My relationship with the Otherfaith and the gods of that faith is still new, budding. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, as much as I can, and trying to understand things. It’s slow going, mostly because I am very tired these days and the day job has sucked away most of my time and energy.
Anyway. I feel a strong pull to two particular Otherfaith beings — the god Ophelia and the spirit Epiphany.
Epiphany is about creative frenzy, writing, reading, learning, the fire of inspiration, the consuming passion of creation. That consuming passion is something I hold in my life, in tension with extreme depression (and sometimes in collusion with it).
Ophelia is a river god; she is sadness, and sorrow, and rebirth and purification. She is a god associated with depression, too, and appears veiled in blue. She is about duty and responsibility.
I think I’m drawn to these two outright because they represent a tension in my own life — those extremes of creative frenzy and explosive passion and duty, responsibility, and depression — repression, really, of that creative passion. Most of the time I feel like I’m drowning in depression, in real life, but when the creative spark gets lit it’s like a river on fire, and I’m both within the flames and the water, burning and drowning at the same time.
I want to find a way to control, to tame these extremes; to find a manageable middle. I’ve felt a pull from Ophelia to start veiling and I think that’s a way for me to work on controlling my emotions, or at least my outward expression of them. I’ve always had the problem of taking on others’ emotions with my limited empath capabilities and I’ve found when I cover my hair it dulls the cacophony of feelings around me.
The Ophelia is associated with recovery from depression, and Epiphany’s flames are about rebirth. Right now I burn until I burn out, and drown until I’m too tired to do anything. I want to break out the other side; I want to find the rebirth in fire; the purification in water.
Right now my creative frenzy is dulled, extremely so, for many reasons. I’m quietly building up the fire, stoking it, and finding a way to do a controlled burn, a manageable blaze. When I let it burn, I’ll let it burn for Epiphany, and walk through the flames to come out the other side stronger.
Right now I’m underneath layers of water, drowning at the bottom of the river. I’m learning to swim, learning to breathe under the water, and soon I’ll paddle to the surface and emerge, the rocks that dragged me down left at the bottom.
There’s a way to break through this and I think that Ophelia and Epiphany can show me those paths.
-Morag