About Saille Tales…
Welcome to Saille Tales, a place for me to keep my readers and friends up to date and my often scattered thoughts… organized. The blog-site framework is a new tool for me. It’s one that I hope to master, with the help of readers and friends who are welcome to add their comments and suggestions as well as their own observations.
I’ll be sure to provide news of my writing, book releases and revisions and short excerpts of new work for your scrutiny and enjoyment.
Then, here it is: one more writer’s blog. As it grows and the content broadens, I really hope I can show you something you haven’t seen before or help you find an answer to a question that’s been bothering you, give you a laugh or at least raise a smile. Thanks for stopping by.
Also, I need to address the name. Saille, (pronounced “SAWL-YA”, maybe “Sail” if you prefer) is the Irish name for the letter “S”. It also carries an ancient connection in the pre-Christian, Ogham writing, to the willow tree, not the weeping variety. These trees are known to draw lightning strikes and were revered in most Druidic Traditions for their strength, ability to easily propagate from a cutting and for their connection to water, the source of life. Groves of these trees became the earliest religious centers throughout the Celtic world. This very old faith is still practiced in the groves that remain.
Now that’s my kind of worship service.
They are also known for their affinity to sources of water. Oddly enough, a Western North American relative, the Cottonwood is also known to draw lightning strikes and wood from of these strikes is fashioned by traditional Pueblo Indian people into ceremonial figures and prayer sticks.
I also like floating around on water, and my surname begins with an S. I haven’t drawn much lightning to this point, but this site may well drawn some strikes from interested readers.
I admit I stole the ancient triple spiral petroglyph symbol found at the huge burial barrow at New Grange. I worked it into a vector drawing (for those of us who speak graphics) and turned it on its side. Saille. The numerology of the ancient Celts found three the most basic stable number. They saw it reflected over and over again in creation. Not a bad place to start for a logo.
I’ve spent a great deal of time in the study of Celtic tradition and religious belief since the late 1960s. Though it is similar in many ways to the traditions of American Indian people which I have also studied and seen firsthand, at least I carry some of the Celtic bloodlines. Family. That makes it much more immediate for me. Most of my stories involve these traditions and how they still survive in the modern world.
My stories are tales. They involve real-life (though fictional) human beings confronting the mysteries of living in this world. Sometimes, the answers come from inside themselves, sometimes from other sources, and sometimes there are no answers. Mystery is something I can believe in, even magic. No matter how fancy our tools become as a species, there will always be questions we’ll never know the answers to, and that’s as it should be. Knowing everything isn’t in our job description.
Enough back-story. As the site’s content grows, from many different sources, I hope you’ll dive in and swim around. I should also mention that this is an example of a WordPress page, the open-source, blog site tool that provides a full-featured, very flexible platform to make communication shine. Enjoy your time here, and be sure to leave comments and suggestions on how we can improve the site or any topic you’d like to see spun.
Looks good. Never knew the Cottonwood and the Willow were related, so that’s one thing I’ve learned this day.
Look forward to seeing how the site goes, Richard, and the publishing of course!