Carving Memory, Gathering Bones, Singing Her

What if the work we do with our hands is a quiet conversation with the past? My hands are often ink-stained, or cramped from the steady, the careful carving of linoleum. And still, I return to the ritual—carving, inking, pressing—because something quiet and ancient calls me to it. In these small, deliberate acts, I feel I’m tending to something as old and as sacred as Time. I am gathering bones. Old ones. Forgotten ones. The kind that lay deeply buried, yet rattle with story. . .

Bone Woman lives in every woman who has forgotten her own howl, and is slowly learning to sing again. . .

La Huesera, the Bone Woman, or Bone Gatherer, is one of the wildest faces of the sacred feminine. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Jungian analyst and Cantadora Keeper of the Old Stories, describes Bone Woman as the wolf-blooded gatherer who roams the desert southwest collecting the bones of the dead. She says Bone Woman is not a figure of fear but of holy restoration. She pieces the skeletons of forgotten bones back together, and when she has assembled one completely, she sings over the bones until they return to life—flesh, spirit, fur, howl. . .

La Huesera, Bone Woman, who wonders the arroyos, or dry river beds of the desert southwest, and gathers the bones of wolves. She sings over them next to her fire until they spring back to life, running into the distance, howling with the voice of a woman. . ..

Bone Woman is known by many names and sung in many tongues. In Hungarian she is named Ö Erdöben (She of the Woods), or Rozsomak (The Wolverine). Among the Navajo she is Na'ashjé'ii Asdzáá (Spider Grandmother), and in Guatemala she is Humana del Niebla (The Mist Being). In Japan she is Amaterasu Omikami (The Numina who brings all light and consciousness), and in Tibet she is Dakini (the dancing force which produces clear-sight within women). . .and the list goes on. Bone Woman shows up wherever something sacred has been buried and is waiting to be unearthed, reassembled, and sung back to life..

Archeological studies show that in ancient times bones were used as tools for more than just practical purposes: humans used bones to carve symbols, designs with aesthetic value and spiritual significance. They used these bone carving tools to etch out stories, folktales and legends onto walls of caves, into stone. Bone carving held deep cultural and spiritual meaning in many ancient societies. In some traditions, bones were believed to carry the essence of the animals or ancestors from which they came. Shamans and priests often used carved bones as ritual objects, amulets, and divination tools. . .I love the idea that the spirit of this lives within me as I do my creative work carving a block of artist’s linoleum into a design that tells a story too. . .

Many years ago in the kitchen of my Vietnamese aunt, the spirit of Bone Woman stirred quietly in the steam rising from a pot of simmering bone broth flavoring the air with the smell of phở soup. . . the heartwarming Vietnamese soul food distinguished by its unique combination of aromatic spices. It was a recipe passed down from my grandmother and we savored it along with ancient stories of Âu Cơ: the wild ancestral bird mother of the Vietnamese people. This winged creature of the mountains, solitary and fierce, dares to marry a dragon from the ocean world, and through this wild transgression, the meeting of two worlds, they birth the Vietnamese people.

Âu Cơ the original mother of the Vietnamese people, often portrayed as a mythical crane, is also a manifestation of the untamed spirit of Bone Woman. In daring to love and mate with a dragon, together they combine feather and scale, weave together land and sea, bridge separate worlds, and birth a new people.

Âu Cơ is a manifestation of the untamed spirit of Bone Woman, of Wild Woman. In daring to love and mate with a dragon She gathers together feather and scale, bridges separate worlds, weaves together land and sea, and births a new people. Her fire is not just of flesh, but of fierce creation, that luminous union made of love and wildness that births a new lineage of kinship woven from disparate worlds.

Though I did not know it for many years, Âu Cơ, that wild winged mother of the Vietnamese people, lives in my bones too. . .

When I think of Bone Woman I am reminded of the day I read Tim Tingle’s novel How I became a Ghost which is a haunting story of a Choctaw family’s horrific journey on the Trail of Tears. That night I had a dream I was walking the Trail of Tears. In my dream, I was in the Bonepicker’s Wagon, the traditional wagon used to store the bones of those who died on the trail, except in my dream, the bones were not those of Native Choctaw, but the bones of my own Vietnamese ancestors. In my dream the Trail of Tears was not in the Americas but the mountainous path my mother’s family took when they fled their province of Ninh Bình in North Vietnam to Southern Vietnam as refugees in 1954 when the Communists took over. My dream was profound because it unearthed the shared parallels between my family’s traumatic history and the Choctaw family’s experiences on the Trail of Tears in Tim Tingle’s story. The shared exile from one’s landscape of origin and the death and tragedy and emotional devastation and that follows, and the experience’s rehaunting of future generations is, and continues to be, a shared Bone Memory. Bone Woman teaches us that nothing is ever completely lost— buried bones are simply waiting for us to find them, reassemble them, bring something new back into consciousness, etch something into being with a voice that howls from the deep marrow of our sacred bone connections.

La Tejedora del Mundo, the Weaver of the World, who sews together the fabric of the world after Trickster Crow pecks at its frayed edges is also engaged in the sacred act of bone gathering too. She sits eternally reviving what is lost, and weaves into being a new world from the threads.

Unlike the Choctaw in Tim Tingle’s story, my Vietnamese family did not pick up the bones of their dead, or gather them together to honor in a Bonepicker’s Wagon. The horror and trauma my mother and her family had gone through had been left largely unspoken, buried and forgotten. Having a family full of immigrants the tendency is to see griefwork as an impediment to success in this new country. Bonework was not considered valuable labor, but merely the job of the undertaker. Yet, if you think about it, it is the undertakers of the earth who do the miracle work: the earthworms, the fungi, the decomposers who silently turn decaying matter into nutrients for new growth. Farmers know how powerful the use of bone meal is in ensuring the vibrant growth of their crops. . .All this underground tending often goes unnoticed, and yet it is the quiet, essential sacred labor from which all new life unfurls. This Bone work is ancestral work, it is grief work, and the vital work that Bone Woman takes on. It may appear counterintuitive because Bone Work, like grief work, appears like you are going backwards, it’s inconvenient, it takes time from the perception of moving forward. Bones appear as a hard, dead, thing in your hand, but if you know the right recipe, the right measurement of spices, and you tend to the bones as they simmer slowly in the pot, the process can release precious minerals and nutrients to nourish those who truely value the soul food that bones offer. . .

There are countless other forgotten buried bones besides Vietnamese and Choctaw that are waiting to be gathered up and honored, remembered and sung into the circle of human memory. In gathering these bones, we do not just look back—we bridge the chasms between us, and sing the sacred back into wholeness.

The “Singing Bone” is a German folktale collected by the Brothers Grimm, it is about two brothers who compete with each other to kill a boar with a prize of the princess’ hand in marriage. It is the younger brother—gentle and unassuming—who triumphs, but his victory is stolen in secret shadow. The elder brother, consumed by envy, murders his brother and buries him beneath a bridge, thinking no one will hear the truth. Yet the bones do not forget. One day, a single bone is found and carved into the mouthpiece of a horn—and when the breath of the one who carved it moves through it, the bone sings its sorrow: my brother killed me, and hid me here. . .

Perchta aka Frau Holle, is an ancient germanic Alpine Goddess who is also a manifestation of Bone Woman. Associated with the seasonal migration of geese, the coming of winter and the Winter Solstice, the shortest night of the year, Perchta like Bone Woman is associated with the endings and beginnings. She is depicted weaving with a large “goose foot” that she uses to push her treadle of her spinning wheel, which is a symbol of her liminal role connecting past, present and future, death and rebirth.

It was through my father’s Germanic-Irish lineage that I first began to hear the low, haunting hum of the singing bone. My father’s family immigrated and settled in the Ozarks, the moss-veiled, forested spine of the South-Central United States—a land through which the Trail of Tears once meandered. I was raised on the old tales of my Irish-German settler ancestors: their hardships, their hungers, their hauntings. I knew the weight of their survival, the echo of famine in their bones, the ghost-stories whispered around firelight and stitched into lullabies. But what I did not know then was how those stories, carried across ocean and forest and time, were also shaped by silence—silence around the grief of the land they had claimed. Silence around who had been displaced, erased, colonized to make space for their belonging.

But this land, where rivers remember and limestone bones still speak, whispered more to me than I was told. Somehow the Choctaw bones (and the bones of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole) who walked through that Ozark landscape—and the bones of the Osage who lived on that landscape long before—found me. What is buried will always rise. Truth, long silenced, finds a way to sing—through memory, through myth, through the breath of those willing to listen. I tell the story of my Germanic-Irish family through tears... for both settler and colonized, Irish-Germanic and Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole and Osage. Our collective stories, our bones, need holding. They need to be gathered into the same circle of reverence. I realized I needed to harness the spirit of Bone Woman and sing over them all, until they found a way back into connection with each other. So they could see how deeply they needed to be in communion to fully come alive.

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So when the bones of my Vietnamese kin rattle with their own songs of war and exile, I recognize them as echoes of the same ancestral song—the song of the singing bone. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War—a war that has haunted my family, whose bones I’m still grieving, gathering, and singing over. Though the trauma of Vietnamese war survivors has been spoken of often, and their heartbreak, devastation and grief undeniable, what remains largely unspoken is the deeper reckoning: how we Vietnamese, too—displaced and wounded—may unknowingly reenact settler-colonial relationships upon Indigenous land in the Americas. Dr Estes captures this brilliantly, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you. And it is also the place from which you might bleed on others, unknowingly, if the wound is not tended to. The suffering one endures can become a seed of suffering in others, or it can become a seed of transformation. We are all wounded by the world, but we need not keep our wounds bleeding”. In our grief, we forget to look down at the soil beneath our feet, to ask whose memory it holds. There is a silence around how we, in seeking refuge, may become part of the settler-colonial culture that erases. And in that forgetting, we fail to bow in deep, ritual reverence to the original keepers of this land. We need to welcome the bones of others into our Bone Woman song, and recognize how honoring them will nourish us too.

When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2022 I discovered Olia Hercules on Instagram, a Ukrainian native who reported daily from her kitchen in Britain what was happening on the war front through her direct contact with her brother who was in the Ukraine military. Through her daily posts of news of Ukraine mixed with her traditional Ukrainian dishes which she published in a cookbook Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine and Eastern Europe, I started cooking her beet broth Borscht which first involves the simmering of bones, a recipe that starts out just like Vietnamese phở. But instead of noodles and spices, Borscht requires adding beets, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, dill. . .The soup is so warming, so comforting, it has simmered its way into my family’s bones and hearts, and is now a beloved soup we return to again and again. Her own family’s suffering, displacement, and immigration to foreign lands because of a foreign military invasion is not lost to me. . .Her story is a singing bone story and carries the same spirit as that of the Choctaw and the Trail of Tears, of my Vietnamese family migrating as refugees to southern Vietnam and then to the United States, and of my Irish ancestors whose bones remember their own long journey to the Americas. Though scattered across continents, these singing bone stories belong to one great ancestral table. They need to be gathered into the same circle, honored, remembered, listened to and digested and loved.

Baba Yaga is a Slavic wilderness witch, well renowned in Ukraine, who embodies the spirit of Bone Woman too. She lives deep in the heart of a birch forest, a liminal hag who holds both death and rebirth in her clawed hands. Surrounded by a fence of bones and skulls that glimmer with ancestral firelight, She does not offer comfort, but is the fierce midwife of transformation. To come face-to-face with Baba Yaga is to cross into the shadowed forest of the psyche, where something in us must die so something deeper can be born. Her chicken-legged hut spins at the edge of the known world because that’s where she lives—on the borderlands of what was and what is coming into being, asking us to surrender what is false, worn, or no longer alive. She does not grant safe passage without cost. But what she offers in return is the raw material of rebirth.

Baba Yaga is a Slavic wilderness witch who embodies the spirit of Bone Woman. She lives in the heart of a forest, a liminal hag who holds both death and rebirth in her clawed hands. Surrounded by a fence of bones and skulls that glimmer with ancestral firelight, like La Huesera, she does not offer comfort, but transformation for lost souls who find themselves in her midst. To come face-to-face with Baba Yaga usually involves undergoing a rite-of-passage where an aspect of the self dies so another one can be born.

In the spirit of the transformative power of Baba Yaga, the Slavic Bone Woman, we must undergo a reckoning and look beneath the built up walls, the borderlands we have constructed to keep us apart from others. Beneath the soil, beneath the tangled threads of grief, migration, and longing—there are so many more forgotten bones aching to be sung over. To gather and bring these stories together side by side is not to blur their edges, but to witness the sacred interwovenness of suffering, survival, and song. It is to remember She who hums still in the marrow of every creature— La Huesera, Âu Cơ, Dakini, Rozsomak, Ö Erdöben, Na'ashjé'ii Asdzáá —guiding us. Her task is not to encourage us to forge new connections, but to uncover them. To brush the dust from what has always been there all along, buried and forgotten. And to howl it all back to life again. This is Old Story Medicine, from Bone Woman’s sanctuary of salves. It is the elixir She offers when the world seems broken and in need of repair.

Perhaps it is in the kitchen where we can most clearly see Bone Woman magic made manifest in our day-to-day lives: creation and destruction are not opposites, but kin. The marrow flavors the broth that nourishes the living. Today as a pot of phở simmers in my own kitchen, I am reminded it is not only the bones that create that quintessential phở flavor — it is the constellation of spices that originate in many landscapes that adds to its power: star anise from China, nutmeg from Indonesia, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, cardamom and black pepper from India, coriander from Egypt and the sun-drenched Mediterranean, and local Southeast Asian ginger. Each offering comes from a different landscape, and yet they come together—not to dissolve into sameness, but to hold their own essence in communion. This is a bone broth of memory, where each ingredient keeps its name, its scent, its story—and yet together, they nourish.

The stories sealed in our bones—Vietnamese, Choctaw, Germanic, Irish, Ukranian. . .and so many more —must be stirred from silence, reverence, simmered in grief and memory, and sung over with care, and honored. This is not a melting pot where flavors are lost, where identities blur into sameness—but a ceremonial cauldron of memory and marrow - where each spice, each bone, each voice holds its own essence. Together, they make a broth rich with complexity, a lineage of kinship not born of uniformity, but of disparate parts reunited.

Perhaps one of the most poignant examples of Bone Woman is in Scheherazade, the Persian heroine from One Thousand and One Nights who weaves together tale after tale for 1,001 nights in order to keep herself alive. Her unique way of telling stories (nested storytelling technique), showing how one story is inside another, and how they are all intertwined, intrigues King Shahryar, blind to his own cruelty, might have ended her life had she not found a way to awaken his curiosity. Over the course of those nights, she not only softens his heart, but also births three children by him. By the end, her storytelling is creative, powerful and transformative . . .a Bone Woman undertaking. The King spares Sheherzade’s life, but she does more than just survive. Like Bone Woman, Sheherzade reshapes her own future and the future of the kingdom by revealing how every story is threaded through another until all the once-scattered fragments sing in a single, sacred chorus. When I can see my story in yours, and you can see your story in mine, we enter into a sacred place, we can begin to see and empathize with each other’s experiences, we can honor each other’s worlds, our stories can live inside each other’s bones and we are awakened together in a new way. It’s a deeply feminist arc when you look at it through a mythic lens—her stories become her shield, her sword, her liberation. . .her howl. She is the witch of word and bone.

Whether you call Her Âu Cơ, Ö Erdöben, Amaterasu, or Omikami, Scheherazade, or Baba Yaga, Bone Woman is the keeper of what the world has chosen to forget, yet She gathers, perhaps She weaves, or writes, or sings, or cooks, or maybe She carves and etches the unseen back into being. As I carve and ink, as I write and weep, I join the slow, sacred work of Bone Woman—gathering what has been scattered, listening for the stories buried in the marrow of many lineages. This work is not mine alone; it is the quiet labor of many. A shared song of sorrow, and survival, grief and celebration that stretches across time and place. Through pigment and prayer, through stories carried and told, I offer what I can to the circle—honoring the many voices, the many bones, that together keep the sacred wild alive.

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