Day Four of Twelve Days of Devotion to Gwyn ap Nudd
I come this fourth day to consider Your beloved.
How, at the beginning of time You shared a womb, hearts beating as one.
How You were torn apart, separated, found each other. How She foresakes You for another lover every year. How, with each separation, Your love grows stronger.
I think of how I was separated from You and it took me thirty years to find You although our paths crossed and I did not recognise You in the books, the land, my dreams, although I was searching…
I think of all the times we have been separated, when I have been woman and/or man, tree, plant, animal, stone, fungus and bacteria,
how my love for You has grown stronger since the beginning of time, the shattering of the cauldron, since when we all shared a womb.
Day Two of Twelve Days of Devotion to Gwyn ap Nudd
On this second day I consider Your boyhood, all the boys you have been.
The boy in the serpent skins born to transform a land of bones and gore into beauty,
Your return as a wolf cub or a boy in wolf skins to Your awenyddion letting us sit You on our knees, tell You stories.
How when You were a babe You never cried but howled.
There was a little of Your boy in me when I was growing up – I always hated dolls, played with Thundercats and Ninja Turtles and wrote about characters from Streetfigher in the back of my exercise books at school.
There are parts of me that refuse to grow up and keep returning to the playground where I swing over the top of the swings
that are no longer there on Middleforth Green
knowing You will catch me and take me to the stars.
Day One of Twelve Days of Devotion to Gwyn ap Nudd
On this first day I consider Your birth, how you were torn from the womb and flung into the Abyss, how You were born
falling
and wonder if I was born falling too. For it seems I have never stopped falling, spiralling downward through life, never up the career ladder, deeper into the well, into the Deep, into You.
I think of how we have both crawled from the Abyss and reclaimed our kingdoms – Yours built out of dragon bones and mine from words.
I have built mine for You and welcomed You in as You have welcomed me into Yours and each in the other’s we have been reborn.
‘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.
The Sanctuary of Vindos 