We tend to think of Rhiannon as the fairy maiden on the white horse who entices Pwyll, the King and her future husband, into the Otherworld. Or she is the young mother who is unfairly blamed for the death of her own child until he is restored to her. This is Rhiannon’s story as it is most well-known, and she has become a beloved figure due to it. The image of the beautiful fairy woman on the white horse has become equated, to modern neopagan folks and Goddess-women, with the ancient Celtic and Indo-European horse goddesses. Of all the women in the medieval Welsh lore that we know as the four story ‘branches’ of the Mabinogi, Rhiannon is perhaps the most beloved.
But this is only half of the story.
Continue reading “Rhiannon as Midlife Queen Mother by Kelle BanDea”
When my doula clients would share with me that the pregnancy they were going through was not like the previous one, I often gently reminded them that they weren’t the same women anymore. Their bodies were starting from a different baseline. They were older. They carried the history and experience of any previous pregnancies in their bodies now. They carried the experience of motherhood. Perhaps they practiced different self-care or a different spirituality, ate differently, moved their bodies more or less often, lived some place new. All of those factors could add up to a completely different baseline when the current babies were conceived. And the babies were all different too — different, unique combinations of miraculous genes, different fingerprints forming, different minds, spirits, & personalities coming into being. So, of course, this experience was different than the last. It was its own unique ritual beginning from a new and unique place.
Again and again, I keep cycling back around to a deeper and deeper exploration of 
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