A place of quiet beyond the row, the heartbeat of Annwn is Your only sound, the occasional song rising like heartbreak from the Deep.
To keep me safe Your invisible roses twine around.
Your forget-me-nots remind me of the King of Annwn in the summer.
Into You I am gathered by the Gatherer of Souls. In You, with my Beloved, I am at home.
In You I can heal and I can heal others too. Into You I gather the lost pieces of our souls.
In You I am complete in every single moment. In You I can breathe every single breath. In You my heartbeat is at one with the heartbeat of Annwn – the heart of my Lord.
‘Gwyn ap Nudd who are far in the forests for the love of your mate allow us to come home.’ ~ Speculum Christiani
Going away. Coming home. These two processes every spiritworker needs to master.
I was away for such a long part of my life, never fully in my body. Struggling with disassociation and derealisation stuck somewhere between the worlds.
Then Gwyn ap Nudd came into my life and taught me to journey to Annwn and, perhaps more importantly, how to come home. Since I met Him I have been striving to lead a life that combines the shamanic and ecstatic with being present in the here and now with the myriad beings on the land where I live.
With more difficulty, particularly since becoming a nun of Annwn, I’ve been getting to know myself a lot better – my body, my mind, my habits.
I thought that I was getting better. That I’d begun to become more aware of my cycles of driving myself too hard often when operating under some delusion such as that I’m going to become a recognised philosopher, poet, author… then realising I’m being unrealistic and burning out and dropping out.
I thought I’d cracked it but somehow similar delusions crept in around what I might be capable of as a nun of Annwn and aspiring shamanic practitioner. After my shamanic initiation and marriage to Gwyn I came back ecstatic with ambitions of running online discussions and shamanic journey circles and hit the ground with a bump when I came upon the same old barrier of lack of interest in the Brythonic tradition and was further derailed by the consequences of my mistake in reviewing a book by Galina Krasskova.
It’s taken me over two months to come back to myself, back to reality, to my limitations as an autistic person and introvert and to realise I would never have been able to hold space for group discussions or run shamanic journey circles due to my difficulties with reading and communicating with large groups and the huge drain upon my energy that these things take.
I’m fine one-to-one or with small groups of people I know and who I don’t need to mask with such as my fellow monastic devotees. But I’m not the warm smiley front-of-house meet-and-greet person who knows intuitively what each person needs and how to put them at ease fit for leading large groups.
Once again I’ve landed with a bump and a crash but as always I’ve had a wonderful God who is now my Husband to hold me through it. I’ve had the support of my mum, the land I live on, and members of the Monastery of Annwn.
I’ve finally come back home into a state of stillness and presence wherein I can stop beating myself up over my mistakes and accept who I am.
That being a nun is not about striving to be a celebrity (‘Sister Patience TM’) but leading a life of prayer and meditation centred on devotional relationship with the Gods and the land and the ancestors and journeying to Annwn to bring back inspiration and healing for one’s communities.
Accepting I am enough rather than trying to strive beyond.
Not easy. Not glamorous. But this is where and who I am. A suburban nun. At home in Penwortham with a wonderful God who dwells in my heart and countless deities and spirits and plants and creatures all around me. With Gwyn’s help I’m beginning to master the art of coming home.
I. ‘Ecology’ from the Greek oikos and logos seems to suggest there is a logic to our home.
And ‘home’ from ham (like in Penwortham), from the German heim, from the Norse heimr ‘abode, world, land,’ is so much more than a haus.
Hiraeth is the Welsh word for the longing for a home.
II. Do the Welsh gods want this English awenydd to untangle the threads, to follow this longing back to when she started asking questions about her home:
“Why did only one group of snowdrops from the hundred bulbs we planted in Greencroft Valley ever come up?”
“Why did the bluebells take so many years to appear?”
“How do the crocuses spread around the garden?”
“Why do the starlings disappear come back greedier?”
“Why did the mouse come in May and make a nest of my feathers?”
“What is it with spiders and September?”
III. Do we ask science to explain because we are no longer able to talk to the creatures because we have forgotten their language?
Because we have forgotten how to speak and share our home?
Did we know the answers to these questions long ago when we were more at home rather than longing?
Is it the ecologist’s task to call us home
with all the words in her repertoire – Anglo-Saxon, Brythonic, Latin, Greek?
IV. In the Norse myths Heimdallr guards against the threats to the home such as invaders, Ragnarok, the end of the world.
One blast on his horn will blow a warning.
Is it the ecologist’s task to be a horn-blower?
To sound the alarm and call us back?
*This poem is a series of reflections on my transition from working many miles away restoring the Manchester Mosslands to my new job as a Graduate Ecologist much closer to home. I am seeing it as a form of homecoming.
The Sanctuary of Vindos 