D’ARK-N-ESS

Atlantean depthheights;
Treasury Asunder
Not even Nothing is outside of
     God - dess - ex
The Three is One is Nonesomuch
Allow the nothingly nature
Suprise to surmise the
     musé-ic soliloquestqueriesquarries

                                             | Cybele Brandow

About

ODES FROM AVALONIA is a place for my visions, poetry, musings, and dreams. It is my hope that these enchantments will offer a spark of mystery, of joy when you come upon them. Everything published here is my attempt at faithfully transcribing what Avalonia has entrusted to me, often through invisible dictation, either from within me or, seemingly, from outside me. I also include an audio recording of a recitation in each post, so you may receive them in a similar way as I do.

This publication began on Beltane 2023 as Little Cosmic Missives. Around two years and 84 missives later, a voice announced to me on May 26, 2025 that this publication would be evolving to ODES FROM AVALONIA. Avalonia is the name given to a proposed microcontinent which collided with Laurentia and Baltica in the Late Silurian—Devonian Acadian-Caledonian Orogeny.

By some accounts, the extent of the Avalonian terrane stretches from Connecticut to the Carpathians, passing through Transylvania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, England, Wales, and Ireland (Avalonia orientale) before crossing the Atlantic to the Avalon Peninsula, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and all 3,478 miles of Maine’s rocky coast (Avalonia occidentale). Each of the lands of my ancestors are connected as pearls along the serpentine constellation body of Avalonia, on which I too was born (in Portland). Presently I live on the narrow Diamond Island Formation geologic band (Odi in the Maine Geologic Bedrock Survey), which my house was built atop a hundred years ago. It is a vein of black, rusty-weathering quartz–muscovite–graphite–pyrite phyllite — an Acadian orogeny product, formed under compressive tectonic stress during the collision~suturing of Avalonia to Laurentia. Metamorphosed sediment — once mud or shale — that was buried, squeezed, and recrystallized over 400 million years ago — and surfaces today as a visible ledge along the back boundary of the land I care for.

(Revised terminal Ediacaran – Early Cambrian palaeogeographic map)

Avalonia verbally announced herself as my muse back on January 6th, 2023, but has been with me my whole life. I have come to realize that the missives I received these past two years were all under her auspices. I deepen now in my commitment to passing along her blessings and conveyances to you all under the banner of ODES FROM AVALONIA. Odes from the land, from the spirit of the land — which spans the whole vast of the Atlantic, and primarily lies underwater, emerging metamorphically as liminal shorelands, misty and moss-covered forests of evergreen, stone crags and bluffs witnessing the dawn of each new day~

About Cybele

Cybele Brandow is a third-gender sibylline poet of Magyar, Celtic, and Germanic (et. al.) ancestry. They live in the Dawnland just south of Portland, Maine; a short walk from the rocky Avalonian coast they grew up with and so love. They hold a degree in Religion from Reed College, where Cybele studied late-antique Christian mysticism, Sahidic Coptic, pre-imperial Chinese idea systems, and presented a thesis titled “The Fool’s Hermeneutic: Toward a Trialogic Understanding of Authority within the Confines of the Tarot Divination Event”.

For as long as they can remember Cybele has received richly colorful, narrative visions. Similar in character to waking dreams, these visions regularly come with accompanying poetic dictations. While it has been their practice to record as many of them as they can, they never transcribe that which must be passed over in silence. At times, these powerful imaginations occur daily or even more frequently, and can only be experienced.

Through years of being in intimate learning community with Jungians via the Maine Jung Center, Cybele received many keys that aid them invaluably in more gracefully and sustainably navigating unconscious imaginal currents. These tools and techniques are much treasured by their psyche, and you will undoubtedly see regular allusion to them in their writings.