Continuum is the word, working with a city that's had thousands of cultures, spirits, ghosts, deities dragged through it. The city's magic feels like a steady, loud hum whose current tunes my own passage through the city; reading this I thought of spirit work as harmony work, making my own voice and body bend to line up with the right notes. Octaves as vertebrae stacked down a communal spine making up – what?
The pollarded hornbeam is becoming a place where the mouth of the city opens up and speaks for a season or three. It reminded me, when I discovered it cut and oozing with half the clearing's canopy ripped away and grasped for what to do: being quiet and listening is not the same as a fallow period. This kind of figuring out, being quiet and just listening, is working too. You don't have to do anything. We are showing you a way this works.
My own deities have become sharper this year, more a communal pantheon that feels like it's coming together, in part, to let the city talk to me more directly. A convenient mutation, a vast mycelial network working a strand through dirt towards my open beckoning hand which asked the crows, two autumns ago, to be led to fly agaric. The gods showing up for me are mine in aspect and not-mine in their vastness, the ways they link back to the land before people took shape, the ways they've woven themselves into that land through much more recent journeys.
Dionysus translated through the original colonisers, dug into the muddy trench-banks of Londinium. Rhyming with Mithras and various revivals through the city's sex workers, aristocrats, faggots, drinkers, actors. Familiar in his sneer, like an old queen's on her way to the Fuck Tree on the Heath. The ancient bull-god, Bronze Age or older who I call Orion. God of the Hedge, the Wildgod, human king translated to fairy many millennia gone, who keeps the city's night walkers. He who at one point became peer and one-time consort to the Goddess, Lady of the River, a loose Oberon to her Titania, now out of tune. I met them as different things, with and through different people – Mars? Pan? Cernunnos? Jack in the Green? The fairy Hunter King and River King of the Fleet? The Holly King and the Oak King? Mama Thames? Oshun who is in London? The oldest gods of the land, forest, river, moon? – but right now I have a sense of them blurring and taking active shape in relation to one another. Mitosis into mother-husband-brother-lover-cousin-queen-kin. This season, they have horns; they speak in the same tongue most audibly through the slow hiss and thud of longhorn cows, the forest gods, moving through the seething hawthorn.
'A chance mutation disappears immediately if there is no hospitable environment to receive it'. Something there about learning how to receive rather than give or transform; to tune myself, my body and space, into a hospitable environment for what's reaching my way. Tending the garden, breathing deep during sex, putting my energy into comrades friends lovers whose voices I recognise in the hum.
