‘S olc an Obair do theachdairean Cadail
Hu-ru agus uillirrinn o horo
Bean òg a chùil chleachdaich aig baile ‘ga càradh
Ho ro hu aig toiseach na tràghad
Bean òg a chùil chleachdaich aig baile ‘ga càradh
Hu-ru agus uillirrinn o horo
Mairead ni Ruaraidh bean shuairc an deagh nàduir
Ho ro hu aig toiseach na tràghad
Mairead ni Ruaraidh bean shuairc an deagh nàeaduir
Hu-ru agus uillirrinn o horo
Dhèanadh an t-aodach ‘s gum bu chaol bhiodh a’ snàithlean
Ho ro hu aig toiseach na tràghad
Dhèanadh an t-aodach ‘s gum bu chaol bhiodh a’ snàithlean
Hu-ru agus uillirrinn o horo
‘S Aonghais ‘ic Iain bu tu cridhe na fèille
Ho ro hu aig toiseach na tràghad
‘S Aonghais ‘ic Iain bu tu cridhe na fèille
Hu-ru agus uillirrinn o horo
‘S bu mhìlse do phòg liom na òl a’ ghath-ghrèine
Ho ro hu aig toiseach na tràghad
‘S olc an Obair, or Sleep is Ill Work, is a faery song that reigns from Scotland. Passed largely from song-bearer to song-bearer in the oral tradition since time out of time, the specific village from which this song is rooted remains shrouded in mythical mists. This is because the ancient song has notably been passed down through two lineages- the Uibhist and Barraigh song tradition of the Outer Hebridean Isles. It is filled with minute intricacies, and is deftly braided with internal rhyme and otherworldly vocables.
Scottish stories share that the faeries were often walking amongst the human kind, but were especially present in times of great sadness and great gladness. They were often said to be present for spinning thread, waulking wool, and to help souls transition to the afterlife as well. This song is for a beloved spinner and weaver, a woman of good nature, as they sang. The faeries had come to accompany this beloved soul on the transition to the Otherworld after a tragic childbirth- during which the tides lulled her love to sleep until it was rather too late to row across the teal Hebridean waters for the aid of a midwife. The faeries left this song in her shimmering wake, a gift that has been cherished by many generations. Celebrating her life, this song carries not only the faeries’ love for Mairead, but also for humanity, for the art of creating, and for spinning the wee threads of the web of life.
You can listen to Calum and Annie Johnston sing the song as they learned it in Barraigh here.
Brother and sister duo, Calum’s and Annie’s love and generosity of spirit helped to preserve traditional Gaelic songs, music, and stories from the oral tradition that otherwise may have disappeared but can now be found in archives, and perhaps more importantly, the hearts of many people worldwide- Gaelic or otherwise. It is said that in his nineties, Calum played the highland pipes in full traditional regalia at a blustery seaside funeral for a fellow Barraighnach, only to pass away, himself, moments after playing the last salute. No doubt, the faeries came to accompany this magnificent soul on his journey beyond as well.
This arrangement and these lyrics were passed to us by Josie Duncan of Leòdhas.
“I should say something about Kontomblés, because they are the kind of being which you will see in certain Western mythologies. They are referred to, for instance, in Ireland as leprechauns. These beings are very well known throughout the Dagara tribe and they are said to be the ones that provided Dagara people with all the magical knowledge they have.”
-an excerpt from Of water and the spirit by Elder Malidoma Patrice Somé
The Little People of the Earth have been here since the beginning. They have been known by many names, perhaps as many names as there are cultures and villages of humankind; they are Kontomblé, Chahochina, Menehune, Huldufólk, Duende, Ellyllon, Leprechaun.
As beings who guard the earth, they are also oftentimes said to come to this dimension through portals of nature and the elements- caves, lightning-trees, forests, mountains, streams, even earthen homes in the hills. In many cultures, the stories tell of small-statured people of magic with long hair and darkened skin who were there to show humankind the way, how to live, and how to create a life that is in reciprocity with all that is. They lived amongst humanity for many centuries, many of us unknowingly carry their blood in our veins. In 1820 there were even 65 Menehune recorded living alongside a forest village of humans in Kaua’i. Across the ages, these so called little people who really aren’t so little, have carried magic, medicine, ritual and ceremony, culture, music, and the memories of what we once were and can be again. They are the fair folk, the good neighbors, the wee people of the mist. And they are our ancestors, our relatives, our guardians, and our friends.
Without them, humanity would not have survived. And yet, they have been systematically pushed underground and into the recesses of our minds, cast into the land of make believe, and demonized by the powers that cracked through the earth to disconnect us all from our natures, our hearts, our truths. The remaining little people myths are often wrought with the mark of the systems that colonized this planet. Wars have been raged against them; lives of many kinds have been lost in efforts to protect and honor them or because we have refused to do so. And though humanity has still not remembered, they are still here. And they are coming out of the mists. Will we meet them?
In a time where we have nothing more to lose or to maim on this planet, welcoming them back to our hearts and lives is paramount- perhaps more so than we can understand. And this is not to take from them, these great beings of truth and goodness; it is to listen, to humble ourselves, to honor, to give, to thank, to return respect where it is rightfully owed. It is to reconcile what connects us, not what divides us. It is to remember our natures, so like their own, and to walk with them as beloved and revered allies in service of life. This is how it was always meant to be.
The Kontomblé call us to be valiant, to be humble, to be strong, to be fluid, to be open-hearted, to be ourselves. If you are reading this, perhaps you heard them call you too. The Kontomblé, ancient elders of the Otherworld, and their relative Liv Mokai call us to tend the earth in true reciprocity and the spirit of generosity. We honor and bow our heads to our relatives, the Little People of the Earth. We are immeasurably blessed with the gift of their presence, and guardianship, and the opportunity to grow within their cauldron of transformation whilst we journey together and also in this time on Earth. It is our prayer that we can join our hearts with theirs- in times of sadness, gladness, and for all time-threads out of time. They are the ones who held us together, after all.
Below you will find stories of the Little People of the Earth from our teachers, friends, and loved ones. You will find a prayer woven together with that which is often lost in folklore, but nevertheless remains intact in the hearts of those they walk with.
Writing by Sylvie Zacrep
“I had an amazing session with a mother and her two daughters. One of the daughters came in for the session with a drawing. The caption said, ‘Dear Kontomblé, I respect you.’ I’m tearing up thinking about that. The kontomblé consider respect to be an incredibly important virtue… But no one ever told this girl that. Our session felt as if it could have taken place in a village in Burkina Faso.”
-An excerpt from With the Love of the Ancients: My Spiritual Journey of Remembering by Liv Mokai Wheeler
May we uphold the Little People of the Earth…
...as our beloved relatives…
“When my grandfather died, as a result of his having been a great chief, his funeral not only included this constant wailing and grieving, but also it included… the appearance, from out of the blue, of this being that we refer to as Kontomblé, which came to greet my grandfather or to say goodbye to his soul… They came because, of course, Grandfather had been interacting with them all his life… These beings…finally appeared in the village as part of the ceremony that was going on around the funeral.”
-An excerpt from Of Water and the Spirit by Elder Malidoma Patrice Somé
… as carriers of ritual and medicine…
“Talking with this younger Yankton Medicine man up at Crow Dog's: “I went down to New Mexico to help some relatives build a new lodge and we got the new one mostly built but my relatives wanted to sweat in their old lodge that night so we did our ceremony in there. Well, during the sweat we began hearing this drumming and singing coming from that new lodge and some of the people in there started getting a little worried, spooked about what was happening over there. They asked me what was going on and so I asked my helpers and they told me that the little people were having a ceremony in our new lodge because whenever you build a new sweat you're supposed to have a ceremony in it that night. We didn't do this and I didn't know this, so those little people were kind of getting our backs and taking care of it for us. Now I make sure we always sweat in a lodge the day we build it. That's how I learned about that.”
-An excerpt from The Memory of Souls by Cliff Taylor
… as caretakers of humanity…
“I dreamed of a little old man, maybe two to two and a half feet tall. The dream is too special for me to share here but I will say that he gave me some things, shared with me his name and told me, “Call me and I will come to help you.” He also talked to me some about a kind of assignment we were to work on. “We need to fix the memory of souls,” he said. I repeated this back to him, “We need to fix the memory of souls...to heal the people.” “Yes,” he said, “to heal the people.”
-An excerpt from The Memory of Souls by Cliff Taylor
... and as guardians of the earth…
“She was a woman with a lightness about her, a twinkly sparkle in her eyes, and a deep love of the earth. Ragga had been speaking with the elves since she was two years old. The elves once told Ragga to protest development that was encroaching upon their homes. She did, and she wound up going to jail because of it.”
-An excerpt from With the Love of the Ancients: My Spiritual Journey of Remembering by Liv Mokai Wheeler
… who hold the light of remembrance…
“We hear amongst maoridom that term of kaitiaki, in English terms: guardian. And a lot of us believe that's our role. Which it is. But it's not solely our role. Those little people we refer to are also kaitiaki. In the past the humans and those little people worked together to maintain the earth. What's been lost over the generations is the unity between the human race that we know as human and those little people. And this is what they've been waiting for, the re-establishment between the relationship between ourselves and them.”
-A quote from Stephen Rawi Walsh in Voices from the Forest
… and have never left our sides.
“She had told us that story about her grandparents meeting the elves, a story from an older generation, which still lives in the present and is thriving and growing into something new, now united with the story of the kontomblé. I felt that her story, and the way that it came alive in the present, is much of what's happening now on the earth. I have full chills as Spirit asks me to express this. They've not gone away. They're here with us. They're waiting.”
-An excerpt from With the Love of the Ancients: My Spiritual Journey of Remembering by Liv Mokai Wheeler
May respect be justly returned to their kind.
May we bow our heads to the earth in their honor.
May we call to them, the people who’ve hidden in the mists, and welcome them to walk freely amongst us again.
Dear Kontomblé, we love you.
To Live Art in Every Way: A Message from the Beloved Kontomblé
In the following message, the Kontomblé are in sacred dialogue with Andrew Bartzis, The Galactic Historian. Together, they share of the Kontomblé's starry origins, essences, and ethos.
An excerpt from the Memory of Souls written by Cliff Taylor
In my early twenties I was introduced to the sweats and to the spirituality of my people. It was like love at first sight. I'd never sweat before and then I was sweating once or twice a week for two years straight.
Going to the sweat I met all sorts of people. Growing up, I don't think I ever heard an indian relative of mine talk to me about anything spiritual, really, but once I started sweating I was treated to an almost unimaginable superabundance of indians talking about spiritual things. There were elders, medicine men, Sundancers, pipe-carriers, heyokas, dreamers, psychically-gifted people, prayerful people and spiritual people of all kinds. I listened as a shy young man as life stories, dreams, visions, incidents of healing, and powerful memories of every sort were generously shared. It was like being washed by the sacred spirit-waters of the ancestors. New rooms grew inside of me to accommodate what was being passed around, to accommodate new aspects of my spiritual life that were waking up within me. I met Leonard Crow Dog. Spirits began coming to me in dreams. It was transforming. It was unbelievable…
Indians have lived in a close, reverential relationship with Nature and the spirit-dimensions for thousands and thousands of years. In short, this way of living has gelled into a different kind of consciousness and culture and being. The wisdom and ways of our ancestors are coded into our spirit, our DNA; and although this lifeway of ours has been disrupted immensely in the past hundred years and then some, the roots of our consciousness and culture run much deeper than the West can conceptualize, much deeper than their campaign of decimation has so far been able to reach.
We Indian people are made of rich, resilient stuff. Thousands and thousands of years of the most pure and self-sacrificing human prayers possible protect us and continue to carry us forward. We are of the land and as such, will ultimately outlast the unsustainable monsters of modernity. We're older than this out-of-control story that so many think is the only story. We have a staying-power crafted by all the creatures and critters of the earth, by our Mother the planet herself, by the stars and our relatives in the greater cosmos, and by the Great Spirit, the Maker of life itself. We carry things, sacred things. We have something to say, to contribute. We Indians are this ancient land, speaking, singing, praying, and being. Like our relatives the little people, we were here before this party and we'll be here after it's over; we aren't going anywhere.
So who are the little people?
When Joe Bad's teacher Joe Eagle Elk was a young man working as a farm hand on a farm in Western Nebraska he started seeing one of these little people every once in awhile, peeking at him in the stable, watching him as he got up in the early hours to go and milk the cows. It threw him off a little, seeing this tiny little indian person here and there as he was trying to go about his business and do his work. Eventually he went to ask his uncle about it. Ceremonies were done and then he went up on the hill to fast. When he was up on the hill two of these little people came to him and told him that they were going to be his friends. They told him their names, gave him songs to sing for when he called them, and gave him instructions for how to set up his altar. They told him that during his ceremonies they would come and use the knowledge and powers of their kind to help him and his people. After he came down from the hill he did as they instructed him to, working closely with these two little people friends of his, and a vast amount of help and good and healing(s) and blessings came to his friends and relatives. This was how Joe Eagle Elk began his career as a medicine man.
Our people have lived in a culture that very carefully and knowingly stimulates and nurtures spirit-awareness. Life is more than just what our physical eyes can see; that 'more' is seen into with the eye of the heart, the eye of the spirit; this spirit-awareness. This expanded awareness unveils the reality of the spirit-world. Through experiences and conversations, had in dreams, visions, and ceremonies, we came to know our spirit relatives, with whom our lives are interwoven. For as long as we can remember this dimension of life, the spirit-world, has been integrated into the very heart of our culture and everyday life.
There are many Nations of spirits and the little people are one of them. When I asked my Sundance Chief in Santee about them he said, “We call them the Chahochina; which means: 'they live in the trees' or 'the boys who live in the woods.' Everything that we've lost, they still have. Everything that we once possessed but appear to have lost, they still possess and have knowledge of. They are what we should be. They live how we used to live. They're playful, they're loving, they're wise, they're sacred.”
The little people, like many of our relatives in the spirit-world that we have relations with dating back untold millennia, have and maintain hope that us people can right and correct our course, returning back to a life that revolves around the sacred, honors and protects and loves the land and the animals, the plants and the water, that doesn't move towards destruction but creation and renewal, spirituality and love. The little people have been working with our indian people for as long as we can remember. They're our relatives in this big, beautiful earth family that we're a part of. They continue to come to us today, despite the amnesia that pervades the people and the times. Like they came to Joe Eagle Elk, making him into an indian doctor for his people. Like they came to me, becoming my friends as I went on my own journey of healing and remembering as just a regular, lost Ponca guy.
And the little people are everywhere too. They, like us humans, are worldwide; and they've been chummy friends to all sorts of people from all sorts of cultures and civilizations. Everyone knows about them as being the Leprechauns to the Irish. The Hawaiians have their own long-standing knowledge, name for, and relations with them. Same goes for countless peoples everywhere, especially among the indigenous. I met a four hundred pound legless aboriginal spirit-healer from Australia once and we talked about the little people. The night before our talk he said a few of our indian little people had come into his tent to check him out. He said that when he was a little boy his mom would set out food for them in their kitchen and sometimes they'd show up to come and get it. “Back when all the continents were one,” he told me, “during the time of Pangea, the little people were at the top of the food chain.” Who knows?
I've had little people come to me from India, Africa, Ireland, Nebraska. They're spirit-beings. They live in nature, in the interiors of the non-animal life-forms that make up the natural world; hence their vast knowledge of the deep layers of earth life. They're just like us, with their own culture, language, and spirituality, varying slightly in looks and ways according to climate and place. Like many mysteries in life, there's more to them than we'll probably ever know; but maybe the most important unifying piece of knowledge about them that we do know, and which is shared by many around the world, is this: they are our relatives and they want to help.