The Journey Begins

[Please remem­ber my dis­claimers and rules if you’d like to engage this post here or in any of my spaces.]

About two and a half years ago (June of 2020), The Mor­ri­g­an called me. 

This is not a sen­tence I write light­ly. It is a sen­tence that has tak­en me every moment of those two and a half years to tru­ly under­stand (not that I TRULY under­stand even now), accept, and be able to say with­out melt­ing into a pud­dle of my own skep­ti­cism. It is one thing to have an open mind to the world that has renamed many known and under­stood phys­i­o­log­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na and giv­en them super­nat­ur­al expla­na­tions (and to be open to the pos­si­bil­i­ty that we may yet mea­sur­ably dis­cov­er the rea­son for a few of the phe­nom­e­na that cur­rent­ly exist with­in para­science). It is some­thing else alto­geth­er to believe that a pre­his­toric Irish deity of war and death has tak­en a per­son­al inter­est in an athe­ist liv­ing on the west coast of North Amer­i­ca at the height of an iso­lat­ing pan­dem­ic.

These days I work with Her. I train in mar­tial arts and with weapons. I work out. I do shad­ow work into the deep­est and most murky parts of my psy­che. I study the lore that exists (and try to sep­a­rate Her ancient iden­ti­ty from her mod­ern neo­pa­gan and Wic­can appro­pri­a­tion so pop­u­lar in alter­na­tive cir­cles… to say noth­ing of Her delib­er­ate mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion by Chris­tian­i­ty as “evil” or wicked). I strug­gle for social jus­tice. I make offer­ings. I have an altar in my room. I speak of Her pres­ence in my life with­out para­graphs of dis­claimers about how I don’t know for sure what is “real­ly real­ly REALLY” hap­pen­ing or that I know I might be some­how… still… in some way… talk­ing to myself. I do dai­ly devotionals—some as sim­ple as drink­ing a suf­fi­cient amount of water, oth­ers as dif­fi­cult (for me) as hold­ing a reg­i­men of med­i­ta­tion. Work­ing with a deity in the pagan sense is not exact­ly “wor­ship” in a way that a more main­stream (par­tic­u­lar­ly a monothe­is­tic) reli­gion might rec­og­nize, but The Mor­ri­g­an is an intense and per­va­sive influ­ence with­in my life. I do things for Her, and in return, She does things for me. This arrange­ment has served me well enough to agree to a life­time of ser­vice.

I need you to under­stand some things about me. In June of 2020, I would have iden­ti­fied myself as an athe­ist. I wrote arti­cles to help launch a group of athe­ist par­ent blog­gers. You don’t have to look around very far in my own writ­ing to find my high­ly skep­ti­cal respons­es to reli­gious dill­holes telling me I’m damned and shit. The entire­ty of my “woo” prac­tices involved things I could com­fort­ably explain in skep­ti­cal lan­guage. (I use this charm for men­tal focus, and med­i­tate for the psy­cho­log­i­cal ben­e­fits.) I was­n’t at ALL famil­iar with the Irish pan­theon, hav­ing grown up an athe­ist in the U.S., and I’d nev­er EVER heard of The Mor­ri­g­an. (I’d heard that name in var­i­ous media ref­er­ences, but it was applied to a fight­ing game suc­cubus or from Lost Girl or some­thing.) I was bare­ly alter­na­tive beyond what mapped eas­i­ly over a more per­son­al spir­i­tu­al quest for inner peace, most­ly a skep­tic when it came to extra­or­di­nary claims, respectful—but high­ly dubious—of reli­gion, in no way pagan or poly­the­ist, unaware of Irish mythol­o­gy, and com­plete­ly igno­rant of a spe­cif­ic deity called The Mor­ri­g­an.

Then the dreams started—night after night after night. Some­times they were night­mar­ish, and I woke, with my hands in a vise grip around sweat-soaked sheets. The sense of being hunt­ed (or haunt­ed?) filled my nights. The inex­plic­a­ble and vivid expe­ri­ences that became increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to explain away as some­how not actu­al­ly super­nat­ur­al. The shifts in my phys­i­cal body. The warn­ings of dan­ger that kept me from harm, and at least a cou­ple of times, from prob­a­bly dying. And the crows. A name echoed in my head (“Anu”) and some­times on my lips as I woke up, and every day I scoured the inter­net try­ing to make sense of it all.

But… I’m get­ting ahead of myself. There’s a whole nar­ra­tive here, and if being called by The Mor­ri­g­an is the begin­ning, there is at the very least an open­ing scene. The first thing that hap­pened was a death in my social cir­cles that changed the way I see and inter­act with the world. I had a spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing, and if you are inclined to believe such things, I had a mag­i­cal one as well. And to REALLY tell this sto­ry, I have to go all the way back to 2015 to tell you a pro­logue: a per­son­al and vul­ner­a­ble pro­logue about addic­tion to ADHD meds.

I’m start­ing to write down this jour­ney now, but I’m already years into it, and there’s a lot of ground to cov­er to catch up to the present. There will be many posts in this saga; this is only the intro­duc­tion. 

Yes­ter­day, on the last day of the (sol­stice-to-sol­stice) year—in the form of a phone call that my CT scan looked absolute­ly wonderful—my year of work with The Mor­ri­g­an to sim­ply sur­vive can­cer end­ed, and the new shape of my work and ser­vice began. I must train hard­er. I must work out more. I must be bet­ter about my devo­tion­als. I must renew my fight for body auton­o­my and social jus­tice. But per­haps most impor­tant­ly, I am to tell my sto­ry. To those who believe and those who don’t. 

So here we go…

Next: Death and Awak­en­ing

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