Last night I got home from a party full of friends and kids, the first outdoor bbq of the year. (It has been over 60 degrees out this week, and sunny. In April!! Which makes Seattleites lose our minds.) I got home, read “Where the Sidewalk Ends” with Forest and tucked him in and drew a bath. (Love that phrase. Where does it come from?) Drew a bath and lit the candles and turned out the lights and got in to the steaming water with my copy of The Mabinogian Tetralogy.
California Camp is drawing close and also, the things that are happening in my life are hard to write about now. I have amazing new work, wonderful love, and my practice of radical honesty in this blog feels complicated again. The stakes have gotten higher. I have scared myself silent. I make excuses for not telling my own story.
But myth always helps me to enter the truth I’m living. And I love this myth so much. Rhiannon feels like the woman I am trying to be, a woman who will be a voice for the goddess in a sometime crude and cruel world, and also bravely in love, even as she remains as sovereign and true to herself as she can.
Maybe that’s part of the power of these enduring stories, that we can all see ourselves in them…
But no. I think it really is all about me.
So I will tell a little of Her story, and a little of mine, and find my way through this.
Last night in the tub, I read the next bit. Our hero Pwyll has taken up the challenge offered by the corrupt druid, who I’d really like to call a priest, because he is part of a fucked up institution, not a tribe of tree mystics. Maybe I’ll call him the High Holy Druidtiff… He explains why he’s trying to get rid of the Goddess in the tradition. His underling asks “What is to come?” And he says,
“A day when men will fly higher than birds, when they will fare deeper undersea than the fish. When the lightning shall be shut in little boxes and serve them like a slave. And all these wonders will be worked by the hands and wits of men. Woman – she who only receives our seed and carries it while it shapes itself in her darkness – how can she then claim to be a creator? The fields we tread shall be ours as, as are the shoes that are also beneath our feet – no longer a holy trust, no longer Her holy flesh, the Breast of the Mother whose Milk is our Bread.
Creepy right? Add a dumptruck full of personal arrogance and take away the poetry and you’ve got Donald Trump.
The Druidtiff finishes his rant by saying “We rulers talk much of freedom, but in the name of freedom, we must destroy freedom. Questions can be more dangerous than swords.”
Tell the truth. Tell the truth. Rhiannon, help me tell the truth.