The water lily, the serpent and the nøkk, an ecofeminist trinity?

This website celebrates it’s 6th birthday today. Since I decided around autumn equinox 2018 to be vulnerable and share my observations, experiences and thoughts about deep human nature connection, the website has been changing a lot. However, when I look back and especially when I am adding categories or bringing more order in this website, I realise how many blogs and projects like the Sacred Trees – project and Rewilding female saints – project are interlinked. In this blog I want to share some sense-making of three beings that have been accompanying my thoughts for a while.

Sense-making journey

As someone who is always open for information and knowledge, sensemaking is an important process to merge the information to get new insights that help to make decisions or inform my art. I try to make often sense what I observe in my forest baths, other landscape engagement practices and reading books. Sense-making is all about finding associations and patterns between words, concepts and beings that might not always look closely related. Some claim on their social media that when snakes swim through the water, they leave traces in the form of wavy circles that correspond to the dynamics of prime numbers. However, it is important to be critically and be grounded to avoid the extreme where you start to see relationships that are not there. What I share, might be considered delusional. However, it gives insight in my act of creation of for example fiction stories.

Water lilies

In the project writing (with) plants, I got to read an interesting paper about waterlilies as feminist plants.

Gibson, P., & Gagliano, M. (2017). The feminist plant: Changing relations with the water lily. Ethics and the Environment, 22(2), 125-147.

• “Water lilies flourish in clusters and hormonally communicate together within their community. They can self-reproduce and have mobility across the water surface, being both earthed and waterborne.” (p.125)
• “Vilified for being too passive, too silent, disparaged for having inferior abilities and condemned for being immobile, the water lily nevertheless defies these anthropocentric denigrations.” (p.126)
• “This lily has an idealized history as the Nymphea bride or “veiled one.” Its long, representational life has created its iconic status and its associations of purity.” (p.127)
• “The water lily’s roots nestle in the silt below the water but its leaves and flowers are mobile, floating across the reflective watery surface. Water lilies communicate chemically within their vegetal community so that they can better flourish, signaling to each other if there are adverse conditions or imminent threat.” (p130)
• “Does rootedness, then, discount these capacities of beginnings and becomings? What if humans, like the water lily, could do both? Stay rooted but also keep mobile. Plants not only move locally but across vast distances. The thirty-five species of water lilies are rooted in the soil in bodies of water but their fragrant flowers and waterproof leaves can float across the aquatic surface.” (p. 135)

As a serial rooter, always busy with the question what home means, I started to be more interested in the water lily. When a friend took me to the botanical garden in Oslo some years ago, I wanted to see the water lilies. They were huge, magnificent.

Then I saw the Norwegian name. Wait a minute.

Nøkkenrose? Rose of the nøkk? Rose of the water spirit?

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Wendy Wuyts🌲 writer 🐞 reader 🕷️ ecophilosopher (@wendywuytswriter)

SPIRITS AND Blood

Not even a half year before that visit to the water lilies in the botanical garden, I wrote about an interesting discovery regarding language and culture about the black water spirits in Norway and Belgium. When I did a bit of internet research behind the etymology, I found indeed a folktale were a maiden got almost kidnapped by this black water spirit, but defended herself with a knife. The blood of his wound changed in the water lilies.

When I told some Norwegians about this word and asked for more background in the past two years, I observed that any of them realised where this word came from. Most of them knew about the nøkk, but had not made the link. I believe that when you study different languages you also try to make sense in the words you memorise and look for some associations and stories behind the words to help you remember them. In the end, we, humans, are wired for stories.

Of course, I have thought how the nøkk could be some sort of hydrofeminist mascotte for Norway, like I saw other artists in Ireland seeing the potential of the shapeshifting Puca in addressing the societal problems caused by water energy infrastructures and dams that uprooted whole communities. The nøkk has also this trickster-energy as its Irish brother. I did not found yet a reason to work with the nøkk in my fiction work. I keep my antenna open for stories about nøkk related to the waters in the area where I live, but I only heard about Nessie-like snake serpentines in Mjøsa lake (when I heard about a project where they would scan Norway’s biggest lake underwater), but nothing about black spirits. For someone who almost drowned as a toddler, engaging with a nøkk might almost sound like sadomasochistic behaviour. Add the fact that I have been writing about tree spirits since my grandfather died in a forestry accident. I know my childhood trauma’s has been influencing my sense and art making.

Snake as water beings

As part of my Flowing with Eglė – Project I started to dig into snake as water beings and underworld kings. The work by Veronica Strang, and more specific her book “Water Beings – From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis” (2023) noted the “longstanding representational association between water serpent beings and the lotus (Nelumbo) or water lily (Nymphaea).” (p.20). In Maya cosmology, the underworld is full of water. The water lily serpent is the conduit between the aquatic underworld of Xibalba, the everyday world of the Maya, and the celestial world. This worldview where plants and snakes are central is also present in the old Norwegian cosmology with its Ash tree (or is it a taxus tree?), as well as in the origin story in the Christian bible with the tree and the snake. In my long-term fiction book series project, starring dryads and the wood wide web after which this website is named, also snakes play a role.

How does this all make sense?

Perhaps that is the wrong question. The question is rather: If so, what next? What can we learn from this all? How can these stories about water lilies, snakes and black spirits help us in the apocalypse? This blog is not going to save the world – whatever ‘saving the world’ means.

For me, these sense and art making processes are my medicine to keep me grounded and sane in this world that often feels so crazy. Once in a while I get a reaction or an email of someone who is working on her own art and sensemaking process and I have some virtual tea with her or him to connect and exchange. For example, someone is working on a story based on Czech folklore characters and contacted me after reading about Rewilding the Czech legend of Libuše’s vision and Wild Sarka. These ‘encounters’ are magical events where I realise how these blogs are all seeds that might never sprout or touch someone else but years later. Years ago, an older woman in the USA called me a seed collector and that is what I am and what I do here. That is why I keep working on this website. However, be aware that I write this blog for myself, but by sharing this with you and often inviting some of you as a guest blogger, I hope you also feel encouraged to (keep) making art and sense trough engaging with landscapes, the fictional and the real.

Whatever ‘real’ means.

How more I observe and listen, how more I do not see this artificial boundaries and binaries between fictional and real, woman and man, culture and nature, right and wrong, Israel and Palestina, and so many other constructs, do not make sense. How more I observe, how more I become a frog.

The snake, water lily and the nøkk are all my companions in my sense and art making journey challenging these constructs.