#audhelga

[brand-lokason]

Lots of Gods

in the autumn, particularly around late october and november, hela always leans heavily on my head. never wants the same thing and is pretty unpredictable, but my vibes have been that it might entail visiting a cemetery with a bottle of alcohol i can afford to pour out, and also bringing some stuff for other other spirits of the place. we have a lot of apples because upstate ny is apple country, so giving those away won’t be difficult financially.

(after my hospital stays and surgeries, money is extremely tight. even with the reduced rate the hospital is giving me, i’m still paying every extra dollar i have a month after i pay my normal bills. also the govt is not giving social security recipients a cost of living (inflation) adjustment and they are also going to raise premiums for medicare by more than $100. i have less than $100 after i pay my bills and right now, it is all going to the hospitals, so what am i going to do?)

in the spring, summer, and early autumn, i’m usually busy helping my mother with things. she has been taking me along sometimes when she goes to do her work, and i don’t know if that amounts to informal training, but i expect there will be bits and pieces of that all winter. when it snows heavily, and jotnar get bored, they tend to go at each other with their weaponry for the sake of distraction or because people get more aggravated with each other when they’re in close quarters for long periods of time, she says, so there’s always something that needs healing.

i feel like i need to do something for one of my step-mothers, but that may not be more involved than pictures and some writing. basically, “speak my name.”

my father can rarely be predicted, so i’m not even going to try.

the thing is, for the last few weeks, maybe longer, now, someone else has been knocking on my head. it might be two people, or might just be one. i have been so distracted with being severely ill and then dealing with ten thousand appointments for myself and my husband that i haven’t paid as much attention to it as i probably ordinarily would, but yesterday, it finally came to a head.

i keep hearing/reading/seeing veles’ name EVERYWHERE. i don’t have slavic friends or live in a slavic area and while i did watch a polish game recently, which used a shit-ton of slavic mythology, and therefore that made sense, the rest of it just doesn’t.

my husband just randomly mentioned him to me yesterday and i kind of made a loud groan and told him about the EVERYWHERE, so he started reading the wikipedia article to me. 

i lit some incense this morning and said, “if you want to come and talk, you’re welcome to.” but i’ve been doing tons of laundry and couldn’t really meditate properly. so i lit some more and pulled out my divination stuff. basically said, “this is a good idea! your life sucks right now, go with the flow and it’ll improve a lot!” and then i pulled a rune for today. fehu. cattle. i sighed my bones out.

if he does talk to me, question 1 is “where did you come from????” 

i, like every lokean, are completely accustomed to loki’s entire family showing up as soon as he does, so it’s not that Random God is weirding me out, but rather that this is another pantheon entirely.

last time that happened, it was set, who primarily seemed to want me to help arrange something for him and n., because my godphone used to be really good, and he kind of wandered off after they were doing their thing and didn’t seem to need an intermediary translator. 

can i get it together enough for even my normal gods, much less a new one? i’ve been dealing with the worst depression of my life, despite dealing with major depression for 22 years. it’s so bad and never lightens, and increasing my meds has done nothing.

then i also got some new from my earth family. sounds like my grandmother is not going to be around a whole lot longer. see above about my finances. they’re halfway across the country.

cattle.

what do you need/want, man? is this an ongoing things, new-normal, should i make room for a permanent addition, put in a new bedroom? it’s cool, just. Explain. things to me, inasmuch as possible. i’m pretty fucked up right now and Mystery is actually really counterproductive. if we could do this in some kind of relatively straightforward fashion, i think it would go better for both of us and the lack of additional stress and confusion would help me not hit the tipping point with my depression.

also if you can do something toward helping the reevaluation of my disability case go smoothly, i would really appreciate it. if i lose it, i will not be able to pay my rent, and things will be extremely bad.

i’m open to dreams and just talking, the occasional omen (except i don’t know what yours tend to be), harping at me through my cards/runes like lots of people tend to do, etc. but talking and dreams are preferred. i am trying to meditate a lot more to make hearing easier and find a way to enable dreamwork that isn’t defeated by my insomnia medication. 

also, be patient with me. i’m sick and unusually and excessively mentally ill, and it’s making me a little deaf, spiritually. 

[brand-lokason]

i manage just fine with pretty much everyone i love not possessing a physical body of their very own on this plane of existence, but get completely miserable about missing my mother sometimes.

[brand-lokason]

Swans

My mother is a swan. Specifically, I think she is a whooper swan. They differ from the mute swans you probably imagine when you imagine 'swan' by not having a black mask.

Other people have said that it's reasonably common for jotnar to have a non-humanoid form, to have an animal form, or an elemental form, or both. I don't know how common it is; I only know that both of my parents do. My father is well-known for his shape-shifting, but insofar as what he most commonly looks like when being non-humanoid, with me, it is a black wolf with brilliant green eyes.

(As a wolf, he has a singular lack of fucks to give. My advice, if you encounter him as a wolf: be extremely respectful, do what he says immediately, do not even remotely talk back or be in the slightest bit sarcastic -- he is not in the mood, and being flipped onto your back by an extremely large wolf who then grabs your neck in his teeth is neither sexy nor fun -- it is fucking terrifying.)

My father also has a reputation for having non-humanoid children, or children whose default form is non-humanoid. So I think it was fairly likely that I'd end up as a swan, a wolf, or something else entirely.

As it turned out, I was not a cute, fuzzy baby swan. I'm a wolf. An extremely white silver, with green eyes. I'm guessing the white came from my mother. I tend to default strongly to my usual humanoid shape and I've never manifested the ability to shift into other things, like my father does.

Not spending time in wolf form for long periods of time is increasingly uncomfortable, I’ve noticed. Fortunately, my lovers are very supportive and, of course, neither my parents nor the rest of the gods and spirits I work with find it strange.

[brand-lokason]

the majority of my mother's garden is drying, steeping in alcohol, or has already been processed or preserved in some way. it's strange to look out and remember breaking up the ground to enlarge it what seems like such a short period of time ago, and now most of the bountiful harvest is in. the ceiling is no friend to tall people with all of the bunches of herbs.

my father asked me some time ago to write more, talk more about my mother -- to make her known -- and i've partially dragged my feet from not knowing what to say. i started collecting pictures here that reminded me of her, or of home in general. i have them queued.

i wonder if i'm collaging her in a way. when words fail, pictures and pictures.

the eth isn't in the tags; it's replaced with a 'd'. her name is pronounced something like OWTH-hel-gah. 'Auth,' like 'author' isn't it -- you want something like 'owl.'

i read something recently (from an acquaintance, which is always nice) about how presumptuous and stupid it is to think that a deity might love you, a boring, infinitely flawed mortal, when they are so far beyond anything you can imagine.

i watched freyr court shannon, who wasn't even interested in the beginning. shannon was very happy being buddhist and leaving the norse mess to me. but i suspect it's viral, because he eventually gave in, and they were married.

it was not the boring, flawed mortal's idea. and said mortal has no delusions of grandeur, even though he probably could take on a fair amount of pride without being the slightest bit unreasonable or incorrect.

it makes me more than a little snarly, coming from someone i know, but it is a waste of energy to argue about it.