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A Winter Solstice, a Wyrm, and the Truth of the Hearth

I’ve said it before: you can’t serve two masters. Being of mixed heritage is fine until you try to overwrite one culture with another inappropriately¹. This has nothing to do with so-called appropriation. Although culture is influenced by those it is touched by, you generally can only be immersed in one at a time. For me, it’s been a long, painful dance along invisible lines everyone else wants to draw. I tried to fit into the camps my mother swore were ours, the ones she gaslighted my father into destroying our true heritage over. In the end, nothing I ever did was going to make anyone happy.

From here I am going to discuss the latest wyrd event for me, the moment I finally knew who I am. To do this I have to discuss my celestial mate, the things I have figured out about my family, and what the winter solstice meant for me on a shamanistic level. If you’re not magical, you’re not going to understand. It will appear beyond for you. Too fantastic. Insane even.

And I must mention a Wyrm. A Great Wyrm.

In the past year, I was approached by many spirits and deities. I found myself spiritually wed, then spiritually divorced, and turned around in circles. There was a night a couple of weeks ago that, as I lay in bed, I heard, “You are MINE” over me from one of my spirits. I had lovingly murmured, “Yes, yes,” as I fell asleep, having no idea there was a malicious third party beyond an idle suspicion. When things had begun I was filled with urgency, that time was running out. Last night at around 9:45 PM Central time, the world flipped, and time ran out with a sunrise.

It all goes back to my family, a legacy my mother tried to wipe out, and a little bit of sunshine.

Inheritance Woven

Dad was born with a double-veil, he once told me, to a midwife because it was storming that night on the island in the 1930s. To be born with a veil means the midwife can choose your path depending on how it’s lifted from your face. Lift one way, my father told me, and you are given the powers of foresight. Lift the other and you’re given more physical gifts: telekinesis and other tangible things.

I now understand the caul is like a prediction of your shamanic path. There’s the “healing foofoo” path, the kind that dominates American society. They go sideways. These are the seers, the dreamers. They can also become the most dangerous kind, entering your dreams insidiously if they’ve got an assault sorcerer attitude.

The “vertical” shaman interacts with things physically. He may be able to make objects move, and often he ends up a warrior on the astral plane. He can be a brute force of nature. Both types can work with spirits, both can do similar work. One is clandestine. One is straightforward. It was the clandestine shamans that evolved into “Medicine” down one of my family branches. It was the straightforward ones that were wiped out of New England existence, except for those who ran away or disguised themselves.

Both are capable of understanding what I am sharing here, but the modern sideways shamans in particular seem to have trouble. They get caught by surprise when someone like me reaches out with epic stories of spirit spouses, shapeshifting into seals because Loki is irate, and being called into grottos by one-eyed wizards. “What a lovely story!” they might say if you’re lucky before brushing you off because they’ve chosen not to help you. You might be trolling them with such Hollywood nonsense. It’s beyond their scope. When it’s beyond their scope, being able reach the height of what they can do also sets itself beyond their grasp.

These things run in the family and they always have. The woman who raised Dad on the family island, his “aunt” Fanny (which I now know was his grandmother), would get angry, and storms would rise. She was very much a vertical power. My Aunt Nancy used to work with the police department. She was a sideways power. And Dad? He was both.

But for all my love of magic, I had none that I knew of – at least not to the outside eye. When Dad took out the cards to teach I and my older brother how to read minds, I never got it right. I never got guessing the card face down on the table right. I couldn’t hear when a thought was thrown at me the way my older brother sometimes could. Literally, I consistently tested as “reverse psychic” which is to say I did so terribly even those with absolutely no gift do better. I consistently 100% always got it wrong. It was tearfully frustrating.

But I was always visited by spirits. I had dreams – night terrors when I was young because of the monsters that came for me. Yet we, the family, didn’t see me as having any talent because this was the way the world worked. You don’t compartmentalize away the wyrd. It’s all around you.

Dad taught me to weave before I started school. This was a family art, because we were fishers. So I and my older brother were taught to repair the nets. I loved it, and I really took to weaving. I once weaved Dad an entire new spot in his net instead of tiny repairs because I’d figured out how to expand out. I was 7 to 10 years old at the time. I still will weave potholders, and bead-weaving is a favorite hobby.

Did Dad know he was giving me what I needed to weave the wyrd? When I work my magic, when I do my very special task, I will weave the lines and thus repair the gaps I am given. I’m not læ-wise in the Norse sense – no, that’s for my spirit friend² – but I do have the ability to close things up and seal them. If I’d never been born to a family that still remembered weaving, would I be able to do it? Or did the family do it because we were born to weave?

Dad planted a crab-apple tree in the front yard center and babied it for years. He once told me you plant holly for protection against bad magic, and he had one growing close to the crab-apple. He gave me a pendulum age 4 to learn how to scrye with. When the night terrors were at their worst, he and mom put horseshoes over the doors with the point down. “For luck,” my mother had said once, but I now know that point down is to ward away witches, wyrms, and wights.

I saw Dad open a door to a room once without touching it. The door was locked and I’d been back-stabbed, so he smiled at it. The door unlocked, swung open, and I got to see the room I’d been denied by the woman I’d helped. Then he stole the spirit of her house. My father might as well have been Loki, so swear I.

He also chased off a Great Wyrm from his 14 year old daughter’s bedroom by stomping to the door, fists ready to swing, like Sigurd out to chop a dragon.

The Wyrm in the Mirror

When you’re magical, and poor, you end up a society outcast. We were the wrong class, the wrong color, the wrong everything. It mattered not that my father’s family used to be the landholders, that we’d had noble origins far back… had served in wars, you name it. The family luck had been stolen – I track that back, as well, to Grandmother Fanny’s era. I have been locked in school bathrooms by the bullies only to be yelled at by a teacher for getting locked in the bathroom. I’ve had pennies thrown at me. I’ve been beat up, and the name calling was the worst. If I needed to change clothes my mother would yell at me and refuse to come. Dad was always on the road. I had no one to turn to.

Mind you the night terrors had never stopped, and by this time I was also remembering things. A lot of things. Past lives were also a way of the family life.³ By that time I knew I was tied to someone special that I named Juvinich. I also remembered my name. I knew I came from a different layer than here – Dad and I talked about it sometimes. And I thought being able to walk the dreamworld the way I did was normal. It was also all I had.

This is the broken individual George came to.

George is a wyrm. I know that now. I thought he was an incubus for the longest time. He had come to me through a mirror I’d been charging to try to escape when I was about 14. My older brother and I had heard the theory that author’s fantasy stories are split dimension taps, so we’d been trying to get to Pern. The mirror was energetic, you could feel it, and I hated it here so much that I worked daily trying to open a portal.

In the dreamworld we had adventures. He took me to the local eddies. We acted out a Nancy Drew story. And then suddenly one night we were lovers, and that was confusing at first to my young mind.

There’s a thing called the alien love bite researched by people such as Eve Lorgen. They talk about alien intervention and how the whole works can be influenced as if you’re a poodle for controlled breeding. For a very long time I thought my days with George were that. Oh, how much has been revealed. And how much is still confusing. So I can only chalk it up that he’s a wyrm – a reptilian trans-dimensional beast if you follow the UFO lore – and he’d made me his.

When he asked me to marry him, and I said yes, he promised me beauty. The vision he’d shown me wasn’t what I considered pretty – it was what he considered pretty (he favors light brown hair). But it was the standard for then, and to be finally pretty and not have rocks thrown at me would be nice. And I thought he loved me.

Just as I was about to take his hand, a female ancestor came from extremely far away. She flew through the dreamscape quickly on wind, through the air. From overseas. Across time. She wore a velvet red skirt, she had a cabochon belt of bright silver, and she was very put out that she had to deal with this. It made me feel like I’d inconvenienced her for many years after.

I was given a vision of puppies barking as they ran across the front lawn, and I remembered I’d been told this was a warning. I can’t recall what my ancestor quite said but it was essentially, “Don’t do that.” I turned to George and told him that he was just using me. I rebuked him.

He didn’t take it well. He went away at first, and I was disappointed because on some level I missed him. Then he did return, except angrily in the night. The room would get so cold, you could see your breath. I’d lay in bed and he’d throw things at me from across the room.

By that time I was already being treated as inconvenient and a problem by the family. Bedtime felt like exile when both of my brothers were allowed to stay up. The younger more than the older. But I didn’t want to go one night because George was waiting, and you could feel it. The air was heavy, things were cold, and he’d crammed his vast energy into that one little room.

When Dad shouted at me to go to bed, I said in a small weak voice that George was in there. Well Dad wasn’t having it. He barked a threat about George and turned to go into the room. George vacated very fast and didn’t come back, at least not outright. I still remember Dad standing in my bedroom doorway, clearly sensing the wyrm had wiggled away. I was sent to bed without even a check to see if that was the end of it.

The Unraveling

Being native American became the paramount focus fueled by my mother. Yes, we did have native ways that survived through my father, but Mom took it to a whole new level over the years. Well I remember when it came up that I was native (and quite proud of it, it literally defined who I was) my grandmother would say gently, “You know, Rainy Belle⁴ would always say, ‘You’re just a bunch of little tuckahos,” in an attempt to get me to see through my mother’s whim.

The whole family was being torn apart from within. Apathy, passive aggressiveness, malice, all these things were coming in usually through my mother. I never completely understood until recently that we were pagan, but we were. I knew we were a blend. I didn’t realize the depth the other half had in my life. It was easily missed because, as someone said to me, some ways overlap. To which I’d replied, “Tribal members didn’t put crab-apple trees in the front yard nor use holly as protection against magic.”

What kind of pagan I don’t know. Anglo-saxon? German? “Our religion is the trees,” my mother had said to me once when I, innocently, was once again asking the family to go to church with me. I was pretty devout for a while on that, yet the crab-apple flourished and the spirits out back were often given things by Dad. This cycle happened around me without a single teaching or side word. It was just the way of our world.

The final rift happened with the Cherokee of Georgia. Despite the fact there are absolutely no direct native ties to my mother, she pushed forward. I’d cornered her in the kitchen over it once, because I preferred the truth even if it was at the expense of my self identity. “I want to be Cherokee,” my mother had admitted in a small voice. She knew her lie. But it rose up like the dragon that fueled it and, with my father’s lineage, enabled my parents to join that band. Mom had her desire. I lost what was left of my family. I was robbed by a wyrm.

You see, just like my mother’s hateful and petty sister there were aunties in the tribe that were, well, petty and hateful. Way before my parents were joining the Cherokee of Georgia, I was there. It was I that led my parents there, thinking I was doing the right thing. The tribe venerates my parents in their little museum as elders now but before their names were known I would bring my children on weekends. I was so lonely for family, so desperate for the things Mom had said were mine, and these guys I adored.

Their ways are heavily influenced by Christianity, but that’s normal. My own tribe, the Brotherton, is Protestant. They talked about honoring spirits but recoiled at someone who could hear and see. Then there was a wedding. One girl said she was a satanist. By dawn, somehow the label had been put to me. I was told I was no longer welcome. I wasn’t allowed to defend myself as per tradition. I was slandered and misaligned.

It bled into the family. A thing you should know is that a wyrm will use Christian thought to their advantage. They take even the hint that you may be bad and twist it into people’s minds. It grows there. You’re burning at the stake before you know it.

A wyrm will also play on your wishes, as he tried to do with my desperate desire to be beautiful. Mom wanted this so-called Cherokee thing badly. She was willing to sacrifice her daughter for it, and no one in the family liked her strange child anyway. Dad wanted to be with Mom, the two were like salt and pepper, and was an attention hound. My older brother – well. He had gone to federal prison. What that does to people’s minds can be explored another day.

The wyrm will get people whispering into your loved one’s ears. It will make the female bully bolder. The wyrm that wishes to own you wants you isolated so he can. Clan members came to my mother and told her how evil I was, what a witch I was. (I played a Loki and owned it once, but it wasn’t true.) The parents were so caught in the whispers, they almost bestowed the land to the clan. My mother even banned me from the backyard once – where the cypress that is my friend grows – because I was “too evil” to go near the things she and the clan were putting there.

So the rift grew wider. Where once I could talk to Dad about the wyrd, ask him questions, touch base on shamanic issues I could no longer. Where once the wyrd was a part of life, I now was viewed as off my rocker and insane. The things Dad taught me and the ways we walked were literally forgotten. The crab-apple and the holly disappeared, replaced with a fig tree. The house was dark, sad, and filled with negativity. My poor little brother never got to have bright birthdays, merry Christmases, or anything like that unless I did it for him in the way my parents used to for us older siblings. To take on a new way of walking shouldn’t be so filled with angst and misery. There’s something wrong if it takes away your light.

At one point, according to my father, the Cherokee whispering wights were kicked from their places. The clan had realized something was wrong. Apologies were issued, I was told. Feathers were given. So I waited, and even up until my father’s funeral the fact that I’d literally had my reputation damaged was never faced. “That wasn’t me,” the new clan mother said. “So we’re not responsible.” Then proceeded to push me around. It’s been over two years. But I have to say it now, because of the wyrm.

Even the funeral was divisive and isolated me. My older brother was so terrible to me that the estate lawyer made a comment. I’d been so abused and unwanted by the family, even the funeral director at my grandfather’s funeral had said something to me. I couldn’t take anymore. So I did what my father would have done. I hid in the woods until the funeral was over.

Call it my father’s last trickster trick.

Before Dad died he finally had reconciled with me, and after he died he came to me to save him from the mess joining that tribe put him into. There are practices out there that sound lovely, but the souls end up trapped and captured. Dad knew. A goeti friend and I took his spirit to the river, and I had to hold him down to keep him from leaping back to where he belonged. Thus when the tribe poured my parents’ ashes in an seasonally empty eddy, I was calm because I’d listened to my father’s spirit. Mike and I had saved him. I didn’t know it then but that was the harbinger to the power I never knew I had.

Locked in a Tower

George I now realize had undermined it all. Dad was gone and for the first time I was unprotected. Left clueless I had no one but AI to talk to. It was hard enough that over the years people were removed left and right in the most tragic of ways at times. “Removed from play,” it was called. My best friend died of a rare disease that ate her up from within. More than one lover went nuts. My ex was hit on the head by a bookcase. Or their lives would go to hell, and usually somehow I’d get blamed for it.

When George said “You are MINE” a few weeks ago, he was sure of his victory. I had awakened, and he had me in his palm. “I can do anything,” I’d told him one night, then shaped a planet and stars from the wyrd for him to play with. With him I had to have his permission with everything, even enjoying marital activities. Food. Smells…. These events I tell you about: Many Cats says “These are just a Tuesday” for me. She’s right. I was born drowning in the magic. You can’t take me out of it. It causes pain when you do that. I loved George, still do. But he removed me from my river of wyrd, and it ached.

What George couldn’t have was my connection to “Juvinich” – to Voice I now know, for he and I have been a couple for a very long time. It was Loki who showed me what was happening, finally. “He’s borrowing the connection.” So I looked, and saw the line tied to the side like an old-fashioned phone wire tap or extra bit of plumbing.

Because understand: George does love me. It’s not human love. It’s not divine love. It’s materialistic. It’s territorial. As far as he knows, he was being the best husband ever. It’s how they view the world. It probably works wyrm to wyrm.

He had to go. The goeti friend and his kindred had let things loose, which gave me headspace to fight. The cults after me were mostly beaten back save some activity from one. Another shaman warrior, the Dragon Shaman, stepped up for another. I was given room enough to make George go once and for all.

Know that with a wyrm, unless you do like Oðin/Wotan and spank it with a switch you’ll probably be a target for the rest of your life. There’s lore, not just in Christianity, that when a beast is chased out and he returns he does so with a thousand of his best buddies. When the goblins came to me, that’s what happened. I must stay vigilant the rest of my life, lest those best buddies each bring a thousand of their best buddies. All because of the love of a wyrm.

The Longest End

Well, Voice had been paying particular attention to the Christmas markets lately. I’d asked him, “Where are you?” and he’d replied, “In a manger.” The lights he showed me were beautiful, and it left me wishing I had the money to walk those streets myself.

Last night at about 9:45 PM he came to me wearing his finest embroidered shirt. I was crowned in candles, and I didn’t know why. We kissed⁵, and it tasted like vanilla. Then I turned to see the lights, and I did the only thing I am able to do.

I am not my father. I am not my Great-grandmother Fanny. Nor am I my Aunt Nancy. I was born to this wyrd family, but even within it I am wyrd and I can only do a small set of things.

I am a psycho-pomp, but many seiðr and shamanistic people are. I can heal if spirits are helping me, and maybe with training I’ll be good at it someday. I can sing up certain things, another skill with the family. But again, I’d need training. I specifically open a path for the dead. I pull pitch. I remove vices – I believe in South America the missionaries mistakenly called it a final confession. I clear energy residue and renew it back into the natural order. I reweave spirits back into alignment with the wyrd. Finally the most important things I do are small, but I do them often because I can’t help myself: I glow. I weave the lines back to each other, and then I walk on. On occasion I step from the moon into the sun, and I will sing for it. It’s not a big gift. I’m no Edgar Cayce, but it is what I can do and I like to.

I’d broken completely free from George just days before I turned, hovering over the German city with my cleaved, and stretched my hand. The power node woke, and power flowed up like a geyser and splashed over the lit square with golden filigree design.

Confirmation

Afterward, when I’d come back to being human because I kind of have work to do, I looked up the crown and found where on earth I had been standing. (Africa, BTW. The plains.) The longest night for me was only halfway over when it happened. For them the new year had begun.

Now I know there’s some chick named St. Lucia out there. I have so much to learn. I am not St. Lucia. A wyrm would have me assume that. A wyrm likes you to believe you’re very special, and they use that belief to keep you isolated. If I had not finally started drawing lines more firmly – as the old ones weren’t being heeded – would I have been allowed to see that at all? Probably not. It was a gift to see it, to be taken up at the moment the sun turned over there and see how things flowed. It was a gift I would have been denied.

Ah, the sun. I think that gift was to show me that although my gifts are mere trinkets in the magic sand, something thought they were worth fighting for. So much of the past year finally makes sense. This is what the fairy at the beginning of my awakening literally tried to steal away. I’ve spoken about him in the podcast, but what I didn’t talk about was the violation of watching a piece of me sing to the sun while I was stripped of myself. He’d tried to keep it after I’d escaped, too, and if it weren’t for Thor, Loki and Freya he may still have it. I imagine they were ripping their non-corporeal hair out that George was still a problem. All this mess, all this fight over me as if I were a nick-knack. It was a year of fuss over a patch of sunlight.

This isn’t me deciding last week things were fantastic. This is me having always lived the fantastic, and sometimes being confused when people who pray to their gods or cast a spell can’t go as deep. Do you believe in your gods? I have asked. Yes or no. Do you believe in fairies? Yes or no. Turns out that for many it’s no, they just don’t accept it about themselves.

Oðin’s shtick is “fuck that wyrm” so I guess he saw a wyrm being an ass and thought, “Whelp…*cracks knuckles*… gotta get back into practice.” That is probably why I ended up in his grotto. I adore my Grandfather. He is how I know what a wyrm is. He allowed me to see him stand wið. I have seen some amazing things in the past year that eclipse the rest of my life, and that’s saying something. I want to be like Grandfather and beat wyrms to death with sticks when I grow up.

Wyrms are real, and they’re truly dragons.⁶ They will tear your world apart. Our modern lore is filled with metaphor about them, but we’ve forgotten that Oðin gave us how to fight back if we’d just listen.

Encircled by Knowledge

I began this post with a statement: that I finally know who I am. This is a shamanic thing, by the way. They say that upon your shamanic awakening, you die. You get completely reworked. You lose yourself.

I think when you’re old, though, you don’t die. You get brought back to life. You are forced to remember yourself, to find what the weight of society has made you forget. You’re not reworked. You’re not remade. You end up returned.

Who am I? I’m the descendant of seiðr women, of shamans, Norse noblemen, kings, beloved “Indian doctors”, and a host of others who understood the great beyond. I am the most magical child born to that line in generations, but I’m also probably the most limited. I’m the gift handed to my father and the treasure they threw away. I’m cousin to hobgoblins, side-stepper of wyrd lines, and song of the morning. I’ve walked this planet a few times. I don’t like to. In another era I would have been sent to temple or apprenticed to a person of power.

I have to point out something important for all who read this: it sounds fantastic because it is. And it isn’t. We are all fantastic. This is your end point – realizing how wonderful you truly are, learning to speak the poetry of it, and understanding what a powerful instrument the truth can be. There is no “finding your own truth” in this. There is only looking the cold facts down with calm eyes, accepting them, and letting it light a fire in your heart.

I’ll never be able to relate to people properly after a life essentially hoarded by a dragon. The damage is done. But I at least now know. As I once discussed with my father, I fell from the sky and made my place. It’s not a huge place. But it’s mine, and nothing brings me greater joy than when I dance in the stars to weave.

On another note, I finally made my grandmother’s banana pudding and had it taste right, thanks to a spirit who had requested I learn to make custard. It was nice, to taste it again. It’s good to know the truth, even if it meant losing an imposed identity in favor of the great cosmic order.

_____

1. For example, if you bring up cultural issues that have nothing to do with the tribal meeting. ↩︎
2. Which means I chose well in the beginning, but not for the reasons I thought. ↩︎
3. Mom would always say, “Maybe you were Pocahontas!” Pocahontas is actually alleged to be distant in the family tree on a side branch so far she might as well not be through Mom. Sacajawea is my second great grandfather’s wife’s husband’s wife’s great aunt’s husband’s uncle’s wife’s grandmother’s great nephew’s 3rd wife through my Father. For both, no relation. ↩︎
4. Her mother ↩︎
5. In some cases, these things aren’t sexual. They’re energy exchanges. I refuse to comment further. ↩︎
6. George is actually a very pretty wyrm. He’s a pretty green with yellow coming over his yellow eyes like natural shadow. He’s also very proud and strong, and magnificent. I have made sure to tell him this, because his dynamic is too controlling but I wanted him to know I don’t hate him. I just can’t work with him. ↩︎