Suddenly, from out of nowhere, flying at me like a mad dog, just one tooth at the end of a wooden haft, the spear that was thrown long ago, that should have pierced me before I started running.
It’s finally caught up.
It opens me and inside I am empty and hollow as the old yew tree on which my ragged carcass is hung.
And of course the ravens come.
And of course He’s amongst them – my God who hung on the yew in raven form for nine nights pierced by the same damn spear.
I always knew my turn would come.
And so He comes to sit beside me and I go to visit Him and we are one – the tree, the spear, the hung, the void, the hollowness within and without.
And this moment is within us.
This drawing and poem record a rite I undertook before the Winter Solstice in 2025 – nine days in meditation at the Abyss with my God. Looking back, on the one hand it had worth as a devotional offering, but on the other it wasn’t the healthiest of impulses. It opened a can of worms leading to my recent insights about how my monasticism and asceticism had partly been driven by the unhealthy restrictive and self-destructive impulses that also drove my eating disorder.
They Called Me Pig is a poetry collection charting the development of an eating disorder that began with childhood bullying and how I have begun to heal by building a healthier relationship with food, exercise and my body. I have written it as part of the inner work of my shamanic apprenticeship, as a way of processing trauma and transforming it into art. I’m hoping it’s a topic everybody can relate to on some level as we all have a body and need to eat and exercise to live. You might also have relatives or friends with an eating disorder who might benefit from reading it.
It is downloadable for free but if you enjoy it please consider reciprocating by passing on the link to a friend or by telling somebody about my writing and shamanic work.
If you’re interested in working with me on using shamanic work combined with art as a method of healing, transformation and self-expression, I offer sessions at £15 an hour. Please get in touch lornasmithers81@gmail.com
We have not the myth of a son of the sun who got burnt by the sun and fell.
When Maponos stole the horses of Bel and rode skywards to the horror of His mother He did not come to grief.
Although Maponos burned He was not burnt.
He returned instead alive and ablaze, replenished, youth renewed, as the Sun-Child.
So, why, black poplars, do You grieve?
Do You grieve because Your brother lives? Do You grieve because You are jealous? Do You grieve because You got no grief?
Or is there a story of another brother?
A forgotten son of Matrona, daughter of the King of Annwn, who mounted a black horse and rode after the black sun when it set and sunk to the depths of the Underworld?
Did He drown in a black lake? Was He eaten by a black dragon? Or does He still wander lost in sorrow through a labyrinth unillumined by the rays of the black sun?
Poor brothers, did You search for Him and almost lose yourselves? Did You get trapped in a dark prison and scrape Your bloody fingers against the walls and weep?
If so, how did You get here?
Did You ride with the black sun or with the King of Annwn on the back of His black horse who carries lost souls?
Did He plant You here, He and His Queen, with labyrinthine roots winding down?
Did He seal Your tears deep within?
Did He kiss Your fingers like His Bride’s, tuck them into a yellow bud to emerge again only in the spring to reach not for the black sun but the love of a mate?
Did He bring You here to tell me when I grieve my fingers are not talons to scrape the walls and my tears are not sap to entrap the insects who get in their way?
Did He bring You here so I could learn from Your clawing, Your crying, my clawing, my weeping, to turn my grief inward in winter and then, in spring, to reach out in love?
*This poem is addressed to the two black poplars who stand at the source of Fish House Brook, near to the Sanctuary of Vindos, in my hometown of Penwortham. The photograph is of one of the fallen catkins, taken in spring 2022, not quite emerged.
I was born from a rose bush planted by Creiddylad – black, white and red. My black sister is dead and my white sister is gone.
I wanted to be kind but I could not escape my thorns.
I fled from this world and wrapped myself around the fortress of Annwn’s King.
I would not let Creiddylad in.
I wanted to be kind but I was cruel.
“It will always be winter here. He will always wear my crown. He will never return to gather the dead. We will sleep together amongst His treasures for ever.”
“I planted you, I nurtured you,” Creiddylad wept, her tears pouring down around my roots. “Each one of your petals I made from a tiny piece of my heart.”
“Then why am I so cruel?”
“Because there is cruelty hidden deep within my heart – that is why I practice kindness every day.”
“Then I can be kind too?”
“Yes.”
“Then what must I do?”
“Leave Annwn, leave my King, return to the world to be a sanctuary for another, who like you, has been cruel, but longs to learn to love, to be kind, to heal.”
So I unwrapped my trestles and I threw down my thorns and prostrated myself at Creiddylad’s feet in my first act of kindness promising there will be many more.
It’s said there’s an animal beside us from the moment we’re born ’til the moment we die.
Why, then, was I so alone when I walked through the school doors, and got knocked down by the animals in the playground again and again?
Why was I mocked when I showed a bit of spirit – running as a horse round the edges of the tarmac whilst the others played British Bulldogs or Red Rover or skidded on the crips the seagulls fought over?
Why was I so alone when I sat in the classroom writing secret stories about horses in the back of my books and sketching them running, jumping showjumps, galloping free?
One of the lucky ones I had the chance to loan a pony and muck out for free rides yet even at the stables we were saddled by the same rules – boxed in.
I was like the horse on the end of the lungeline, the box walker going round and round and round…
My white winged mare revealed herself in the form of a tattoo when I came of age yet it wasn’t until ten years later she revealed her magic breaking all taboos.
Now I help others to find the animals beside them – to bring back their bears, eagles, otters, wolves, to befriend their snakes and cockroaches.
Together we are slowly escaping our boxes, learning to see through the illusion of separation, with the animals beside us to understand why we are here.
*A poem based on my relationship with my white winged mare and on helping others to discover their animal spirit guides and power animals on my introduction to shamanism courses and in power animal retrievals.
I am currently offering free power animal retrievals as I progress in my shamanic training HERE.
There is a black butterfly in Your heart. I cannot decipher the meaning on a bright spring morning when the May flowers blossom and all the hawthorns are in bloom.
There is a black butterfly in Your heart. I cannot decipher the meaning at midday when the sun burns bright and Maponos strums a song on His harp with chords of sunlight brighter than the fires of Bel.
There is a black butterfly in Your heart. I cannot decipher the meaning at sunset as the blackbirds sing the sun down and burning happy dancers dance and talk and do the things that people do.
There is a black butterfly in Your heart. I cannot decipher the meaning until midnight comes and I follow the funeral procession of the sun into darkness. Until I walk with the dead sun into the depths of the Otherworld.
~
“Dead sun, dead sun, what are we doing here, what are we doing here in this darkness, darker than the dark side of the moon, darker than the dark side of the sun?
“Dead sun, dead sun, what are we doing here, what are we doing here in this silence, more silent than the silence when the King of Annwn died and Maponos ceased to play His harp?
“Dead sun, dead sun, what are we doing here, what are we doing here in this stillness stiller than the places between the dance-steps of His faery dancers, the hoofbeats of the horses of His hunt, the spaces between the beats of His heart?”
“Come deeper, come deeper,” says the dead sun, “beneath the world’s chatter and words and images that paint butterfly colours, come deeper, come deeper.”
~
The dead sun takes me to Your tomb in the Castle of Cold Stone. Reminds me of how Your castle fell from the skies of Annwn, circling four-cornered, from the songs of the mead-feast, from the revelry, from the boiling of the cauldron, from the passing of the mead-cup,
down, down, down,
into the Abyss,
into the place between the end and the beginning of life and death, the end and beginning of words and of worlds…
~
You’re dead – there are no words to express my sorrow. You’re alive, only sleeping, there are no words to express my hope.
You’re dressed in black as if ready to attend Your own funeral. Your hair is white and silver as the light of the moon and the hairs in the manes and tails of the horses of Your hunt.
And Your heart, Your heart is red as the reddest of the roses of Your queen who forever betrays You on May the first.
For You I plant five red roses in Annwn and a single rose above.
~
For you I sit here in the darkness, the silence, the stillness. I listen to Your breath and the beating of Your heart.
At first it is felt, not heard, not seen.
Then I hear it, then I see it – the dark flutter of the butterfly in Your heart.
“What is this? What is this?” My heart flutters in concern. “Why has a black butterfly come to abide in the heart of the King of Annwn, the heart of the Otherworld?”
“Worry not.” Even death does not faze You. You do not speak like a corpse but like the most living of the living and the brightest light in Annwn’s darkness. “You are the black butterfly who flaps her wings in my heart.”
~
“Did You hear that?” I ask the dead sun.
The dead sun has already fled – it is morning.
“Did You hear that?” I ask Maponos.
He has already gone to play His harp.
We’re alone now, my King and I, butterfly and heart, in the darkness, in the silence, in the solitude, for a moment before the world’s call forces us to part.
I created this painting at a Beltane focused seasonal creative workshop with Two Birds Therapy and wrote the poem afterwards. It’s based on the dichotomy I always feel at this time of year between the beauty and energy of nature and the sadness of Gwyn’s death and my need to be alone with Him whilst others are celebrating. The black butterfly was the result of a mistake wherein I tried to make Gwyn’s heart redder but instead smudged black into it. For me this gave the piece its meaning.
If I had a thousand words to describe the King of Annwn’s cheekbones
I would say they were like icebergs, like the hulls of the ships that crash into them and sink, like the angles of the limbs of the dead men who float to the surface, like the way He lays out the dead in the icy caverns where the ice dragon roams with a single icy jewel hidden deep within his forehead.
I would say they are like the way He says the letter ‘A’, the capital, with the triangular tip, as if it is not the beginning but the end of the alphabet.
I would say they are like the broken glass of shattered coffins in my good dreams and not the bad.
I would say they are the antithesis of polar bears and the peak of antinomy. I would say that I have seen many a skier slide down them to death.
I would say they are like runways and the paths of aircraft and the flightpaths of starships, the souls trampling across them to the otherworld.
I would say they are like the travels of swans and geese.
I would say they are like the strobe lights that shine down from the helicopters that fly over my house at night, sometimes hunting for the criminals as He is always hunting for the dead.
I would say they are like the spotlight in which I stood, dancing, seeking to win His favour.
I would say they are like His anger, like His fury, like His lament, that they were bent with a hammer in a forge that was neither hot nor cold nor even burning.
I would say they are his secret.
I would say everybody knows but keeps quiet.
I would say they are like the divine madness that unfolds itself within His followers in their shapeshifting, folding, unfolding, spreading wings.
I would say they are bone-light but heavy in my hands.
I would say they are like the precipice I walked on so narrowly between life and death, so very thin and dangerous on both sides a fall into the abyss.
I would say they were the answer to my prayer after a long dark night of soul searching, the first slants of the appearance of a face in the darkness, the first strokes of a name written on my soul.
I would say they were the remedy to the poison within me, the pharmakon, the paradox.
I would say they were the pride that summoned me from shame.
I would say they were the answer to my cry for help.
I would say they will help old men and feeble infants regain their dignity again.
I would say they will once more be serpents and dragons with wings bent at cheek-bone-like angles.
I would say I have spoken only half the words and will speak the other half to him alone in death.
and polished all his statues I fell into his smile
and I smiled too
and all the world smiled and all the universe smiled and all the people of Annwn.
I can’t rememer how long ago I forgot how to smile
but here it is –
this sign upon my lips,
not just for me but for you the Wise Lad’s gift.
When I drew this image it was supposed to represent the unburying of a multitude of meditating Wise Lad statues being unburied from the earth from where they’d lain for eons. On completing it I realised that looked at from another perspective they appear to be hovering over drop down toilets! One of His jokes I think!
The Sanctuary of Vindos 