21:54 
It's funny how cousin Wyrd (a bit like Cousin It) doesn't think she is one of Wyrm's, particularly. It seems so obvious. The manner of speech, the same overriding impression that the entire world is absolutely obvious and one is in control of the whole damn lot (even when it isn't, and you're not). It's not arrogance, not the way Raven Brats can give the same impression through sheer arrogance. It's the smell of Wyrm. Wyrm's people always turn up dressed smartly, at least with me. I go with them, am ordered about, scruffily dressed in combats and dirt, and they stand cool and unruffled, in sharp suits and immaculate hair. They don't look like that in consensus, as far as I am aware, it is just the way they present themselves to me, but the message is clear enough.
Wyrm is the AllFather, cousin. The very fact that you do not belong to any one of the Peanut Gallery means that you must belong to Him, for He is the only one left. You couldn't shout at Raven, take my Father to task, unless you belonged to Lord AllFather Wyrm. You could not do what you do unless you belonged to Him.
That's why I can be a bit odd with you sometimes.
I still don't miss him as much as I should do. I still feel odd. I wish I knew what was going on.
20:37
Notes from the Stones
Brutally, savagely, homesick today. I shouldn't have lit the fire. It gets me every time. But I was, am, bruised and cold and hurting. That sense of being stranded in the completely wrong place, the wrong life. I keep thinking it sould be approaching Hallowe'en. Sometimes I wonder if I would be happy in a perpetual late Autumn.
It will rain soon.
I miss Frood very badly today. I feel that desperate need to find a place of our own, somewhere to call home. I think about the obstacles standing in our way, between us and the goal of being settled, having somewhere safe to call home, and it almost brings me to the point of despair.
No. There is no "almost". I feel trapped, still, by circumstance, by the need to complete my studies before we can take the next step. The situation has been created both by my own ambition and by simple circumstances. I can't help thinking that right now I should be in a panicked frenzy of work attempting to write up, and then it would only be a few short months before I found work and we could start saving to buy someplace.
Whatever we buy, wherever we end up, whether it be Oxford, Bristol, Cornwall, Herefordshire (it was that good) or some hovel in the Western Isles, it has to have a fireplace. It must.
The Low Impact Housing idea still draws me very strongly. It is something we could do, with the RP expertise. Perhaps it's time I started writing seriously. I could do that from anywhere, and with some of the rubbish that makes it into print I'm pretty sure I could make something of it. The only reason I haven't is because I'm fiercely critical of my own stuff.
Thoughts are terribly disjointed today, in case you hadn't noticed already. Can't keep track of them. Can't keep them together. They shoot off at strange tangents, jumbling together, but from here they are all connected, the various tangents make sense. It's like being given a collection of apparently randomly chosen objects and being told to work out the common factor, when the common factor is intensely personal. These are all things found in the plastic bags of crud I keep in the attic.
I want to go home. I really want to go home.
And, yes, Andy came over on Monday. Turned up at the stones while I had my Warden's head on over the cold, hard part of me I have to have, have to use to get through the days. I have to be that way so often. I can't stop myself. It creeps up on me and I end up in the glass box. Sometimes I fight and weep, but more worryingly I often just sit with eyes half closed and let it happen because at times it make sense.
You see? There is less pain this way.
Yes, I see. But only in some ways. Squash the emotions, change the driver for a thing that cannot care, is driven by motivation singular and near-incomprehensible, and the pain of longing does become less, the need to get through the day becomes just another task to be performed with the expected degree of competence rather than the painful battle it otherwise is. Only because it cannot care. That part of me is not a nice part. It holds others in contempt. It regards Andy as weak-willed and foolish. If he sheds tears I want to make him feel better, I feel with him. It sees those same tears as a sign of weakness, as a sign of lack of strength. Big boys don't cry. Big girls shouldn't either. There is almost a sense of contamination, that having feelings for one so weak will cause me - it - to be weak also.
Contempt is such a small word for the way that part of me can view others. Only Frood, out of them all, escapes that label. Never contempt for Frood. It sees him almost as a kindred spirit, another individual in the masses. Others are slow, they do not observe, they are forgetful, lack understanding, are subject to bouts of emotion. They cry, they feel fear. Sometimes they just don't get it. And they should, this part of me says. They are intelligent, they are involved, they have the same senses, the same data. There is no excuse, only incompetence.
So when I cannot cope any more and this part of me, the Weapon, sneaks up and encases me in glass, I no longer love my brother. I no longer see him as my brother. The Weapon will use the arguments of the Rationalist to stay in control.
There is less pain this way.
Inside the glass I still love him, but contempt bleeds through and that is painful.
I have not recovered properly from this latest round. I do not miss him the way I used to, the way I should. That scares me, but not as much as it should. I can feel the bruises, the nerve clusters angry where he overworked the connection points «not designed for repeated or prolonged use». The connection was not easy this time around. I have a crescent mark on my chest where his thumbnail dug in, and the entire central line is inflamed. My right temple feels bruised but I still feel empty. In some senses I feel I have failed him by not being instantly better.
He said I could shift, dragged me through a shift to prove it, but still I feel locked in one form. My pattern used to dance and shimmer in response to every slightest signal, the way sunlight on water reacts to every slight puff of wind. Now it sits fixed and lifeless, a deep, impenetrable darkness. Perhaps it is like having something in one's eye - the sensation that the object is there can last long after it is removed. Perhaps I should go and lie in the circle and shift into it the way I used to, but I can't, I'm on duty.
And yet I can sort of vaguely tell, still, where there are things in the circle that shouldn't be there. I can only compare the sensation to that peculiar form of blindness which means the person can avoid bumping into things but cannot actually see. The body sees, the mind doesn't. The system is capable, I am not.
The robins are feeding out of my hand now.
The flaring has subsided somewhat, although I am still having hot spells. It's infuriating.
My brother thinks the Weapon is more beautiful than I am. I find that strange, not offensive, although it is a little chilling. I don't think of myself as beautiful. I am too hard, too unusual in my appearance, too asymmetric. I don't even think of myself as being particularly attractive. Striking, perhaps. It seems odd that he should think of me as beautiful, never mind something so cold and uncaring.
The ravens at the Bird of Prey Centre were called Thought and Memory. They were locked up in a cage. My tears were not only a result of finally seeing the object of my obsession so close. I should go to the gym today, have not been since last Tuesday's appalling session, but the entrapment is so tiring. The events, the work of the last two days, has exhausted me. My entire system feels angry, the way the flesh around a wound can become angry. Not angry in the sense of the emotion, but raw and inflamed.
19:59
Today's soundtrack:
"Ommadawn" - Mike Oldfield
"The Contino Sessions" - Death In Vegas
"Albedo 0.39" - Vangelis (optional)
From 7th August, 2000
Herefordshire was just fab. The scenery was fantastic, the entire place quiet. The campsite was on the banks of the River Wye, next to a forest called Fiddler's Green. Ravens live there. We got yelled at for making too much noise on the Friday night at midnight. We were being a tad boisterous, but not that bad. We had been drinking absinthe, after all. Some woman stuck her head out and screamed at us. She woke everyone else up even though we hadn't.
The hills were fantastic. I climbed up the ridge near Hay-on-Wye where Offa's Dyke Path runs. I was hyper, climbed despite intense pain, almost because of it, despite having looked up at the ridge and thought getting up there would be too much for me. I climbed up past where the parascenders were launching themselves into thermals and was utterly awe-struck by the view. Heather and scrubby grass moorland, strong wind and bright sunshine. it was so beautiful, so perfect, I forgot the pain. It reminded me of Jura, in some ways, and of other places, other times.
Andy came too, followed me up, went up the direct, near-vertical route I had contemplated then set as being outside my limitations. I got him to take a picture of me standing next to the trig point so I can send it to Dad. Rowan, Shyrley and Frood stayed behind down at the bottom, near the car park, but we went on, following a dry stream bed across the moor. Each time we considered stopping some other piece of scenery, or some other viewpoint from which to look at it, caught our attention and we went on. It was almost a completely different world up there. We found a tarn, a limpid pool of water, reflecting nothing but sky in the most incredible shade of blue. There were dragonflies and damselflies, sounding like miniature helicopters when they flew low through the heather. The were bright, dazzling blue, as if droplets of the tarn had been elongated, given wings, and then electrified and set free to flit about its surface.
From the tarn we could see another rise, with a rocky ledge, a little one, sticking out of the side. We went on, the last bit we could permit ourselves before we had to turn back, just to sit on the ledge for a while in the sun.
Then we saw ravens, a pair, huge and graceful and majestic, soaring on the wind. After years of looking at crows and rooks and jackdaws, in the most bizarre places, always looking, there they were and it seemed extraordinary that I could have thought that they would be hard to distinguish from other corvids. The flight pattern is terribly distinct. Andy was crying and I nearly was. I felt like I had waited such a long time to see one, and been through so much.
We didn't really want to go back. I could have walked on, but the others were waiting (in fact Shyrley had SMSed me to find out where the hell we were, but because the phone was buried at the bottom of my pack I didn't hear it). But that made the weekend, above the amazing carved corbels at Kilpeck, above the Templar church. It even made up for spending the day scared to death by Rowan's interesting driving style (I am a poor passenger at the best of times). We were gone for 2 and a half hours, and it didn't even feel like 1.
That night we lay out and watched the stars, spotting sputniks and giggling about silly things. Andy slept out in his mutant slug bag. The next day we saw another pair of ravens soaring high above the woods of Fiddler's Green. It was as if, having finally seen them, some spell had been broken, they weren't hiding any more. Almost as if Raven had finally said "Alright then, you've waited long enough."
Another church, with a massive hollow yew. It was sensual, the bark both smooth and rough, the living wood growing in luscious curves that begged to be touched, and it did like to be touched. Not climbed, no, it wouldn't have like it if we had tried to climb it, but it did like to be touched, caressed. We ate some of the berries, and it seemed to like that too. They were sweet and sticky and insubstantial yet giggly. Only the seeds are poisonous (but they are very poisonous).
We had a pub lunch, watching a buzzard glide around overhead, mewling like it had lost something, then Shyrley went home while we sat around like stuffed lions for a while. Rowan mentioned the National Birds of Prey Centre that was nearby and we decided to stop on the way home, after visiting the Weston's Cider Mill, which was where Rowan left us.
I found myself unbelievably moved by the sheer presence of the birds. And, of course, to round it all off, they had ravens - one of them was Loki, who stars in the BBC programme about ravens. The other two were called Thought and Memory - they were the only ones named on the board, those two, and when I told one of the staff that one of them was Loki he seemed amazed I had recognised him. Not obsessed at all, not me, no. That did it for me, seeing them. It was almost too much to be so close after all that had happened over the weekend.
When I had that dream about becoming a raven, I had never seen a decent picture of one, had never seen a film about them, but I had every detail right except the size - the one in the dream was much, much bigger. I could have watched and listened to them for hours, days.
All the birds were gorgeous though, from the impossibly cute baby wood owl (Edison) to the captivating secretary bird (Precious). Andy said the woman who runs the centre reminded him of me so much it was frightening. I was reminded of how much falconry has always appealed to me, was terribly impressed by the way they treated the birds like people, talked to them like people. I asked about how one goes about getting involved, and Jemima told me that the best way is to volunteer at a centre, asked where I live, and then told me she can make Oxford in an hour and 15 minutes. Andy reckoned that it was an invitation.
I might just have to try it, despite the petrol.