Auk Sham

Good thing I wrote this down on an e-post-it. I forget everything!

The other day, doing the round, I was with Calmé. This was the day after I'd done lots of merging with her via Marcan. On this day I was paying attention to her more than usual. She has reddish hair, fair skin and freckles, she's half my height and she has wings. Basically she looks sorta like a short Celtic fairy but without the woo-woo element (mostly).

Nero has previously explained that things like this (things like 'wings') is what happens when some aspect of an identity's primary-presentation in the consortium just doesn't match anything else I have an internal model for. I do understand that they (each personal Aeon) are many and which 'identity' I perceive, and the details of how I perceive it, is as much about me as them.

She looked at me closely and said to me with surprising clarity: Auk Sham.

Like she was telling me something. It sounded like "awk shom" but I understood that it was to be spelled like auk sham. I understood she was telling me something about herself and that this was a thing, or a role, or a name, something like that, maybe more than one.

I went googling tonight when I found that note. I don't find anything except this:

In the Gaelic language -- the old Celts coincidentally -- 'Auk' is the name of a large flightless bird (now extinct) from that region, and 'Sham' is a word for 'Friend.' I am pretty certain I didn't know these.

At first I thought, "How could 'bird-friend' be a thing/role/name for her?" and then I realized well ... she is an entity I perceive as half my height and she has wings, right? Maybe some part of her is as much a bird as something else can be a horse.

At the time I was disappointed only to get the two words, as there was this great 'feeling' when I got both the sound and understood-spelling at the same time, and I'd hoped for more of that.

Why Gaelic? Who knows?

PJ