The endlessly inventive and productive people at Across the Lines (IFI) / Open Mic Manor / The Thing Itself are inviting video or audio contributions for their next Crossing Borders Open Mic Online (IFI). The theme for this event is “Way-points and Markers” – the places, journeys and signposts that have marked our individual and collective transitions over the last three months. They invited me to come up with a prompt to spark contributions. Here it is:
Hestia is the Greek goddess of interiors, of contemplative time and space. She is the hearth-fire that makes a house into a home.
Hermes is the trickster god of travel, trade, computers, protector of doorways and boundaries, the messenger and mover, the communicator.
In her books “Goddesses in Everywoman” and “Gods in Everyman”, Jean Shinoda Bolen tells how these two very different archetypes are related. In Greek households the “herm” – a pillar symbolizing Hermes – stood just outside the front door, in a distinct but intimate connection with Hestia’s hearth-fire at the centre .
I invite you to see in your mind’s eye a place that represents the containment of “lockdown”; and a place that represents the process of “unlocking”. These places may be in the geography of your home, your county, your country, the world; or virtual places; or the space inside the arms of someone you love – a hug you are grateful to have received during lockdown, or a hug you are still yearning towards.
Whatever spaces come to you, feel them through your senses, through smell, and sight and touch and sound. And then write about these two spaces, placing them in relationship each with the other.
Photo credits:
- The Slippers – Samuel van Hoogstraten
- By the Hearth – Platt Powell Ryder
- Hermes/Mercury – Amelia G. Suárez, http://www.pinterest.co.uk/collaciu/
- Pedestrian crowd – http://www.pikist.com/free-photo-xevfk
- Grandfather, granddaughter – Varun Kulkarni, pixabay.com/photos/grandfather-granddaughter-family-2391461/
Monica Corish 