I.
I didn’t make a very good nun. The Dark Magician mocked me when I told him I was going to be a holy woman. I think he knew I did it to escape my name. 

“Loo-nar,” they called me at school. Somehow they knew I’d be a loner. Loony. Pulled and pushed, against my will, by the tides of the moon.

How I wanted to get rid of that name. How I wanted to get rid of my memories: of how it was spoken with mockery, of how it was used by my parents and teachers to order me about as if they were magicians summoning and ordering a spirit, of how lovers I couldn’t satisfy spoke it.

I think I preferred ‘pig’ even in the mouths of the bullies and those who spoke it more jokingly because I snaffled up the leftovers using a hatred of food waste as an excuse because I couldn’t control my hunger when I was drunk.

And ‘Smithers’ was far too English for someone who worshipped a Welsh God.

To escape her lowliness, upon the calling of the Gods, Lorna Smithers tried to make a name for herself; standing on a stage in the centre of the Flag Market in Preston, in cafés, in pubs; posting on social media. 

It was all too much – she vanished into the land and reappeared as Sister Patience.

II.
Sister Patience sprung up like a mushroom from an invisible mycelial network. Nuns of Annwn and Fruits of Annwn are similar things. They appear with birch trees – a pioneer species. Neither lasts for long. But they both prepare the way for future dreams, strange and hallucinatory, then they disappear.

III.
What can I say of monastic life? I might have learnt to play the Heartbeat of Annwn but did I live truly live in alignment with it? Was I truly alive? 

Or did I just obsess about how well I did with giving up things?

I battled with food, alcohol, exercise, emails, blogging, books, all my addictions…

And some of them I conquered and some of those things I could not give up. 

Exercise – the gym. The satisfaction of shifting more than my body weight on the leg press, getting one more rep in on my barbell bench press without dropping the bar on myself, removing another 2.3kg towards an unassisted pull-up. 

Food – Gods damnit, I love food. I managed to eliminate all added sugar. I weaned down to oats, fish, meat, cheese, eggs, multicoloured fruit and veg – to what my body, my gut, spoke it truly needed. But could I fast for a day or even or a half day? No.

I came to realise that, as an active person, fasting is not my ascesis. I was not destined, like the saints, the boddhisatvas, the gurus, to be like a bee or a hummingbird, living lightly, drifting that way into inebriation.

I had too much guilt to carry. Like my running shoes. Deceivingly light. My final confession. Brooks Ghosts, women’s size 7.5, every 500 miles. Now I’m not running so much, I’ve cut down, but I still get my steps in on the treadmill, the elliptical, the stairstepper…

“Ghosts on your feet, my beloved,” the King of Annwn speaks with irony, hinting at the petroleum-based materials taken from the Underworld.

Yet, the original meaning of ascesis related to athleticism. Maybe I can be redeemed?

IV.
And what of those other athleticisms of monks and nuns for which they are revered? Of prayer and meditation? In my experiments, did I fail or succeed?

Unfortunately, there are few words to describe the silence that one enters into in deep prayer or deep meditation, but there were times I got there.

Instead, I might tell you of a rather guilty and hubristic dream in which Sister Patience and Saint Theresa of Ávila were both the recipients of offerings beside a pool in a woodland grove. Afterwards, they ran ecstatically, barefoot, in their habits, into the woodland, and I never saw them again. 

Once, in the silences between chanting Om, I gained a sense of Absolute Consciousness. Was this Brahman, Bhairava, Shiva? Was Gwyn the equivalent in our Brythonic tradition? I have no answers. 

The Christian tradition of kenosis, ‘self-emptying’, in order to be filled with the divine, relates to the shamanic concept of the ‘hollow bone’, to being an empty cauldron or vessel in the Brythonic tradition and still intrigues me. 

I gained access to the witness part of oneself, which features in Eastern and Western traditions and is summarised in the Camoldolese rule: ‘Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish.’ In my personal mythos, this relates to Gwyn’s father, Nodens / Nudd ‘the Fisher King,’ to the patient Heron.

V.
I wasn’t a very good nun. I had no prospects of being a saint. Yet the insights I gained will be carried with me into being a good devotee of Vindos / Gwyn. Into being a good shamanic practitioner. I’m hoping that, in the future, the impulse to be holy will be tempered by the impulse to be human, and this will help me to serve my Gods and others better through my writing and shamanic work.