Luthien Seagull anniversary

[David Dalton]

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]

Of possible relevance to this group, I am an orphan,
clear sky lightning preceded three of my waning
crescent inspirations (and I relate such lightning to
solar activity affecting the ionosphere), and I wear
glasses, though I discarded them for my naked sun
stare, thorn hill climb, and blue rose vision of
Sept. 5/6, 1991.