Sovereignty
🏴 Sovereignty 🏴
I was talking to my mother this weekend about what it means to be Welsh, to be a Welsh woman.
Wales is in its essence a matricentric culture- where the home and social life is centred around the women and their doings. Historically Welsh women had much more rights than their English counterparts, they could get a divorce for adultery and once widowed could not be compelled to marry again.
Why so different in Wales?
In the tales of the Mabinogion, the Welsh myths and legends, if you peek through the Christianised telling of the tales about fickle and treacherous women, you can see the Goddess clearly. Whatever happens to them, these women belong to themselves.
In Wales the Goddess is named Sovereignty and what appears to be unacceptable behaviour to men is the divine feminine choosing the best steward for her land. The mistake these men make is expecting loyalty - the Goddess has her own interests at heart and belongs to none of them.
In the Arthurian legend of Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, Arthur searches desperately for an answer to the riddle that will save his life - what do women most want? It takes Gawain literally kissing a hag (embracing the dark feminine) for them to get the answer.
Women want sovereignty. They want to belong to themselves.
My aunt at my wedding warned my husband about marrying a Welsh woman - she wasn't wrong.
Dear woman, the mistake everybody makes is thinking that you belong to them.
With love from Wales x
I Have Served
I have served.
Through heartbreak and homelessness
And breasts sharp with milk
As they call to a babe
That is not this one
I have served.
I have walked and wept with women
With gentle hands and truthful tongue.
Sometimes I wonder
Whether the right choice
Was to keep going.
And yet
I treasure this work that held me together
Like beads and string.
Women weaving
Women delving
Women dancing together
In sacred mystery.
- Jenny Wren
Apology Flowers
Gwydion,
Did nobody tell you
That owl is not a punishment?
Like all men who shout names as you leave them
The curses that rain down on women who go their own way
By men who forget
The ancient honour of the words
Created by our mothers
As they talked and sung and gathered
Those words twisted
And used against us.
Virgins belong to themselves
Birthing sacred life onto earth
Spinsters weave the fabric of creation
Like the grandmother spider
As they hold riches in their webs.
Whores are holy wombs
From which we are all born and to which you ache to return
In a woman's loving embrace
And owls are the wisdom of the night
The communion
With the wild feminine dark
That you crave and fear.
I like to think she laughs
Like all the women who escape
From the clutches of men.
She traded apology flowers
For
Wings.
- Jenny Wren
Artwork "Little Blodeuwedd" by Tammy Wampler
