Following the Birds from the Mundane World into the Otherworld

Blackbirds and Mulberries, by Angela Harding (also have a look at her Bird Alphabet)

In her article, Following the Birds, Terri Windling quotes H.E. Bates´s book, Through the Woods, the Story of a Year in an English Woodland. Bates is describing the busy, beautiful, bird-filled months of the passage from winter to summer.

As a comment, Windling writes:

”For me, the challenge in writing fantasy fiction springing from the myths and folklore of the land is to evoke the numinous world of nature with such precise yet poetical language. Others have done it. Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Patricia McKillip, Diana Wynne Jones, Jane Yolen, Alan Garner, Robert Holdstock, Graham Joyce...to name just a few. Not all fantasy does this, of course. It's a very broad form of literature, containing many different approaches to the "lands beyond the fields we know." But this is the kind of fantasy that thrills me best, and the tradition I want to follow. Whether writing rural stories or urban stories, whether set in this world or wholly imaginary lands, I want to go further and further into the green....

Following the birds.”

The movement of search can only be from the mundane world to the mundane world, and all that the mind can do is to be aware that this movement will never uncover the Otherworld. How is one to find The Way Between the Worlds?

Any movement on the part of the mundane is still within the field of the mundane. That is the only thing I have to perceive; that is the only thing the mind has to realize. Then, without any stimulation, without any purpose, the mind is silent.

Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening full of birdsong.

Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence. And without this silence, which is complete emptiness, there is no creation. You may be very clever in your capacity, but where there is no creation, there is destruction, decay, and the mind withers away.

When the mind is empty, silent, when it is in a state of complete negation—which is not blankness, nor the opposite of being positive, but a totally different state in which all thought has ceased—only then is it possible for that which is unnameable to come into being: the Otherworld.