“Let’s argue about a mermaid, by the way, there’s been a bombing in Yemin again.” – The World
“You can’t tell me you love Eric Kripke and then tell me you haven’t read Mary Shelly or Edgar Allen Poe, You can’t say you love Buffy but that you haven’t seen the original Dracula, or that you adore stories of the past without studying the greatest time that humans had, the 1900’s. You can’t tell me you’re a writer if you haven’t studied the past.”
Devon J Hall
One of my favourite actors of all time is dead. Let me reiterate, one of my favourite actors of all time is dead, but the legacy he left behind will last forever.
Tom Hardy died on October 31st some year in the future, and by the time your great, great, great, grandchildren find this book in a dollar store bin, he’ll have been gone for so long most people won’t even believe he existed.
Each of us leaves behind a legacy, and in the future, they will say that we didn’t exist and that we were made up stories that help our children’s children understand why it is that they are going through whatever Hellscape they’ll face when they get here.
In the meantime, I’m the one writing this book, so like Plato and Leonardo before me, I exist, like Dionysus, and Hades, like Hecate and Hera, Nyx and millions of other human beings.
When I die they will either say I was a demon or a Goddess or both, but none of that will matter, because I will have existed sometime in the past, even if the past that I existed in, isn’t my past, in particular, are you with me? Mary Shelly would have understood the joke, but she’s dead.
The point is, that just because someone swears up and down that something can’t exist, doesn’t mean it doesn’t, it just means that they can’t perceive the world the way that you do, and if I leave this world tomorrow before this book is finished, I hope you remember that I believed that.
When I was a little girl I believed I could see through space and time, and so I always knew that I would be The Loud Mouth Brown Girl, I just didn’t have the words to define what it would mean to become her.
I became, in January 2017, years before this book was written, a new version of myself. That was the year that I would decide I’d see where I was when I got where I was going, and now in 2022, I know where I’m going and I gotta tell you, shit got weird over the last few years.
For several years I’ve whispered those words every January, for a lot of reasons that I don’t know how to really conceptualize or explain, but the one that sticks in my mind is that January is filled with promise.
A brand new year, anything’s possible, and yes by February we realize that we’ve achieved or unlocked another layer of bullshit for the entire world to deal with (pandemic, war, women’s rights, youth rights, etc.) but in January everything is new.
We get to literally watch the snow melt, watch new life burst forth from trees and under them, we get to see everything as new again as colour overtakes shadow and darkness, the Vikings return to Vahalla, and the Witches come out to play with all the things of spring.
It’s a beautiful time of the year filled with promise, and by the end of the year we’re looking back at January with wistfulness, unable to wait until we can feel it again, but dreading what it takes to get there.
The year between one January and the next can change everything about our lives, everything about our planet, and everything about our solar system, and that’s why understanding the way that we speak a certain language not only makes sense but is absolutely imperative to understand how we have forgotten where we come from.
This means that just because it happened a long time ago, or just because it happened in a time and place you were not, does not mean that you didn’t hear the fucking tree fall in the God damned forest.
January and February did not exist—the year started in March. Around the year 700 BCE, the Roman king Numa Pompilius is said to have added the two winter months. January was called mensis ianuarius, the month of Ianus, the ancient Roman god of beginnings, of passage, and time itself. – Time and Date dot com
The ancient ones absolutely had a word that represented the first few months of the year, and depending on where you came from, that word changed inflection, sound, accent, and even meaning.
But Perception remains ever strong, no matter how one speaks any one language, their perception may remain the same, or change, depending on whether or not they are interested in hearing how other people around them see the world.
But only, and we cannot stress this enough if one desired for their perception to change, only if they were willing to learn how their perception could change, would it even be remotely possible to change one’s perception.
This is the art of free will. A gift from a God people around the world swears doesn’t exist simply because they’ve now convinced themselves that “God,” is a title, instead of you know…a fucking name.
Or for that matter, that God is a name, instead of a title.
See? Perception, The Goddess to end all Gods and Goddesses everywhere.
The point of me explaining it this way is to say that we can’t always understand everything that we don’t see, but that doesn’t make it any less there. Sure there are medications when we’re overwhelmed, but I have to believe that sometimes it really is the ancestors.
Other times it really is people from my past, or my present, or my future, helping me out or pushing me in a direction that will hopefully keep me safe, but mostly? Mostly it’s just your younger, wiser self, saying “I told you so.”
Sending all my love,
Devon Jessica Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 