Hoof falls. The hunt rides. Trampling the falling leaves.

It’s a time of letting go. Of dissolution. Of the banishing of illusions. Of the seeing of the hidden truths that have been haunting the shadow edges of vision.

It hits me like a blow to the chest. Like I’ve been knocked down by a charging horse although I should have seen it coming long ago. Read it from what people have been telling me and moreover from their silence.

My devotional book for Gwyn isn’t meant to be a fantasy style novel. I’ve been reading too much fantasy. I got out of touch. Carried away by the old ambition to be a fantasy writer I long ago promised to give up. 

Understandable perhaps. When I failed to succeed in a career in the environmental sector and realised by autisism places me in a position in which I’m too neurodivergent to cope in above base level jobs but not disabled enough to claim benefits it left me in a very dark and desolate place.

I turned to dark fantasy as the stories of dark and broken characters battling alone in dystopian worlds resonated with me and made me feel less alone. 

I think a lot of this, along with my own feelings of despair, got reflected back into the story I was inspired to write for Gwyn. Getting torn from the womb at birth when His Dragon Mother was slaughtered during the Battle of the Dragons. Being flung into the Abyss. Crawling out. With the guidance of the ghost of His Dragon Mother building His kingdom from the bones of dead dragons and the light of dead stars. Mastering the art of turning sorrow into joy.

Writing this story was deeply meaningful for me and a gift from Gwyn. Quite a lot of the other material I wrote in an effort to combine it with a creation myth featuring the Children of Don and to wed the story of Gwyn, Gwythyr and Creiddylad with some of the material in the Four Branches of The Mabinogion never really worked.

Also, the process of writing a novel, long hours at my laptop, hasn’t been good for me. It makes my eyes go squiffy. I grind my teeth. I twitch. 

I still intend to create a devotional book for Gwyn. I promised Him. I owe it to my patrons. But it isn’t going to be a fantasy style novel. I’m not sure what it is going to be yet but what He and my spirits and my body and soul are guiding me towards are creating it not on the laptop but to allowing it to come through in journeys, meditations, hand writing and drawing. To going back to more traditional forms of creativity that were practiced by awenyddion and monastics and moving away from the screen.

This has come at a time when I’ve also realised I’m living too much of my life online. I deeply value and appreciate the support of my patrons and my online community at the Monastery of Annwn and membership of the Way of the Buzzard Mystery School which are real lifelines. But I’ve come to realise they’re not a substitute for physical community and a physical role in the world. 

What this might look like for me in terms of something that fits with my vocation and with the limits of my autism and social anxiety I don’t know yet.

But this dissolution feels timely as Gwyn’s hunt tramples the fallen leaves, rides down the old, the decayed, the dying, makes way for something new.