Keening

Keening

Where do you go from that? My mind became numb and only my body and spirit kept me alive. It was raw and animal. It was primal and full of rage. Yet I knew, I had to keep living.
Of all the things her death taught me, that I MUST live was the greatest blessing. There were other lessons. That I can endure. That I have to do it my way. I could not grieve in some quiet, modest English way. I was a Banshee. I cried almost constantly. Until I was bloated and swollen and almost unable to see. I would sob so violently I would throw up. Yet I kept the house, went shopping, look after my daughter. If I tried to keep it in I simply couldn't carry on. I had to bleed it out of every pour.
I have had physical pain, sexual pain, spirit pain but this, this was soul pain and was like no other.
While I looked like a crazy person I was healing. Washing my open heart wound with salty tears and slowly, slowly it began to heal. Losing a child is like losing a leg. You have to re-learn everything.
For a while the people around me (lets not call them friends) were supportive is uncomfortable. My keening grew quieter. I was able not to cry, but strange things would set me off. In time those people grew impatient with me. Some after a month, some three or four. Some at six. Coming on a year I could almost pass for normal but in my grief I had missed what was going on around me past my immediate need to eat, feed and love my Witchling.
For me to discover I was about to become homeless again because our "friend" was kicking us out, shocked me back to myself.
We lost much again. I had surgery the day after we were moved into the to awful temporary accommodation and I was physically very ill. It became a huge abscess and then I almost died.
I woke to myself again to find my husband was very ill. He was in fact crazy. It was a dark time. I was still potty training Witchling (I did try before but I couldn't keep myself together enough).
I lost my daughter and to kick me in the soul the love of my life was unrecognisable. As warmand kind as he was he was now cold and hard. As smart and generous he was, now cruel and full of rage.
I could barely move my arm and had the district nurse coming a couple of times a day to re-dress and see how I was healing. I did yoga for half and hour twice a day and I slowly regained the use of my right arm.
It felt like forever but in the end we got moved to more perminat housing.
Ken slowly returned and I fell deeply in love with him all over again. I think I fell harder this time than the first.
I had learned I could endure. I would survive almost anything. I could heal from almost anything too.
I began to keep my keening to myself for fear of upseting Witchling or K. That was a mistake, but one made out of love.
I began to put myself last. It would be years before I began to myself first again.
In the mean time, I cried in the bath. I sobbed to loud music when alone.
I know why the Banshee keens. It is the grief and pain. If she is the fae speaking then the land it's self is in pain. Her soul is torn and she can not contain the howling pain.
She is washing her clothes in tears and water, for they are one. I had seen women craddling there dead children on the news before, but now I knew. That open-mouthed-chin-tilted-up wail. You would turn back time, rip out your teeth and hair. walk through fire for those pains are as nothing. I think if we keened more we might all be healthier and more whole.

Death and the Maiden

Death and the Maiden

 I moved six times while I was pregnant with our first child. We lost the pub and travelled around trying to make a home for ourselves. K lost his carer he had spent seven years working towards. He was devastated. That was the first time the Demon D appeared in our lives. Even our wedding and child only lifted him for a little while. People had a lot of advice and very little actual help.

I needed him to “snap out of it” and “get a grip”. Rather than say anything to him, it was me they dumped all their “advice” on. Including whether or not to keep my baby. A lot of people felt they had the right to tell me I should get rid of “it”.

Yet she was my calm, my anchor, in a sea of stress.

We finally got somewhere to live and though it was small, it was a start.

I drew faeries all over the walls of the tiny room that barely fit the crib into it.(She still has wee-folk on her walls, but now they are Feegles).We never bought a baby monitor, the house was too small to need to. K got a crap job and was working split shifts so was barely home. I was alone. Just me, the dog, and when she came, my daughter. She was strange and wonderful. Beautiful, but not girly. With eyes that shifted in colour everyday. From navy, a strange metallic silver, to green and hazel. She was a miracle, all be it one that for four months didn't sleep. As soon as she began to sleep I began to do readings, mostly tarot. Even though the street we lived on was call Heroine Street by the locals, the dog and the magick kept us safe.

Not from the in-laws but that is a whole different story!

The cupboards would bang about from time to time and K was still sceptical of faeries at the time. They clearly believed in him however and until very recently they would move and torment him alone.

I wish we had never moved from there now, at least not were we went but hindsight is bitch sometimes. Once I got some sleep being a Mum was the thing I was amazing at and I loved it. We figured when Witchling was 8 months that if we started trying now, I'd probably be pregnant by Christmas. Two weeks later, I was pregnant, we had to move and worse, we could not take the dog with us. We were all devastated.

That should have been a sign. Yet we moved into a big beautiful house in a lovely area.

I did a lot of magick there. The garden was lovely. I began teaching two students. One baby at the table practising her letters (before she was 2), one on my hip or tit. Kara was a beautiful baby, not that Witchling wasn't. They were just as different as twilight and dawn. Witchling was cool and purple, mysterious and intelligent with wise old eyes. Kara was like summer, gold and oranges and pinks. I almost called her Summer. Ka, meaning soul, and Ra the Egyptian sun God, was Ken's choice. For a while things were better, though Ken was hardly well. I was happy.

Then one night I went to bed and the day I woke to would shake my life forever.

I was helping Witchling brush her teeth, while brushing my own, when K started screaming.

I ran downstairs and grabbed the phone from the hall. I dialled 999 and saw K move Kara's small body. She was stiff and blue.

I started to scream then. I could see she was gone. K kept breathing into her. The paramedics arrived. I don't remember when they told me she was gone, but in the back of the ambulance they gave me her tiny cold body, with her eyes half shut and the air that was breathed in making small bubbles from her lips.

The police went through our home and an armed officer guarded her body while we were there. I don't remember much of the day, except the last time I saw her. So cold and still.

I told them that I wanted her organs to be donated but they could only use her heart valves.

She was seven and a half months old, and she died on the full moon before Winter solstice the 9^th of December. I was an organised mess. They had to get a special child pathologist from Birmingham and it took weeks but we were finally allowed to bury her.

I planned a large Christmas meal for Witchling's sake. I did all I could to organise, and clean. Anything and everything, yet I burned salt marks down my face.

My sister and “Mother” turned up for dinner but my sister helped herself to the big desert that was to be the big fish of the meal. We got into a fight. I remember looking at the frying pan and thinking I was going to hit here with it. I went out to get some air.

My “Mother” comes outside and spends the whole time making excuses for my sister. That she is having “a tough time”. I had buried my daughter less than a week before.

Something in me snapped. My need for her approval or love, that unconditional thing children have for their mother was broken that day. 

Love and Magick. 3

Love and Magick

I have never really being one for love spells I hardly thought that was what I was doing, but it was. It was about six weeks before I left my ex-fiancé. In my heart I still hoped that it would make him understand how much I loved him. That was not however what I asked for. I don't remember much of the spell save for making a list for my true love. One white rose cut in half, one red, and then bound in ribbon. I asked for kindness, generosity, intelligence, and more I can not remember. The sensations of the petals on my fingers lingers longer than the words.

I had already dedicated my life to the Goddess by then. I surrender my life and destiny to Her will and work. No great ritual. I just lay down in the middle of the night under and old oak tree and gave all of myself over to Her. (This sounds smutty but I just figured I had been making a hash of things She could probably do much better).

I cast the spell and gave the left over roses to the earth and river.

Within six weeks I was in a tiny room with blue walls and red curtains. A single bed of tiny proportions. Yet I was happier than I had ever been. I was also dead broke. The Jobcenter told me I was not eligible for any money. So I worked giving healing and doing tarot readings, sometimes out of pubs.

My one-day-husband-to-be ran a pub. We had met about 2 years before. Our first meeting I don't remember. (But he does). I was very sick and sad at the time. The second time, I remember. This slim, elegant mysterious man with long dark hair and beard. He wore a waist coat and pocket watch, but it wasn't for effect. I later learned he would come to the rock club after work wear he had to dress smartly. My tall, slim, could have been a model friend was flirting with him. He flirted right back. He drop and ice cube down her back and I don't know why I retaliated. I grabbed him and dropped an ice-cube down his trousers. Only he smirked at me and shook it out of his untied boot. The lights and music pulsed around us and was shaken to my core by my own desire. Yet he flirted with everyone, and I do mean everyone. Yet he always went home alone. I never thought for one second he thought me any different than the other's he flirted with.

A defining moment for both of us was when I snapped a ligament in my ankle (well the bone gave way where it was attached) running for a train to do my Christmas, Yuletide shopping in Manchester.

I felt it CRACK like a whip but I hobbled onto the train. I put it up and wrapped it in my scarf but by the time I got to Manchester I could put no weight on it and it was the size of my knee. I could speak no words I was in so much pain and I had to be wheeled through Manchester train station. My ex-fiancé was called and rather than come and get me, he sent his friend instead. I ended up in a hospital in Manchester with Sid beside me. All the while him looking pale and guilty. They said it wasn't broken (I found out ten years later that it had been after it went again). I left strapped up an on pain killers and on crutches. I was still expected to cook and rather unlike myself I burned myself getting his food out of the oven a little while later.

Still we had planned to go to the Christmas part at the rock club near us. We met at a friends house first on the way, but my arms and hands were sore and I couldn't keep up. Two people stayed with me, and helped carry me that night. One of them was the happiest goth I have even know call Tig, the other was Ken. That night should have been awful. Normally my ex- sat in a corner brooding while I danced like a demon. Yet tonight he danced and this irked my friend Tig immensely. He grabbed me round the waist and propped me up, then Ken went to the otherside so I could not fall over, so I could dance. It was bliss we all giggled like children. When I could stand no more and my ankle began to throb, Ken sat me down and massage my foot and ankle. His eyes seemed black (they are blue) as he stared up at me. I actually thought my knickers might melt! It was the most erotic thing that had even happened to me and I was in no way a shrinking violet!

At the end of the night, back at our friends house drinking tea, our taxi's back to where we were staying turned up and he got up and part of me really wanted to go with him. I never dreamed he felt the same way. Some time later Ken confessed that had been the night he finally realised he was in love with me.

Six weeks after the spell I was in his bedroom. I was freshly single and had been propping up the bar of his pub all evening. I got quite drunk. Ken made me up a bed on a spare air mattress in his room. After getting undressed and laying there a while, I got up and passionately kissed him. He kissed me back and as I lay on the air mattress I waited for him to pounce.

He however, did not.

I was quite peeved. It seems funny now. He was of course making sure that I didn't do something I might regret after a bad break up. In the morning I felt weird but we could not keep our hands to ourselves. We talked and laughed, and talked some more. He ran the pub all day and evening as he usually did and when he closed up he brought up a bottle and some ice. We shared a little almond liqueur and made passionate love all night the like of which was unprecedented. The blue of morning was up before we got some sleep curled up together.

Much to the ire of some of our “friends” I firmly refused to define what was going on between Ken and I. We loved doing the same kinds of stuff like walking around flea markets and much of the same kinds of foods. I was in a health food store when Ken mentioned his love of dried apricots. I flung my arms around him declaring “I love you”. Only to realise what I had said and pretend it hadn't happened.

I enrolled in another course, one teaching massage and holistic therapies. I studied in the week and spent the weekends with Ken. It was bliss. Ken then got offered a different pub, one in my home town in Wales. It felt like fate. Ken asked me to move with him and I agreed. It is no mean feat moving house by train but we did it. Unfortunately some of our most valuable items were stolen in the move. One of the few trips back to Crewe where I had been living I am talking about relationships and how much being engaged sucked. I said “If I was ever going to get married I would just go and do it.”

Ken turns to me and says quietly; “Is three weeks okay?”

I looked at him to say something and opened my mouth. Only to shut it again much like a goldfish.

Tears began pouring down my face, and it took the whole trip back to Crewe and to the house for me to find my voice to say yes. We had been together three months. After a hot cup of tea, I said that six months would be better and we agreed.

A lot happened in that time but we managed to make it . We got made homeless and jobless and even found a dog. I found out I was pregnant just before the wedding. We paid for it ourselves and we walked together don the aisle. The morning of my wedding my mother was trying to talk me out of getting married. Fifteen years later it has not always been easy not I have not regretted that day once.

Where we Run to. 2

Where we Run to.

When our world is on fire where we run to is not always the safest place. For all my insight and knowing I was a young girl in love, who had some pretty messed ideas about love and relationships.

I was at University or as I affectionately called it “Where Dreams go to Die”.

What with the terrible relationship (very high drama) and my course having more hours of work than a surgeon, I became very, very ill. It had started small. He was "trying to fix me". I was wrapped up in his world and it was all about things and money, for all his spiritual spouting. He could feel spirit but he was blind. It was me who did all the teaching, healing, seeing, channelling and him who took the credit. He had "needs" and if I was too busy or sick to fulfil them he would get them anywhere. He systematically sleep his way through almost all of my female friends, he even started on my male ones. His sexual deviancies got darker and darker. I was terrified. I was in bits. My family had disowned me again and I had no-where to go.

I even spent my 21^st birthday in bed, in agony with an ear infection. I was running a small coven too when I could. I look at it now I must have been crazy but the warmth and magick kept me alive.

I was so stressed I couldn't keep down food. 

That's when I saw my second faery. I was lying in bed when I heard this noise. A buzzing. A sprite dressed in red came through the wall behind me and flew past my altar covered in plants and through the open door. He was as real and solid as everything else in the room. He flew as though he had a jet pack on. He was dressed in patch-worked red leather clothes. He was pale with a healthy blush to his cheek and dark brown hair. He even had a hat on!

From that point on, things would move in my kitchen. Even as I watched. I had long standing difference of opinion with my “fiancé' (who called himself my Control) about where things went in the kitchen. From that point on things would rearrange themselves to where thought they should go, even if I wasn't there to do it.

Once I stood talking allows to “The Ketchup Faery” as I had started calling him and asked him to show me he was still there. Well a pair of large scissors began to rotate on the counter. Slowly at first and then more quickly. I could have been scared. Except all I did was laugh and lay my hand on the scissors to stop them spinning. I was not alone.

Slowly from being a broken pile of wet bones I rebuilt myself. Healing through Goddess magick and prayer. I scrapped by my degree somehow. Mostly by working my ass off. I wrote 10, 000 words in three weeks.
 I began to feel better and the last part of that was of course to leave the toxic relationship.

I left with only my magick tools and my duvet and nothing else. It all seemed like junk, or pointless. I had after all, been one of his things too.He gave away my clothes to several of the girls he was sleeping with (a lot of whom were f**ked up and 17, like I'd been when I met him).

I still have a lot of moments in those few years that will haunt me. Being drugged so he could get “what he needed” from a friend on my couch. Waking up finding him making out with a guy called Simon, or his fetish to stick cutlery up his ass. When we split up, I was the one painted as a whore, of course. He had two lovers, one of whom was engaged at the time.

Much as it was poison and awful, it taught me a lot and for that I grateful. I found a safe place to stay, it was tiny and I had nothing but for the first time in my whole life I was free.

Then I fell into bed with the sexiest man I had ever met. My knees went to water. My face flushed at the thought of him. I had no idea why it worked, but it did. I had met the love of my life. The man who would be my husband, my lover, and friend. My family and the father of my children.

So let us begin then. 1

So let us begin then. 

I was born on a bitterly cold January evening with little fuss to my parents who had children to save their doomed marriage. Both of my parent are gifted magickally but either pretend not to use it, or don't bother. Nether of them are great parents, alright, they are terrible, as parents and pretty awful human beings. Much of my early childhood was me running naked outside eating berries from bushes, either to get away from their violent fights or their terrifying violence towards me.

My earliest memory is sitting watching sunlight through leaves. Now maybe this is why I found the faeries, or why they found me. I have never quite been able to get those early grass stained feet from in my soul. I grew and had a baby sister, which I was thrilled about until she became the worst parts of both my parents.

She wasn't even a playmate. For she was blind. Not blind in her physical eyes, she just didn't see the dragons, the faeries, the whole worlds around me that I could see. We moved all over the world, which still didn't save their marriage.

Our nomadic family blew into an ancient farm house in rural Wales. Then one night my father blew out. The whole house shook from the fight. I was a frightened mouse on the cold dark stair, watching him leave as my mother cried in relief.

The new man in my mother's life was better to her, and far far worse for me.

I loved the farm. The space, the ghosts and the faeries who danced and sang me into different worlds every day. The trees, and stones and animals around were my family.

I was five when the abuse started. A tiny slip of a girl with a short back and sides of a boy. I started to grow it when I hit school and the longer it grew, the more it curled, and the redder it got.

In the jumble of my memories it is hard for me to tell when everything blew up, and when I saw my first faery.

I remember staring at the checker tablecloth and hearing nothing but my heart beat as my sister, the only one who knew my dark secret, told my father at our biannual visits to London, that I had already seen a penis or as she put it, “one of those”.

Of course I also remember lying along a branch of a sycamore tree, being the tree, when a small person dressed in moss and mud with dragonfly wings jumped back startled that she had been seen. She was pale of skin with black eyes and hair that was full of mud and moss so it stood straight up from her head. She was as real as the tree I lay on.

Nether of these events was imagined but my mother would tell you I imagined it all. That I was crazy (something that terrified me for a long time).

While she never believed I had been abused (which allowed all kinds of other horrors into my life) she was always quite keen to take advantage of my magickal knowing, my portents, weather magick or even healing.

As the human world became crueller, I withdrew into the trees, the hay sheds and pig pens. I was too young to go to court (the days before video evidence) and I basically had to go back to my life even though a bomb had gone off in it. Except now everything was different. I lived in a house full of people who didn't speak to me if they could help it. Slowly, slowly my mother's bitter rage became cold hate. My sister, became my enemy, my home a battle ground. School was worse as parents told their children not to play with me. My faeries did their best. As I grew I would wrap myself in music, books meditation and magick.

The older I grew the less I wanted to do with my mother, the less she did, by eleven I even cooked most of my own meals. Other than balancing a cheque book I could have lived alone from the age of thirteen. I spent a lot of time as a teenager trying to figure out if I was mad. While I didn't see faeries every day, trees spoke to me, ghost too, and in certain places I could see history play it's self out all over again.

Knowing the “mad” people were locked away and poisoned made me certain I needed to figure out what was happening to me. What I was.

This changeling child, except not. I made a few friends and mostly got by pretending everything was fine. Except I was not fine as my explosive rage was testimony to. My step brother who was twenty years my senior tried to kiss me when I was thirteen and began a war of creepy stalking attention that persisted until I left forever at 19.

I was stronger than I looked and while I became popular at school most people never tried to pick fights with me. I was ambitious, determined, outspoken and smart. I had read more books on ancient beliefs and magick by this point than most people had read magazines. I meditated everyday. More as a way to lock-down that burning boiling dragon of rage and pain. The older I got if I wasn't meditating to quieten it, or exercising until exhausted enough to sleep, I was drinking. I could out drink most people I knew. Vodka usually.

I began healing people, guided by spirit and very little else after a strange conversation with my father at one of our biannual “watch your Dad get drunk and talk about things you are uncomfortable with and need to keep locked down”. He had always had a keen interest in alternative health and he just said, “I bet you're a healer Lu”. So I was. It didn't seem any stranger to me than anything else. I also at a house party got regressed and found I had access to a thousand new memories which was confusing but nothing worse than what I was living through. I did (and still do) wish that the first memory of a life wasn't usually dying. Not long after that I met a family of mediums and my training proper began.

Of course this could not continue. I managed to lock it all down quite well until a new friend from college mentioned she was abused and in behaviour totally unlike myself I broke down in great heaving sobs. She didn't say anything. She just wrapped her arms around me and said;

“I know. I know. I know.”