rewilding spirit at the edge of ravensweald

background

For a while I have been feeling my writing has started to stagnate at the other site the I have been doing the bulk of my writing these past five years, sceadugenga.com. During those years, I’d been a fairly prolific writer on sceadugenga on a day-to-day basis: posting anywhere from one to ten posts nearly every day since 2020, and quite a few days through 2019 on top of that.

Prior to 2019, I’ve been writing a number of different blogs since around 2001 — using everything from static HTML pages to Blogger. Largely I’ve been writing on WordPress.com or a self-hosted site based on their software since 2005.

The posts themselves at sceadugenga covered a wide variety of styles and topics:

• Autobiographic essays about my experiences when it came to music and growing up GenX;
• Posts with explorations into electronic music, even playing a bit of a 100+ year-old Gibson mandola (not mandolin);
• A reference tool on runes and the start of one for ogham;
• Sharing my attempts at getting skills with digital art later in life;
• Posts containing short fiction, microfiction/flashfiction, and several attempts at serialized novels;
• A vast amount of poetry, mostly of the shorter variety (i.e., micropoetry); and
• The occasional rant, experimental pieces, and exploratory writing. Maybe philosophy reared its ugly head now and again.

Oh. And…

• Promoting my book of poetry, “galdr: thought and memory”.

I may have forgotten a few types of posts as well, but you get the general idea. The site became a catch-all posting place for my interests.

recent history

“Sceadugenga”, for those who are not aware of the word, was taken from the story of Beowulf. It is an Anglo-Saxon word used to describe Grendel in that tale, Beowulf’s arch-enemy. What it translates to is shadow[sceadu]-walker[genga], or “one who walks in shadows”.

I have carried more than my fair share of shadow with me throughout my life. There are a lot of ways that “sceadugenga” might have applied to me throughout the years, so it stuck when I sought out a domain back in 2019 to replace the other iterations of my writing blogs before then.

But now I’ve decided it is time to “roll sceadugenga up” and pursue a path towards what I’ll call “rewilding” my spirit. And that, my friends, is the reason for my transition to a new domain and a new blog called “ravensweald”.

about ravensweald

I should explain the site name. The “raven” is easily deciphered by most folks out there, but not everyone will have encountered “weald” before. It is an archaic word for the forest, the wilds, the fells/fjalls, the woods. The name is equivalent to “ravenswood” or “ravenswild”.

I won’t go into it here, today, but I am being drawn back to my roots of my spiritual ways as I slough off old labels and get back to what I call “the old ways”. And that process is, in of itself, drawing out a different kind of approach to my writing. When readers visit, it is my intent that they will see some of this transitional type of writing, art, and approach towards intentional, rewilded living. Time will bear witness to those things, should they occur — but that is my current intention.

I feel it is time to make a significant change and have the remade version of myself reflect out to the world. Thanks for coming along with me on this journey, should you come along.