Convocation
Work Your Graveyard.
To all of my Exu and Pomba Gira spirits, Laroye!
From the earth, we bring forth the graveyard in which you are remembered and the bohemian, eccentric, queer, and unruly dead are gathered and uplifted in the light and heat of dirt and bone, candle and cool water, root and flower, leaf and branch, stone and wine, ink and corn, pot and box. Together we hold the crossroads open where the living breadth of nature winds into the asphalt and iron of our too-human world and fashion sacred vessels enfolding the numinous in the worldly.
In your fierceness and compassion, I find solace, direction, and courage. I seek to live a bohemian, eccentric, queer, and unruly life of my own that remains ever open and ever anchored to cosmic depth and wonder that you are.
Sharing in your understanding, I revisit my inheritances and carry forward the precious and work to release the harmful, hoping to give what I can to those who will carry on after me. May I be a source of aid for others in their own work.
From your visions, I draw inspiration and create the fantasies, the fruits and flowers of my work that I can share most easily with others. May the pleasures of this work be shared widely.
"a weird old witch who loves (and sometimes writes) weird new games."
That's the placeholder text over on my itch page. This prayer is a straightforward enough thing for someone offering spiritual services, perhaps, a little map back to my source so that folks know where the water comes from.
It sits strangely on a website that also serves as a place to talk about tabletop role playing games. Those are things we do just for fun, right? Especially after the moral panics that linked role playing games to lurid ideas of satanism and occultism, role playing game discourse has had every reason to sidestep questions of spiritual significance.
But role playing games are my most durable creative outlet and my creativity wells up from a place of injury and healing inseparable from my spiritual commitments. I don't think running, playing, or writing games is a religious or spiritual action, or that participating in games with me entails any spiritual work.
I do think that my creativity in role playing grows from the place of injury and healing where my spirituality also thrives and reflects it aesthetically and sometimes morally.
Aesthetically, I love the weird of all sorts from the gothic to the pulpy, the cosmic to fantastic, and much more. The weird is a crucible where what began in dissociative escape from an abusive childhood became a container in which I could shape images of hope and perseverance. Through weird literature and games I discovered that the crucible involved more than just my own autobiography and opened onto so much history.
Here I want to feel out the shape of my ideal gaming experiences and describe ways of achieving them in a way that others can enjoy and take their own ideas from for their play. While the roots sink deeply into spiritual matters, these fruits and flowers can be carries off by others with no ties to them.
But I honor the roots, and I hope you will respect them.