Threads in Candlelight

I said to a friend, “We see the darkness, and some go in.  It is the abyss.  We have to find out what is there, to find out if there is meaning. 
And we see only the abyss.
And some go mad.
And some never return.
And some–”

I’m pretty sure Dionysos sort of doesn’t make a bit of sense when you’re on one side of him.  I mentioned something about abeyance one time, that is, keeping things at a distance for what you suspect is your own sanity.  This is of course nothing approximating an indictment on anyone but myself.

Keep a god in a distance for a while and then approach?  This I suspect is the root of Divine Trauma.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the piece I wrote for Mabon.  I walked through the woods near my tent in Bretagne carrying a white taper, something I had to do, or needed to do to make something clear to whomever was watching (and fuck did I feel like there were others watching).  Trembling, stumbling through darkness lit only by a candle whose light illumines much less than you think except when you stop walking and suddenly all is light around you.

Why did Taliesin run from Ceridwen?  Why does anyone run from something so brilliantly inevitable?

It isn’t boasting to declare how sometimes this stuff works, because it’s sort of ugly.  Sometimes you walk a myth, and sometimes the myth walks through you, and though you have choice in the matter, you sort of don’t really because, well, the pain of separation from this strange Other, this other World is so unbearable when it happens that you really wouldn’t make another choice.

Your life begins to weave together and you don’t really know why for a little bit, but you start to notice certain threads keep repeating and repeating and this is the thread you’re supposed to learn at this point, the thing you are to see, the thing They are trying to show you.

And so you follow that, because that’s not just the strongest thread that binds everything together, it’s also the only thread that leads out of the sudden tapestry, and you really don’t want to fuck it up because you want to know this time, you want to learn, because you maybe lived a whole lot of your life not quite learning, not following, as Eliot said “we had the experience but missed the meaning.”

So it happens.  The night you meet a man that He told you to meet and you’re up for the next 17 hours and you swear there’s a forest around you though you’re inside a home.  Or the time you’re suddenly leading something, playing music and you don’t know how you got there but you know it’s all just started.  When you wend your way back to a building you saw in vision, or you’re standing 5000 miles away on the side of a druid mountain and you see the vision you had before, or almost all of it, with your eyes instead of your other eyes, except where Bran stood there’s a church and you know what happened.

You walk through it.  You follow that thread, sometimes because you don’t feel like you have a choice, sometimes because fuck this is all gods-damned fascinating, and sometimes because you really don’t know what else to do at this point.  You can back out at anytime, cancel your subscription or leave the party but you’re here now, it’s all here, and you don’t see a point in stopping because you’ll miss it all.

And it happens, and then (if you’re addicted to words) you try to write about it afterwards, and it all comes out obscured but you hope maybe someone else saw that something happened, something was there.  Maybe they wonder if you’re crazy, or just like your words, and maybe they read something entirely different from what you wrote but it’s okay.

Staying distant from the fire gives you some light, but if you carry the fire with you, you can see elsewhere, not just where you started.

I doubt this makes sense, or maybe it does, or makes a different sort of sense.  But that’s how it happens, at least for me, and to what ends?

I don’t know.  But it’s kinda fucking glorious in its absurd relentless dance, and staring at a stone and remembering a spell you got to help keep that distance from someone which is also keeping your distance from Someone, and remembering you can always close off your heart and spirit from it if you wanted to, and then remembering you don’t want to at all because–fuck.  That dance breaks you open, brings you near death, and you don’t just see His face, you see the faces of the others too and know why they all exist though you could never actually really know that…

Nah.  I’ll follow this thread again.  Happily.  Because I’m not the only one dancing.

—

P.S.  I just learned I’ll be writing a monthly piece on The Wild Hunt.   This makes me happy.