I dream of a wren’s nest on a wooden beam overhanging tidal waters. Then I’m holding it. It’s warm and soft and feathery and filled with baby wrens. I’m afraid for them. I fear they will fall into the water.
The scene shifts and I’m watching from beyond as the wren chicks fall as I feared, but before they drown each of them is saved by a kingfisher with a blue-grey beak, who plucks them out and places them on the nearby sands.
I’ve been struggling of late. Minor health problems. Exercise niggles. Burning myself out by working 7 day weeks even though I’m not in paid work. Problems with my spiritual practice and lamenting having no human teacher, no existing structure or tradition to turn to.
I’ve been losing wrens.
Wrens. They’re secretive birds. A lot of people can’t or don’t see them. I’m not brilliant with birds or bird calls but I often spot the ‘little pointy tails’ in the undergrowth before hearing their loud song and I also see wren chicks around this time of year. In the Wildwood Tarot they’re associated with voice and prophecy and folklorically they are a sacrifical bird killed around mid-winter.
Kingfishers. Contrastingly I don’t see kingfishers often and when they do show up I know something deep and numinous is happening. The last time I saw a kingfisher it was connected with the death of a friend and spiritual guide.
The message of this dream seems to be not to be too harsh on myself or on our fledgling spiritual traditions. To stop getting frustrated and jettisoning my wrens.
This time the kingfisher has shown up to save them. I’m not sure who the kingfisher is. Glas y dorlan ‘blue of the riverbank’. Maybe Nodens, the Fisher King. Maybe a messenger of His or of His son, Vindos/Gwyn, my patron. Or maybe something or someone else turning up to remind me I have been guided less formally by a number of different mentors in different ways along my path*.
Perhaps here is represented the Monastery of Annwn and the polytheistic movement as a fledgling endeavour. Although we have no structure or tradition we have each other for support and the saving grace of our Gods.
*To name them Phil and Lynda Ryder in Druidry, Brian Taylor in animism, Greg Hill in the Brythonic tradition, Jason and Nicola Smalley in shamanistic practices.
Over the last few days I have been taking some time out from writing my novel in progress, In the Deep, after completing the second draft and realising some of the content has strayed from the imaginal into the imaginary. Not being sure how to remedy it I turned for insights to one of my favourite mythtellers Martin Shaw. I found the wisdom I needed in his video ‘On the Fall and the Underworld’ where he warns to be aware of engaging with avatars rather than divinities themselves, giving the example of ‘Baba Yaga with her teeth pulled out’. I had fallen afoul in this mistake in some of my later scenes with the winged serpents.
I also discovered, at first to my surprise, that Martin, whose works are deeply Pagan and animistic and based in his experience of extended wilderness vigils recently converted to Orthodox Christianity. I felt less surprised as I learnt about how this happened in relation to the rest of his personal journey in his dialogue with Mark Vernon ‘The Mossy Face of Christ’. Following a one hundred and one day vigil in a local wood in Devon he had an Old Testament style vision and retired to bed to hear 9 words that led him to the conclusion he must return to his ‘original home’ which was Eden. This was followed by a series of intense dreams featuring Jesus and the son of God moving into his life in a similar way to which He wrecked the temple in Jerusalem. Martin grew up in a Christian family and his practice already resembled that of the Desert Fathers and the peregrini who set out for wild places to find God.
Of course I could not help but relate this to the conversion to Orthodox Christianity of his friend, Paul Kingsnorth, whose writing I also admire, in particular ‘the Dark Mountain Manifesto’ (which was written with Dougald Hind in 2009). Kingsnorth writes of his experiences in ‘The Cross and the Machine’. Here he speaks of carrying an Abyss within him, of needing ‘a truth to surrender to’. He did not find this during his time as a Wiccan priest. Following a series of dreams he found it in Jesus and in Orthodox Christianity and his Abyss was filled.
‘In Orthodoxy I had found the answers I had sought, in the one place I never thought to look. I found a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart—a faith with living saints and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power. I found a faith that, unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template but a mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters. The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story I had never heard at all.’
There is much in both Shaw’s and Kingsnorth’s experiences I relate to as someone who received a calling to devote their life to a Brythonic god – Gwyn ap Nudd. The shock of a deity who was not expected stepping into one’s life and coming along and turning everything upside down. Inititally resisting. Submitting to the call in spite of being unsure what it means and being terrified what others will think.
I’ve also been tempted by Christianity. Like Kingsnorth I rejected it but still found myself hanging around churches and I additionally had a calling towards monasticism. As I approached my 35th birthday I was desperately aware this would be my last chance to become a Christian nun but I didn’t take it. I also had a couple of encounters with Jesus whilst working as a cleaner at a local Catholic school. His presence was everywhere and whilst I was cycling home I saw His face before me trying to mouth something in Middle Eastern. He then turned up at our dining table and I told Him politely I was already taken by Gwyn.
Looking at Shaw and Kingsnorth’s converstion to Christianity I can fully understand the need to respond to this strange and rebellious and self-sacrificing God-become-a-man, to take up the cross, to walk in a 2000 year tradition that has its book, its churches, its liturgy, its mysteries, its mysticism. That Christianity provides better trodden and more accessible ways to deeper truths than we find in modern Paganism and Polytheism as we have little over fifty years of development (if one claims Wicca and Pagan Druidry as points of origin).
Although I feel this impulse Christianity is not for me and the Christian God and his son/incarnation, Jesus, are not my God(s). I belong heart and soul to Gwyn.
As a polytheist nun who recently founded an online polytheistic monastery, the Monastery of Annwn, (of which Gwyn is the patron) I wish whole heartedly we had longer and more explicitly sacred texts than the fragmentary material from medieval Welsh literature, longstanding prayers and rites, systems of meditation, moreover physical monasteries. But we don’t. So our small group is having to make things up as we go along – sharing and co-writing prayers, joining together in meditation, discussing our experiences, putting together rituals. Our deeper truths too are there. We’re touching on mysteries and finding our mysticism. I believe this can be done just as well in Polytheism as in Christianity with a little patience.
I find it interesting to note the cross over between the impulses towards a rewilding of Christianity with the likes of Shaw and Kingsnorth and the call for more depth and discipline within Paganism and Polytheism with the Polytheistic Monastic movement.
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.
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.
So it reaches an end. The trajectory that began with volunteering on local nature reserves, took me into paid work restoring the Manchester Mosslands, and eventually led to me working for a local ecological consultancy on developments across the North West.
Whereas my choice to work in conservation was guided my Gods, when my traineeship reached its end, and no conservation positions came up, I chose my ecology job because it was local, permanent, well paid, and offered financial security, and because I had a good interview and liked the people.
I knew next to nothing about ecology, the high pressure environment, how distant some of the sites would be, or how badly working nights would affect my mental health. I hadn’t thought through how I’d feel about working for developers, some just people who needed a bat survey for an extension on their home, but others who wanted to build on green spaces and nature reserves.
Working just one night a week, the dread beforehand and the tiredness afterwards, had a massive impact on my mental health due to my need for a regular routine and sleep pattern as an autistic person who suffers from anxiety.
This, combined with travelling to sites over an hour’s drive away, and learning to write technical reports and mastering an unneccessarily complex and counterintuitive mapping system called QGIS whilst, at the same time, organising surveys, preparing quotes, and replying to clients, swiftly led to stress and burnt out.
Within a matter of weeks I went from being a happy, fit, and confident person with hopes of excelling in botany, pursuing an MSc in ecology, and running an official half marathon to being unable to read academic articles or comprehend the logistics of getting to a run or navigating the crowds.
I started waking early in the morning in tears and crying until I went to the gym or on a run and somehow cried all the way through a run on a very bad day.
I turned up in tears, managed to get on with my work, in spite of the crushing feeling in head, which increased as the day went on and throughout the week. I drove the wrong way up to M62 and through a red traffic light. I got hopelesssly muddled on a survey and drew the map the wrong way up. One day my brain melted to the point I couldn’t recall what a PDF was.
My manager took me off nights and I stayed because I liked the team, who were kind and supportive, because I didn’t want to let them down, because it was my mistake for rushing into what was the wrong job but right location and people.
I didn’t speak much to my Gods at first. But when drinking ceased to cure my troubles and I realised it was doing me more harm than good, both in my work life, and strength training and running performance, I began to pray.
I began to seek a place of retreat and healing as respite from an overwhelming world. “Remember who you are,” said Gwyn, recalling me to my vocation as an awenydd, as Sister Patience, as a nun of Annwn.
Somewhat laughably, as is often the case of Gwyn, at a time when I was craving financial security due to fear of losing my job, He told me do the thing least likely to make money in the world – “build the Monastery of Annwn”.
Yet His imperative, my vocation, could not be ignored. I have set up the Monastery of Annwn as a virtual space; started laying the foundations in terms of daily devotions, a ritual year, and practices such as journeying to Annwn and tending Creiddylad’s Garden; and begun dialogue with others.
Desiring to partake in lectio divina and lacking an Annuvian creation myth I have been inspired to return to writing one – a pursuit I began a couple of years back with a book called The Dragon’s Tongue, which didn’t work out.
This attempt to weave a new creation story, from the perspective of the Annuvian Gods, from the existing Welsh and Irish myths and also drawing on the Mesopotamian epic ‘Enuma Elish’ and the Bible has been renewed as ‘In the Deep’ (the antithesis of ‘When On High’ – the translation of ‘Enuma Elish’).
In returning to devotional writing I have found deep joy, which has dissipated as soon as the stresses of work and worldly career have got in the way.
This positive discovery/recovery combined with the knowledge that, as an autistic person, I am not suited to full time high pressure work, has led to the decision to hand in my notice at my ecology job and seek less stressful, part time work in conservation or horticulture that will allow me to fulfil my vocation.
It has been a relief and a release. Although I have two months’ notice to work I have a myth to tend, a monastery to build, and can find solace at my altar and in Creiddylad’s garden, where the bees are loving the blue geraniums and the foxgloves I grew from seed last year are looking magnificent.
I am a keeper of an ancient monastery (yes this monastery is ancient although its builders only built it yesterday).
Likewise I am born from the Deep.
I am forged in Annwn’s fires.
I am the creation of a myriad creatures who continue to live within me, barking, stampeding.
I am born of the Dragon-Headed Mother. The nine elements swirl within me.
I live by the rule of awen*.
My destiny lies before me.
~
This poem was born from a time of crisis and struggle as I have suffered from poor mental health as a result of working a late shift as I find it very difficult to cope with changes in routine and sleeping pattern as an autistic person.
Following the realisation I can’t make a living from my vocation as an awenydd, for the last three years I have poured most of my energy into pursuing a career that is in alignment with my spiritual values. I’ve volunteered my way into paid work in conservation, completed a year-long conservation traineeship, and gained a permanent job as an ecologist.
There is a lot to like about ecology. There is much to learn. I get to visit varied sites. There is an art to getting the best deal for people and nature. But the job is also high pressure and, in many consultancies, (thankfully not mine) there is a complete disregard for mental health with junior ecologists working several nights a week and being expected to keep up with day work
I have been lucky to gain work with a team who are not only friendly and professional but aware of and supportive around mental health problems and have allowed me to cut down nights and take time out for counselling.
Over the period I have been developing my career I have had less time for my spiritual vocation and, it’s sad to say, have only fallen back on it at a time of crisis, when my work alone has not been enough to pull me through.
Having realised that my difficulties with night work will mean I cannot become a good all round ecologist (I will not be able to get my great crested newt and bat licences and will be limited to developing my abilities with habitat and vegetation surveys and protected species I can survey by day) I’ve been questioning if this is the right career path and assessing where my talents lie.
“Remember who you are,” I have heard the voice of my God, Gwyn, on a few occasions, reminding me of my vow to Him, to serve as His awenydd.
This has led to the realisation that I’ve been living an unbalanced life. Devoting too much time to Thisworld and not enough to Annwn, the Deep.
This doesn’t mean that I’ve made a poor choice of job, but outside it, whereas I was spending all my free time reading ecology books and articles, trying to record and memorise plants, and carrying out extra surveys, I need to make room for the soul-world.
From this has been born the Monastery of Annwn as a sanctuary to retreat to; where the Gods and the Deep are revered and honoured and put first; as a place that provides the strength to return to Thisworld and pursue one’s awen/destiny**.
*The phrase ‘the rule of awen’ is not my own but is one of the principles of the Gnostic Celtic Church which resonates deeply with me. **In Medieval Welsh poetry ‘awen’ means not only inspiration but destiny.
I can’t remember exactly when. It might have been around this last time last year. I was being characteristically irascible, rash, impatient, none of the qualities that you’d associate with being a nun.
“Sister Patience,” I heard the mocking voice of my patron god, Gwyn.
It irked me, but it also awoke and called to something deep within.
Rising to his challenge, “I will be Sister Patience,” I told him.
And that was how Sister Patience came to be.
II. She came into my life as an alter ego at first, as I struggled through my traineeship with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust on the Manchester Mosslands, helping me shape and find respite in the sanctuary of Creiddylad’s Garden.
I wrote this poem about her last summer:
The Sanctuary of Sister Patience
Weeks of weeding are fundamental to the path,
to the wedding of him and her and him – Gwyn and Creiddylad and Gwythyr.
When Summer’s King vaults over the wall all the flowers turn their heads towards him, as if to a beam of light.
All the plants need the light and dark reaction to photosynthesise and this is written on her habit in an obscure symbol on one of her voluminous cuffs.
He who stole the light of Bel and Belisama and gave it to mankind…
When he arrives in her garden it is yestereve, yesteryear, and all the flowers are gloaming and he longs to know what lies beneath her cowl for her eyes are two moons that will shine
upon a future world that will never stop flowering with its own weathernarium…
He is all heat and fire and flame and she is patience…
in Annwn, in the soil, in the mycorrhizae, in the roots, in the shoots, in the leaves, in the flowers, turning towards the light and these are the mysteries –
the poetry of nature not of the bardic seat.
Like the ranunculi are the wanderings of the wild nuns knowing no order –
their names a mixing of Latin, Greek, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, common and binomial.
This I was taught by the comfrey I bought when I was first learning to ‘do magic’, which worked its magic here,
filling my garden with purple flowers,
smelling soothing as the healing of bones, one of the favourites of Old Mother Universe.
She loves the first one or two tiny cotyledons of every plant reaching for the light not knowing their origins.
She carries the seeds of all the worlds in the brown paper envelopes in her pockets rustling when she walks, so carefully labelled in the language of Old Mother Universe only she knows – the names, the dates, the places, so distant…
With them she will build her sanctuary beyond the trowelling of my pulse.
III.
Since then, slowly, imperceptibly, the miles between us have closed.
I’ve been patient. I’ve completed my traineeship. I’ve moved on into a new job as a graduate ecologist in which I’ve been faced with a whole new set of challenges. Not only learning to carry out new surveys but a whole new skillset on the admin side – providing quotes, carrying out desktop studies, writing reports, learning to see a job through from beginning to end.
It’s been a steep learning curve and not without its ups and downs. As an autistic person who likes routine and staying close to home I have struggled with travelling long distances to new places and, in particular, with night work.
One of the surveys is monitoring great created newt and wider amphibian populations as part of mitigation schemes on developments. This involves arriving before sunset to set bottle traps, waiting until after sunset to survey for newts by torchlight (as they’re active after dark), then returning early in the morning to empty the bottle traps. This work can only be done in the company of an experienced licence holder who is qualified to handle the newts.
It’s fascinating work and it is a privilege to see these beautiful creatures up close. It’s also a shake-up to my routine, most days get up at 4.30am to do my devotions, meditate, study, and go to the gym or run before cycling to work for 9am, finishing at 5pm, eating, winding down, and being asleep by 8.30pm.
I’ve been lucky to be part of a team who are not only incredibly knowledgeable and experienced, but also supportive and mental health aware. I’ve been able to be open with them about my autism and the anxiety that stems from it from the start. For now, my manager has allowed me to start no earlier than 8am, so that I have time for spirituality and exercise, which are both essential for my mental health, and to do only one night a week.
They have been patient with me and, although I’ve felt like I’ve been slow, looking back, over just a month and a half I have learnt a huge suite of new skills, from assessing habitats and writing species lists on Preliminary Ecological Assessments, wading up rivers looking for otter spraints and prints, investigating buildings for signs of bats, to mastering the routine admin.
When I’ve been tired and shaken and overwhelmed I have walked with Sister Patience and together we have shaped her sanctuary in Creiddylad’s Garden.
IV. I have been patient.
The garden is coming into bloom.
I have found a job where I belong and feel fulfilled.
On work days I am an ecologist and, in my own time, I am Sister Patience.
I’m hoping the two sister strands of my life will one day intertwine to become one and that this job will provide the financial grounds to shape my sanctuary and, perhaps, one day, build the Monastery of Annwn*.
*Whether this is meant to be a physical or spiritual place I don’t yet know…
there will be no rulers and there will be no rule.
All will uphold the virtues of their choosing.
Neither light nor dark will be banished for they form the night sky and the stars – the womb of Old Mother Universe.
Eating, drinking, fasting, will all be allowed for all states of the cauldron must be embraced – empty and full and there will be no divisions between the ones who drink and the ones who stir as this was the root of the original disaster.
There will be no good and there will be no bad.
We will exist in a world before sin existed.
The before that 365 plants come from and art and who we bring to life with our songs.
There will be room for men and women and all between.
It will be accepted that we all are monsters.
The monstrous will be raised on high with the dragons, spiralling, spiralling down, descending into darkness, sleepily drunk on mead.
We will be visible and invisible.
No-one will see that we wear our habits like invisible cloaks as we got about our daily lives.
No-one will see the Monastery of Annwn because it lies beyond doors and walls and no-one will read the forbidden books in our personal libraries
because they lie unwritten on the dark shelves of our souls.
The Sanctuary of Vindos 