Brigid's creation song

St. Brigid's Cloak, the Shannon Academy.

It is Imbolc, that middle place between the winter solstice and spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. We're in that first salvo of the creation principle, awakening after a long sleep. Imbolc is the primary feast of Brigid, goddess of fire and water, with dominion over midwifery, poetry, crafts, brewing, iron-working, and technology, per Judika Illes in "Imbolc: Crafting the Creative Flame," in Taschen's Witchcraft tome.

I lit a candle yesterday, on Brigid Eve. This morning—sun bright, frost still clinging to its edges—I dug through Sean Kane's Wisdom of the Mythtellers and found one of my favourite passages. This is Brigid's song of creation, written by Ella Young as told by Alice Kane: 

Now comes the hour foretold, a god gift-bringing,
A wonder sight.
Is it a star, newborn, and splendid up springing
Out of the night?
Is it a wave from the Fountain of Youth, that is upflinging
A foam of delight?
Is it a great immortal bird that is winging
Hither its flight?

It is a wave, high-crested, melodious, triumphant,
Breaking in light.
It is a star, rose-hearted and joyous,
Risen from night.
it is a flame from the world of the gods, and love runs before it,
A quenchless delight.

Let the wave break, let the star rise,
Let the flame leap.
Ours, if our hearts are wise,
To take and keep.

Brigid sings this song and moves the hearts of the other gods, who quickly recognise it doesn't come from her alone. She describes it as the song of the earth, who dreamt of beauty and longs for it now. Thus inspired, the gods descend to earth—a dark, formless abyss, chaotic and frightening—then begin paving it with beauty, each gifting it with their own pulsating wildfire touch.

When they have finished, the earth is rampant green and blue, clothed in flowers. They commit not to duplicate, there, the things that exist in other places. They decide to stay and collaborate with the earth, helping cultivate a beauty that is hers alone.

Only Brigid opts to leave. Her work done here, she turns her mind to other matters. The gods lace a ribbon of remembrance to her mantle, and off she goes, needfully separating herself from the creation she contributed to.

Every fire

Each morning I wake, put on my rubbery boots, and gather wood and kindling from the shelter in the garden.

At the stove, I clean the ashes out from the previous day.

I make a sandwich of paper, kindling, cardboard, more paper. I light it bottom to top.

In some configurations I know this will go well, but it doesn't always; the fire can be colicky, slow to take.

Every fire is a different fire. Each has its own temperament, its own way of being coaxed into autonomy. I start it off with soft foods, then move on to progressively bigger, harder comestibles. 

It will spend its first hour toddling, needing careful attention—a spare ear or eye forever monitoring its condition, even as I prepare breakfast, stretch, start my computer. By afternoon it will seem more confident, but experience knows this is not the case; left to its own for an hour, it could be dead-cold, not an ember left to revive it.

Every fire is a different fire. My job is to forget the nature of the one that accompanied me yesterday. I spend the day weaving my attention to it, hoping that by nightfall it will be fully its own, raging hot and radiating, dangerous in its certainty.

On making my new phone mine

There's a lot of change happening—shifts backed by years of marinating. In the midst of two big shifts I'm engaged in at the moment, I had my phone stolen a month ago and decided to break it off with Apple. I'd been considering it awhile, the cost of it had started outweighing the value, and a chaotic, stressful situation was the perfect last straw.

So I got a Google Pixel and lost half the data I've accumulated over 13 years—phone numbers, apps, messaging data (iMessage!), any number of things that seemed really important at the time. I spent a weekend in a foetal position and another week trying to understand my new normal, then came out the other side and decided it was time to start adapting the phone to my needs.

I'm very much an Otterbox fan because I drop my phone a lot and have often enjoyed the exercise of throwing it across the room to demonstrate the value of "military-grade" protection. But I'm over that now. Protection for ordinary drops is fine, which means I don't need a case the size of a commando's walkie-talkie. In keeping with that, I also decided against getting a phone clip, which in any case has proven too bulky for the type of gear I carry lately, and utterly impractical for attaching to a bicycle.

I still want to be practical. But it's a time of change, and I'm interested in who I'm changing into and how she manifests herself, especially in terms of styles and textures. These are the things I got:

First, this most delicious leather phone case from Bellroy with a secret orange interior that I have already forgotten about and which has consequently delighted me all over again. It is delicious to touch and yields perfect grip.

Second, this fully-rotatable ring and stand from Burga which is pleasingly smooth and niftily associates with my tropical leopard water bottle—an acquisition that followed the loss of my black Zojirushi bottle, which vanished as I was sliding off a cliff face last year.

I like this—these leaping-out greens and oranges that mark such delectable contrast to the monochrome accessories I have favoured most of my adult and adolescent life. It's a new language, muted but playful. It leaves room for other kinds of exclamations, new ways of being.

None of this is very important but I wanted to put it somewhere because it makes me happy. I also like how these colours interact with others in my life: The orange metal pen sitting beside my phone at this moment, the black Merci wristwatch with the subtle red details. Why have I spent so much of my life refusing my eyes this lush indulgence?

On heroes

There's a convention in the very old oral stories where a prophecy is given, but its completion relies entirely on the central person not knowing about it.

This is a crucial distinction, completely at odds with the convention that you, the Hero, are aware of and thus driven by your destiny. Knowing or believing you're the Hero is a burden for you and others.

In the older tales, there aren't any side characters, not really; the whole universe conspires to bring the prophecy to fruition. Even your mistakes are critical. Sometimes you have to die. Sometimes you resurrect, unable to be the person you were before. But you need everybody. You are part of a larger story that isn't really about you at all.

A story where a central character is infused by their own heroism enables the hero to use (and treat) everyone around them as collateral. The hero is not only protected and supported but enabled, including by the audience. Their belief in their own story—that they act in the service of a Greater Good—ultimately corrodes the very qualities that made them heroic, because there is no place for a greater good—for others—to flourish.

Somewhere along the way, the story came to be about them alone.

What is your kiwi?

Credit.

A few years ago I had lunch with a former intern who was in town and wanted to catch up. He told me a story of a man who had never eaten a kiwi.

"It's not a very interesting story," he said. "His parents didn't like kiwis so he never had them as a child. Only when he was older, and people started saying, 'you've never had a kiwi?', did he realise it was a weird thing. But he decided to make it a choice. He still hasn't eaten a kiwi."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because he thought, one day when life gets too dull or repetitive, or he feels depressed, he will know there is still something new to look forward to. All he has to do is go downstairs to the nearest shop and buy a kiwi." He paused heavily on that ending and leaned over our empty plates. "Angela. Do you have a kiwi?"

I can't remember how I answered. I like the idea of having some small, easily-accessible thing that remains to be experienced, a hedge against the everyday travails that can make life feel Sisyphean. In moments I've considered the question since, I mostly think about big kiwis: Moving to Paris. Half-moving to Italy. Learning to forge and tend fires. Learning to cook. That one time when, lonely in my new Paris life, so long ago, I took a four-hour improv class.

But the point of the story is that a kiwi isn't a big thing. It's a tiny thing that reinfuses a tiny dose of magic into life, enough to keep going, to hope again. I went to the Italian bookshop in Paris and practiced Italian with the shopkeeper, which made me nervous. I let Demo talk me into buying butter cookie-scented candles. I ate dark chocolate with octopus on top. I conducted that Covid experiment where I stayed up as late as I wanted, and slept when I wanted, and ended up living on a reverse schedule to everyone else: Breakfast became dinner, sunrise my sunsets.

The general vibe on the social networks right now is that people are tired of hoping for a "better" 2023 than the 2022 we got. I think of something a client said, months ago: Nobody believes anymore that life will be better tomorrow than it is today. Nobody thinks anymore that their children will do better than they did. 

Hope is being crushed, at a growing pace, under the burden of capital.

What a mindset to find oneself in, though. Where does one go from there? I've already done the rage against the machine, shuttled through the abject desolation that follows. There's no solace there. There is no there there. As King Solomon once said: "Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!"

It occurred to me, the other day, what my kiwi actually is. I've been fooling around with it for the last few years, and it has never stopped restoring my sense of wonder. 

My kiwi is making weird choices. Big, small. Doesn't matter.

When you're finally ready to cede to chaos, it merits remembering that chaos yields new cosmos. This is the lesson of trickster gods, and, oddly enough, kiwis: The fruit is thus named because it resembles the furry egg of the kiwi bird. It is a something that looks like something else—deceptive, but not shatteringly so. (Unless you're a kiwi bird, I suppose.)

Social conventions are collapsing. All the things we didn't dare do, for fear of punishment or opprobrium? Fuck it. Make the weird choice you didn't think was allowed. Go on vacation alone. Do the wacky masters degree. Run away from all the war news and take a salsa class. Quit your job and live on unemployment awhile. Take up a weird hobby that has zero viable hope for becoming a "career." Fuck careers. Learn High Valerian—or better yet, a real language like Tagalog—and speak it to strangers.

Call reality's bluff. Test the elasticity of your possible, your normal.

We spend so much time chasing rewards and avoiding punishment. Half of the rewards and punishments don't come to fruition. I suspect the worst thing we can do in this time is dig our heels into the old, dying promises and threats our system has made to sustain itself, and find ourselves alone holding an empty bag in the end.

Norbert Wiener once observed that the more one learns about the universe, the more one realises that life was an improbable gift, utterly squandered when you measure it by the arbitrary benchmarks of civilisation. The sum of this gift cannot simply be spent desperately pursuing capital or some golden standard of success. We need more.

Make weird choices. My weird choices have done more for me, and borne more beautiful fruit, than my careful plans. Sometimes the outcomes have sucked, but that was less than 5% of the time, and 0% were devastating. It has all been a good exercise in staying open, curious and childlike; and learning the many nuanced lessons that love still has to teach me.

To return to the topic of kiwis, though, here's a weird choice I made about them specifically once, when I felt too lazy to peel one. I bit straight into the skin. It wasn't fibrous or unpleasant; improbably, the skin is totally edible. Practically melts in your mouth. Because of this weird and vaguely antisocial choice, I will now spend the rest of my life knowing that peeling a kiwi is a luxury I can indulge in or not. 

It doesn't take a massive weird choice to make your life richer.

Chaos makes new cosmos. If you don't happen to like the one you find yourself in, another awaits around the corner of your next decision.

Fitful hibernation

I'm on a complicated journey. It's entangled in my feelings about capital and exploitation, and a newfound fear about whether I can continue to sustain myself—to make money, as if from air—as I've done for almost two decades.

I've changed, but the world has also changed.

This past month or so in Paris energised me, as it always does, a wolf mother feeding a prodigal cub. I activated myself for work in ways I haven't in two years. I began new projects, started turning the wheels on a different kind of life that will cost more and demand more of me. I barely slept. 

In those weeks, which slid by like water—and despite the challenges, which were numerous and insane—everything seemed possible. I seemed possible.

But now I'm back in Italy. However long I run the fire—and I've become so good at igniting it, nurturing it, feeding it and cleaning it—upstairs it remains cold as a marble tomb under night air. I can see my breath, even wrapped under covers. It is hard to crawl out of bed, to initiate the day. It is hard to do anything but tend fire.

My mobility, of course, is also not what it is in Paris. As long as I don't have a car here, I'm limited. The nights are longer, solstice having passed. I didn't mark it, but watched the sky go darker earlier. I spend the nights on the phone with banks, trying to sort international transfers, paving the way for new things.

We are in the lee of holiday time. Everything grinds to a halt; I shouldn't fret, that's what this time is for. It's Hekate's time, Crone time: A moment reflected in our days by the auspice of night, in our months through menstruation, and in the year with winter. Like all animals, we slow and recuperate energies for waking time, waking season. Sugar and water will once again rush up the veins of trees.

When I walk across the garden for firewood, I become aware of the stillness of the plants, and of the careful coverings Demo's father placed over the crops and the external faucets. The chickens no longer squawk. Everything is sleeping. Braced against the cold, I do my yoga—stilling my racing heart, trying to locate quiet as I listen to my body. Where are we aching, where is it tight? I refilled my private apothecary, combining oils and plants for muscular pain, nail fungi, lip balm, mouthwash, moisturiser. 

Constant movement but still I feel that anxiety, that all the energy I whipped up in Paris will somehow snuff out beyond reach and beyond reignition. That the hope and possibility I felt were contextual and temporary and now I'm back to stillness, waiting for a new life to begin while uncertain what to chase, or whether to chase.

I oscillate between offering services to people and wondering if there is anything, really, I can or want to offer. In a matter of days I've again lost my sense of fit. I drink peppermint tea mixed with cacao, filling my body with familiarity and comfort. I make porridges, alternating between salty and sweet.

In the night I'm fed by offerings: Thick stews Demo prepared, cool bean-based mixes his father set on the doorstep, one morning when I hadn't yet found the courage to face the chill beyond the sheets. My life here is quiet and almost maddeningly calm, and I think again about how, during our time together in Paris, Demo said it was hard to sleep because my relationship to time is different, I vibrate with stress, it rolls off my skin and permeates space. He's contemplating changes, too, to ease my back and forth swinging.

Eventually I will adjust, like always. I need to find a way to make peace with these dynamics and move forward regardless of where I am, locating equilibrium between these two selves, which can no doubt serve whatever I decide to do in their own way.

"What's happened with your PhD?" my Italian instructor asked pointedly.

"Nothing," I answered. "It's too expensive and I can't take it on right now."

He frowned. We talked a bit about where I could look in France. "France would be easier, and cheaper," he said. I told him about my fear of complex writing in French, even after all these years; he said he wrote his PhD in French while still learning it. "Some things I would say better today, other things not," he said. Then he shared his own anxiety: Next year he'll apply for a fascinating programme in California, one that excites even me, and he worries for his English.

I laughed. "I can help with that," I offered, and he smiled. I know he won't take me up on it but I also know he's glad that card is there. We like each other and share affinities. That I found an Italian instructor as taken by mythology as I am doesn't feel accidental.

I'm going to read, and do some handwriting—things I haven't done in weeks, so taken was I by the tides of Paris and what I've been needing to do there. The fire has finally caught, so I can step away for awhile. It wouldn't be right to say I don't dare to hope; rather, I don't have to hope. Instead I have to wait, slow down and reflect. I will need this rest for what's to come, whatever it is.

I think of the woman who married a bear. It burst into her tent, spiriting her away, locking her in his cave just in time for hibernation. Beside him, she falls into deep slumber; sometimes, in that time out of time, she wakes in the dark, her tummy a sharp hollow, and pokes him sharply. He groans and gives her his paw, from which she licks thick tears of oil. Just enough nourishment to fall back into sleep until spring, when she wakes as his wife.