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. Leguin'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 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 then 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.

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