Saturday July 11th, 2026
This past week I’ve been walking late in the evening. It’s still hot, but the heat has a strange ascending quality. The air feels like a living breathing entity that I wade through. The air rises in slow lazy currents, shimmering across the fields of dry wheat as the trees in the distance seem to hover blurring the horizon. There’s a name for it: thermal inertia. The earth after baking under the glare of the sun all day slowly releases its heat, and cool and warm currents co-mingle as night gathers.
These past weeks have marked the end of a birth cycle. A new year that has already been fraught with elemental ancestors. I’ve been reading the myths of creation, of the weighty conversations between the sun, moon and the stars, between the gods and the goddesses. I’ve been holding space in workshops for the heat of the summer to land its knowledge. And I’ve been remembering too. Once I dreamt my grandmother, with her flowing white hair and crazy eyes, was trying to pull me into the centre of burning flames. I tried over and over to kick her away. As my feet finally touched the flames to the sounds of her laughter and taunts I screamed myself awake. I was hanging off the end of the bed, legs and feet bright red. It was winter outside and so cold in the room, I could see my breath. That same blood red rash appeared on my shins a couple of days before my birthday, a reminder of how ancestral knowledge lands in the body. Remembering the stories cooled my blood. As the connections surfaced, the inflammation slowly receded. That’s the power of story.
The goddess Nut is my favourite creation story. Nut is one of the oldest and most beautiful cosmological figures from Ancient Egypt. At the beginning of creation, the world existed as an endless ocean of possibility known as Nun—the primordial waters. From these waters arose the first mound of earth, and with it emerged Atum, the self-created one. From Atum came Shu, god of air, and Tefnut, goddess of moisture.
Shu and Tefnut gave birth to two children: Nut, goddess of the sky, and Geb, god of the earth. Nut and Geb loved one another so deeply that they lay locked in perpetual embrace. Sky and earth were inseparable. Their union was fertile, creative, ecstatic.
But the creator god Ra feared the power of their closeness and commanded Shu, the god of air, to separate them. Shu lifted Nut high above Geb, stretching her body across the heavens. And there she remains. Every evening Nut swallows the setting sun. Throughout the night it journeys through her star-filled body, travelling the underworld, before being reborn from her womb at dawn. Nut becomes both sky and cosmic mother continually birthing light from darkness.
The warmth of the evening hits my nostrils as I walk. My body is the connective tissue linking gate to gate. My thoughts are the tendrils playing with Chronos, marking time and distance. And Kairos, stepping out of time, slowing down, listening for changes, differences, similarities from evening to evening. The clouds catch my eye, it is as if a huge hand curls around a stream, a pathway holding the sky in place. The cows have been busy laying bare the pathway I walk. I have slowly been building relationship with the herd of 30 cows or more. They haven’t yet let me touch them, but their pointed black tongues are fascinated with my clothes, my skin. One wrapped her tongue around my wrist and began to take it towards her mouth, and I wondered for the briefest moment whether she could swallow me whole, carry me through rumen and reticulum, bring me back as cud before passing me through omasum and abomasum, and finally return me to the earth as shit.
I revisit the lightning struck tree beyond that seems to emerge from the stillness of sunset like some grotesque monster. Trees are dying in this relentless heat, and I worry for them, as I do for all the critters, plants and insects that are struggling to survive as the world tips into madness.
On my way home, I bump into an owner and his dog. He, like so many others, begins to tell me the tale of this beautiful German Shepherd named Troy. A rescue dog from Northern Ireland, who was somehow shipped to Basildon by the RSPCA, and now here he walks, close to the ground, reading the world through scent. His nose is deliciously wet against my skin, his eyes clear and bright, all seeing. His owner tells me, he spent three months lying in darkness after arriving here. Fear, grief, mourning his past life, his lost owner. There are times I have wanted to do that too. Lie down in the dark and not get up. But Nut arrives at dawn pulling me out of her womb to face another day. And so too, this dog who carries the entire weight of an ancient city in his name. Troy a city ruined, remembered and carried through story. He is the true guardian of this threshold, the true being rising from the depths to a pathway through this field on a hot summer’s evening.
Just before I reach home, I come across a pigeon lying dead on the road. Its feathered body is still warm to the touch. I carefully lift it and carry it to the grass bank, covering it with leaves. Rest well, little pigeon, I whisper. Nut will look after you.
Leave a comment