Dead, Mad, or a Poet

The cavern is low and rounded like the belly of a mare in foal. What light there is seems to come from the floor, a dim glow sprouting up in slices of white and black. It's been an age since he died, since the game began again. An age since the raven-shield was sundered and his path twisted from Annwn to this board Underhill. An age since all he's heard are the words, "Your move" over and over again. He still hears the whispers of lore on the winds, of course; his ravens see to that. They tell of a king asleep in a hall with his knights, ready to rise up from his cold slumber to defend the land. If only that lore were true—death would be far better if it were. A slumbering king is one without the thought or might to battle on the wood for the land.  For hundreds of years he lost. Lost pieces. Lost the game. Lost the battle. Hundreds of years of seeing his black stacked up on the opposite side of the board while his opponent's white pieces mocked him from the s...

I've spent a lot of time in front of a computer this past week. And when I say 'a lot of time', I mean  it. I'm talking a 'cluster-migraines-I-don't-remember-the-last-time-I-went-for-a-walk' amount of time. It got so bad I actually started to wear my glasses again. But it wasn't nearly as bad as it can  get with writing. There's one thing no one ever tells you about writing when you first get into it, and that's that it will break you if you're not careful. Stories will grab and ride you, and characters will take up residence in your head. You'll force yourself to write the things you don't want, and then force yourself to write the things you want to but are avoiding for completely different reasons. You'll become this strange shadow of a person, possessed by emotions and voices not entirely your own. A caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived, temporarily crazy person fighting-migraines and wearing those sexy new eye-sty accessor...

Today I'd like to introduce you to a demon of mine. The first time I saw him he was made of ice, all sharp yet brittle in his jagged edges. He was living in my arms, but his whispers and ice made it to my heart and mind all the same. "You can't do that!" he'd say, and pull my arms back from reaching out. "You can't dream that!" he'd command, then darken all the dreams from my mind. It's easy to hate a demon who traps you in this way. But hate will never make a person free. I may have introduced the demon, but he is gone now. Because as it turns out, he'd only ever wanted to keep me safe. When he took root in my arms, I had needed that wall of ice. But as even the most stubborn among us will come to learn should the president get his way, a wall can just as easily imprison as it can protect. All it ever takes to shift from one to the other is the slightest shift in the tides of fate. When I sat with my demon and felt his fear,...

Would you like to hear a secret about magic? Well I mean, it's not really a secret because I've kind of mentioned this before. But just to reiterate: magic is about story, and stories are sometimes the most powerful acts of magic out there. As a culture, we do not have nearly enough respect for stories and the powerful magic they bring. Nor do we really respect the role of story in the magic we create. Some people stick to the tried and true pre-generated stories of grimoire rituals. Other people make their own magic and lean into teleology, or "the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise". In short, we create correspondence lists and talk about how "this does that" and never the *why*. We create long explanations about how materia magica exists on various levels and the rays of energy they have rather than considering the possibility that they too at some point had origins storie...

The winds blow hard here. So hard that if you forget your hat your ears will hurt. She once had a dream about that, saw herself as both older and younger in clothes she’s never worn.  Walking across the bare-bone back of the open moor to the burial mound in the distance. She'd seen feathers in her hair, matted and wild, and heard the rattle of bones at her belt. Both younger and older versions were each the mirror of the other - only the younger carried the gear (as all good apprentices should). They’d sat on the mound and used the white noise of wind to enter trance. But that only ever hurt the sensitive skin of her ears when she tried it awake. In a pinch there are those little cottony whips of white that grow in the moorland grass. You can stuff in your ears and they can help with the soreness. But they do nothing for the whipping of hair and loss of warmth from the head. This isn’t Ilkley Moor, but you could certainly catch your death of cold up here, and t...

I've been reading a book on animism recently. Well, it isn't actually about animism, but the author gets it in that kind of 'bone-deep' kind of way that very few European-descended Pagans do. The book is Silence by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and it has proven to be one of the best books I have ever read on animism in my life. I've seen a lot of modern (mostly European-descended) Pagans and Witches claim to be animist over the past couple of years, but for the most part their animism feels like an affectation to me. If anything, animism is something that seems to have become trendy. Thich Nhat Hanh probably doesn't see himself as an animist, and yet it shines through in his musings on how the trees on the banks of a river would feel if the sound of the river were to suddenly stop. It's there in the way he talks about acquiring a bell for practice - it is not simply a thing that is bought, but invited to come home with you. It'...