I'm pleased at making it to Day 12 of the Blog Along, and I'm pleased with the page I made this afternoon, taking a break to journal jam with Effy Wild. I went my own more or less,  starting from the initial prompts of "overlapping circles," "red," and "use pretty tape."

On a less unmitigatedly happy note, I finished The Changeling by Kate Horsley tonight. Horsley's work was recommended to me by a teacher I train with. I looked her up and was surprised I hadn't heard of her before: theoretically, it's exactly my jam. Confessions of a Pagan Nun is set in fifth century Ireland; the writer Gwynneve (the novel is in the style of a recovered and translated medieval manuscript) is one of the monastics (or cele de) at Brigid's church, but she was trained as a Druid. The best part of the book is the imagining of what pre- and early-Christian Ireland was like, from life in a tuath (not glamorous and most involving pig tending, although tales are still told of the deaths in skirmish of Gwynneve's grandfather and great-aunt). Gwynneve's mother is a member of the woman's council, a healer and collector of herbs, and Gwynneve learns from her but becomes fascinated by the Druid Giannon and his great power of literacy (as well as the traditional Druidic power of satire). The novel tells of Gwynneve's childhood, her training as a nun, and her adventures in young adulthood as the traditional order regulated by wandering Druids comes under assault by the worldview of Christian monks (particularly those in the Augustinian mode as opposed to the more pleasure-loving and tolerant Pelagians). This coming-of-age story is intercut with scenes from the monastic community at Kildare, which becomes troubled by extremism and conflicting ideaologies.

The downside of The Changeling is that it's pretty bleak. Life is hard, and it isn't fair. Gwynneve, like many spiritual seekers, tries to understand and explain this. Her teacher, Giannon, is accused of rejecting both the old ways of Druidry (and magic he dismisses as trickery) as well as the new doctrines of Christianity, though he embraces knowledge in many forms. Gwynneve finds her solace mostly in the natural world, but also in writing; although in her Confession, she attests the official party line that Pelagian Christianity's doctrine of original grace and lack of asceticism are heresy, it is clear that she disagrees, In the main, The Changeling is perhaps primarily a philosophical text (it's published by Shambhala press; though I could occasional elements of Buddhist philosophy in Gwynneve's ruminations on suffering, they felt more Epicurean or Stoic to me) with passages like:

    And what message would I have wanted from the stars that night when I wandered motherless for the first time in my life? What message would I want the sky to tell me on any night? That I am loved? That I am protected? That something understands my efforts though they fail? That the sky is a curtain behind which all that we long for waits, that all the dreams we mourn that are held in the arms of the dead, who wait and whisper like children in a game of hiding? That if I have faith I will be embraced by an understanding that is complete and blissful? Perhaps if one stops looking up at the stars and looks instead at this world, the messages we need would be there and the gods could tend to larger matters than one tiny person's sorrow.
    I did not know and still do not know what message would give me the greatest comfort, for all signs in the end seem to be desperate interpretations by those who must have some explanation for the pain of living.

Overall, Confessions is rather bleak, although Gwynneve does take her own journey and claim her own choices, even when her options seem limited. The Changeling is set nearly ten centuries later, still very invested in the . It starts out promising, with the birth of young Grey to the Finnistuath goatherd and his wife, raised as a boy out of fear the goatherd would expose or beat to death yet another girlchild--okay, not exactly a barrel of laughs (especially when you add in a few scenes with the abusive English Lord and his sons and the casually callous and violent local Priest), but then it takes bleak to a new level--including Grey being pimped by an unscrupulous monk and lengthy visceral descriptions of the Black Plague. It's one thing to try to capture a historic mindset or to confront the hardships of life head-on without a false or easy positivity; it's another to envision a world without pleasures (except, in this case, rolling the grass, eating cheese, and--clearly dominating many characters' minds--sex). There's the occasional song, but I was three-quarters through the book and reading about a world where it seemed no one had a drum or a whistle or ever picked berries or baked fruit or distilled whiskey. Time passes; life happens; things start looking up (at least for Grey; and we get mention of a drum and flute and brewed ale) and I started to imagine the book might actually have a happy ending, but (spoiler alert) those hopes were pretty much dashed. Still, the book ends on what in this context seems a relatively hopeful note: the closing sentences, "Sometimes she was a warrior, though she still didn't know what her true cause as a warrior was. Perhaps it was simply living each day without succumbing to bitter sorrow over the pain of being human; perhaps it was fighting to savor what one has and to honor what one has lost."