What Earth Sees of Sky

The second in my series, “Where They May Be Found,” is posted on A Sense of Place.  Last week’s was on Brân; this one’s on Arianrhod:

You can see yourself, shadowy but there, an image I suspect closer to “truth” than the ones we see in polished surface. When I feel unwell, or lost in the world, I stare at myself like this and smile.

But I’m not the only vision in the water, and never the most interesting.

She’s on the surface, and I don’t know how this works. She’s what becomes of the sky in water, silver and blue like the kingfisher. The sky before storms, the sky after storms, so many blues that people just shrug and call it grey.

…

Stars are balls of flaming gas if animals are mere food and trees are mere fuel, humans mere workers and puddles mere bits of water.

I really, really liked writing this one, except I still feel no closer than I was after writing Arianrhod, The Crown of The North.  I feel like the mind breaks a bit when attempting to comprehend Her, some deeply speaking silence that can’t be described no matter how many words I try to throw at it.

A few days ago, I stood on a bridge and stared at the sky in the water, and then the water in the sky, and then rode off to pick flowers for an offering to her.  I wanted blues, but it seemed she wanted purples, and each one I picked led me closer to the one flower I know she always accepts–chamomile.  But the purples came to me last year–one of the other figures with her (I don’t know how this works), who is one of the beings who occasionally teaches me some spell or another (I also don’t know how this works–if you’re looking for profound wisdom, please go elsewhere) likes purple.

I offer her mead and chamomile on my altar.  There’s a bouquet of purple flowers (including grass-heads) and chamomile with a bit of mead in the water of the jar they sit in on my altar at the moment.

That’s all I know, though, thus far.  There are people who’ve done extensive work for Dionysos and The Morrigan and Brigid and Odin, but with the exception of some closed-off witch-cults, there’s almost no public writing about Arianrhod beyond an occasionally kinda awfully useless “get in touch with your inner goddess archetype” stuff.

Regarding Patheos

As a side note, several people have noted that a few other queer polytheists have left Patheos recently and have asked if I intend to do the same.  While I utterly support their decisions to leave, my emphatic answer is “no.”

If I ever do so, it’d be on account of my qualms over writing for free for a corporate religious site.  I guess many of the rest of you see advertisements when you view the site–I’ve been using an ad-blocker for years now, and I’d really suggest you do the same.  It’s absurdly simple.  There may also come a time when I can no longer “afford” to write for free for that site, but that will be awhile, I suspect.

As to other matters of concern–there are some awfully abusive bourgeois fucks in the Pagan “establishment,” who get away with some horribly misogynist and condescending things not just on that site, but pretty much everywhere they go on account of mixed contributions they made to American Paganism 20 years ago as well as apparent access to “essence” or “legacy” or whatever it is that they claim.

And I’m a fucking anarchist, so you know what I think of such things.  Letting them bully people around, dismissing everyone having “direct” experiences with the gods rather than going through their archetypalist (and old-white-man) traditions, belittling others’ embodied-gender experiences and effectively silencing them is precisely what I won’t be letting them do to me.

Could the editor of the Patheos Pagan site (who has also become my friend) do more to stop this? Possibly.  

But she’d also have to figure out a way to change all of American Paganism, with its disgusting reverence and sniveling fear of distinguished white men and its insistence on having all the benefits of middle-class, bourgeois life while also wanting to be nature-y and goddess-y but not changing a fucking thing.

I don’t think that’s in her job description.  But I’m beginning to suspect that’s what’s in ours.