Alternative Lore

2019, Digital Art / Visual Poetry
Duration: 4.47 minutes
​​​About

Maija’s film ‘Alternative Lore’ invites you on an intimate journey through the doors of sensory perception blending together the elemental and emotional.

This film was exhibited in the CAS Associate artist group exhibition Let Us Dissent (spudWORKS Sept 2019) It features the poem ‘Darkness’ from Maija’s anthology of poetry ‘Paper-clips with Raven’ (18.72 RRP). Selected for this exhibition it revolves around a poem which voices an alternative viewpoint beyond the culture of good/bad judgements and the impulse to ‘fix’ or ‘heal’. 

film stills

Prints of selected film stills available on request
​Darkness; the poem

There is nothing to fix in my darkness,
Please don’t try to heal me.
I have no interest in forsaking the dark
workings of the inner dominion.
The love I am learning to be and receive
Through the dark unknowing,
In the shadows I find interwoven with my
brightness and hanging out behind the sun,
Through the dark night at daylights close
In the depth of deeper me,
A world, a majesty, a birth canal,
A wisdom comes.
Scattered seeds dormant through a long winter
Germinate in sun warmed, water soaked,
moonlit earth
The planets are singing a birthing song.
There’s nothing to fix in the darkness
Behind my lids, about my form, below and
beneath the face of me.
Every word of pity and comfort is a denial
of my truth unfolding.

To shield me from sensation, feeling, and
knowing of this terrain is to shield me from
the parts of me that are teaching me to grow.
Please don’t presume to lift my burdens
until I willingly ask and let them go.
You cannot transform the wit of me
before I’ve whet my need for a taste of its
medicine.

Your aid in service of my strength may be
welcome if you ask
But no denial of the bloody writ will serve
the bloom and blossom yet to burst across
your field of vision.

So healer of wrongs, I ask you to meet me
beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing
and discover the world in which we are a part,
and where your medicine
is a potent truth of being,
not an intervention forced on me.