THE SECRET GARDEN OF THE BONE MOTHER

THE BONE MOTHER SERIES 2020 - 2021

I am so intrigued by your blending of science & magic. They are after all one & the same. Their reintegration with one another is needed & inevitable.

You are a gift, Imelda. A true modern day shaman crafting a healing alchemical elixir of the past & future into the NOW!

-Gwendalyn (@LucianaLycanus)

International Teacher, Author, Painter and Forest Witch in Europe and Globally

SPECIAL OFFER

FREE art book download for all "old" and new subscribers to my newsletter!

This special "bonus book" was created to mark the festive season of 2021. My intention is to reward the people who have subscribed to my mailing list for years as well as new arrivals!

The paintings presented in this book were created exactly one year ago and they attracted a lot of attention and questions on social media. I decided to bundle the 20 most significant paintings in this series together into this small book.As we all enter the deep fertile darkness of the yuletide period, I invite all readers to connect with The Bone Mother to have their own experience of transformation and rebirth.

This book costs £9.99/$13.95 (hard copy) and £4.99/$6.95 (Kindle version) on amazon

If you have problems downloading your copy, please email me (on imelda dot almqvist at gemail dot com) and I will sort out a personalized download link for you!

Imelda

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THE SECRET GARDEN OF THE BONE MOTHER (NOT FOR SALE)

The Bone Mother has a secret: her cave-womb-tomb is not a desolate or frightening place: it is a Garden of Abundance!

MY JOURNEY HOME (NOT FOR SALE)

Halfway through pandemic year 2020 I had a dream where my own ribcage became a boat. It was taking me on my Final Journey, to the Land of the Ancestors.

THE BONE HARP

<< On the Shore of the Ocean of Eternity a Bone Harp plays its startling music, plucked by the Wind. The Souls of the Dead whisper to us on this breeze.

The Bone Mother is exactly that: a Mother. Her Cave is the Womb-Tomb where all life forms return at their Journey's end. Where the Dead receive compassionate cradling and the Living learn to re-member (literally meaning: to put all limbs back together!)

This is the place where go to re-birth ourselves. She lifts the mantle of false burdens and injurious projections. We all carry so much weight on behalf of others - and often we don't even realize it...

Halfway through pandemic year 2020 The Bone Mother started appearing in my paintings. She presided over an on-line sacred art retreat I taught. Once the retreat ended, she would not leave. She demanded no less than a wholehearted plunge into Sacred Darkness. A cancellation of all plans and expectations.

BEAR ME (NOT FOR SALE) >>

International Teacher, Author, Painter and Forest Witch in Europe and Globally

THE DISMEMBERMENT: MY BONES BECOME MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS - SOLD

As the Winter Goddess arrived, I started dreaming of bones and dismemberments even more intensely. In one dream a community of bears dismembered me and proceeded to make musical instruments from all my bones. My one task was to surrender and listen to the eerie, other-wordly music.

We die so many times before we actually die. We die the smaller deaths of loss, grief, abandonment, rejection and betrayal - before we actually cross over. As I grow older (and hopefully a little wiser along the way) I am learning to embrace those smaller deaths as intense training sessions for the ultimate event.

When I die, I trust that this eerie music will show me the way home as I enter the Land of the Ancestors.

BEAR STIRS THE CAULDRON THAT IS MY SKULL (60 x 42 cm) £295

Mid 2020 I had a profound visionary experience: all the molecules that make up my body were dancing before my eyes and communicating with me. They showed me that one day, they wish to continue their own journey. Blood ultimately wants to be water again and bones become stones. The substances that make up my body want to be trees, mushrooms, clouds, hills, animals.... one day.

In that moment I understand what an utterly precious gift this human body is and how countless other 'beings' entered a sacred bond (of marriage) to 'hold me together in physical form' until the day my soul transitions and crosses the veil between worlds. I realized how beautiful the larger cycle is - and an incredible level of acceptance came over me. One day I will die but for now there is living to be done, and a tending of this incredible human vessel.

International Teacher, Author, Painter and Forest Witch in Europe and Globally

MY WHITE MOTHER (60 x 42 cm) £395

My White Mother (a Beluga Whale) gives birth to my new self, so I can swim out into the world as changed (and healed) person. And yes, some of you guessed right, I am a Pisces!

This is a mysterious painting, even for me, the painter! No further explanations...

THE WHALE CLAN (SOLD)

Inspired by a dream where I was shown (and reminded) how we all have Animal Ancestors, as well as Human Ancestors, and our natural body shape will often reflect this.People who belong to The Whale Clan are not naturally skinny.

(Not that I wish to divebomb the diet industry obviously, as so many people put bread on their own table by means of encouraging others to self-starve! But it is a perspective nevertheless... piece of 'visual activism'!)

FOX AND SNOWY OWL (60 x 42 cm) £285

I invite you to watch my art video

The Resurrection Bone

Many spiritual traditions call the human body a Temple. It has taken me 50 years to this planet to fully comprehend the truth of this teaching! The Tzeltal Maya people take this concept a few steps further. They believe that the human bodies and the bodies of animals they hunted have a so called Resurrection Bone. This bone is part of the pelvis and it often the last bone to survive when a body is unearthed long after burial.
Tribal hunters believed that that from residual essence here a person will be reborn after death. This is why they often carved the sacrum of animals they hunted. Ritual care for this bone ensured success in the hunt and carry favor with the gods.
They also believed that the human body has loci (places) of transformative power. This means that we can access the cosmos, powerful gods, ancestors and other worlds using portals in our own body.

WALKING MY OWL (60 x 42 cm) £325

Core shamanism teaches that we all have a power animal (or even several). The Old Norse Tradition teaches that we human beings have fylgja, literally "a following spirit" or follower (but not in the 21st century sense of a follower on social media!)

The fylgja reportedly takes two forms: it can appear as a woman or take the shape of an animal. Families, clans or tribes have a 'Clan Follower': the Kinfylgja, who watches over the collective. Most people cannot see the fylgja (unless they have the gift of second sight). However, often there are reported sightings of a person's fylgja just before they die.

During the pandemic new animal powers (or animal spirits) have come forward to guide me and work with me. One is Snowy Owl and another is my White Mother (A Beluga Whale, usually accompanied by her calf).

We are still getting to know each other but I value their presence and guidance immensely...

International Teacher, Author, Painter and Forest Witch in Europe and Globally

POSITIONED FOR BIRTH (60 x 42 cm) £275

One of my many faults is that I do things too fast: I talk too fast, I speed-type, as a mother working from home I multi-task incessantly and I sometimes jump to conclusions.

For me the pandemic has brought a period of being becalmed. I managed to overwork my way through nine of months of Lockdown (due to asthma and respiratory issues I have been self-isolating even when I did not have to). In early December I had the wake-up call: nine months is the duration of a pregnancy!!

I don't want Lockdown to end without having enjoyed any sense of "more time" reported by many people around me (not frontline workers!) I suppose I really bought into the notion of 'myself as a spiritual key worker' and, one December day, decided to release that.

After teaching a 4-day intensive (on-line) sacred art retreat dedicated to The Bone Mother - I plummeted into her Cave-Tomb-Womb. At the time of writing (January 14th, 2021) I am only just starting to paint my way out of this place of Sacred Darkness. As one long-term student asked me this morning: when will you start fleshing out the bones?! The answer is: I don't know, for once I am not in charge of the timing...

There is a mysterious point where Ancestors and Unborn Children are one....

SPIRIT CHILDREN

THE ANCIENT FOREST AS THE DWELLING PLACE OF SOULS (SOLD)

It was inspired by an Old European belief held by Norse and Germanic peoples that trees, and the primordial dense forests which once covered much of Europe, were profoundly sacred because the souls of dead ancestors were believed to dwell in trees.

There were prohibitions (and also a lot of superstition) around the cutting down of trees - because there was a real fear of "making our ancestors homeless" and "displaced" (and without the support of our ancestors, we are nowhere!)

In the Northern Tradition (as in most other traditions I would guess) there is a strong connection between ancestors and fertility - they often act as Guardians of the Land.
In a recent dream I saw how the souls of Ancestors stayed engaged in the great Cycle of Birth - Death - Rebirth by guarding the souls of babies about to be born, and also by reincarnating (which I saw as leaves dropping of those trees and becoming seeds for new life germinating in the ground). I married this vision to another recent dream where I was in a Dark Forest where all the trees were fish skeletons - linking all humans to the Primordial Waters.
If we took on board this profound ancestral wisdom teaching we could not possibly engage in the mass logging of rainforests (and so forth) that is decimating animal species and affecting both air and soil quality (and much else).

WARNING TREES ABOUT LOGGING - VIDEO

THE OLD WOMAN WITH ANTLERED HANDS (60 x 42 cm) £375

RED RIDING HOOD IN THE BONE FOREST (60 x 42 cm) £265

WHERE MY BONES BECOME BIRCHES

AND MY HAIR BECOMES LICHEN (SOLD)

Carving and painting bones in My Forest Studio brings me face to face with my own death. In one recent vision the bones of my skeleton became the silver birch trees they have always been and my hair became lichen. It felt deeply comforting and reassuring.

ON THE SEA-SHORE OF ETERNITY (60 X 42 cm) £295

This painting is mysterious and it shows that I am a native of Pisces!

'To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.'

-William Blake

THE BARE BONES (60 x 42 cm) £275

WHEN PLANET VENUS CAME TO EARTH FOR A DAY (60 x 42 cm) £285

MY BONE MOTHER (60 x 42 cm) £495

THE MOMENT AFTER REBIRTH (60 x 42 cm) £385

International Teacher, Author, Painter and Forest Witch in Europe and Globally

THE DREAM OF A PISCES CHILD (60 x 42 cm) £285

I was a Pisces child. Always walking between the world of my everyday reality and other worlds: the spirit world, inner worlds, energetic or astral worlds. Someone once called me Pipi Longstocking ("You will never grow up, will you? You are a child for life!" I took that as one of the best compliments I have ever received!

It was not surprise that, in adulthood, I ended up writing a book about navigating and harnessing the human imagination:

MEDICINE OF THE IMAGINATION

This was my third book, published in October 2020!

CRADLED BY THE BONE MOTHER AND THE BONE FATHER

(Commission for Sandra Price and the details are shared here with her permission)

"The night you said: go ahead and make the Sister Painting to The Bone Mother, I fell asleep to a vision of the Bone Mother being joined by the Bone Father, in her Cave. I saw your deceased parents holding space for you together and lovingly, even from the Other World. It blew me away: I had two solid months of painting in the Cave of the Bone Mother - and then the Bone Father arrived... Wow - wow - WOW! Making the painting was an emotional journey - even for me!"

This painting made it safely across the Atlantic during the Pandemic!