About Spirit Roads
Spirit Roads is a free non-fiction publication and a space for people who love art, literature, witchcraft, and occult themes. Uncommon Tapestries is a fiction sub-section of Spirit Roads. Here, readers will find my musings, occasional writing exercises, updates on the Harmonium, (a literary magazine in the long-term works) writing excerpts and experiments, book reviews, notices about seasonal tarot availability, and related offerings or services.
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The Story of the Name
Titles generally come quite easily to me, and consequently, I love naming things. Or it may be that my love of naming things prompts titles to come easily to me. But who can say? So when I recently returned to Substack and found that I was struggling to give this newly refurbished writing space a name, I gave it place holders instead, Hughes Reads and Hughes Writes, but I hoped to find a way to merge these placeholders under one umbrella, one publication, one stream, rather than two. My attempts to find the container and give it a name were met with persistent images of The Ridgeway an ancient trackway in the UK that runs near a number of familiar-to-me and much loved sites and landmarks. It’s near The Uffington White Horse, a prehistoric figure carved into a hill of white chalk; near Avebury, a Neolithic henge site that encompasses the village by the same name and contains three stone circles; near the West Kennet Long Barrow, a chambered Neolithic tomb; and near a cottage I once lived in on a 545-acre former WWII airfield, RAF Wroughton, now property of the London Science Museum. And to these images I’d respond: “No. That makes exactly zero sense. I am not naming this publication The Ridgeway.” And the images would fade, and I’d dwell on the container again trying to get a sense for it. And images of the street where I currently live in a suburb of Houston took the place of The Ridgeway. “No. What is with the street imagery?” And the images would fade, and I’d dwell on the container again trying to get a sense for it. And images of the street on which I grew up in a small Southwest Louisiana town took the place of the street where I currently live. Wash, rinse, repeat for days.
I was looking at my shelves this morning, 26 October 2024, for a reference book, and my eyes landed upon Spirit Roads: An Exploration of Otherworldly Routes, an unread book given to me by a friend some years ago, written by Paul Devereux, published in 2003. And with that visual connection, all the images of the last three weeks came together, The Ridgeway now shining like a blazing beacon, and I understood the nature of the container and knew its proper name. Spirit is a word with multi-layered meaning and numerous derivatives. It can refer to immaterial beings, gods, goddesses, angels, demons, beloved dead, and wandering ghosts, but just as easily, it indicates the animating principle of material beings, the bodied, whether human, animal, plant, mineral, or landform. It comes from Latin spiritus, meaning breath, also the wind, a derivative of spirare, to blow into or to breathe upon, the same word that gives us the word inspire, a prompt to action, a call that rouses animation, from which we derive the word inspiration, meaning motivation to act, the influence of a muse or a god flowing through one’s creative expressions, possible spirit possession, or the simple act of breathing in. And the word roads, of course, indicates pathways, travel, adventure, connections, and journeys.
Spirit Roads. This is a name that can last for years and easily contain, or logically point to, any number of side quests. I’m likely to keep it a while.
