process

A slow slow conversation, dreams, synchronicities, and experience.

On the last day of Ranger Adventure camp, I’m almost to the turnoff when I see a brown lump lying in my lane, I navigate around it, and as I go by, see that it’s a river otter lying lifeless in my lane.

I go, park, and then walk back, making my way along the shoulder with cars whizzing by me, to where he lays. When the coast clears, I run out and grab him - an adult male - still warm, not yet stiff, and softer than I could imagine. I carry him back up the hill, just a little blood dribbling down his chin.

When the children arrive, I show them. Some are grossed out, others intrigued. As the time to head out comes, the guides circle to discuss our plans for the day.

“Please veto me,” I tell my boss, “-but I want to skin the river otter with the kids.”

“I’m not going to veto you,” she says. “If these kids didn’t want to skin a river otter they shouldn’t have come to a nature program.”

I carry the otter with me as we make our way into the woods. We settle in our camp near the stream, and after opening circle, gather around. I make every child watch and they have wildly different reactions. The group of boys who had been excited about the gore turn squeamish when it’s opened, while the girl who couldn’t bear to see it cut into, is fascinated by the beauty inside.

We skin it, and then I let the kids that want to depart, while I show the rest the organs.  - I accidentally cut into one, wrinkling my nose at the smell. I bury the body in a marked spot so we can come back for the bones, and we leave with the pelt.

When I get home - exhausted by two weeks of camp - I’ve just sunk down into my chair, when I get a phonecall.

“Hey, you know how you said to call you next time I got a roadkill deer?”

At first I say I’m too tired, but the phone static obscures my reply.

“I’m not going to do it if I don’t have help,” she says.

When given a choice, choose the option that makes for the better story.

“Yes,” I say, and she hears me.

---

In my dream I am wandering in an old house with hardwood floors. I’m in a section I’m not supposed to be. A dog and a cat race through the rooms. I’m looking for something. I know it’s here. I can’t find it but I feel I’m close.

---

The hag, I am told, will erupt in every relationship that has life.

I’m reading a Jungian woman’s interpretation of the Rapunzel story - the pregnant wife who sends her husband into the witch’s garden to go gather forbidden Rampion and bring it back to her. The witch who catches him and trades his life for that of his child.

Her story of trying to trick the hag in the tangle of young love and her inevitable discovery. Both prince and girl are blinded and cast into the wilderness before they can find one another and see once more.

The writer claims that the hag lurks in every relationship. Where there is life there is that which we want to hide.

That Witch we want to hide.

Every woman must find the balance between showing off her ugliness and strangling life in favor of peace. She cannot reach for her creative self, her true self, her alive self, without alerting her shadow to the opening and letting it bubble up to destroy her carefully crafted masks and upending her life.

It fits what I’ve been noticing of late - how much more alive I feel when I stop caring what others think of me. The seeming antithesis of peace and vitality - but is it the whole truth?

I’m invited into a Pathfinder game by old friends - my first Dungeon Master now a player beside me. I decide to explore this question.

The character that emerges is named Pharika. There’s a pathfinder race called “Changelings,” half hag women who are left to be raised by more loving parents. When they hit puberty, their hag mother calls them back with a siren song, trying to lure them into a ritual that would make them a full hag - embracing evil and witchy magic.

Perfect.

The party needs a healer, so I step into that role. I choose to be an Oracle of life, serving the goddess Pharasma - goddess of birth and death, midwives and morticians. Purely to optimize the build I take two curses instead of the normal one - the gift of powerless prophecy and the inability to speak the human tongue in danger.

I research healers in pathfinder and find out that everybody agrees that they’re bad - reactive healing never does as much good as proactively preventing harm. The only healer that’s worth anything is the “Oradin” - an Oracle Paladin multiclass - built around taking other people’s pain into yourself and then having the ability to heal yourself. Unfortunately Paladins - the holy knights of the game - have to be Lawful-Good, while worshipers of Pharasma must be Neutral. I didn’t want to play a Lawful-stick-in-the-mud, anyway.

I look and look and finally find an exception - a prestige class called the “Scar Seeker” which lets her be Neutral-Good and get the Paladin abilities I’m looking for. Unfortunately it requires her to worship another deity - Vildeis, angel of zealots. When this demigoddess stepped out of heaven and saw the evil in the world she was so horrified she cut out her own eyes so that she wouldn’t have to. Once the most perfect beauty, now her body is wrapped in bloody bandages as she fights unceasingly against unending evil.

Could Pharika worship two deities? Not as a Cleric - but as an Oracle nothing seemed to be against it. Suddenly the double curses came back and I realized of course - each goddess would have given her a different curse - powerless prophecy from the goddess of death - the ability to see the inevitable but do nothing about it. The warping of her tongue by the goddess who mutilates her own body.

In a click, it all comes together. She’ll be a teenager just entering puberty with three forces vying for her soul. The Maiden Vildeis - so idealistic - trying to bring her evil birthright around to good. The matron Pharasma setting balance between birth and death and giving balance to the girl stuck between opposites. The crone - her hag mother - the hag inside her, always threatening to emerge.

---

At a desk through rooms where I always find my father’s corpse, I eventually find a woman who I touch. She turns to me with a skeletal face, a plaster mask that is her face.

"Skeleton woman!" I say. "I'm sorry for recoiling." I touch her arm and the flesh falls to powder. I touch her all over and her flesh falls off but the skeleton underneath isn't human but a long beaked bird with a scorpion tail. The bones are sharp. I keep touching her and fascia starts to manifest. Soon she has bird skin and on the next pass feathers. I gently put the bird on the desk and kneel down next to Papa’s corpse lying next to the desk. I put my hand on him and his skin falls away revealing a bees nest under his skin.

---

When I get there, the deer is lying on its side in my Dayan’s yard, she kneels next to it. I think the doe must have been nursing because her belly is distended with its n*****s like a cow’s udders. This is my first time - the largest thing I’ve cut into before today was a chicken - so I’m given the privilege.

I roll her over and kneel between her legs with my knife. Kneeling there, I’m suddenly hit by the erotic quality of it. I imagine myself as the horned god, half deer myself, kneeling here. In the odd synesthesia of my erotic imaginings, it seems like sexual hunger and belly hunger are one thing.

Then I cut into her, up from the anus up her belly, and realize why it was so distended, her guts burst in the impact, the entire cavity is just one mass of poop and digestive juices. Luckily we have a hose here. I scrape guts with my hands, washing often against the low burning of stomach acid on my skin, face wrinkling in disgust. When all the guts are out and into a plastic bag, we wash the insides over and over again but still sacrifice a lot of the meat.

Next we hang her by her neck from a tree and I working on one side, and Dayan on the other, skin her. Where the otter was easy, slicing through fat, the deer has spots on her back where the skin seems almost melded to bone. The hide ends up with a few holes but I take it to do along with the otter.

It’s dark and we’re working by floodlight, mosquitos buzzing around us in swarms attracted by the blood, when I finally decide I’ve taken as much meat as I’m willing to risk. Her normal looking head is attached to her mostly meatless skeleton when I’m done.

---

I am skinning Papa, taking my knife to his face and delicately opening it. There is no sense of malice here - if anything a sense of rightness, relief, finally I know how to do this.

I didn’t know what to do with his body - now I do.

---

 
At the very end of this week’s Pathfinder game, Dale, our Game Master, mentions that Pathfinder released a new class - a Paladin that doesn’t have to be Lawful Good. When I get home that night, I stay up late looking at it and weighing options. The next day I awake with nothing but ideas.

It’s called an Omdura - a “guardian of souls,” and it fits what I wanted to do even better than the scar seeker had, bringing me to full power at level 6 instead of level 9. I’ve already laid out Pharika’s entire level progression, and to shift something as radically as becoming an Omdura at level 5 ripples out changing everything up to level 20.

With fifteen levels to rework, I set to work. As always when going through my previous decisions, I second guess them, disposing of spells that aren’t really worth it, and moving things around. Is this game even going to make it to level 20? Should I optimize for early power at the cost of late game fun?

Eithne messages me, “How are you doing today?”

“In a process,” I say - “Need some time and space to work through this.”

I’ve finally decided to do all three - the Scar seeker, the Omdura, and the Oracle - dropping my one level dip into witch and focussing on the healing side of her nature, when I hear voices.

Voices?

I come to the door just as they knock. It’s Jehovah’s Witnesses. An older woman and her younger assistant.

“Have you heard the good word?” She asks me.

“No, please tell.”

“The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

She goes on to tell me about the kingdom of heaven brought to earth. No war, no famine, no disease.

“No disease? Are you sure that’s a good thing?” I ask.

“Have you -been- sick?” she asks, incredulous.

“I just kind of believe that if we were healthy all the time, we wouldn’t be.”

She scoffs a little and turns to her Bible verse where it very clearly states that there will be no disease in the kingdom of heaven.

When she’s about to go I stop her - “Can I give you a gift?” I ask.

“What’s that?”

I was in this class where we learned the Lord’s prayer in the original Aramaic at the UU church, can I share it?”

“Certainly”

I give it, and then after she asks the interpretation

“Oh non-gendered divine that is birthed through us into the heaven that is always around us, hallowed is the word which you are. Come come kingdom of god! As you wish it from the surrounding heaven to the dust of which we are made.”

I have trouble explaining the “Hallowed be thy name,” phrase - Nithquadish Shamooahk - besides to say that Shamooahk is the same word used in genesis - “In the beginning was the word,”

The Jehovah’s Witness lady is all on top of this, flipping to that bible passage to read it to me.

When they leave, I go grab some bread and butter, not having eaten yet today, and return to my computer. Hallowed, same word root as hollow I believe - is there a Pathfinder spell about hallowing? I look it up - sure enough Hallow, and it’s a really cool spell. It allows you to affix a spell to a holy spot, blessing all who come there with the spell for an entire year.

What spell? Well - Shamooahk obviously - the word. I look up Oracle “word” spells and find one called Word of recall - reading it, it takes a moment to realize the potential. You could make an unerring teleportation matrix between any two holy sites. That’s normally a 9th level spell and I’ve just figured out how to do it with a 6th. With this power, I want to get to those levels as quickly as possible. This changes everything.

A few hours later I hear - voices - I peek out my window and one of the two nicely dressed men in my driveway sees me and waves. I head outside to discover that these are Mormons.

“Do you have a faith?”  the older of the two asks.

“I’m a Celtic pagan,” I say.

He blinks, “Oh, hmm,” he looks at the other who steps in.

“And what, ah, brought you to Celtic Paganism?”

“Raised that way mostly I suppose,” I pause “The way I think about it - may I?”

“Please.”

“The way I think about it, if you look at the natural world around us, it’s insanely complex. From the microbial life, to the mycorrhizal networks, to just the number of different kinds of plants. Why would we expect the divine to be any simpler than what we know of our world?”

“Huh, what about . . . you could call all of this ‘life.’ Couldn’t you call a really complicated God, God?”

“Sure -” I gestured, “behind me is a Hawthorn tree. It’s potent heart medicine. Over there is a Willow - aspirin comes from it. Sure I could call both of them ‘life’ or even specify ‘trees,’ but generalizing the similarities is less useful than knowing the differences. Same with the divine.”

“It sounds like you’ve thought a lot about this.”

“I, yeah.”
“Sometimes God reaches us in thought, but often He finds us in other ways - would you be willing to pray to our Father tonight, just to see what happens?”

I think about it for a moment, “Sure,” I say.

The Mormons offer to help with anything I need help with, and I turn them down, despite having a billion things I need help with. Not today. Today I’m in a process.

I walk to the house thinking about prayer. Asking for help. I’ve just spent the whole day on the computer rebuilding a character for a fantasy game. I have so much I need to get done. Why haven’t I asked for help? When was the last time I prayed?

And what would I ask for? I’m so privileged, I have the divine sending missionaries to my door as externalities to my thoughts. Two sets in one day that’s a synchronicity, and synchronicities mean you’re on the right path. I believe that the closer you are to your destiny, the more miraculous your life becomes.

So, gratitude? When was the last time I prayed in thanks? The last time I had hot food presumably, but maybe it’s worth remembering to do that more. By thanking the gods for my blessed life, I can remember how blessed my life really is. That in turn will help with the overwhelm - the feeling like I can never get enough done, and anything but homesteading is extraneous.

Then I turn back to Pharika. She’s a priestess. In all this maximizing of her abilities and getting the right feats and spells, I’ve been missing the most important part of her, which is her faith.

Here is a girl who is inherently evil. Talk about original sin. Without help her only power comes from the hag and given that she is an Oracle of life - to refuse power is to die.

But Pharika has choices. An angel of sacrifice has chosen her and offered a way out. She can bargain with her birthright, the hag inside her, but the zealot also has power, and Pharika can bargain with her too.

And when all is said and done, Pharika was raised by priests of life and death. She can surrender to the hag for life, yes - and she can surrender to the holy martyr within her to compensate - but she has a third option, the one that has always been there. Pharika can surrender to death itself, peel back the skin, and really be alive.