Yule, the Flight of Dove and Christmas Eve...

As usual, there I was, all poised to do a nice Yule post.  I should know by now that nothing I ever plan for December ever actually happens.  The entire month always gets away from me for one reason or another.  This month it has been the (still) sickness of Fluffhead, which leads to my own lack of sleep and very low mood; the horrible troubles Stanley has been having at work, and the way that despite me not being very outwardly social, the month tends to get filled up with 'stuff and people to do'.  I'm really not quite sure where they all crop up from.

First: an apology to Fry.  He mentioned that my last post was all 'donkey' - i.e. it was exactly what I complain of with poetry: un-understandable clever clever gobbledygook.  Quite right in one sense, I shan't deny it.  (I shall deny clever clever - it wasn't clever at all.)  It was a rather private rant about the situation at Stanley's work and what I was doing about it, but I felt I couldn't write it openly, so it was sort of coded.  Anyone who is a 'magick practitioner' (as someone once, rather modern-ly described me, what an odd phrase, I thought) will have got what I was waffling about; other than that - it was probably undecipherable.  Sorry people.  Will try to make more sense in future...

Second: the flight of Dove.  You remember Dove?  She was being mistreated over here and was not happy.  She has flown, and escaped back home to Italy, to where it is warmer both in climate and people's temperaments.  She will start a new thing in Switzerland in the New Year.  She has no idea, none at all, of how brave she is, trotting from country to country - where she learns the languages as she goes, as well.  We had a last meeting, where we discussed many many things and nobody cried.  There was a lot of hugging and thanking. I think we both found each other this year as a result of a deep need.  It was one of those weird things where you feel much closer to someone than you realistically should considering the timescale.  I feel like my sister has gone abroad.  But unlike most other times when I meet people and they go (which happens alot), I feel like she isn't really gone.  So I don't get to undergo 'ambiguous loss' as the psychologists would say.  (That's when, for example, you get divorced, or have a fight with someone and never see them again in the way you used to - so you mourn them but they are still alive and present, in some cases living close by).  We've been texting, and we shall email too.

I had a friend once who was in a very similar situation to me, it made us very close; and then her circumstances changed.  With a death.  I was SO JEALOUS that she had (in a very cruel way, yes, I didn't say I was a nice person) escaped her situation, that I couldn't be there for her to mourn.  All I could feel was that *I* was still trapped, and she was free.  It took me many years to get over that - and to change my own circumstances.  The friendship with this lovely person was irreparably damaged, and all my fault.  The situation with Dove is similar in some ways: we bonded over how hard we find childraising, the crippling sense of responsibility, the feeling of splitting your consciousness between 2 people, being forever therefore running on half power yourself.  The lack of rest, sleep, personal time.  The worry if the children get sick, or will they turn out ok.  We both got a bit sick from our worries here and there.  And she has escaped - she was a 'nanny' remember, and now she isn't going to do that anymore.  But...I don't feel that poisonous envy and jealousy I felt before at all.  Isn't it GOOD to be able to report some growth as a person?!  This time, she goes, and I will miss her painfully...but I feel nothing but happy for her that she escaped.  She is free!  She can go on to more brave globetrotting, doing new jobs and meeting new people and having experiences and making choices.  I smile when I think of it.  One of us is free!!  So Dove has flown, but is is good.  She needed to go, and I will always be her friend.

My other great find this year, Time Traveller, came by earlier this week - or was it late last week? - and helped me to get up my decorations.  I would have none were it not for her help.  She and Fluffhead singlehandedly did the tree, while I sifted the decorations box outside (Stanley had stored it in the outhouse to become infested with spiders - ask me not why he thought this a suitable place; he doesn't know why he did it himself!).  I bravely rummaged through everything and disposed of spider corpses.  I always feel more awake when Time Traveller is in the room - her brain hums and thrums with thoughts and ideas, and I start to feel bouncy and smiley and interested in the world; my sense of humour even comes back from wherever it hides when I spend most of my time sulking because I am horribly overtired.  (I don't think she has any idea she has this effect on people either.  People are often remarkably unaware of their bestest qualities, isn't it so?!)  So that was lovely.  And it cheered up Stanley no end when he came home and found Christmas had happened to the living room.

And so, there came Yule.  Which is at an annoying time of year!  In the sense that of course, Christmas has hijacked it's timing utterly, and there I am, preparing for the tree and present fest that is Christmas, while also trying to have a slightly solemn, or slightly joyful (depending on mood) Yule ritual.  And it always gets lost.  Yule always ends up being celebrated about 4-8 days later.  I think, for example, that I am going to have a very small Yule ritual in the middle of ...next week, when everything has calmed down.  When all that stuff about family and the trying sense of enforced togetherness that makes alot of us really cranky were we to be quite honest, is over.  So I shall look forward to that later, then.

In the meantime: today: Christmas Eve.  Classic English Christmas weather - its pissing with rain and its overcast, cold and windy.  We are lucky we aren't in Cornwall or Wales, they are low slung and awash with flooding.  We are up here on a hill, listening to buffeting rain and wondering if the outhouse will hold (it has done for 3 years, but its not best made...so its worth the wonder).  I am wondering if its Christmassey to have a chocolate cupcake, or just...excessive (it'll be my fourth).  I am wearing the new boots I fetched from East Croydon yesterday (the sole *fell off* my only other pair the day before yesterday - so I became the only female in the Western world to be left with one pair of footwear).  I used my one and only storecard to pay for the new boots, which means I'll be paying them off all year, but hell - its better than being barefoot.  Also, whilst out, Fluffhead got to ride in a miniature car thingy that moved; and Stanley and I got to eat icecream and cookies - a Christmas and birthday tradition we have.  We listened to carols, and acapella singers and then took the train home.  Stanley is upstairs wrapping gifts.  I'm about to re-organize the kitchen cupboards to accommodate the excess dry stores (see Troubadour - I do not forget what I am taught!!).  Later, Saint Mum will come by and spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with us. 

Fluffhead sleeps.  All is calm.  Shhhhhhhh.  I'm going to go into the kitchen now, and shut the door so I don't wake him with my noise moving stuff about.

Happy Christmas!  Merry Yule!  Well met, Alban Arthur!  See you soon!

A nasty little Winters Tale...

I don’t know how this story ends.

Its one thing that I sit here, spinning my words, spinning a spell, letting the little Arachne’s live when I see them, so that they will help me with the web.

Its one thing that I call upon Tyr, with his hard eyes and the cut of the sword of absolute justice that goes both ways.  That Odin, on back of Sleipnir rides in just for the joy of a scrap, because I asked.  That Thor will always defend the small man against the large and powerful oppressor.  Its one thing that I call them, most vehemently, and explain the situation in this season of ice and frost.  I explain that the Ice Giants are filling this small part of our world with lies that cloud and bank over everything so that we cannot see the land anymore, and before us it cracks.

Its another thing that I create a mood with several songs, several melodies and run it through my head until a story plays there: a powerful archetypal story where someone glows with the force of integrity and shines with the truth, getting bigger every moment as those who shout their falsities cower and shrink, their biting insults and twisted acid blowing back in their own faces as the warriors I have called throw thunder and wield swords, ravens, dogs, wolves.

I can feel the battle as it rages back and forth and up and down that room far away.  I can feel the liars telling their merry stories, barking and snapping like the dogs they are, and the supposedly neutral listener taking his notes that bias toward the powerful and refuse to listen to any other than the official story.

I close my eyes and I can see, in a strange almost cartoon form, this battle surging.  I can see the Gods fighting for us, I can see the evil men with their tarnish of grey and spitted red over them, smiling and fighting back.  They are not afraid. I feel their confidence, their arrogance is a stink I can see, like heavy dark furs covered in fat.

But I don’t know how this story ends.

I watched it for almost 2 hours.  Then quite abruptly I felt it stop.  I felt the energy I was putting through it, holding the line, I felt it falter and …stop.  I felt, I hope it was not so, I felt our side conceding something. I hope this was tactical only.  A move.

Battles remotely fought are of course difficult to view.  But it turns out I was accurate of the time it ended.  The warrior Gods pulled back and breathed heavily and the opponents vanished from the room.  The skirmish was over.

They gird him now, my loved one, and we wait for the result of today’s war fought with words in a boardroom; and with Gods and love and music on another level.  By sage and lavender, by story told through in tarot form, by the binding of purple ribbons and grey silk cloth…I know how the fate should be spelled.  But casting for another, however close…

I don’t know how this story ends.  I know it is not over.  I know we did not use all our weapons, or take this battle to a wider plane, a bigger room.  But this means we still can.  I think they think we don’t have the nerve.

In the meantime, I think on the two liars who propagated this whole story’s start. I think on their smallness, their viciousness, their attacks even within this battle that was not supposed to be a battle today (though I knew it would be).  I hope that the supposedly neutral witness was taken aback by the venom of his colleagues; the violence of the words used against the man with no union representative, the man invited to a meeting to make his side of events, and then not really allowed to.

I think on those men.  I think they need mirrors set round them, reflecting in.  I think their acid juices should eat them from within.  I think I hate, and I do not forgive.  Not yet.  I hope the one who witnessed on their side has eyes to see.

Tyr will see Justice done yet.  Thor will protect, as that is what Thor does.  Odin will ride back for us.

But I don’t know how this story ends.  A winter’s tale where the wolves howl, but as yet, who they will eat is unclear.  Are they Odin’s wolves?  Will Fenris be bound at the expense of Tyr’s hand?  Or are they just a pack from the dark side of the forest, hungry for anything warm as they are cold through and through and have no warm blood of their own so steal another’s?

I don’t know.  I sing the songs, I weave the words, I see the battle.  I see another will come.  This was just the first engagement.