Jack of Many Trades

W is for Words

Originally posted: 2012-11-16

I started writing about "wisdom" about three times. Wisdom, after all, is one of the ADF virtues, one of only two I haven't written about yet. It would make sense to once again double up, get it written and out of the way.

And yet it didn't get written.

I've been thinking about words a lot this month. That's not surprising, with NaNoWriMo in full swing, but I'm thinking about it in more ways than just the sense of plunking one word down after another. I'm writing in a universe I've been playing with for at least fifteen years, and many of the powers and "rules" of magic feel as real to me as Odin or Kuan Yin.

This is a kind of reclaiming that's slow going for me, and most of it, by necessity, goes on behind the scenes. You probably don't want to read this as I write; it's as much a therapeutic exercise as anything else. (If you do, let me know and I'll direct you to where you can.) And it's much harder for me to talk about here on the blog, if only because it requires so very much more explanation.

I've written a few times here about my Dark Lady, but it's not always easy to know what to say, and I don't know that many people are interested in reading about deities almost no one else knows, and some people just don't get the fiction thing.

Yes, I write stories with my gods in. Lots of people do, and call it blogging. That doesn't mean they're fictional, strictly speaking, but my ideas of reality are a little fuzzier than most. Some people take it the wrong way when you say your gods came to you in the stories you made up as a child, though. Lately, though, it seems more acceptable to write about one's deities and spirits without naming them. I like that trend.

Words and letters have always been powerful magic for me, in my fiction, in poetry, in spellwork, in galdr. One's as useful as the other, as real as the other, and it seems to me that storytelling has long been a powerful mode of connecting to the gods.

In a way, that brings me back around to Odin - or Woden, to cycle back to the letter of the week. If I work with a god of storytelling and poetry, does it not follow that I should hold storytelling as a sacred and magical act? I think it's obvious.

More than that, though, I think it works for me. My gods know me, even the ones I don't know by a historical name. I trust my instincts and my own personal history - I've known these stories and these words for a long time. They are very much who I have been, and they continue to shape who I am and will be.