‘Gwyn ap Nudd, helper of hosts, armies fall before the hooves of your horse as swiftly as cut reeds to the ground.’ ‘The Conversation of Gwyn ap Nudd and Gwyddno Garanhir’
Three years have passed since the last time I celebrated the winter solstice here – the reeds still stand as do the standing stones and the tradition of dancing down the sun.
Who or what has fallen since the beginning of the disease?
More than armies, 181,000 deaths to this day.
The reeds still stand but something was cut down within me when I cleared other reed beds in the name of good service, knowing they would grow again, strove to become a good custodian of the Water Country but was not accepted.
I fell and got trampled beneath the huge round hooves of Your horse.
I’m not dead yet, I picked myself up, got back on my bicycle
but appeared a stranger at the Pagan gathering in my hi-vis jacket with my cycle helmet
needing to leave before it got dark
and chasing the sun west to the place I call home.
Here I attend the work of putting the cut reeds together again reciting not the names of long dead warriors Gwenddolau, Gwallog, Llachau…
but making a new bed
for the lost and weary souls who half-died and want to grow tall.
The reeds say that we will grow again no matter how hard we are trampled by the hooves of horses to the ground.
I am running on a treadmill because the roads and pavements are too slippery in this man-created world in a harsh and early unexpected winter.
I am running because I want to see my heartrate come up, to know I have a heartbeat, a pulse, after the shock of thinking climate change means warmth.
I am running because this is the only thing that keeps my feet warm, “Warm feet, warm feet,” my mantra, one foot, then the other, slowly the layers come off.
I am running to summon the heat from within not the electric heater.
I am running for endurance, I am running for strength, I am running for salvation, breaking down my nine miles into inclines and sprints and imagining I am escaping grenades and bombs in some underground city of ice.
I am running because I am safe, I am privileged, I can afford to go to the gym.
I am running to escape my guilt.
I am running because keeping goals is the only dignity this world allows us.
I am running to escape my flaws, which are without number, cannot be counted.
I am running, but going nowhere, wondering if I might set foot on the spirit paths, if other runners go elsewhere and there is a place where treadmills meet.
I am running on a treadmill because no path is ever dark or challenging enough.
I am running the tread off the treadmill, aiming for the stars, hoping if I get to the North Star in this bitter cold I might be able to reset my compass, start again.
I am running on a treadmill in an Arctic blast and my feet cannot keep my pace.
*For over a week, due to an Arctic Blast, we experienced temperatures down to -6°C here in Lancashire and colder in other parts of the UK. As it snowed and then froze the icy conditions made it very difficult to walk on the pavements let alone run.
**With thanks to my local JD Gym in Preston for providing somewhere to work out (and run when the weather is awful) for a reasonable price.
Gwyn ap Nudd, White son of Mist, I hail You in the morning and pray with You beside me I will never be lost again.
Gwyn ap Nudd, Hunter in the Skies, I hail You in the morning and pray with You beside me my hunt, my quest, will never die.
Gwyn ap Nudd, Bull of Conflict, I hail You in the morning and pray with You beside me I will keep on fighting through this day.
Gwyn ap Nudd, Keeper of the Cauldron, I hail You in the morning and pray with You beside me my life will be filled with inspiration.
Gwyn ap Nudd, Ruler of Annwn, I hail You in the morning and pray with You beside me I will know the unfathomable depths.
Gwyn ap Nudd, Gatherer of Souls, I hail You in the morning and pray with You beside me I will gather my pieces be whole again.
Gwyn ap Nudd, Lord of the Dead, I hail You in the morning and pray with You beside me I will walk with courage until the end.
This is a prayer for Gwyn ap Nudd through which I have been praying to Him every morning as part of my developing monastic practice. Up until now all my poems for Him have either been for specific Holy Days or have been an expression of a particular experience with Him. This is the first time I have written something more formal, based upon His epithets, which could also potentially be used by others should they want a starting point for building a relationship with Gwyn.
Reciting a set prayer every morning (I have now memorised it) has been a new experience for me as my devotions up until now have been mainly spontaneous. I’ll admit somedays I haven’t felt like praying it, but have been glad when I have, and others I’ve really needed it. I have found it anchoring as an affirmation of Gwyn’s presence in my life and the gifts He brings and have experienced different meanings and nuances in the words as I have recited them on different days and in different circumstances.
If you would like to incorporate this prayer into your own practice please feel free to.
See her dancing on the circumference of the world, on the point of the compass that divided night from day, on a needle point with a thousand devils.
See her tip the globe
and go off dancing on the ball point of her foot shaking her rattle at the heavens
dancing between the fortresses in the summer stars and the winter stars who call forth the Lords of Annwn
summoning
all the horses from the Song of the Horses and all the oxen from the Triad of the Three Prominent Oxen and all the dead from the Stanzas of the Graves
to the city where the people have made a patchwork dragon
from old discarded clothes and are parading it down through the subway from the drunken streets.
Someone lifts an umbrella spinning in the colours of her soul.
A wooly mammoth appears and joins the dance as she passes by.
It is said she will leave no corpse or she will leave a multitude of corpses of those she has possessed and one day they will be resurrected to dance with her again haloed in star dust spinning…
The spinning of the stars / the spinning of the Abyss…
She broke the surface of the waters of the cauldron and stole the awen not for herself but to scatter the drops in the darkest most mysterious and most unexpected places.
Who will find them in the necropolises we have built, in the nameless archways, in the manes of horses, in the terrible names I cannot speak to thee tonight or ever?
I wrote this poem after drawing the Ecstasy card from the Wildwood Tarot as part of a reading I did on the morning of my dedication as a nun of Annwn.
On the one hand I was slightly surprised as ecstasy isn’t the first thing I associate with monasticism (although there are examples of ecstatics even in the Christian tradition – most famously the ecstasy of St Theresa*) but on the other I was not as ecstasis is central to my path as an awenydd and devotee of Gwyn ap Nudd, a ruler of Annwn, in the Brythonic tradition.
On my walk the previous day, Gwyn had already shown me by leading me from the roads where the Benedictine Priory once stood on Castle Hill to the wooden sculptures I have come to know as ‘the Oldest Animal of Peneverdant’, He wants my vocation to remain shamanistic and animistic.
Another interesting coincidence is that the girl in the tarot card is holding a rattle. In a journey previous to this I had been given a rattle by one of my guides and used it in a dance to awaken a serpent. This prompted me to buy a rattle from my friends, Jason and Nicola Smalley, who live nearby in Anglezarke and run the Way of the Buzzard Mystery School. Coincidentally, after my ‘Strength’ blog post I found a rattle crafted with the focus on strength. I knew it was the right one and have been using it to connect with the serpents since and now… they’ve taken over my writing and come into my life…
I’m 41 today and looking at this card reminds me of the birthdays when I used to go out clubbing and how my first experiences of ecstatic states and with the spirits of Annwn came from dancing all night in night clubs and at festivals.
Those days are gone but accessing ecstatic states through drumming, rattling, maybe even dancing, are going to remain central to my path as an awenydd as I continue to explore what it means to be a nun of Annwn.
*The famous sculpture ‘the Ecstasy of St Teresa’ is based on her experience of a seraph piercing her heart with a ‘long spear of gold’ which she describes as leaving her ‘on fire with a great love of God’. Her ecstasy was depicted in a mural on the bike sheds in my local playing field and always spoke to me when I walked past. They were sadly knocked down a few years ago.
I. A small person in a small room in a small suburb
looks up at her God riding dark and holy, immense and terrifying through Van Gogh’s starry night
demanding that she become a creature of paradox closer to Him.
His hounds howl, His owls screech, His ravens scream, yet His silence is what opens the skies and cracks the earth of her small place.
II. She walks with Him where monks once walked – ‘Monks Walk,’ ‘Castle Walk’, ‘Tower View’, where the monastery once stood near Castle Hill,
tracing the labyrinth of the roads and houses instead,
Church Avenue from which the Fairy Funeral was banished to Fairy Lane where stands the leaning yew.
III. He takes her to visit the Oldest Animals of Peneverdant – the tawny owl who speaks of the silence before owl time, the hidden newt, the shapeshifting otter, the tickled brown trout reminding her of laughter the sacred in all, the common darter living out her last days.
IV. At the spring which dried up long ago but runs again for this night
He takes out her eyes, rinses them clean and grants to her the gift of clear sight.
He takes out her tongue, drenches it in mead, makes it a scroll of ancient vellum written in giant’s letters in a typeset
known only to monks and nuns of Annwn.
She translates it into nine vows.
V. The next morning, at sunrise, at moonrise,
when the Hunter is gone from the night skies
the three stars of his belt continue to shine in her eyes.
She consecrates her room as a monastic cell and speaks to Him her vows
as a nun of Annwn, seals her awen.
*This poem depicts experiences in the lead up to and upon my taking my nine vows as a nun within the Monastery of Annwn on this morning’s new moon. The God referred to is my patron, Gwyn ap Nudd, a ruler of Annwn.
It’s been a year since I joined my local JD gym in Preston and started strength training sessions with a personal trainer and I’m writing this post to share some of the benefits this has brought to both my physical and mental health.
As background I have run on and off since my early twenties as a way of keeping fit and managing my anxiety. However, I have struggled to maintain running longish distances due to a variety of issues such as runner’s knee and problems with my piriformis and hamstrings.
Over a decade ago a physio recommended strengthening my legs to help with my knee pain by doing squats and lunges but this seemed to make my knees worse and I gave up on this course of action and running for a while.
Since starting sessions with my excellent personal trainer, Marie Meagher, I have learnt that I am perfectly capable of doing squats and lunges. Initially my form was incorrect and, with her help correcting me, I have progressed to learning a variety of different forms (sumo squats, split squats, reverse lunges) and to adding weights such as kettle bells, dumb bells and bar bells.
She has also helped me learn to use the resistance machines and free weights. When I first started at the gym all the cogs and pullies and weights and fastenings were utterly bewildering and I didn’t understand the exercises or know much about my muscle groups and the best ways of working them.
I can now put together an effective workout incorporating a variety of exercises such as leg extensions, hamstring curls, hip adductions and dead lifts for my lower body or dead rows, chest and shoulder presses, and assisted pull-ups for my upper body. I know what weights to use, the right techniques, how many reps to do.
Strengthening my legs has worked wonders for my running. Before training, the most I had been able to run was 4, 7, and 10 miles a week with the occasional half marathon which usually left me crippled for a couple of days. I am now running 7 and 9 miles and a half marathon every week and have taken 15 minutes off my half marathon time from 2hrs 10 mins to 1hr 55 mins.
I’ve also noticed the difference that doing exercises for my upper body, abs, and core has made when I’m doing outdoor work in my local green space or gardening.
It is now rare that I suffer from any of my former issues either during or after a run. Another big help has been finding a good physio, Phil Noblett at South Ribble Physiotherapies, who has been brilliant at sorting out my minor injuries and keeping me running. It’s been a big revelation that some of the niggles I’ve had are simply due to lactic acid build up and can be massaged out.
Learning about my different muscle groups, how to work them, and discovering muscles I didn’t know I had has provided me with much better knowledge of my body and a more positive and mindful relationship with it.
My successes with strength training and running have also improved my mental health. Being physically stronger helps me feel mentally stronger and and provides me with a source of accomplishable achievements when I’m struggling in other areas of life due to limits with my autism and anxiety.
I have found both are better antidotes to stress than alcohol or overeating and am far less likely to do either as I know they will have a detrimental effect on my training.
Although I will never run record beating times or lift heavy weights it is an accomplishment, at the age of forty, to be the strongest and fittest I’ve ever been.
*With thanks to Marie for taking the photographs as this morning’s PT session.
You are the God who awoke my soul from its coffin.
You are the God who awoke my questing and my questioning of all truths.
You are the God whose truths have a misty question mark hovering over them.
You are the God who showed me the truth of the mist, the fog, shrouding, obscuring, revealing only half-truths, shifting like metaphor, escaping words.
You are the God of the truths of the void, the abyss, the darkness and the beautiful illusions that cover them lest we run screaming, clawing out our eyes.
You are the God who visited me with the truth of madness.
You are the God whose light is truth only after years of wandering lost in the mist, following the long dark tunnels, running, shouting through the catacombs.
You are the God of truth’s veiling and its unveiling and of the veil between the worlds.
Your truth begins in namelessness and comes to shine brightest in Your name.
Vindos, Gwyn, Hunter in the Skies, Light of the Mist, Lord of the Abyss, by all Your names and none, until all worlds are gone and ever after, You are my truth.
On August 31st this year I celebrated the ten year anniversary of meeting my patron God, Gwyn ap Nudd, at the leaning yew on Fairy Lane in my home town of Penwortham.
For those who don’t know the story, Gwyn appeared to me in a visionary encounter at the head of my local fairy funeral procession. He revealed His name and offered me the opportunity to journey with him in spirit to Annwn, (the Brythonic Otherworld) on the condition I give up my ambition to be a professional writer.
Recognising Him as the deity who had long been calling me to the Otherworld and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to establish a relationship with the God to whom my soul already belonged, I agreed.
The following January full moon I made my intitial vows to Him as my patron God, as his ‘apprentice’, and soon afterwards learnt the name of my path – awenydd ‘person inspired.’ On the super blood wolf moon in 2019 I made lifelong vows to Him.
It’s been ten years now and a lot has changed. On the day of my anniversary I visited the yew, made an offering of mead, gave my thanks to Gwyn and spent some time in meditation and in conversation with Him.
Since then I have been reflecting on the past ten years and the ways my devotional relationship with Him have shaped and changed my life.
During this period Gwyn has been there as a source of guidance and inspiration in my devotions, my journeywork, my prayers, guiding my work as His awenydd in poetry, storytelling, in writing my three books.
He’s not only supported me through my successes but my messiness and meltdowns. I have been able to talk to Him about anything, no matter how dark, because I know that, as the Lord of Annwn and Gatherer of Souls, He’s been with the mad, the dying, the dead, will be there for me at the end and after.
On a more difficult note He has consistently called me to my truth. This has been a tough process which has involved quite a lot of unmasking and a surrendering of my desires to fit in, reach a wide audience, and gain financial security.
After my latest straying into an attempt to become an ecologist I have again been stripped bare of all masks and brought back to my role as His awenydd and a step closer to my truth in His calling for me to become a nun of Annwn.
Finally, at the age of forty, ten years since our meeting, I have come to realise that He is my truth. That only when I honour Him and do His work, I am blessed.
I am currently moving into a new phase of my life exploring what becoming a nun of Annwn will mean within the context of building the Monastery of Annwn.
I am developing a monastic routine and practices and treating my bedroom, which already holds every part of my life, including my altars, as a monastic cell. My work as an awenydd, devotional creativity, sharing inspiration, at present through writing my next book ‘In the Deep’ for my Gods, remains central.
Having learnt from my mistakes I am looking forward to a life in which my relationship with Gwyn and my spiritual path are its truth and sacred heart.
It’s been a few days now since I left my ecology job behind along with my somewhat misguided dream of finding a suitable career in the environmental sector.
Returning to my vocation, to being a good awenydd, ‘person inspired’, after a time during which my path had lost its meaning, invigorated with new life. I’d turned away because I thought I’d lost my inspiration after several years of writing nothing of note without realising even unworthy notes fuel the Cauldron.
I didn’t realise my research into the British and Irish and wider myths along with my first attempt to bring them together in The Dragon’s Tongue would eventually lead to the trilogy of books which I am near-certain will be right.
It’s going to be called ‘The Forgotten Gods’ trilogy. The impetus behind it is a long-standing sadness that people in Britain know the names of the Greek, Roman and Norse Gods but nothing of the ancient British Gods and Goddesses. Zeus, Athena, Hermes, Mars, Venus, Pluto, Thor, Odin, Loki are all well known but no-one knows of Nodens, Vindos, Rigantona, Brigantia, Bel, Belisama, Lugus, Ambactonos, or Gobannos.
The first book, In the Deep, is an attempt to re-imagine an ancient British creation myth based on the stories about a primordial conflict between the deities of Annwn (the Otherworld) and the Children of Don in British and Irish mythology.
The second book, The Gates of Annwn, tells of how the Roman Invasions and the coming of Christianity led to the ancient British Gods becoming overwritten by new Gods, demonised, and forgotten, of how the people of Britain turned to Christianity, believing their souls went to Heaven or Hell rather than to Annwn.
The third book, The Black Dragon, which I haven’t written yet and will be the apocalyptic finale will tell of the return of the Gods and provide a vision of the future.
I’ve never felt more alive, since I finished Gatherer of Souls at least, as I have whilst I’ve been writing these books, becoming the Cauldron and in it walking with my Gods in their stories, with Vindos/Gwyn through His Dreams as He sleeps through the Summer.
There’s such excitement and magic in writing a story, not knowing where it’s going, being somehow in control and somehow not. Learning when a plot choice is right, when it is not, divining the guidance of the Gods. Being one with Them in the act of co-creating.
On a more mundane level I’ve had some ideas about how I might reach a wider audience with Their stories and make a little income to support myself whilst I devote my time to writing them by making some videos of excerpts from my books.
I’m looking into how to use Photo Booth on my Mac and planning on re-opening my Patreon with the aim of sharing video excerpts of readings from my books and poetry read around my local landscape along with general news and views.
The Sanctuary of Vindos 