I have many, many things to tell you. Most will have to wait for now. Tonight, I have to drink with the dead, after one of the most beautiful weekends of my life. I’ll tell you one fun thing, though.
There are two peacocks. One is blue&gold, the sun in the noon sky reflecting off the water. The other black&red, blood coursing through the hidden dark places. One is the light of Awen, the other the rage of Annwn. The first is the mid-summer’s dancing, the second the revolt in winter. Both are the blade of love, violence and compassion. And only the forest mediates between them both.
With that aside, have other interesting things in sundry and scattered places, some of them mine:
Last week, I posted this piece, the first essay in a series on Ancestors of Revolution. It’s on Marx. You may already know this, but I’ve been carrying around his grave-dirt for awhile, after it was gifted to me by a friend. The Raven King and the Lady of the Forge have been awfully insistent that I work with the Revolutionary Dead, and so I do, and holy fuck. But that’s a tale for another time.
A day later, I wrote this for the Wild Hunt. It’s on the question of civilisation, the dichotomy of the Forest and the City. Except, it’s also a dialectic, and as I mention in the introduction to A Beautiful Resistance, the Marxist Dialectic is also the mystery of the Divine Twins.
Speaking of that mystery and what I wrote at the beginning of this, I encountered at least 20 depictions of Peacocks while in Portland this weekend, and a few minutes after I returned home, found a friend of my roommates waving a peacock feather in my face like it’s nothing. There’s some stuff ’bout power there, but Chani Nicholas says it better than I can right now here.
Also, speaking of A Beautiful Resistance, today, this was posted on Gods&Radicals, 20 minutes of me discussing how G&R and the journal came about. I sound kinda ghostly. That’s kinda fun.
Also also speaking of, the proof copy of the journal arrived. It’s fucking gorgeous. The full order is getting placed today, and I’ll be doing a ritual to thank the forests for the paper that will go into its production.
And also and also also, this. Holy fuck this:
This music’s what one might hope chamber music in a tavern full of poets, witches, and rebels might sound like. In fact, I think it’s precisely that. It soaks into you pretty heavily, and sounds like those who’ve seen death and find their life much stronger, have seen sorrow and find their joy that much more fierce. I’d buy it if I were you. Actually, I bought it anyway, because I’m me.
And oh! Oh! Alley Valkyrie finally has a Patreon account!!!!
Be always well.
Rhyd Wildermuth 
I’m glad you posted those links because I’d forgotten to get around to reading your piece on the Wild Hunt and. . . . and I’m having a lot of feelings about it that I can’t verbalize at all, but it’s really really good.
🙂
I always felt there was a lot of truth in China Mielville’s ‘The City and the City’… I like the forest and the city better!
The deeper reality of my locality is The Damp Oak Forest which was preceded by the Boreal Forest. I feel more connection with the oak forest and its bog oaks as oaks still remain along with sparse areas of lowland raised level peat bog. I’d find it tough to find it in the city of Preston though where the otherside bears such a deep imprint of labour and pain from the industrial period and its hard to walk or see beyond that.
I’m intrigued by the peacocks and lovely atmospheric tune 🙂 Also by King Ludd turning up again in the Marx piece and G & R intro. I recently discovered a street nearby called Ludygate leading to a church called Kirklund (church in the sacred grove) not too far from where a statue to Mars-Nodens was found (Nodens, Nudd, Lludd being kind of equivalent). ‘No King but Ludd!’ and lines from ‘Lludd and Llefelys’ about him being ‘benevolent and bountiful in giving food and drink to all who sought it’ seem important at the moment in light of the UK government’s austerity measures.