Arianrhod

">There is an eight spoke wheel that turns and weaves in a distant place, far beyond where the eye can see. Some say it is of silver, spinning high and cold as the moon, some of wood from the 8 different trees of our seasons, but others say that it is cast of iron, rusting slowly on its axis. She, the great spinner of all, sits and spins us like thread, and the iron of her wheel is woven deep into our blood. Rust, dust, iron from the mother of all. Her lessons are not easy or sweet, but they go deeper than bone, to a time when we were but stone and mud.

Ahrianrod is the cold aloof light of a million stars and the very depths of the ocean in which they say she drowned. But then men are want to say these things, telling stories of how craftiness and female cunning can come to nought but a bad end, metering cause and effect out in neat little parcels. But life has a way of unfolding that is not so neat or seemingly just. Perhaps she did drown, surrounded by all her madness and wickedness the way they tell it, but we believe she swam with a different tide, untouchable by the currents of life as you or I would walk it. Ahrianrod was star born and star bound. She was as cold as the empty atmosphere just beyond the curve of the earth but as warm as a midwinter night, when the glow comes not from the brashness of the sun, but from the bright points of light we see in one another as we gather round to celebrate the ones we love at these times. She was not and could never be defined by the laws that the men tried to tie her story up in, she was instead as dark as the dark moon, untouched by her brother sun. But even there, there is some discrepancy… a magical child, some argument as to who the father was and Ahrianrod as ever, too proud and distant to say, as if the words would diminish her somehow.