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Everyone was surprised when Bob died.

Not only was he the youngest of the siblings, but—as he himself would have acknowledged—his reputation as the family health nut was well-earned.

Bob didn't smoke or drink. His diet put everyone to shame. He ran several marathons a year.

When he died at 50, no one could believe it.

The autopsy explained it all.

Unknown to anyone, including himself, Bob had been born with a congenital heart defect. Under normal circumstances, he would have been dead by the age of 30.

By his actions, he'd bought himself an extra 20 years of life.

This is one in a series of blog posts about our pantheon. Find the list of the whole series here.

You may have heard the Greek tale of Arachne, the mortal woman who angered Athena with her perfect weaving and ended up as a spider. What if I told you that Arachne was originally a goddess, and specifically a fate goddess? Like Ariadne, who was also "demoted" to mortal status in Greek myth, Arachne turns out to be a Minoan goddess.

It was a silent, windless night far north, beyond the harsh lights of city and suburb. I was lying belly down on a dock, staring into utterly still water. The diamond splash of stars above was reflected perfectly beneath me.

I was rapt, drawn out of myself by the strangeness of finding stars above and below. With a slight shift in perception, suddenly all was space and points of light. I was falling, floating in this wondrous, mesmerizingly unfamiliar space. I was suspended, lost in an ocean of stars. 

It was day three of a seven-day meditation retreat and I was busy sabotaging my practice by wallowing in guilt. At the mid-week interview with the meditation leader I complained about these negative thoughts: “I don’t know why I do this to myself.” 

“But are you doing it?” she said. “Are you doing it?” 

Well, no. My thoughts were basically thinking themselves, assailing me when whether I wanted them or not. The more closely I observed myself, the more I came to the conclusion that I had ridiculously little control over the thoughts and reactions that drove me into various states and actions. 

The stately magnificence of the hymn to Fortune (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi: “Fortune, Empress of the World”) with which Carl Orff's 1935-6 pagan oratorio, Cármina Burana, both begins and ends, either belies, or comments ironically, on the over-the-top quality of the lyrics.

In this not-very-literal rendering, I've attempted to forefront this tone of self-parody. The speaker is a poet who's down on his luck, and in response hits back with both fists.

For all the good it does.

O Dame Fortune

O Dame Fortune, Queen

of it all: like the Moon

you wax and wane,

always in flux.

I've been thinking a lot about Fate lately, what with all the crazy things going on in the Big World. Fate has always been a focal point for people's thoughts, and the Fate goddesses of the ancient pantheons have a lot to teach us. There is, of course, a Minoan Fate goddess. In the Tribe, we call her Arachne.

But over time some of her traits shifted to another deity: Ariadne.

Title: Romancing the Null (The Outlier Prophecies Book One)