, he had never been there. This is a man who works in transportation, who ferries folks like me from one place to another. But he had never once himself taken the relatively short and inexpensive trip north to see the birds he spoke so tenderly about in person.
How could he be available to welcome others to this island when it sounds like he has barely welcomed himself?
I’m not saying we should stand silent while people spew poison. But I do feel a resonance between the sense of constriction generated by limited resources in a land shaped by feudalism and enclosure, and my own sense of insecurity and fear of rejection upon arriving in a land that doesn’t belong to me.
You could say this land doesn’t belong to John either. You could easily argue it was taken from his ancestors by Romans and Normans and greedy lords long before he was born. Powerful people decided land would be more profitable as a commodity to be hoarded and made scarce. So it became one. And the scarcity-based logic behind that initial disconnection from land echoes out in an enclosure of hearts and minds that expands far beyond the physical ground of Britain, or of any British colony.
John speaks from internalized unwelcome. And I would guess his anger, if he would soften to it, might open onto grief.
I wonder what would happen if one day he saved some pounds and finally took that overnight trip north to meet his Scottish bird friends. Would he find it easier to love his new neighbours from India?
Yeah, so maybe healing from colonialism is not so simple as just giving yourself a break from the grind, if that’s even a possibility. The landlords of yore certainly didn’t use their ample free time to cultivate empathy for those less fortunate than they were.
But I do think there is something in tenderness to the self which prepares the soil of empathy. It’s clear to me that when I tend to my own alienation from the world, it becomes immediately easier for me to extend a hand outward to others.
What other than the sweet sap of mutual welcome could bind the frayed threads of our connection to this world?
It is a spiritual adage so widespread I won’t bore you with an illustrative quote: the first step of the learner, the apprentice, the page, is the willingness to witness the imperfect and unfinished self. And then to welcome that self to the world anyway.
So as I rookie myself for the umpteenth time in my life, this summer in the Borders, and start again, laying myself at the feet of welcome, I say also to you, reader,
Welcome, love. We need you here. Your sweetness is everything. Open to life and it will open to you.
I pray, as you read this, that some of the faith in the beloved world I’m conjuring with my whole heart these days spills out onto your hands, your heart, your lips also.
May you be blessed with a glimmer of hope for whatever sense of home it is that your inner being yearns for.
I hope to share what I learn with you as I wend my way along and between these new, old shores, a newborn page of Britain.
In other news! I moved my mailing list to Substack
My mailing list has been relocated to Substack. This will make no difference to most of you, except for the fact that as a part of this shift I intend to communicate much more regularly through the summer and beyond, as I hope to funnel more of my creative output through this platform in the future.
I also intend to make an audio version of this newsletter, which will be offered to paid subscribers whenever the (free) written one comes out, and sometimes more often than that. If you don’t see the podcast up and running yet, it will be here for you soon.
And you are of course welcome to unsubscribe from my list at any time if it’s not ringing your bell!
Where you can find me in person this summer:
Cascadian Midsummer, outside Olympia Washington, USA (June 21-23). This is a pagan music festival on the solstice! I'll be leading a workshop/singalong of summer songs from northern Europe.
I'll also be singing and speaking on a panel at Glastonbury Music Festival (June 26-30) this year. I must say I was honoured and surprised to be invited to perform at the biggest festival in the UK, so I’m sure this will be a moment to remember. It goes without saying there will be MANY other acts worth seeing there.
I’ll also be giving a workshop on ballads and myth with Daniel Allison at this year’s Medicine Festival at Berkshire UK from August 14th to 19th.
FINALLY, the event I can honestly say I am the most excited about this summer, is the Song of Oak and Ash, summer retreat on Loch Tay, Scotland (Aug 31-Sept 6). I'm one of the hosts of this retreat this year, along with storytellers Daniel Allison of House of Legends podcast and Sorcha and Aaron of Candlelit Tales podcast. Last year's Oak and Ash retreat was one of the most enjoyable events I've ever attended. This one will be even more epic, with a larger capacity and a longer stretch of time to immerse in myth together.
Thank you ever so much for being here, and I’ll talk to you soon!