212 Low Impact

[gentle music] It's early summer as I write these words.

The spring flowers have faded, and my mind turns to the legend of Blodeuwedd, as it always does each year when the meadowsweet blooms.

Blodeuwedd is one of the stories in the Welsh book of legends, The Mabinogion.

They made her from flowers because no human woman would do.

Math ap Mathonwy and Gwydion, the magicians, gathered meadowsweet and broom and oak blossom from the hillside above Cwn Hyfel, pressing the petals together with their hands until the flower face opened and she was there, Blodeuwedd, the woman made of bloom.

They made her as a gift for Llew, a great warrior, whose mother had cursed him never to have a woman of any race on Earth as his wife.

So the magicians gave him a wife who wasn't any race, who was meadowsweet and oak, who smelled of the hillside after rain.

The thing about making a woman from flowers is that flowers have their own nature.

They open toward the light.

They don't ask permission.

They turn toward whatever warms them, and no magician's hand can hold them facing a direction they don't choose.

She found Gronw Pebyr on a hunting day, and she turned toward him as the meadowsweet turns toward the sun.

Not because she was faithless, because she was made of something that reaches, and the warrior Llew was not the warmth she reached for.

They punished her, of course.

Gwydion turned her into an owl.

Blodeuwedd turned from flower face to owl face, condemned to fly in the dark, to be hated by every other bird.

What they never say in the story, owls are good listeners.

Owls hunt what others can't find.

Owls are silent in flight.

The punishment gave Blodeuwedd everything she needed to be free.

That is my wish for this series, that you find inspiration and turn your face toward it.

And if they call you an owl for it, know that owls can see in the dark.