A Bemusement of Faeries

When I light a candle in the hollow of the fallen Cedar, he, or she, or they are there.  I haven’t asked them which pronouns they prefer, so forgive the ambiguity.  We haven’t gotten that far.

Mostly, they’ve just shown me where to find pretty stones for the stream-bed, the one I’ve been cleaning out, preparing it for the coming rains.  Also, showing me certain trees, certain views, certain places where the moonlight illuminates an other world on an overlook.

Some spirits of forest and stream are bitter, fierce, distant, cold, so capricious their wit and bemusement can be painful and possibly deadly.  These?  Maybe the most playful I’ve ever met, and thus far, the most “fun.”

I always feel like dancing when I’ve left the forest.  Sometimes I sing to myself.  Sometimes I’ve actually danced, alone in my room.  I’m pretty certain I’ve skipped, something I’ve always enjoyed doing.  A bearish mid-30’s skinhead punk skipping in combat boots through a crowd certainly makes the crowd part.  It’s fun, and you should try it.

I’m utterly bemused by much now.  Months of really intense work, moving and traveling and trying to get all sorts of things right and settled and in their place seems to have let up a bit now.  The path between Mabon and Samhain is Ngetal, “Wound,” the Reed or the Broom.

John Michael Greer’s got it meaning “Swiftness, sudden movement, healing, transformation, the flow of time.”

There’s a bit of 8 of Wands in it, shades of Quert (Apple).  A sort of “laughing as things change.”

There’s a part of my forest-grove that my lover and I call “the Hall of Apples.”  It’s by one of the two hidden gates (two of the three entrances are utterly invisible unless you are staring from a certain direction or are right in front of them).  An old apple tree guards the entrance and the apples roll down a sloped track, passing a line of very tall, tree-size Brooms.  That’s the entrance you leave from if you’re getting awfully giddy because the place is a little too much fun for you at the moment, because then you climb a hill and get to see much of the city and a very big mountain on a clear day.

It helps clear your mind a bit to see all that, especially when everything moves so fast, and you with it.

I’m also bemused by what appears to have moved in to my home.  I guess, once your home hits a certain threshold of spirit-worker-witch-types (there’s now two of us permanently, and a third when my lover moves in), things enter, or come back, or something.  Oddly lucid yesterday, noting the sudden cleaning frenzy of the two others who live here (including some incense and other oddly poignant rites, though I think they don’t quite know what happened), I smiled and laughed a bit.

“One of them moved in,” I told the witch-mate (roommate + witch =…oh, you get it, I’m sure.  It’s not very clever), and so we’ll be stocking up on rosewater.  The dog’s a bit put out, though.

I’m bemused by quite a bit lately.  Much of it is the forest and its spirits.  No small part of it is also realizing how severely in love I’ve fallen (why don’t we say “risen,” I wonder?).  Also, the exceedingly quick fun things about to happen, like going to New Grange for Winter Solstice.

Also, I guess, bemused by what several people have called “Rhydgate,” or “Rhyd Wildergate.”  Gate’s a fun word.  Yeah, I know it refers to that one thing with that one president, but if I might get a little etymologically playful, we come up with “riverford gate” or “riverford wild gate.”  Kinda fun.

If you missed that all, don’t be too sad.  Mostly, a few people threatened to stop funding The Wild Hunt because of what I wrote, which is an awfully lot like “I’m taking my toys and going home,” which is not playful at all.  It’s not even clear many of them got very far past my description of the Liberal-Universal “The Goddess” to actually understand my point, which was on gender essentialism.

I started out a little sad, and then I got quite bemused.  Watching certain people utterly destroy  their credibility in the comment thread of a piece they disagreed with is a bit embarrassing and tragic, but also quite bemusing.  Like, damn–you really gotta undress yourself down from everything in order to try to prove a point to maybe the most bemusing and scary brilliant rhetoricists in Pagan literature–in front of everyone?  Dude, Gus–Sannion probably strips off his skin for Dionysos and runs around naked in shopping malls on a regular basis, it’s a race to the marrow with him, and anyway, you missed the point.

We’re cool with your gods.  Just don’t tell us that all of ours are all squished up into one of two.  And don’t tell us to get off your lawn and to stop skateboarding on the sidewalks and to get out of the big circus tent of Paganism.  ‘Cause, well, you know–Circuses are fun. Carnivals and all that.  And unsquished fairies and gods and goddesses and nymphs and dryads and brownies and, you know, all of that.

And anyway, it’s all gonna burn down awfully soon, and I, anyway, was planning on making out with furry man-satyrs on burning barricades and playing fairy-songs as the bankers fall from the towers and we all start again.

So, hey.  Have some fun, too.