Book III
“The Witch has arrived,
and I now have the rather tiresome task of explaining what that actually means to them.”
BIRTH
NAMING
THE NATURE OF SEX AND SEXUALITY
THE FOUR SEXUALITIES
THE FOUR WAYS OF SEXUAL EXPERIENCE
EMOTION AND LOGIC
A WORKING — OF EMOTIONAL MASTERY
DEATH
THOUGHT
BIRTH
There are questions that’ve been asked for as long as people have been able to ask questions. Perhaps the oldest of them is a simple one: Why are we here?
The Witch Blood answer isn’t complicated. There are two reasons, which may become three.
The first is simply to live. To experience life is reason enough. To know its pleasures and its pains, its joys and its sorrows; to learn, to fail, to succeed, to change, to wonder, to suffer, to laugh, and to experience the strange and remarkable thing that is being alive. Life doesn’t require another justification before it’s worth living.
The second is purpose.
But purpose, in the understanding of the Witch Blood, isn’t an instruction given by another. It isn’t being told to wash the dishes, cut down a tree, build a house, raise a family, or perform some task because somebody else’s decided that this is what you should do. Those things may be worthwhile, necessary, or even deeply meaningful, but they aren’t purpose simply because someone’s placed them upon you.
Purpose is something you may see.
Sometimes it may appear without invitation. Sometimes it may arrive through an event, a thought, a person, a loss, a discovery, or something that can’t easily be explained. And sometimes the Sisters of Weird may place it directly in your way. They may place it there once, or they may place it there again and again. They may put it into your path, into your thoughts, and into the strange repetitions of life until you can no longer honestly say that you’ve not seen it.
But seeing it isn’t taking it.
You still decide.
You consider what’s been placed before you and decide whether to take it or leave it where it was found. It may be recognised as something that belongs to you, or it may be recognised as something that doesn’t. The fact that it’s been placed before you doesn’t make it an obligation. The Sisters of Weird may show you a door, but they don’t have the authority to make you walk through it.
In this is sovereignty, because purpose has meaning only when it’s chosen.
And once chosen, purpose isn’t a casual thing.