The beheaded flowers

Imaginary gardening it is again.  It’s been such a strange summer.  All raining and the flowers have come out far too soon; only to be clogged down and blighted with odd dry patches, it looks like.  Then they shed all their petals under the onslaught of this rain.  Between that and the apparent (so it says on breakfast news, ever that medium of tetchy and apocalyptic information to have with your toast and cereal) invasion of Spanish slugs eating everything in sight…its astonishing I still have flowers of any kind in the garden.

I do though.  I have 2 unidentified Alpine or heathery type plants I bought on reduced from the small florist at the bottom of the hill – one deep pinkish, one white in flower, with small, tiny, perfectly shiny leaves.  This hugs close to the ground, and spreads itself out very very slowly.  I have a small pot of lavender that was decanted into the earth near the living room window.  This so that when I am walking rather dazedly up and down the living room while Fluffhead (known elsewhere, especially to Gitarist und Dichter, as Colin Baker, but this another story) plays with his alligator truck, his wheeled block trays and his combine harvester.  We are in a patch of wheeled vehicle development at the moment.  They must run over everything; and stickers must be stuck on the wheel centres, so he can watch them turn, endlessly. 

Fluffhead has become a real tyrant with the TV and radio, so we endure a more or less constant diet of CeeBeebies  or Radio 4 panel shows (which can get really annoying after a while – there’s only so much Jack Dee you can listen to…I’m not sure why radio is caught up in the 50s/60s still, in some ways, its odd).  So whilst this goes on, at a hopefully restrained volume, I pace up and down.  Trying to hold in all my stomach muscles to support my back, and stop it from pain.  I look out of the front window at the street and the trees all growing higgledy piggledy, with branches and leaves sprouting forth from the bottom of them instead of the tops.  And then out of the back window to the back garden, with the meadow (such was the state of the garden till Thursday last) now shorn.  Apart from those flowers planted near the living room window, there is nothing.  It’s barren. 

I planted a great many seeds at the beginning of Easter; but they didn’t seem to take.  This was before the rain, when we seemed to be having that drought…maybe they dried up; more than they were, I mean.  (I imagine dead sultanas nestled in the Earth.)  I am still woefully ignorant of gardening.  Lots of borage came up repeatedly…other than that…nothing.  I weeded the borage, since I have discovered giving any quarter to it is like asking houseguests to move in forever and ever rent free to eat you out of house and home.   I grew a mass of tangly nasturtiums inside the lean to conservatory, but they didn’t like being replanted outside – they had twined themselves around each other and various other pots on the large shelf to the point where they didn’t really want to leave this arrangement.  I had great trouble repotting them outside.  They fell over, they lurched about, they insisted on dragging their flowers to the bottom, grazing the ground over the edge of the large pots at the front of the house I was trying to rehome them in, to greet the sun each morning and smile at me when I was back from my walks. 

I even managed to wreck some geraniums.  I bought 8 enormously vibrantly pink ones from that small florist – in very good health, and planted 7 of them in those pots outside the front door, with some ivy round their edges, for love of that twining and soft green.  (The other sits proud and happy on the kitchen windowsill, still very vivid.)  Two days of violent rain and they were petal-less.  So I beheaded them, and now the pots are a mass of lighter and darker green, but no flowers. 

This is annoying, and a bit  sad, coupled as it is, with the fact that apart from the nasturtiums, I have only managed to coax up from seed some aubrietia (no flowers on this their first year of life – hopefully next year), and some lavender.  The lavender is interesting.  It has come up so small and gentle, not thick and strong and woody as you so often see it…But both these things (and the remains of the nasturtiums, which I sensibly left indoors, twisted up around everything as they are – and flowering madly too, with blood red, damson plum red and lemon curd yellow heads), are doing well…indoors and pest free.  We’ll see.

All this information in lieu of …what?  Life information?  My health scare is half over.  My cancer tests came back negative.  It took me about 3 days to process this information, as I had got into such a state of high peaked worry I was wound as tight (but not as pretty) as a nasturtium to a sunflower.  But I still have some worrying symptoms and the mad scientists still have little idea what is bugging my guts. So more tests ensue.   Sighs.  I wait to hear what they are and how much they will scare and annoy me.  I had two days of feeling wondrously clear of worry, it gradually fell away from me, or melted, dried like grass after rain…though not without leaving a rot, as this violent rain this summer has done.  I don’t feel quite the same.  We’ll see, we’ll see.

So in the imaginary garden of BlackberryJuniper, which I admit has been sadly neglected of late – as have the Lands in general, as I have been so focussed on this other particular part of my existence…there is a small and disjointed story waiting to be told.  I don’t think it goes anywhere, and I don’t think it has a message or moral of any kind.  It sounds sad, and rather gothy; but perhaps it isn’t.  I think it just is, and just is now, and you shall have it, for that reason alone.

                                                ***

Once upon a timeless place, there was a garden.  A large walled garden, full of sunlight, except toward the far end, where it was a little bit shadier sometimes, from the tree branches hanging low. 

Strewn over what was the altar, over the flat stones, was an image of desolation and beauty in endings…they shone in the noonday sun and then their essence wandered away, their lives cut off, cut short, their stems bruised and sheared.  Their colours faded, their petals curled – golden yellow to beige to tan to brown. 

But now they are graves and soon they will be earth, soon they will be chrysalises, soon they will be parents, suckling round the edges of small shoots, greenly waiting in the earth; soon they will be small shoots, earnest and free of all taint, poking upward.  They grow and sprout, a stem, a leaf, a bough in the scale of flowerkind. 

They do this, the sun moves over them, the moon shines from so high above, and it seems to take an age to get four inches tall; snails wave their antenna slowly as the earth waits and the tiny ladybirds sit on top of the leaves.  Unfurl, the palm of a hand, softly opening.  And finally, the bud, twisted and secretive; the last to allude.  It hides unripe and fresh.  Its colour takes it by surprise and then it is here, before it can control itself it knows the time to seize the worlds is now, and the maiden slowly comes to her feet and stretches wide her arms. 

She mirrors the trees around her, she salutes the sun; she opens, she receives.  She is the brilliant pinky gold of a summer’s morning.  She is innocence with no experience.  She is kissed with one dewdrop, as if we made her up just to be pretty, just to tell a tale.  No one, no one sees this, she is entirely alone but for the insects.  The birds cannot smell her, and won’t until noonday sun. 

But here comes the taller maiden, who sees her own echo in the grass at her feet and takes the scissors.  She strokes the flower, this one perfect sweetness of the whole world and she loves it to her centre, she feels the flower inside herself, and she kisses it softly.  She tastes it.  She takes its stem between the blades as she kisses it.  It knows.  It feels the coldness of the blades, it knows this one salute, this one morning – the way the light falls through the trees, she knows it.  Knows it is the last.  Her petals widen.  She feels the love of the girl.  They are innocence together, in the way different species can occasionally feel each other.  She knows no harm is meant, but that in the cause of love, harm will come.  In her innocence, in her mendedness, she knows to break is her way, is her destiny.  She flowers, she falls.  Inside her budded core, she breathes deep one last time of the sun, of the dew, of the morning and she waits, all upthrust and held out and beautiful in her life in her wondrous morning.  She waits.  She gives of herself.  She gives herself.  The blades, they touch her sides, they hold.

They cut.

She falls.

And so do her friends, further away, all around, all around her, so many colours – the palest of blues, the morning sun’s sister.  The pink of fervent love, the green wildness of a glade somewhere where the unicorn does indeed (oh yes why not) wander.  All her friends fall, with their serrated leaves, their many sided petals.   And all give of themselves, now this morning.  They feel themselves, fractured, being bled; their sad stalks facing the sun.  The sun will cauterise.  The stem will feel the fall, it will bleed out.  Next year, she will rise again, as her mother’s daughter. 

The heads they move away, carried in her white apron, in her basket, in whatever you want.  They move, they wonder, as they breathe the last, at this sensation of movement – of going past.  It is all so fast and so blurry.  They reach the altar stones, they are strewn.  The maiden sits before them on the grass.  She cries.  She cries for what she has done, and she cries for what she thinks she has lost.

(and one day a thousand years ago, my cat Blossom died in a morning, very early, and I crushed that perfect rose I saw in the street as beauty had to be sacrificed as I had Blossom no more)

The maiden cries all the full morning. She leaves.  By nightfall on the third day, the flowers are dead and gone, so far gone they have no memory of ever being there.  Only the altar knows, and has felt a thousand beheaded flowers and more.  They looked lopsided at the world one last time, from funny angles, some upside down, as they died a violent but instructive death.  They watched and they saw.  They saw her innocence being preserved by their own, they did not mind.  They screamed and felt the pain, but they didn’t mind.  It was a long time ago in the small measure that is theirs, that is everyone’s.  They closed their eyes and left their eyes behind. 

Golden yellow becomes beige becomes tan.  The maiden comes back.  He is with her.  The flowers no longer know.  Respectfully, she takes the dried petals and strews them over his head.  She kisses him.  It means something.

Now it is over.  The cycle continues.  Green presses up from below, the mother’s daughters are here again.  Flowers.

And it is possible that the maiden and her man and whatever flowers she birthed lived happily ever after, here on the Lands, at least; where the wild horses run free on the beach with sun in their tails.  It is possible.  The flowers will always bloom and come back. 

And this happens Here too.  Maybe all will be well.  For a while.

Who knows?

Something I need to get off my chest before I go on...

I’ve been struggling with what to say next for a while now.  These are my thoughts.

This health scare I have been having.  It’s not over yet.  The docs think I may have something serious.  They are testing.  Endless, invasive, nasty, scary tests.  There’s been a lot of hospital lately.  Soon there will be an answer, and lets hope it’s a good one: that they jumped to the worst case scenario, tested backwards from there and will conclude I have nothing wrong with me at all that a damn good holiday wouldn’t fix; or an injection of cash to pay the bills without worry and loss of sleep.  Several other things that would help.

In the meantime…

I have been thinking this.  You know how when people have had a near death experience, or recovered from an illness, and they say: ‘live every day as though it were your last’, ‘treasure every second’.  The treasuring I can get with, I see that.  But I think it anyway.  But you can’t live every second, every day as though it were your last.

For instance.  If I knew, rather than thought, there might be something awful wrong with me, and I had little time left – I would be quite selfish with it.  I would demand that I go and live with my mother by the seaside, because I have been craving seaside for a long while now.  That spaciousness, the call of the gulls high up, so free and speaking of blue expanse and long journeys.  I would ask for that, and I would get it, because my mother is lovely at the best of times, and would move heaven and earth to help me if she could.  I would go, Lil Fluffhead would go.  This would completely mess up mum and Fry’s living arrangements, but it would be bearable, because everyone would know it would be for an unspecified, but limited amount of time.  I would sit in the sun a lot, get loads of babysitting and generally try and ‘come to terms’ with mortality, while listening to the sea and watching it glitter.  Possibly Stanley would get some kind of leave off work and stay as much of the time as he could – ‘compassionate leave’ it’s called.  I would make him come.

But that is just a scenario.  It’s not now.  What am I supposed to do, in the hinterland, the no man’s land of I Have No Clue What Is Wrong With Me, The Symptoms Persist, But No Diagnosis Has Been Reached, Nothing Ruled Out.  ???

How do you fit that in to your life??  How do you live with any kind of joy, any kind of ability to look forward and see a momentum, see a life stretching out in front, see the point of making any plans at all…etc?

Also – life is not normal anyway, at the moment.  Roughly once a week, there is another test.  Sometimes I have to fast for the test, or be quite ill to clear things away so they have a clean slate to look at.  So the test intrudes beyond its actual time.  A half hour test can ruin three or four days of the week, as I start to feel ill-er and ill-er, weaker and more headachey.  I have to ask for help with Fluffhead; mum loses money she could have gained at work (that she badly needs) to come and help me (because Stanley has used up all the time his work will charitably give him short of a diagnosis).

That last makes me wonder:  where are my ‘friends’?  I’m the first one to admit that I was Push Away Girl after my dad died.  But its remarkable how easily people let themselves be pushed.  How easily they disappear into their own lives.  How in one case, I actually felt dismissed after I left my last job, from someone whose friendship I thought I would carry with me.  Or one woman, endlessly at sea in her own life, I had been writing to for many years, and met up with 2 or 3 times.  I felt we were sisters; she said she did too.  But we drifted.  I made one mistake, born of confusion, and lost her trust, never to be let back in.  Now I hear from her once every few months; the same light small talk.  I have apologised till I am bored of my words, but she cannot say anything to me that isn’t light and funny and meaningless – while I know from others that she still rages beneath.  I wish her well.  But I can’t be friends with people who can’t trust me with their actual selves and their actual lives, as I would wish to trust them with my thoughts on mine.  Who cannot forgive a mistake earnestly apologised for and understood.

Or the friend I have known for almost twenty years, who has disappeared into her own life since she restarted work with such a pop of totality, it’s as if she never existed.  There’s a tight vacuum of absence.  Now: she loves a crisis and always has done – indeed, I have often referred to her (privately to myself) as my Foul Weather Friend.  It took me 2 tellings of her about this little peccadillo I am experiencing for her to even connect.  Then there was a small facebook flurry, then nothing. 

Others are there at the end of email, more or less consistently.  Again though – its amazing how terrified people are of the first hint of unwellness – they do vanish…Some of my erstwhile mostly virtual friends are doing their damndest to completely avoid this issue of mine due to their own health phobias; and ignoring me as a result.

It makes me wonder what the POINT is, of having friends.  I think I may expect too much.  But that will have to be the case.  I have read words of people who say unconditional love is the way to go, expectation is always wrong.  I disagree.  I expect someone I count as friend to be here for me when I am in crisis.  I would be there for them, if I knew about it.  If I couldn’t go in person, I would be on the phone, I would be there by email; snail-mail; facebook message.  If I was late or not as consistent as I said I would be, I would explain why, as soon as I could.  But I would want the person to feel not alone when they were frightened and weakened.  I would help them stand up and face what was in their lives – if only by my words of encouragement, if that was all I could do.  I understand we all have our own lives going on – but it is an easy thing to send a morning text to someone, or a quick ‘thinking of you’ email; or a note in the post, and to keep it up.  Many things I would do, and have done, for people: are matters of moments.  But they count when you are scared and facing deep uncertainty.

The only person who has the right to laugh at all this prescriptive (and rather judgemental) sentiment is Troubadour – as he can say, as ex husbands do, that I left him in his hour of dire need.  And I will always bow my head to his interpretation of events and say: I’m sorry but I had to.  I will accept the blame, always, for what I did there.  And anyone who wants to say it’s my karma to be mostly alone in this situation now – go ahead.  I bow my head to that too.  I accept the responsibility.

But still.  One small ray of hope: I met a woman recently, quite by chance.  I won’t say much of her.  She seems as odd as me; whilst not being as insane as the last person I met as a result of the blog (one day I’ll tell you all about that, but not now – I wish that insane person well too: we both messed up, there).  From the first, conversation with her was easy, honest and real.  She doesn’t hide.  She answers questions.  She seems to take me at my word and not read between the lines and make up her own story (you can’t really deal honestly with people determined to do that).  I discussed her with Fry.  He suggested I should call her friend.  I said, ‘it’s too soon, its needy, it might scare her away’.  He shrugged, as he does, and said, ‘you women – you take everything so seriously – you talk well with her, you know how rare it is to find someone whose brain works even a bit like yours, just call her friend, honey kitten’ (which is what he calls me when he thinks I am being small and stupid and rather ignorant; but cute).  So.  So.  Alias TimeTraveller: you’re here.  Be assured, I am not expecting you to answer for the sins of anyone else.  You are you, and I am happy to have met you.  Long may our pleasant talks continue…friend.

But still.  Again.  Further.  How to live life while all this is going on?  While I have this health scare, while money worries pile up almost to intolerable levels, while trying to make a happy home for a small, innocent and blameless person.

It’s these times when you need your philosophy, your spirituality, your religion, whatever.  Existentialism helps me in moments.  Some days I bravely face the day and make my choices, looking whatever current truth there is, in the eye.  Some days I can’t.  Those days I choose distraction or spirituality.  Distraction is when I decide I am part of a story – as only stories make sense, really.  If I were Dr Who, I would be in the marooned on Earth phase, without my Tardis and my freedom, at the mercy and doing my best to cope with all the Earthbound problems; while trying to deal with my own issues at the same time.  (So apparently I’m Jon Pertwee – well, here’s to being astonishingly well dressed).  If I were in the novels of Sherrilyn Kenyon, I would be in that unlit and scary period before I am made a Dark Hunter and have my purpose; that time of cruelty and torture before the gift of vengeance and protection, and way before the redemption of love…Sometimes I am not in a story, but simply preferring to be surrounded by one: these are the times when genre fiction is what you need.  Series of romances, or science fiction epics, or fantasy quests.  Action, feeling, MOVEMENT, choices, consequences, change…Inspiration to stand up tall and deal with life from wise cracking space commanders, or detectives; from strong women with groups of supportive friends as clever and kind as they can be.  (This is where I get my ideas of friends from: and why NOT aspire to the heights of fictional loyalty, why the hell not???)

Spirituality, well…As you know, I incline toward the green earth and its smells, its wet grasses.  I feel free in the woods, tramping through dried orange leaves.  I feel clear on a hill with the wind on my forehead and blossoms blowing by me.  It is horribly hard to hold on to this when you are in a strip lit windowless room, lying on one side, with a tube up your arse in your intestines causing you the most excruciating pain.  You whimper (yes, actually whimper) as the mad scientists work away above you, occasionally opening your eyes to see what they see on the screen – never have you felt so strongly that insides should be left alone, inside, where they belong, and not interfered with.  You screw closed your eyes again.  The nurse says you are breaking her hand, and takes it away, refusing to let you hold it anymore.  You hold the side of the metal bed instead, unable to see any images in your head that will take you away from all this, because all there is is now, and now is pain.

Yes.  Well.  There was no journeying on the Lands of my mind for me that day.  And it’s difficult to not dread whatever is next, and worry over it.  Science and medicine are cold.  My Christian friends (yes, astonishingly, I have 2 of them, despite me being unkind about their God, repeatedly) are praying for me.  This is kind and I want them to carry on doing it.  I have an odd belief in Other People’s Beliefs.   Their faith may well send helpful emanations my way.  But nonetheless, I still can’t be doing with their God.  One of them suggested to me that all would be eased were I to ‘Accept Him’…but I maintain that a God that needs me to believe in Him and Worship Him or He will Send me to Hell and punish me, is not as loving as advertised, and I don’t appreciate the emotional blackmail.  I accept this responsibility too (so that Christian friend: please be assured, you did your best, you shan’t get the blame for failure). 

It would be wondrous to have a mighty God to look after me and see that this all works out ok, wouldn’t it?  But what I have in the heart area of my mind…is still the green green grass, and the call of birds, the petals of flowers and the fur of cats, the scales on fish.  Beauty.  Decay.  Destruction.  Rebirth.  My Asatru correspondent phrased my query on how to cope with this sort of thing this way:

In Heathenry our future is not known until we make it. Even divination through runes and seidh only gives guidance, not specifics. While death is accepted as inevitable when and how is not.

As I see it one can draw great courage from this uncertainty. To me it means our actions have meaning and impact no matter what happens. The simple courage of living in spite of loss, fear, and hardship is a powerful thing. It shows what you face that you will not let it rule you. 

(~ by Ryan Smith, one truly coherent thinker, in private mail; my italics)

Now…considering a good portion of the best and most famous Gods die at Ragnarok in Heathenry…they are damn good at living with uncertainty, and the death of their heroes, the dream of these larger than human yet so human creatures.  And all that about being brave in the face of the unknown, of trying to live your principles, whatever they may be, IN SPITE of not knowing, in spite of anything and EVERYTHING…this all brings me back to the existentialism I spoke of in posts past.  Personal Responsibility.  Do the best you can – even if it feels pretty poor that day.

Its cold comfort.  (Not as cold as the mad scientists, but then I am biased by their recent well intentioned meddling about with me.)

It would be less cold were I less alone…But I’ve had that rant.  If any of you reading this at any point feel like you know me in real life and I am having a go at you – you know what:  I am.  I could have been a better friend to several people; I have made bad mistakes myself in the past.  But I try to correct them, I try to repair.  If I can’t, I leave and walk away.  (It’s questionable whether the door is still open, as Troubadour would have said, as I am not good at forgiving and forgetting, though I persist in trying).  But I very rarely just abandon people. 

But anyway.  My anger, my disillusionment, they are all part of this big thing going on with me at the moment.  Stanley actually feels it too.  He wonders where his friends have gone also, since we moved away from London.  I will try to remember to NOT do this to someone else one day.  I will try and learn to support even the people who have pushed me away, because of something I knew about.  I will keep trying.  This is what I will learn.

And to life.  Well, right now, I have dyed my hair again (deep warm brown – I can’t afford a haircut, so this will have to do for a smarten up), and now I will go and plant soft pink petunias and geraniums outside.  They will carry on going despite this summer of rain, despite the masses of slugs. They will keep going even if all their petals are eaten away, or soaked to colourlessness.  They will not die and they will exist still, in a different form, as a green plant without flowers or leaves.  Their roots will be whole, and fine.

Somewhere, it is always summer.

Living with Dr Who

In our house we have a dalek on top of one of the bookshelves in the living room.  A medium size remote control dalek that has lost its forward motion, and can go only rather confusedly side ways.  But it rarely comes off the shelf; we spend a lot of time pointing at it, for Fluffhead, and saying: ‘What’s that?  What’s that?  What’s its name?  What’s it called?’  This is in an attempt to engage Fluffhead into the realm of the Speaker, rather than the incoherent occasionally specific Babbler.  (He’s a bit late in developing talking; though he understands everything.)  I have a smaller dalek on my windowsill of my book room.  It’s not mine, its Stanley’s (as is the other one), and I keep it forever next to a stuffed toy unicorn that is slightly larger.  To me, this originally random, and now left there deliberately placing, indicates the power in my mind of dreams over science and technology. Though I begin to see this is a false dichotomy.

We have all the Doctor Who’s ever released on DVD, and all the ones that weren’t or haven’t been yet, through one means or other.  We have a drive on the main computer called Dr Who, as it contains all the documentaries, makings of and various other bits and audiovisual pieces that are associated with the programme.  We have rare copies of the Radio Times from ages ago, in plastic covers, with Jon Pertwee velvetly gesturing, having just got out of Bessie. 

I used to think all this was rather cute.  Like Stanley’s other major thing he does in his spare time, collecting and building models (I don’t want to say obsession, as he thinks of loads of other things; yet its way more than a hobby), it’s a thing that takes up a lot of space and time (there’s a Tardis joke there somewhere), but didn’t really concern me.  It was one of those…things your partner does, that you don’t mind, but aren’t really involved in.

Stanley used to write for the old style Marvel Dr Who magazine in the old era (way before the new fangle-isation of the latest and ever younger growing twelve year old Doctors we have now), so not only does he have all the stuff, he knows loads of things about it.  He can nerdily correct anyone about any detail.  Whilst saying to me, as an aside, that he isn’t being nerdy, because he doesn’t subscribe to all that new stuff, specially all that stuff about Bernice, and the endless attempting, by fanboys, to correct continuity problems from the past, or replay and redo over incidents they didn’t like, from their own understanding of them.  To make it all better, and bigger.  He knows it for what it is, he says: A Programme He Likes.  That’s all.  Not a world, not a real universe, not a living breathing thing (which he seems to think you could be forgiven for imagining some of these other fanpersons behave as though it is).

Again, not really of any concern to me, really, I thought.  An interesting distinction, I thought.  I see what you mean.  I suggested, idly, one day a few years ago, that we have a Dr Who marathon (we are a couple of marathonhood when it comes to viewing anything; our twin nerds – and I freely admit Happy Nerd-dom about anything I like – sit peacefully entwined together watching many a boxset in our free time)[1].  This all went well through the early days of William Hartnell.  I used to get a bit annoyed with the bouffant haired whatshername being all teachery and posh.  But I loved the ‘Quite so!’-ness of the whole enterprise at this stage, it being one of my favourite expressions anyway. However, I had no patience with the BBC’s treatment of Patrick Troughton’s era, there being so few un-broken stories remaining to see.  I got all itchy and annoyed and stuck.  I insisted on moving on to the first Doctor of my childhood, Jon Pertwee, who I vaguely remembered loving for his flamboyancy.

I loved him all over again.  I wanted to be a scientist, like Liz Shaw.  I realised I remembered wanting to be Jo Grant, with her brilliant white knee boots, and her not really entirely ditsy but actually quite gutsy portrayal of a companion, when I was quite a small thing[2].  I thought the dinosaurs were brilliant – Stanley thought they were supremely poo and most badly done.  That’s just unkind.  (I come from a history of liking horror films with awful amateurish special effects, so I suspect I have a way greater tolerance of this sort of thing than he does).  I did fall asleep, repeatedly, during the Sea Devils.  But then, that was a very chase around story; not my favourite kind.  I had ecstasies re-watching The Daemons, and remembering I had thought of it as one of the first horror films I had ever seen; my mind somehow mixed it up, for years, with The Devil Rides Out.

Then we did Tom Baker.  I was surprised to find I mourned Jon Pertwee for almost the first 3^rd of watching Tom – the Actual Doctor of Most of My Childhood.  And Therefore Clearly The Best One, for me.  But the scarf helped.  The hair helped.  The mad eyes helped.  I wanted to be Leela – so loyal, unafraid and clear about so many things.  I wanted to be the second Romana, calm and clever and pixie like in her so often Victorian style clothes.  I was content to watch Shada even though it was broken.  (Still one of my favourites.)  Apparently I made my first nerdy Dr Who comment during this stage of the watching.  Apparently, I watched one story or other, and turned to Stanley, who didn’t like it much at all, and said, ‘Well, it’s no Talons of Weng-Chiang, but it’s alright, isn’t it?’  I had to laugh hearing myself come out with that.  Ehem.  I can never remember the name of my favourite story here – is it Seeds of Doom?  The one where a mad – and completely correct, in my opinion – person wanted to get rid of humanity, so that plants could retake over the Earth, as less of a danger than us.  Terence Stamp, was it, playing the mad person?

Then we got to Peter Davison.  Oh dear.  It was too much of a shock.  Just as in my childhood, I completely baulked at the new Doctor.  I watched the first 3 or so stories, getting ever more grumbly, before I came to a complete stubborn halt.  In childhood, I do believe I just continued growing up, or whatever it was I had been doing (reading the collected works of James Herbert or something).  As an adult, I was nagged a bit about consistency of viewing, and then we moved on to some other marathon (I think we were re-doing Space 1999, at that point).  I just couldn’t get past the low key cricket outfit, the blondey mellowness.  And all that slightly sickly bumbling about at the beginning of the run.  And the way the entire story styles and look of the programme changed.  I was informed by Stanley this was due to the beginning of the John Nathan Turner era.  I made mental faces at this man, for ruining my good buzz.  I mourned Philip Hinchcliffe and all that nice gothic-yness that had been going on for a while with Tom Baker’s Doctor.

Then Fluffhead, started getting nerdy about 6 months ago, the way tiny children can do.  When they want the same story read fifty times (this is how they learn: repetition, the orderliness of the same things appearing at the same time endlessly etc – you have to have the patience of a saint when reading).  We had a lovely run of re-watching Robin of Sherwood (my own personal English nerdfest) quite a few more times than was reasonable.  Then I wondered what else we could watch when indoors, that was in nice small segments.  When Stanley had Fluffhead, he always put Dr Who on, and the titles seemed to calm him, every single time, from any kind of unhappiness or tantrum.  I don’t know if it was the time tunnel effect or just the brilliant music (which I don’t think I will EVER tire of – and woe betide anyone fast forwarding through the titles and making me miss the music).  So I put on some Jon Pertwee, and some Tom Baker.  Fluffhead loved Robot, and Carnival of Monsters.  He would run up to the screen and keep pointing at the Doctor. In every scene, I had to re-identify him.  And the companions.  He seemed to really like Sarah Jane’s smiley face.  But Stanley had all the Dr Who’s in order, in a large bookshelf we had covered and hidden the front of, with weighty poster frames.  Because Fluffhead had loved the whole lot too much in the past and they were in danger of being broken with the stampede of loving little feet and tearing mashed potato fingers.  So one day when he was sleeping, I quickly disassembled the whole defence system, and grabbed a random large handful and rebuilt it back.  This being rather an afterthought, I was annoyed to find I had plucked out loads of Sylvester McCoy.  I had never seen any of those.  No idea who he was at all.  Oh well.  It was out, Fluffhead was up…

So I put Sylvester McCoy on.  And went a bit mad.  

We had previously been watching these in between other things; if Fluffhead sang or burbled at me (as he more or less does, all the time), it didn’t really matter if I missed bits, as these were old stories I was familiar with.  If I missed loads of exposition, or dialogue, again, not a problem, we would likely re-watch it later anyway, or I would just enjoy the colours and running about the countryside (or sewers or tunnels or whatever).

But right from the very first story, Sylvester was different.  He seemed to just fall into the role naturally.  He fitted in with the startling lack of money and sometimes downright daft plots and characterisations with no problem at all.  He was theatrical, funny; he had a very sympathetic face – both angry and compassionate.  I had no problem with Bonnie Langford, as other people seemed to have had.  She was cheerful – hey: I would love to be a cheerful person; I won’t besmirch the Chipper Fairy Woman. 

Suddenly I really cared if Fluffhead did that unerring child thing of yelling JUST when some very important thing is being said very quietly indeed, some important bit of exposition.  I found myself not getting through 2 full length 6 parters in a day (as we could previously if it was raining outside), but barely one story of less episodes.  I would watch it, then go back to where we got lost and just do it again, till I felt I got what was going on.  Whilst attempting potty training (what a lovely mess that still is on the rental carpet, sigh), reading and re-reading Tabby McTat and all the other books of Fluffhead’s, doing the laundry in a different room, and listing and preparing Amazon and ebay sales etc.  The universe was working with a Sylvester McCoy background.  I started dreaming about being Ace.  What a firey girl!  What a lot of possibilities she had!  What lovely character development – and not just in the way they wrote it, but mostly in how she acted it, as she went along.  I give credit to those two, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, for making the Cybermen and the Daleks bearable and even interesting for me, for the first time.  I generally have terrible trouble with villains that want world domination and demand ‘Destroy Them!’ with regularity.  It’s just boring.  I loved when Sylvester ranted at the daleks and mimicked their tones and wants: ‘Limitless rice pudding!’ he mocked.  I laughed out loud.  Exactly!  I even got past some pretty dodgy misuses of Norse Mythology, my other big obsession this year so far.  I mean – the Gods of Ragnarok????  …Had absolutely no relevance to that circus story, as a myth.  And The Curse of Fenric could’ve used the mythology so much better; but is forgiven for being a very good looking production, and just interesting on other levels. (And the Target novelisation makes it make a lot more sense, too.)

I was very happily confused during Ghostlight; laughed through most of Silver Nemesis, enjoyed the scenery in Delta and the Bannermen, and wanted to be a cheetah person (‘ride, sister, with the blood of your enemies in your mouth…’) in Survival.  I loved the way they ended the whole thing.  I like low key endings (or else endings where there’s a shoot out and everyone, absolutely everyone, dies[3]).  It was good the way he put his arm round Ace, and they just went off back to the Tardis, to …travel about more.  That was nicely done.

And Extremely Annoying.  Ending it just when I had totally fallen in love with the two main characters.  And when it had all gone rather Gothy again here and there, too…maybe John Nathan Turner ended up just where he didn’t want to be, and all those changes he made seemed to lead back to the same sort of darkish shining that he meant to change all those years back…but I was happy with where it had gone, where it finally had ended up.

And leaving me to have to go back to…Peter Davison.  The funny thing was; once I did (and I had to admit hookdom by then), I didn’t find him so bad.  I rather started to enjoy his quieter Doctor.  I realised that I quite liked a lot of his stories: I think Enlightenment is a most interesting idea (and my goodness Lynda Barron is bosomly brilliant in it!); I thought The Visitation was excellent; I really liked The Awakening too, and wished it had been longer (rarely I wish a Dr Who story longer; I usually think they could have mostly been improved by being a bit shorter, like most Stephen King later works).  There are more, loads more.

I looked at the BBC website and realised I liked more of the stories than I didn’t.  Stanley and I had a fight about The Myrka in Warriors of the Deep. (I think my relationships will ever and always involve arguments about things that make absolutely no sense to waste spittle on, for other people).  He maintained it was the worst pantomime horse monster ever; I maintained it was a charming large sea horsey thing and I wished it would come to tea and menace us, so I could stroke it and offer it a French Fancy or somesuch.  I do this to Fluffhead’s Cyberman toy too – it regularly has breaks in the whole World Domination Plan to have mashed potato, or a nice bit of chocolate; and we wrap him up in a muslin and put him in a shoebox to sleep at night.  As Fry would say, I have completely ‘un-cooled’ the thing.  (A lot of my reactions of this ilk are to do with Fluffhead – can’t have him being constantly scared of ‘monsters’ and aliens – so I call them ‘creatures’, a subtle difference, but its meaningful, you know.  Also – if he grows up with a healthy curiosity for lifeforms that look different to us, instead of a screamy 1960s companion type fear…what a better place the world will be, eh?!  The best way to deal with a scary looking ‘monster’ is to think of it as a cute creature – look at those lovely proboscis of that funny looking thing in The Twin Dilemma – bless its little face!).  Anyway.  We have agreed to disagree about the Myrka.  We have agreed instead, that Ingrid Pitt was not best served by either that makeup or that outfit.  She’s gorgeous and needed a nicer ensemble – I couldn’t even identify her from her voice, in that story, usually so distinctive.

Now I am travelling with Fluffhead through the mists that are Colin Baker’s Doctor.  I am not minding him at all.  He’s grumpy often, and arrogant.  He has very unsuitable clothes; but they are happy looking.  I hope he gets rid of Peri soon as she wheedles and I am thinking she is not really having a good time – people keep trying to kill her.  I shall be glad when the wheels of time move along and we get Bonnie Langford back.  When all this is over, I shall have to go back to Jon Pertwee again…Joy!

I found a way to do the broken (and too annoying to watch) Patrick Troughton stories.  As I have always liked him as an actor, and am muchly irritated that I don’t get to see his turn at the Doctor.  I remembered the Target novelisations.  I remembered I can buy on ebay as well as sell.  I frothed at the mouth when I saw how cheap the first editions still were.  Stanley despairs of the rate at which they are pouring into the house (he sold all his years ago).  I also found missing adventures, and new adventures and audio adventures.  I realised I could not only do all the missing Patrick Troughton, but extra Sylvester McCoys, and I could see how Paul McGann would have worked out, had he got to do more than just the (ehem lets not talk of it) film.  He’s another actor I adore.  So!  Worlds upon worlds opened up!

Stanley and I had another minor argument.  He doesn’t hold with any of the missing adventures unless they were from the season planned for Colin Baker then not broadcast, as well as a couple of others.  I have decided to be broader.  I will hold with stories rejected for any of the Doctors at the time of production and penned later.  And as for Sylvester and Ace…I’ll read and watch anything, and see what I think.  I got called an apologist for fanboys.  Regardless of pedigree.  I’ll make my own mind up.

Quite so!! 

So:  Dr Who world.  Hey!  Welcome the birth of yet another FanGirl.  Do I get a badge or something??

---

[1] I remember, with a sort of sniggery laugh, that I used to know a wonderful osteopath.  He was a Man of Action, a real world person, not the slightest bit nerdyfied. He would tell me, in surprised and unbelieving tones, of his flatmate.  Flatmate and girlfriend never really went out of an evening.  Flatmate and girlfriend watched Boxsets.  One after the other.  And discussed the ideas wherein.  ‘They never went out for a run, or anything…’, my osteopath would say, in tones of total puzzlement.  I used to try to explain the joy of gorging on many episodes of something, and not waiting for a week till the next bit (I have been known to torture myself through the entire lengthy TV transmission of a season of 24, or somesuch long thing, to wait for the boxset, so I can over do it in 2 or 3 delirious days of wonder.  But anyway.)

[2] Oddly, I always want to be a companion; never ever the Doctor.  I don’t want the responsibility I think.  I like being the person standing next to the person causing the action.  I’m not generally in life, the person causing the action.

[3] By the way, that was what was wrong with the end of Buffy, for me: everyone should have died!  How dark that would have been…That’s where Angel did it better; except they only showed one death and left the others to be imagined – whereas they should have showed all or none.  I.e. not killed only my favourite character and left the others to fight hopelessly in the rain, but unseen…(As you can imagine, one of my favourite Buffy episodes is The Wish.)

Requiem for Speech

Silence.  Or words.  ?

It may be slim pickings here for a little while.  My health scare seems to be rendering me somewhat mute.  For someone repeatedly told they talk ‘all the time’, or at the least, a lot, and who experiences themselves as only silent when asleep…this is a strange uncomfortable situation.  Too much thinking and running over possibilities that are frightening cause me to try to freeze myself to ice.  I wish to be Avon from Blake’s 7.  Cold, logical; above all calm.  I want to be the Ice Queen.  Instead, I melt, I flame, I boil over, I am…not quiet.  Except outwardly. 

I used to attend Quaker meetings, back in the early 2000’s, for a few years.  I am not going to tell you anything much about modern Quakerism (not here, anyway).  What I’ll say is: it was a monolith, a continent away from original Quakerism[1].  You do not have to be Christian to be welcomed and to become a Quaker.  Within their meetings I met atheists, agnostics, people of all the major faiths I am aware of – and I was there as a pagan, to add another.  The only place more liberal in terms of those attending in relative harmony that I have heard of, is the Universalists (of which I had a friend at the time – she used to annoy me by competing with me constantly whenever I mentioned Quakers, and saying her religion was even more liberal and accepting…Good, good, good for you.  Irrelevant.) 

The reason I mention this, is that for someone in love with words, with communication through words and their song direct to another’s consciousness…sometimes there is no comfort greater than silence, with others.

WARNING:  Deeply Subjective Recollections to follow: Do not assume I speak for anyone other than myself in what I say of my experiences

A Quaker meeting was a thing such as I have never before or since experienced.  After the going in, the being greeted, the chatting, you sit down.  There are often benches, hard wooden ones, or chairs, sometimes arranged in a semi circle or circle.  There is often a table in the middle or front of the room.  There are flowers, simple ones, sometimes, on the table.  Nothing elaborate or flashy like roses or lilies.  Often meadow flowers.  There might be a copy of Faith and Practice (the closest a modern Quaker comes to something they would carry about for reference like a Bible) on the table.  The room would likely be as unadorned as possible.  It would be as bright as possible.  Windows are important.

People file in slowly, as they are ready.  They sit, quietly.  There’s a little fiddling about, clearing of throats, till they are settled.  This carries on for about five minutes or so.  As each person settles, they get comfortable.  Some cross their legs, some sit straight and tall in their chairs.  I used to try and sit cross legged sometimes, as I can keep still in that position longer than any other.  (That was easier at retreats and such, where they seemed more ok with you sitting on the floor.)

Then comes the bit I would wait all week for.  The quiet.

There’s been much argument as to what Quakers are doing when they all sit together quietly.  I’ll tell you what they aren’t doing.  They aren’t all meditating separately, but in the same room.  Because that, whilst nice, is sitting zazen, and something else.  You are sposed to spend time and action to ‘centre yourself down’, ‘quiet down’, for the first few minutes of meeting.  But once you’ve managed this, you’re into doing what you came for. 

You’re listening.  You are trying to let your mind become as quiet as it can be whilst still being fully awake.  And then, out of that quiet…hopefully, will come, your own voice of wisdom.  Or someone else’s.  You are waiting to see whether you will hear anything worth saying to the others.  Or they to you.  Or, almost the most precious thing: if the silence itself will speak without words.

Which partly makes it sound like you are dying to speak.  The opposite is true.  If you actually do hear something in your head you imagine is worth saying or feels urgent, and it persists with you for a while (‘cos you don’t leap up straight away and start waffling – utterances are supposed to be kept shortish, succinct[2]), the idea of getting up and speaking in front of everyone, into such a Listening Silence, is…terrifying.  Even as the Quakers are the last people in the world to judge you for anything you might say.

There were always two schools of thought about the quality of meetings: one line went – there was no ‘ministry’ (the speaking) from anyone, and the silence was deep and calm between us all: something was here, in all of us, and it …but I get ahead of myself.  The other line of thought was that ministry was lovely to receive, maybe once or twice in a meeting, and to ponder, to let it fall into you and see if it spoke ‘to your condition’ at all, or if it was for someone else…

I used to like the meetings best where no one said anything.  Or where there was possibly just one or two very short ‘witnesses’.  They could be about absolutely anything.  People would sometimes get up and say a couple of lines from a poem, or a song.  They would occasionally sing.  Sometimes it would be a small anecdote, something that had happened to them.  Not complete with moral, but left bare, left ambiguous; left for you to make of it whatever you did.    Sometimes, someone told a joke.  The more Christ-centred Friends may read a verse or two from the Bible, or mention a parable.  Sometimes it felt like whatever was said, from one person, then into the silence, then later, another person standing and speaking – would feel linked.  Other times, it was as if the words came from two different universes of experience or tone.  It was all a mystery, and each person who spoke, or heard others speak, made of it whatever they did.  It was never rehearsed.  Or it should never be.  It’s supposed to be spontaneous.  What comes to you in the moment.  Or nothing.  If you don’t speak, you listen.  You listen anyway. 

The important thing, the everything, was that you were listening.  That if someone spoke: you really, really heard them.  I used to be of the mind that you would be listening so calmly and intently (often to the noises of cars outside, or the blood rushing in your ears, or the rustling of bags, squeaking of chairs) that someone could have gotten up and read from a phone book and it would suddenly seem extremely relevant to life, love and everything. 

The feeling of sitting, about 40 minutes into an hour’s length meeting, in a pool of deep deep awakened silence was amazing.  I would feel like the hairs on my arms were standing up, yet so peaceful.  I know for a fact that if I was in a room with anywhere from 10-160 people (meeting sizes differ everywhere) and they spoke and I with them, as normal, I would not have a good time.  I would find, everywhere, disagreement.  I would find people’s views that frightened, repelled or bored me with ignorance.  (I’m going to let my arrogance on that last comment stand, as honesty is important here.)  Yet in a room with those self same people, all sitting quietly, I felt we were all open.  That we were allowing ourselves to merge with one another slightly.  As if a corporate entity were being created, in the silence, which had pieces of all of us in it.  We allowed to pour out into the silence all the pain, the worry, the fear, and the hope, the joy, of the past week.  Without saying anything.  We listened to each other breathe.  I felt I understood people with whom I had never exchanged a word, a single word.  I felt their humanity, their flaws, their hopefulness.  Their possibilities, their limitations.  I loved them, and wanted to help.  I felt a better person.

One meeting, a man whose name I forget (which is shameful, since I loved his personality), stood up and said that he felt the experience of anything like ‘god’ that was his, was in other people.  Just other people.  Looking into their eyes, he saw divinity.  I never forgot that, because I agreed with him entirely.  He ‘spoke to my condition’. 

This is what I crave.  Right now.  Quaker meeting.  I want to go into a light room, sit on a hard bench, look at some simple flowers, hold my copy of Advices and Queries lightly and calm down.  I want to listen to everyone breathe.  I want to bear with my back pain, knowing it’s for a good reason. I want to feel that all the humans on the planet, starting with these ones, are my family.  Flawed, human, wonderfully present.  I want to sit in the quietness, and feel not alone.  I want to say nothing, and feel heard.  I want to listen to the silence and hear a hundred stories in the shuffling of an old man’s feet, as he twitches, because he has fallen asleep. 

Peace.[3]

---

[1] I also shan’t go into the schisms in Quakerism; the whole BIG DEAL, and it truly IS a big deal, between Non-programmed and Programmed Quakers, for example.  Look it up if you’re interested.  And if you care, my position is that Programmed Quakerism is wrong.  If it’s programmed, my friend, it ain’t Quakerism anymore; it’s something else.  Which is well and good, do that – just don’t mislabel it Quakerism.  I’m pretty sure George Fox and Isaac Pennington and others would turn in their graves.  I am being uncharacteristically strongly opinionated about this.  I DO feel very strongly about it.  But in a Quakerly way, at the time, I said nothing much about it.  (There’s a point there in my reaction then; about what’s wrong with Friends, for me, and one of the reasons I left.)

[2] …and it’s the Elders of the meeting’s job to ensure people who go off on one are gently urged that they have been heard (and for some ten minutes now), and to let us all absorb the words…This often failed of course.  It’s hard to stop someone, who is generally a bit disordered in thought – or they wouldn’t be breaking the idea of the meeting with huge far too long to be heard properly speeches – from talking if they are determined they aren’t done yet, and they aren’t being threatening in any way. (Which did also happen sometimes; anyone could come in. Anyone did.)  Sometimes people got the wrong end of the stick entirely, and stood up and evangelised their religion till they were asked to sit down.   (I was a Quaker for a while, but never a proper one, as I always wanted to stand up immediately and tell them This Is NOT What We Are Here For, when that happened…not the Quaker way, reprimanding people…)

[3] I will leave the main bit there.  Because that is where it should be left.  But it also needs to be said that I left Quakers because I had some big problems with them.  They never seemed to think poverty existed anywhere but in foreign countries (where they were eager to go help and they do good work), and members of their own meetings were sometimes in bad trouble, and not helped – in a group prizing a sense of community, I felt this hypocritical.  They had a rather Hampstead attitude to life: lots of do-gooding, social workers, teachers etc, Guardian readers – yes, I generalize something huge and hurtful.  This was how it seemed to me, me alone.  I felt their desire to be inclusive and some of their means of corporate decision making were…lazy, non rigorous, following a path of least resistance in order to avoid conflict – in terms of how it was supposed to be done, how I had read it and had it explained to me, and how it actually turned out.  It’s very difficult to explain this sort of thing.  I ended up feeling that much as I LOVED meeting, I was increasingly at odds with what many Quakers attitudes were, toward living life.  So I drifted off.  But I treasure a well done meeting, to this day, and crave it.  The way it can just happen…or be flat as a pancake…nothing like it.

ADDENDUM, 7.6.12:
Also - I was welcomed at Quakers, unlike anywhere else I have ever gone.  Don't let it escape you that me, the big Non Joiner of Things - actually JOINED Quakers, for a while.  (I'm now considered a 'Non Attender' at the 2 main meetings I was a member of, over the 5 years or so I was actively a part of things.  As in, gone, but not forgotten; welcome back at any time, no pressure.  That's what they are like.  They won't contact you if you vanish; but they'll remember you if you come back.)  Oh - and they don't evangelise - a Big Plus.  If you ask them what they're about, they'll tell you.  They will have posters outside Friends House, the main Quaker admin centre, in Euston, London...But they don't stand about trying to persuade you of anything.  There's never a single hint of damnation or anysuch unhelpful poodle, with them.  And I have rarely seen so many gay people happily accepted in one place that had a hint of Christianity about it.  A huge good thing.

I think I will always have a big fat soft spot for Quakerism.  Whether or not I ever attend another Meeting.  And I made 2 of my bestest friends there - Alias True, who has been with me through thick and thin over the ether, I met at a retreat there once.  Like me, he no longer attends, but both of us remember with fondness.  And Mr Hooting Yard himself (who has left a comment, as you see, about why he left), who is still a big presence in the BlackberryJuniper universe.  Though I had problems with Friends on some issues...perhaps a truth and proof of the pudding of it all is that I still have these 2 great friends, as a result: 2 of the truest people in my life.  Both a bit eccentric and bonkers, and both steadfast.  Hmmm.

Update on the Pagan Reading Challenge 2012 so far

Remember the Pagan Reading Challenge I signed up for?  (For info – click on the little pic at the side of the blog of a maiden reading beneath a tree.)  This is how its going so far, since January – what I’ve read this year that’s relevant to it.  (I’m in the middle of many more books, pagan and non-pagan, as usual, but the only ones I list are ones I have actually finished with.)

Forgive me while I get a bit nerdy and categorize them for you:

Fluffage – as in, related to serious topics, but done in a very ‘we must sell this book by the thousands!’ kind of way

1. Goddess Signs, by Angelica Danton
   (A nice idea, to mix the Chinese astrology with Western, and to add goddesses.  But it didn’t work for me.  I didn’t feel exclusively or only like my designation – a Metal Pig, a Protectoress Goddess, like Demeter, a Mother.  Its just one part of me.  The learning resonated, but nothing else.  A seller.)
2. Llewellyn’s 2011 Witches Companion
   (Some trash *and* some very good thoughts – notably the one about wealth by Calanteriel: comfort, freedom, security – an interesting system for thinking about money, how to approach it, identified.  And the section on your own fairy tale story, as a useful tool, that really appealed to me.)

Ghost Stories (always deserving of a category of their own)

3. The Winter Ghosts, by Kate Mosse
   (A very nice idea that would have been a wicked good short story.  But was ruined by being self indulgent, overly long and oh my god so badly written; all portentous in the wrong places etc.  Dreadful. I hate to say that about any book - but I could see how truly wonderful it could have been.  I hope other people liked it.)

Anthologies – collections of (usually reasonably academic) essays on whatever topic

4. Hecate: Keys to the Crossroads, edited by Sorita d-Este
   (Some very interesting stuff in here.  A very friendly book, on the whole, about a rather scary seeming goddess.  Some awful bits too – I think it was the essay by one contributor where she slavishly talked about the ‘high born’ Hekate that really put me off.  I can’t relate to the gods as if they are so much better than me.  That probably sounds odd.  I can’t be dealing with entities in a way that suggests they would be doing me a great favour by simply noticing my existence, let alone interacting with me, or helping me.  I prefer to think of it as making friends with someone from a different culture: carefully done, with sensitivity; but both on the same level, just offering different things to the relationship.  David Rankine’s essay made her sound very scary, too.  The book didn’t manage to explain why so many people find her so much the be all and end all of goddesses.  I found that a bit strange.  But I am sufficiently interested to read more; and have a nice satisfying looking reading list to be getting on with.)

One Book Primers on esoteric subjects

5. Essential Asatru, by Diana L. Paxson
   (Now – here was a book where the gods were treated as “friends and allies”, and toasted, not fawned on.  And I have started working with some of these gods – Thor, Odin, Frigga, etc – they all sounded wonderful, and friendly.  I really enjoyed this book, and seem to be having a real almost obsessive THING for the Norse gods and myths at the moment.  Am talking about it all with an Asatru follower on FB – who also has a most brilliant blog, here it be: http://ryansdesk.blogspot.co.uk/.  He has humour, a certain force and authority to his words – and that thing prized highly in these circles: a grasp of the lore and an ability to quote and do the homework.  I actually fit in quite well with this mentality.  I shall borrow some.  The author of the book, to get back to the point,  worked with Marion Zimmer Bradley for a long while; that was where I first knew her name from; she co-authored some of the later books.  A fine fiction writer as well as an explainer of this strand of paganism.)

Pagan and/or Magically based Fiction

6. Moondance of Stonewylde, by Kit Berry
   (I enjoyed this a lot more than the first book.  Magus is still a terrible character, getting oddly more cartoon villain and yet real at the same time, as is Clip becoming more the ‘worm’ of Yul’s trip-vision.  There was less outright suffering to make me miserable in this book.  Sylvie’s suffering was real, but was offset by Yul’s strength and growth in respect and understanding of his destiny– you felt challenges would be coped with, hard, but met.  Him running around the stones touching them each as he went until he drew a storm, to stop Magus feeding on Sylvie’s moon magic was tearful and memorable.  There were some brilliant characters in this one – Professor Siskin, and Old Violet.  What is Kit Berry’s obsession with old women that are outrageously ugly, have claw fingers and all smell so bad???!  Very odd.  But I loved this one and can’t wait till the next; which luckily I have on the bookshelf…glad Buzz was disposed of.  Can’t wait for Jackdaw to be got rid of too.)
7. Solstice at Stonewylde, by Kit Berry
   (Read all in one day, almost hallucinogenically, while laying in bed with a stinking cold and feeling dead in the body, but the brain was still moving in curious neon circles.  Jackdaw got well and truly disposed of in this one.  As did Magus, in the most un-action action scene.  She managed to make it like a repeating pattern, happening but also happened many times before.  Professor Siskin came home for good; Mother Heggy understood the meaning of the fifth candle…and Sylvie had a windey time in this instalment, but came good in the end.  Miranda saw the light; and Yul became the beginning of what he needs to be.  This was so good I’m scared the next may not be as great.  Because Stonewylde needs to be a place where good wins out.  But I think Kit Berry knows that.)
8. Book of Moons, by Rosemary Edgehill
   (Another good Bast novel, one of the trilogy Rosemary Edgehill wrote, always readable, and always more authentic than lots of others in this wonderful hybrid genre.)
9. Shadowland, by Peter Straub
   (A re-read, for possibly the 8^th time? Not as good as I remember, but so many parts of me are in this, and things I think and feel to be true for me – this was THE book of my 20’s.  I seem to have moved on since then – but I have no idea where to or who I am currently, so there is no book of my 30’s or 40’s to define me as yet.  It’s all a confusing fog.  I remember when I had a vague idea what was going on, and maybe I will again at some point – who knows?  Some days I do.)
10. The Gold Falcon, by Katherine Kerr
    (The series goes on and on…and I wish it would never stop.  Even the less exciting parts, like this one, are full of characters so familiar and cherished.  The bit with Branna calling to Rhodry at the end – it’s rare anything makes me cry in one line, for the lost ideal of deeply returned love, these days.  But the last book did it when Rhodry turned; and this book did it, as I say, with one line at the thought he might, at some point…come home.  Jeez, crying just thinking about it.  That’s powerful writing – when you wish you were there not here.  Even when here is fine.  I’ve read her books ecstatic with my own love and hope, and in the pits of disillusion – no matter where I am, I go to where she is, and dwell there.  THAT is the purpose of writing, to poach people’s consciousnesses, and have them live in yours – true communication, the receiving of a clear vision of some else’s mind.  Never alone, with people all around, all of whom you understand, even if you do not like.  The world only makes sense through stories.  Even if one day, my need to pattern may backfire on me.)
    
    

The next step on whatever path books…

11. Living Wicca, by Scott Cunningham
    (On the whole, a very reassuring read, in that I liked his clear and informal, simple tone.  I liked being told, just because others say this is the only way or contradict one another, doesn’t mean you have to do it this way.  There were several very nice turns of phrase for invocations and small rituals, that I would like to borrow.  Then I was rather put off by his saying the goddess and god ‘are deities and bigger than us’, created everything, and other rather Christian turns of phrase though he was clearly not friendly to Christianity.  (As you know, I couldn’t give a stuff whether the world was ‘created’: it’s what you do here that counts.  And the HOW of evolution is fascinating.)  I liked and disliked the fine line he walked between telling you to follow your gut (and ‘pray’, rather than meditate on, or some less Christian –like buzzword), and you DO have to do this or that thing, or else ‘you’ll be inventing a new religion’.  To which I wanted to say, ‘Yes, and?  If I do, it means ‘traditional’ Wicca wasn’t for me, so..?’  It was thought provoking.  I also did like his insistence that I re-examine in depth all my ideas and correspondences etc, to make sure I have everything straight in my head should I come to writing my own solitary Book of Shadows.  He kept reminding me that I would be forming my own ‘tradition’ as a solitary.  Perhaps I just dislike that word, and want to think of it as simply my own path, my own variant on what other people do.  Either way, it was a read that made me think – disagreeing with him in a way that expanded my thinking rather than limiting it.  So good.  Disagreement is vital for thought production!)
12. Wiccan Warrior, by Kerr Cuhulain
    (Best and most down to earth Wicca/magick book I’ve read in some time.  Why does he not write more often?  I like his calm confident tone, his reasonable way of talking and his sensible suggestions for incorporating Wiccan ideas into life.  I like the organisation of the chapters; and the way the idea of being a warrior is used not in its strictest martial sense, but in a strengthening of purpose and sense of self way – much as the Asatru emphasis is, on similar subjects.)
13. Traditional Witchcraft for Urban Living, By Melusine Draco
    (This was a funny read for me, as she was a very opinionated writer, and full of ‘what a real witch does’, as opposed to a…new agey pretend one.,  I get bored of all the division in the pagan world.  No, that’s inaccurate - let me re-state: I think its very healthy there are tons of different flavours in the pagan world, but I get fed up with some of them always doing down other ones.  Live and let live if no harm is being done!  Anyway, despite the fact I found her a bit contentious, amazing things happened to me while I was reading the book, directly relevant to what I was reading – so it seems the material resonated with me, despite her annoying, at times, tone!  It was during this book’s reading I found my magickal name, after over 10 years of looking for it, for example.  She helped me see that it was right in front of me.  Also, right when I was reading about a Witches Pouch, used for strength and protection, I found a very relevant thing for mine, in the garden.  It was all nicely serendipitous.  So I will read more of this annoying, opinionated woman, and see what happens next.)

If you’re thinking this was an odd and arbitrary selection of books – it’s true.  The year is only half gone, I have loads more.  My magical and pagan and nature bookshelves burst, with their contents all crying out to me, all wanting to be read right now.  My Santeria, Heka, Hellenism, Hoodoo, Voodoo, Feri sections…all that relevant social history stuff…so many stories…

If you wonder where the shamanism or Druidry was in that selection, remember I just finished the Bardic Grade of OBOD – so its been there all along, lived every day – just in something I’m not counting as a book (though I did, ehem, read it all, all the many many moons of it…). 

Also – it takes, and I am only exaggerating a teensy bit here, hundreds of years to read and learn through the Norse and Germanic lores…I have been reading the Prose Edda for 4 months now, around other things!  And I think I will be reading that and Beowulf and various others of the Lores, for many months to come! I am becoming very fond of Thor.

Lastly, what I’m not including here, partly out of embarrassment, I spose – is my obsessive devouring whole of the wonderful English annuals and comics of Misty (in particular) this year.  Anyone who used to read Misty as a girl knows you got an awful lot of supernatural/paranormal/pagan notions in there…And I’ve always been a great believer in returning to the things of childhood to regain a simple understanding of things that have become unnecessarily complicated by people’s personalities and baggage, as adults. 

A friend once read my horoscope and summed me up in a sentence.  She said: ‘You go forward by going backward.’  Yup, that’s me.  I will always go back to fetch things I forgot if I think they are still likely to be useful.  New things, old things: all can be helpful.