On Happiness And Home

On Happiness and Home

Lady with grain stems caught in her hair, Lady with strong hands for kneading dough, Lady with strong arms for the dough-shovel, Lady with sun-darkened skin and oven-fires caught in her eyes, Lady whose finery is a worker's tunic, Lady whose perfume is sweetwort and honey, Your voice is the music of flowing beer, Your laughter the chuckle of a clay bottle. Come home from your circling dance around the fire, Passing hand to hand and lips to lips! Come home from the young lioness's roaring tavern, From the kissing of wounds, from the heat of the sun. Ninkasi who gladdens the heart, come home! You are expected, awaited, beloved. Your strong hands have browned like good bread in the sun, And they slide over the pale skin of a fine noblewoman. Her milk-pale skin like fine holy linen, Her slender arms like slim reeds full of grace. Fingers calloused from the churning dough-shovel Twine with long digits like fragile spiders, Graceful ivory combs that spin long hair into art. She is quiet where you are joyful, She is delicate where you are vivacious, Yet her skill speaks with a voice as complex as poetry, As colorful as a tavern tale And just as clever in her transformation. Press your glad mouth to her buttoned lip, Lady. Let Uttu weave your black, barley-flecked hair. Lahar and Ashnan look upon you and smile, Emesh and Enten break bread under your roof, For what has more beauty than such perfect union Of a glad heart and a beautiful wife?

May Uttu be praised, may the name of Ninkasi be honey on my lips, And for the pen of her servant may Nisaba be praised.

——— *I wrote this with a heaping spoonful of UPG. There is no historical evidence for Ninkasi being gay for Uttu. Cool? Cool. Sumerian wives did brew beer though, as far as I can tell. **Lahar, the 'sheep' god notably referenced in the debate between Sheep and Grain, is heavily important to Uttu the goddess of weaving, just as Ashnan the grain goddess is important to Ninkasi, who is the brewer and the beer. ***Emesh, the god of 'summer', and Enten, the god of 'winter', as seen in the debate between Summer and Winter, both have a great deal to do with grain and livestock. From what I can tell by making inferences from other cultures, Summer is the time for brewing and Winter is the time for weaving, and it seemed significant enough that I had to include them.

Love is always a very awkward conversation. I've had a lot of talks about it with various people, not just concerning my own relationships. I knew a girl with nine siblings in middle school, even more worryingly thin than I was, who picked up the slack where her mom couldn't. It's been an ongoing project over the course of several years between my dad and I to try to define love in a clear, logical way. I have a friend who dated a suicidal boy because she didn't want him to kill himself, and it was one of the unhealthiest relationships I've ever seen, second only to perhaps the story of a man who loved his son and tried to beat the sociopathy out of him. I've had happy accidents, like living for a lonely four months in Spain and getting a housemate who was absolutely torn up about his sexuality, and telling him about my own experiences. I can't say I've gone through the same sort of stress as other LGBT people, but. Comparing pain is sort of pointless to begin with. It was enough that I understood, cared, and did my best to help when I had the chance. My relationship with my mother is complicated, in that she loves me with a fiery passion but expresses it through control. She feels responsible for my actions in a way that... doesn't function well. There is no line between personal and professional action, and a lot of times I feel more like her psychiatric patient without the benefit of a professional distance. She resents me, is confused by my actions, and frustrated. She loves me and only wants me to be my best, so by her logic I should just do everything she says, but it really isn't that simple. I'm 21 years old with my own life, and I'm afraid of her calling the police on me or banging unexpectedly on my door. I am comfortable with who I am. LGBT in a three year strong relationship, pagan and more certain of it than I ever was just shadowing my mother at church, fairly decent looking aside from the scars and split ends, capable of quite a few basic things and able to learn anything I need to. My anxiety stems from how other people respond to me, and my history. That's hardly unique, more a simple fact. I started this post off my saying that love is complicated, and I meant it. I've been listening to a lot of documentaries today, reading about gay history. I ran into a particularly misogynistic story that made me physically ill in a way that stories usually never do, and it made me think. It made me think about my mother, who's fierce and professional and feminist, but who admitted to me once that if I ever turned out lesbian she would outright sob over having failed in her duty to save my soul. It made me think about my dad, who's definitely not sure what to make of my sexuality (I came out to him) but doesn't care about making it his business either so long as I'm careful and safe. Acceptance from someone who's just starting to untangle his culturally trained misogyny, and isn't that funny? People are complicated. Just take a brief glance in a neurology textbook, or a psychology textbook. The ways we learn by building associations in particular fascinates me. It explains a lot, to me. Love is complicated. The Greeks had multiple words for it, Eros and Agape and Philia and Storge. We have multiple ways of referring to it in English, too. Roughly 220,000 words are in the Oxford dictionary, but I still haven't found a good way to describe how I feel when I see other people trying their hardest out of good intentions and having it go terribly, awfully wrong, without any possibility of understanding. I don't understand everything. I definitely don't claim to. But it's a gift that I understand what little I do, and I'll keep trying to understand what I do not. I hope other people will do the same. And I hope that little by little, some of the solipsism will be filed away from the world. Not everyone will accept everything. Not everyone is willing to be conscious of the ways their actions affect others. Maybe I'm a naïve idiot venting my rare moment of optimism. I didn't really have a plan when I started writing this, you know? I just have this aching fire in my chest. For myself, for the people I've met, for every time I've seen one person blank faced and going through what amounts to a "Windows.exe has stopped working" every time their locked-in worldview is faced with strange and alien data. It's definitely not going to change anytime soon. But hey. At least the government will let me get gay married. That's more than I expected, I'm kind of curious to see what will come next. Which will be put a stop to first, gay people and non-whites getting lynched in the next county over, or pagan merchants being run out of town? Does anybody actually listen to questions like that, or just nod and smile as they recycle their plastics and move on?

how to get a boyfriend according to the epic of gilgamesh

be a terrible demigod king who rules his people so cruelly that they must call to the gods for help

be so horrible that the gods literally create a man just to deal with your bullshit and let him loose in the woods

send a prostitute to introduce the man to civilization by having sex with him for a week straight

literally have dreams about how much you will love this man

get punched in the face by this man that the gods created for you because you are terrible and need to be stopped

congrats, you have a boyfriend now

On Worshipping Gods People Believe Are Dead

It’s winter, which means it is negative seventeen degrees outside, which means I’m on the rooftop burning incense again, prayer keeping my lips from freezing off. I hear Her tell me to go back inside before the cold makes me die up there, but I tell Her that She is fire enough- the sketch of a lion on a scrap of paper in front of me, the epithets scrawled in blue ink on my forearm where my long sleeves can hide them. Accidentally saying oh gods in class and pretending I just really love Rick Riordan. She finds me in my dreams and tells me She will be here when it is safe for me to worship Her but I shrug Her worries off, I am Her lion cub, I am young and still soft but I was built to survive. Remind Her the Gods- not just my Gods but the rest as well- are always calling out. This is resurrection by worship and my mother’s church does not feel holy. I call myself devotee, I call Her patron. Somewhere, a girl is learning to put claws on, the burden of life as a battle. Somewhere, Sekhmet is teaching them how to properly slash and stab, how to win a fight, and how to forget. Somewhere, a girl is learning how to love enough to hold her family together. Somewhere, Hethert is teaching her that it isn’t her job to keep wood from splintering. Somewhere, Serket is teaching her to be the stress on the beam if she has to be. To survive. Somewhere, Bast is teaching a woman how to love her strange, wonderful daughter. Right here, I light the candles with a lighter I stole from my father’s desk. I use my body to shelter the flame from the wind.

These are the children of Ereshkigal, the dark-eyed: Ninazu, by Gugulanna Heaven's-Bull Namtar, by Father Enlil who sits enthroned in state Nungal, by the queen of the dead and the dust of time that keeps her secrets. These are their titles. Ninazu, city-god, Enega and Ešunna, death-and-life through vegetation and the shadow of the never-never in his blood. Pitiless mace of war, dying and rising serpent-friend. He will suck the poison from your wounds. Namtar, inexorable. Right hand of the sinister, mouth of hell's crown, messenger of An and Ereshkigal and Nergal. Commander of demons whose very name breathes a plague, unfaltering fate, dutiful minister of his mother's court, Death who is the issue of the Dead's All-Mother. Nungal, the neck-stock, the dusty threshold bolt, the screaming lock, the fanged river of ordeals. Rebirther, reformer, who dwells in the mountain where Utu rises. Hers is that corner of the underworld man can return from reforged, the house of dust and shadows where a broken man sheds his old skin or wears it as burial shroud. Goddess Prison-Warden, her mother's daughter in the realm of men, radiant hope and beautiful despair, cool water of compassion on fevered brows. Hear their names in the bellow of a bull, in the snarl of a dragon, in the tolling-bell tones of their mother and as soft as crematory ash. They sit on the borderline like ravens on a fence, silent dark eyes and subtle croaked secrets, twilight-and-dawn owls, young-and-old serpents. Poison and healing, life found in death. Fear. Learn. Become braver for it. Ereshkigal, for deserved awe of you and your children, may your names be marked by the black-headed ones.

Her name is hidden in the words spoken and the history lost to time She manifests in the writer’s ink and the count of the years Her body is the pen and the page and all the tools of the scribe Dua Seshat Dua Netjeret ink Sd-nTr.t