I forged a candle tonight.

It’s one I learned to make for someone else, one quaking with the horrors of death so deeply you feel a bit ill to touch it, you feel a bit dead.

It’s to aid with the shield I mentioned previously, which has involved communing with the revolutionary dead, which is not fun, but neither is revolution, yeah?

And actually, this brings up a matter I’ve been thinking about.  When you talk to people who are really pissed off, who are fully aware of all the shit they suffer unnecessarily at the hands of the powerful–people who see the progressive armament of police forces in cities and towns, people who watch the absurd murders and beatings of blackfolk and shake and shudder with lucid rage, that question arises: what shall we do?

And at some point (and I’ve been in many such moments with many different sorts of people), someone mentions ‘revolt.’

And for a second, everyone’s nodding their heads, because they know that’s all that will work, but then suddenly someone says, ‘but they’ll kill us.’

And it’s funny, ’cause the people who’ve already died don’t matter so much.

It is like this with any revolt, though, is it not?  You don’t rise up because you might die.  Or, on the other hand, revolts result in death–the oppressed die, or uninvolved people die, or the powerful but still potentially-redeemable people die, and we just cannot possibly have death, right?

Ask the dead of Annwn and their guardians about that argument, and you get a silent stare.

Such are the thoughts after the first oath to the revolutionary dead, and the forging of a candle for the next oath.  This weekend, I go to an Alder swamp with the shield, away from computers.  I need that.

Also. I wrote this over the weekend.  Forgot to post it here.

And oh! Reminder–Your Face is a Forest is discounted this month, and half the proceeds are going to Backheion to support their ritual at Many Gods West.

Be well, and do not fear death.