Husk or Horn

 

Nothing last forever
Save in story and in song
It took one final heartbeat
Then in the silence he was gone

Something fell to rest
Cold and empty on the ground
The question hangs upon the air
Was it husk or was it horn?

There was a time that he was brimming
Full of laughter full of light
Booming laughter
Surging blood in love and rage

The last drop has fallen
Cold and empty now he lies
How will he be remembered
In all that now remains

The husk gave all unwilling
Like a miser must be torn
Coin by coin and drop by drop
Broken and empty will he fall

The horn is raised high uncaring
From hand to hand is thrust
Stranger friend and lover
Drink deep wild and uncaring

Spilling over beard
Falling over thirsty breast
Burning with a passion
That makes cherry blossoms weep

To Hel’s own hand
The horn did pass
High she raised it
ere she drank

Head thrown back in ecstacy
Spilling from the corpse slack lip
Throat working as she drank it down
River of fire into the icy sea

Careless in her revelry
life wine spilled over unmarred cheek
Paint her cold white breast
As deep she drank his last

A sigh she gives
No tear she sheds
The horn is empty
Reverently laid to rest

For Kirk Douglas 1916-2020, who brought Vikings to live so well, and for every one of those who have shared in this long winter seasons of those they have lost in their lives.

We are given just this

78. Cattle die, | and kinsmen die,
And so one dies one’s self;
One thing now | that never dies,
The fame of a dead man’s deeds.

We will all lie drained of life upon the earth.  Those who seek only to avoid death will fall as empty husks; life unlived when death claimed them anyway.  Those who embrace life will fall like the drained horn, to the cheers of the hall, their name shouted so loud it will ring in the halls of the dead to announce their coming in well earned glory.

Envy you your Devil

Yes indeed I’ve heard your good news
Its just that I don’t care
I’ve nothing against your Jesus
But I’ve gods and goddess fair

No I do not need salvation
Only coupons get redeemed
But I envy you your devil
So much it makes me bleed

We Heathen’s have no devil
Nor will Loki play the part
For all the ill we do then
It was born within our heart

For I gave myself to frenzy
On the cup that Odin bore
But that cup was filled with my rage
And my eyes that guide the fist

If Frey bless my manhood
Or Freya fire my lust
It was my tongue that seduced her
And my spear that broke my vows

Loki may have laughed
When I lied to dodge the price
But the lie was my invention
The cowardice my call

The Mother knows I chose it all
The One Armed knows which oaths I broke
There is none who bares the shame but me
Of those deeds I would deny

Jörmungandr spans the world
But the venom spewed was mine
If it burned worse than fire
It came from out my heart

I don’t envy your forgiveness
Nor do I seek to dodge my price
There’s no denying that I did it
But by gods it wasn’t twice

No devil made me do it
For the failings all my own
My gods they show no mercy
Not to them they call their own

For each and every failing
All of those who paid for me
Not man or god can change it
Not the fear and not the rage
Not the failings of half measure
Not the trusts that I have broken
Nor those resting in their grave

I carry all the shame of it
It doesn’t balance all I’ve won
The two don’t touch each other
We’re not accountants doing sums

I will one day face my ancestors
With all my pride and all my shame
One thing I beg my gods each day
My ancestors every night

Let me never in my cowardice
Ask to be freed of my price
They day I take your devil
The day I claim it wasn’t me
Is the day I don’t deserve the ones
Who died to keep me free

Freedom isn’t free you know
Oh it has a bitter price
It demands you own your failings
It demands you own your lies
The day you dodge the shame of it
Is the day your freedom dies

For your total lack of mercy
For your cold and bitter truth
I thank my gods and ancestors
If in life I earned some worth

Skadi and Secret Mountains

Skadi is the goddess of the high wild places, the white huntress that teaches us to ski, to shoot, and the cold bitter truth of testing our strength against the mountains.  I did ten years as a soldier, and spent a lot of time learning Skadi’s ways in the high wild places.

She comes to us from the Jottun, Skadi Thiazidottir.  Hers is the old way of teaching, the old relationship, as with Nerthus, where the lessons are edged with fangs, and mistakes paid in blood.  She is a good instructor for those able to put aside their ego and listen.  You cannot pit yourself against the mountain in defiance.   The lessons of Thor to dig deep, of Tyr to endure unflinching, of Odin to hurl your defiance in the teeth of superior strength will get you killed, and the mountain won’t care.

Soldiers come to the mountain hard and strong, proud and cocky.  They learn, or leave on stretchers, for Skadi loves her hunters, but it’s a tough love, a brutal instruction that spares no pride because getting it wrong upon the mountain gets you dead, even today looking down on our bustling cities, her truths remain.

One step per breath.  When the going gets steep you do not push harder, you slow from a walk to mountain walk; one step per breath.  At this pace you can continue.  Your muscles will not overcome the mountain, it will overcome your ego.  Heed Skadi, respect the truth of the place, and forget what you know you can do in other places.  In this time and place, one step per breath is the way to win.

This pass isn’t safe.   You plot your ascent, and many times you reach where you should have been able to get through, but a slide has taken it, or the snow pack is unstable, and there is no way forward.  To go forward to your goal, you first must go backwards to the valley, and then ascend another slope to seek another pass.  The only way forward begins by going back.  Like it, hate it, deny it; the mountain does not care.  If you want to reach your destination, first retrace your steps.

Right now you are asking, since I don’t plan on mountaineering, I have no urge to go hunting, why do I care what Skadi has to teach me?  Ah yes.  Her lessons were born in the glacier scarred peaks of the open mountains, but they become twice as important in the secret mountains.

What, you may ask, is a secret mountain.  I mean they tower above our sky scrapers, force our planes to devote hundreds of miles just to get high enough to traverse them, how can they be a secret?

Life is filled with secret mountains, and they break people in horrible numbers every day.  We don’t see them, or rather, we see them, but fail to accept what they are, and that denial is what allows them to break us in such terrifying numbers.

Many years ago, Skadi married Njörd of the sea.  To his kingdom she went for nine nights, but could not sleep, for it was hateful to her.  To her kingdom he came for an equal period, but could find no rest either.

The White Huntress passed from mountain to sea and back without effort because she knew the ways of the mountains, she lived the truth of the mountains, and she knew when she trod upon the secret mountains.  Their ways she knew, and her lessons she gave are truths that work in secret mountains as well as open ones.

I can hear you gnashing your teeth about all this secret mountain talk, but the infantry in the crowd most likely already know what I am talking about.  Swamps.

A swamp is a mountain turned into a board game.  The board is flat, so you can expect to simply walk from edge to edge without effort, correct?  Try it.  Let people know where you are going, so searchers know when and where to go recover you.  Hopefully in one piece.

Swamps are secret mountains, because they don’t rise up and show you “hey, slow down, no amount of pushing will help you.  One step per breath.  Don’t fight the swamp, accept its rules and adjust your pace”.  No, a swamp just clings to you, drags at you, mocks you.  It takes your one hundred percent effort and gives you thirty percent return.  You push harder, give a hundred and ten, spending from your reserves, and it gives you twenty percent, or less.  Then you collapse.  You refused to see the mountain beneath your feet, and it beat you.

Swamps are secret mountains, they don’t show you a landslide in the pass, or groaning snowpack to demand you turn back, return to the last valley and try another slope.  No, it will look all the same, but grow harder and harder to fight as you advance, letting you spend more and more strength for less and less progress, until you have given up all thought of looking for another way through, and spent the last of your strength on a way that was never going to go through.

Life is full of those swamps, those secret mountains.

Work situations, relationships, family, chronic physical illness, mental illness, and oh my word yes, financial issues are not something that you can simply put your will, your skill and your strength against and win through.  These are mountains, and you had best learn this before they break you.

Skadi is a goddess, but a cold one.  She is the White Huntress, the goddess of the high wild places, the Jottun who came down from the killing mountains to marry into our holy tribe, and bring with her the lessons of her mountain kin.

She does not pit her strength against the mountains.  She masters the mountains by accepting their strength, and moving with them.  She did not win her way to the sea and back by defying the swamp, but by understanding when a secret mountain lay before her, and she learned and mastered its ways.

Skadi is a goddess, as far beyond our strength and wisdom as we are beyond the insects we crush unknowing as we walk, yet she does not waste her strength against the mountains; she is too wise in their ways to court defeat when victory requires only accepting you stand upon the mountain, and act accordingly.

Why do we demand that we put one foot in front of the other, at the same pace, without bothering to see if we stand upon the firm flat ground, the slope of the mountain, the edge of the swamp?  In our pride, in our blindness, we waste our strength, falling bitter and weeping hurling ourself against the pass that is blocked in front of us, when the way back was clear, and the way around was waiting for us to find it.

In full knowledge of our resources, physical, mental, emotional, and financial, we ignore the ground before us, the cost of each step, and push ourselves beyond our limits where we…..fail.  Obviously, beyond our limits is beyond sustainable, also called stupid, also called avoidable.
It is easy to see a mountain when it is physical and in fills your entire field of view.  That doesn’t stop humanity from trying to pretend it is still on the flat and level ground and can proceed without yielding to the laws of Skadi.  This is where Search and Rescue and the Army get to pray to the White Huntress while seeking to recover your silly arses, preferably while still breathing.

It his harder to see the secret mountains.  The physical swamp is still easier to see than the everyday worlds secret swamps, the secret mountains where each step costs more than the last, and sometimes you will break yourself before admitting you must turn back if you hope to survive, let alone find another way through.

We are terrified of the appearance of failure to the point that we ignore every chance to succeed while pouring out the last of our resources on steps towards the blocked pass, the bottomless bog.  Skadi does not care if you accept her teachings or not.  The mountain does not care if you reach the summit and pass beyond, or lie at the bottom of a crag bleeding out.  Skadi teaches us what we need to learn, and more, what we need to accept.

Don’t break yourself against things that are obviously and inevitably beyond your power.  That is not courage, that is stupidity.  No one is strong enough to jog straight up the mountain.  You follow the paths the mountains leave open, if one is closed, turn back and seek one that is not.  You take one step per breath when it becomes hard; at that pace you can reach the top.  Faster, and the wise will step over you on their slower way to the top.

Don’t be afraid to turn back.  Do you wish to reach the other side, or simply waste the last of your strength failing against a pass that is now blocked?  If you want to reach your goals in the mountains, in the swamps, or in life where the forces that you work with and against are vastly more powerful than you, you must adapt to reality, not die because you refused to admit your first plan no longer had a chance to succeed.

Weakness is real.  Denial kills.  The mountain doesn’t care.  If you can’t keep going at this pace, slow down.  Self care is how you win.  One step per breath is all you can do, then do that.  Can’t go forward, it just gets harder and harder?  Turn around, this way only leads to failure.  Find another one.

Skadi’s lessons are not gentle, but they are life saving.  We spend too much of our lives defeating ourselves because we refuse to admit when we are standing on some pretty obvious mountains.  The gods do not give us tools we aren’t meant to use.  They taught us the ways of the mountains because they wanted to see what we could do with the choices we made in the struggles that matter,  not so we could spend ourselves pointlessly against mountains that won’t notice our steps, nor value our bones if we fail.

Do yourself a favour, and when life gets hard, take a good long look and see if you might have not noticed you were on a mountain.  If you are, listen to Skadi’s lessons, and stop sacrificing yourself on stone that will neither yield nor care.

Australia eldsaga

Surt fares from the south | with the scourge of branches,

The sun of the battle-gods | shone from his sword;

The crags are sundered, | the giant-women sink,

The dead throng Hel-way, | and heaven is cloven.

–

Where peaceful Koala |in dreaming tree

No shelter finds | scourge of branches sears

From farm and town | to Njord’s field fly

Grey prowed serpents | all succor bring

–

Farm and field | flock and forest burn

Surt spawn march | where the rising sun was broken

Star girt banner fly | sea blue field defiant

Strong sons of the south | through smoke will fare

–

Beli’s bane | lord of renewal

Foe of Surt | your aid we pray

Let not your daughters | feed hope to fire

From the ashes | raise garth and field

–

Gods of all folk | spirits of the dream time

This hallowed land | from flame preserve

Thor to still |the storms of fire

Njord to bless | with tears of the sea

–

Now do I see | the earth anew

Rise all green | from the waves again;

The cataracts fall, | and the eagle flies,

And fish he catches | beneath the cliffs.

 

–For all the peoples of Australia, who now suffer through fires the like of which my people know too well.  May the gods bless all who struggle to fight or flee the fires, and Njord’s blessings upon the Royal Australian Navy in its rescue duties against this most ancient of foes.

How to donate to assist

Welcome in Another Year

Welcome in Another Year

The sun has turned, the solstice passes and we stand with the heart of the dark about our shoulders and the wan light of dawn caressing us with quiet promises of warmer tomorrow, a spring full of life, a summer of warmth the call of life, where the heart of the dark is filled with the chains of the past, the voices of the dead, and the cold certainty of costs for what we survived.

This is a valuable time.  There is time to gather together and wassail hard in the heart of the dark, to stand in the teeth of privation and loss, the dead hard upon the ground, the loss of jobs, the terrible cost of just surviving bitter upon your tongue, turn your eyes to the fire and charge your glass and howl your defiance at the abyss of darkness not with a snarl but a laugh.  Reach out to those who have less than you, for nothing like your own privation teaches you the value of half a loaf and half filled cup, the little you have shared is a greater gift than scraps from some fat lords table.  Given in solidarity, not superiority, in hopes brighter days attend giver and receiver, not given to make clear who is master and who beggar at the feast.

There is work to be done as well, work to be done in deciding what we will carry with us into the new year.  All those you have lost hang about you, ragged ropes of unresolved grief will neither let them rest nor let you remember.  All those boasts you made, tasks you undertook, battles you took up, promises you made, obligations you undertook hang about your person, unseen, unexamined, and undischarged.

Take this time to sit in the dark, let the fire blaze bright, be it candle or hearth, and take up a warming drink, be it coffee or whiskey, whose heat, bite, bitterness and comfort will give form to what we do now, will give focus to what we give our heart and mind to, and will make possible the dropping of the barriers, the fear, the shame, that kept us from dealing with what must be dealt with until now.

The Yuletide is upon us, the dead and living are separated by a veil thinner than a whisper, what was, what is, what will be tremble and twist about each other separated by less than a whim, less than a thought, not even a word.  This is a time of flux, a time of power, a time of loss; but loss of what is for us to take up.

If we dare.

Those we have lost, we cling to them like a miser to gold pledged in payment.  We refuse to let go from us those who have passed on, not because we do not acknowledge their death, but because we refuse to let go the place the held in our life.  This is cowardice, and costly.  The living are lost.  To cling to them is to cling to the rotting flesh and seared bone fragments of the corpse.  It is sick, self destructive and selfish.  Raise your glass to them that passed and wish them well on their way.  Hel has received them, they are in the mound with their ancestors, safe from all want and hurt, it is only our cowardice that binds them to the moments or months of their death.  Remember their dying forever, or let them pass and remember them as honoured dead; remember the gifts they gave you in life, keep bright their memory and reclaim what you shared in life, untainted by the trauma and rage of death and loss.

We have failed.  Oaths spoken not redeemed, challenges taken up that we fell short on, tasks that defined us, that we took pride in and built worth through were lost or taken from us.  Gifts we have given brought not joy but hurt, praise given was taken as mockery, and aid offered was wound not weal as intended.  The tattered strands of wyrd from each of these broken threads bind and tangle us, fouling all work we undertake and bringing ill luck to all bright weavings we attempt.

Now is the time we sit by the fire, in the cloaking darkness, and strip ourselves naked as we dare not do at any other time and place.  Naked not of cloth, but of justification, denial and defense.  We take each thread, like so many thorn girt vines, and unwind them from us.  We let the wounds in our skin weep bitter blood of loss as we weigh each failure, own it, look without defense as we accept the shame of it, the fear it instills in us, we own it, accept it, seek to learn from it.  Raise your glass and offer to it, then cast it to the fire to burn.  Choose not to carry it forward, but to cast it into the fire you must first accept every single thorn, each element of the failure, of intent, of effect intended or unintended, of effort, or result.  If we do not own each thorn of the whole bitter strand from spindle to shank, we will never be free of it, and it will foul all that we try to weave this year.

We are not what we were.  I am old, so I tend to measure my year in loss of what I once could do, once could contribute and can no more.  This too is foolishness, and weakness. Clinging to the self I chose to remember and ignoring the self I have won.  I am not what I was, and if I strive with the tools I once had in the struggles I once owned all I can do is fall short.  I am not what I was, and attempting to be can only make me a failure.  I have new tools, and honestly where old thorns and blades would find vulnerable flesh there is only iron hard hide and cold white bone.  That which once could bind and bleed me will mark me no more, and the tools I have now in the tasks I take up with them promise me challenges as fierce as ever I knew, and ones that suit the tools that come now to my hand.

Those who are young, you too are not what you were.  You have long measured yourself against your betters, ever and always measuring yourself now against them at their peak. Your peak is yet to come, and its limits are not yet known. Let go the limits that you accepted last year.  You may feel yourself far less, as defeat strips away your youthful optimism, but what you didn’t notice gaining was an understanding of what your true potential may yet be.  Old tools applied in new ways have left you able to face things you long accepted were beyond you, new challenges faced in the year past have caused you to learn new skills, even if that skill is only the ability to endure what you never had to before.  Let go who you were, or you will fall short of the victories that could be yours, the growth that should be yours, and the worth that has been won by the deeds you have not yet learned to value.

Weep for those you have lost, weep for your failures.  Laugh at your foolishness, smile at the bright memories you find tangled in the loss, recognize what the hardships and loss have left you in gains, for nothing wyrd weaves us is without both wound and weal, both cost and learning.

We paid for what we survived this year past.  Time to let go what the old year held, and give ourselves fully to the year ahead.  The harvest is in, the counting has been done, and before the ground can be broken and sewn again, you must let go the last.

Drink your cup to the dregs, let the bitter lees remind you of the cost of the year, and the warmth of drink fill those hollow places the losses left in us.  Fill them with acceptance of what was, and determination to do better, weave brighter, or at least not make the same mistakes again.  Stare into the fire, and let it burn every dark strand of loss, look past the flame into the mirror of the darkness at your loss, your humiliation, shame and failures, then raise your chin, raise your eyes and nod.  I have seen you, I acknowledge you, I claim you as my own, but I deny you any hold on me.  What you deny will rule you, what you claim you command.  Face the coming new years dawning unfettered and fearless.

“Hail, day! | Hail, sons of day!
And night and her daughter now!
Look on us here | with loving eyes,
That waiting we victory win.

“Hail to the gods! | Ye goddesses, hail,
And all the generous earth!
Give to us wisdom | and goodly speech,
And healing hands, life-long.” –Sigrdrifumol 2-3

 

 

 

Soul, salmon, and inheritance

Bear with me, this will take a while to get to the point, but the background is important.  We have all seen the people in our communities that just fit.  The ones who you know were born to be here.  Heathenry comes as naturally to them as a salmon takes to the stream.  You see a salmon hurling itself upstream through the rapids beside you and know that only salmon are with you on this journey.  No pampered koi, no silent sturgeon; just those born to dare the white water and stone teeth of the rapids for the Return Home.  Funny thing is, not all of those salmon look the same.  Not everything that looks like a salmon shows any interest in those rapids at all, and not everyone beside you in the torrent looks salmonish to the outside eye.

I shrugged and ignored the question a lot of years, following a soldiers stark utilitarianism.  If it works you use it, if it fails, the theory is irrelevant, it doesn’t work so toss it.  The inner scientist in me looked at those provable things and waited for another data point to come up with a new theory that worked.  Then I started my clergy training, and progressed along my magical path far enough to apply other senses and collect enough other data to get a different understanding.

Heathen understanding of the soul is complex.  We don’t see it as one thing, nor do we understand it as being one thing before our birth or after our death.  What makes us, the whole and living being that we experience is complex, formed of these disparate elements that come together and are shaped by our life experiences, by our will, by our word and deed, by our trials, by our loves, losses, and choices.  Those parts have been broken down as follows.

1. The physical body – appearance, movement and health

2. the hugr – conscious will and intellect
3. the hamr – image forming essence, matrix between physical and

spiritual worlds

4. the hamingja – shape-changing force, luck, power
5. the fylgja – spirit guardian as female or animal figure

 

We don’t conduct baby naming ceremonies until the ninth day, when the fylgja is seen to have bonded with the baby.  At this point, the baby is bound to the web of wyrd or fate, and the orlog the inherited part of your wyrd attaches to the baby, linking it to all those who have gone before, and who will come after.

It is this part of the soul that carries the inherited portion of our soul lore, the bit that we get from our ancestors in spirit.  Here is the bit that makes me intrigued.  The lore is full of examples where mound sitters have received inherited gifts from spirits they had no genetic link to, but gave full ancestral devotion to.  These gifts, in one case the skaldship that propelled a shepherd (Thorbjorn Hornklofr ) from obscurity to the position of court skald of Harald Shaggy Hair are clearly an inheritance carried by soul part rather than genetic coding.

This fits with the understanding of family and community that our ancestors practiced, where you could be born in, married in, oathed in, adopted, or simply absorbed by being beside you through the struggles of the day until your fate was inexorably linked with those around you and you simply crossed the line and became us in every way anyone could see, however far from that hearth you may have been born.  Family and community were untidy and tangled, real things, not pure constructs.  They were.  People who ought to be part of them turned their backs and left, people who were from far away, and even from the wrong side of long standing battle lines found acceptance and home with the fierce devotion of one who does not simply accept their place unthinking, but dared to shape their fate by conscious choice.

Burial mounds show the truth, genetic variation hard to equal even in today’s world of easy and relatively safe long distance travel, yet burial goods and manner indicate no differentiation between those whose genetics matches the bulk of the tribal identity, and those whose origins were clearly different tribally or even racially.  Us and them are always real to those who are drawing the lines, but the lines then were not based on phenotypical race, but on identity.

Carry forward to today.  We have the folkish vs inclusive rift in Heathenry that honestly everyone has grown sick of.  It really was an attempt from the beginning to dress racism up in pretty clothes and make it more acceptable than the KKK white hoods and burning crosses.  It carried with it misogyny and gender roles right out of the most conservative Evangelical Christian wet dream, and resembled Nazi family propaganda in a degree that would have made Gobels think they won the war.  To say it was homophobic, transphobic is really not doing justice to the degree that folkish Heathenry really found there to be only one right way to be a male or female Heathen.  You had to be pure of blood, you had to be one hundred percent cis-normative in your expression of your gender or you were just wrong.

So folkish was cast into the midden where it belonged, largely because too many of the folkish who weren’t racist misogynist homophobes were just unwilling to stand against the ones that were, so collectively we decided the folkish had failed the test of Havamal 43, and made friendship with our foes.

 

43. To his friend a man | a friend shall prove,

To him and the friend of his friend;

But never a man | shall friendship make

With one of his foeman’s friends.

 

We did our surgery to protect our community, but we missed something.  We let those racist twits taint the idea of folk and inheritance to the point we stared to look at Othala like the Swastika with an almost unthinking rejection.

We missed something.  I am not saying I have it right, but I have at least the edges of something.  We have that fylgja soul part, that inherited portion of the soul that binds after birth.  When you have been at this a while, you get the sense of those who take to Heathenry like the salmon take to the stream, they fit instinctively, they ask the dangerous questions, make the connections between the different elements, ritual, lore, community building, feast, hospitality, and personal development as if they already had the concepts they just didn’t have the dictionary for it.  We have the corollary as well, those who have a bloodline that may well stretch back to the Volsungs with the depressing vision limitations that seek to take the conservative Christianity they were raised with, and switch Odin for Jehova, Thor for Jesus, Frigg for Mary and carry on as if Heimdall wrote the gospels in Latin.

Sorry to the hard Folkish, but blood doesn’t make you naturally heathen.  A huge portion of the original tribes that were Heathen at the time of migration into the European continent are Christian right now, and many follow other faiths entirely or none at all.  A portion of those who are interested in the CULTURE of their ancestors and are proud of those traditions feel no call at all to the ancestral practice.  It is music they can’t dance too, for it moves them not at all.

What about all those fylgja from all those family lines who took the cross and cut all ties so long ago they actively deny they were ever anything else?  What if those fylgja found those whose soul parts were fit heirs to those who had gone before?  Whose hugr, whose will and intellect were a match to those who had joined with the fylgja in the past, whose hamingja called to them, whose Mod could learn and apply the wisdom of the older parts of the soul and whose Hugi could tap the wode, the ecstatic frenzy of creation and destruction that is the highest of our gods gifts.

I really do think some people were born to be part of the community.  I think it is no accident they found us, not a surprise that we WELCOMED THEM HOME, because we, as communities are wiser than as individuals and we do, on some level know our own.  Not all of those who stand in our halls match others’ expectations of who should be here.  If Hollywood were to ever cast our leadership in a movie, I seriously doubt any I have served beside would make the cut, but that is because Hollywood sells clean fantasy, not untidy reality.

Inclusive Heathenry is just that, we don’t let other peoples labels decide who fits and who doesn’t.  We got that right.  Not everyone in the community will stay forever, because we are largely a group of people that exist in an over-culture that rewards conforming to the Christian perceived norm, and to be Heathen is to accept being a salmon that is committed every day to swimming upstream, and not everyone has the drive to find this sustainable, or finds the journey rewarding consummate to the price.

Some of those salmon swimming beside us look African, look Native, look Asian, look Jewish, look Polynesian.  All different expressions of everything from gender to sexuality, from politics to diet, ten thousand differences separate us.  Maybe, but when you hit the water, you feel the salmon moving around you, you know through those senses developed that don’t rely or even notice flesh, you identify who is and who is not yours, who is of the tribe, of the kindred, of the folk, however you want to define them, and when you leap over the next rock in the rapids you take note that those you felt were yours are beside you, and if not all of them look like other people expect, they are following the call only salmon can hear, throwing themselves into the maelstrom with nothing held back seeking to Return.  They are salmon in every sense you are, they are part of the us, where all those salmony looking fish that are sitting in the lake singing psalms are not.

That part of the soul that remembers, that is seeking to return us to a better way of living with each other, a better way of living with the world, with connecting to our dead, and those yet to be born, to live more mindfully, that is what makes us Heathen.  That is found where it is found, and how it got there is something the gods aren’t sharing, and far enough above my pay grade to simply accept that it is.

We are each unique individuals.  Part of what we are is inherited, part of what we are is chance, part of what we are is experience, and part of what we are is choice.  All of what we are is ours alone, and when we die, this unique configuration, this glorious and fragile thing will be gone forever, but our words, our deeds, our choices will be untouched by the death that takes us.  We are made of so many parts, both body and soul, that there are doubtless many paths we could follow, many streams we could have chosen, but those who swim beside us today, fighting the current beside us, they are simply us.  If others don’t think all of us look equally salmony, I am reassured to note that bears are true egalitarians and are perfectly willing to take each of us as pure salmon as Loki at his slipperiest, and eat us accordingly.

The world is full of bears, the river is swift, the rocks cruel, and there are few enough salmon on the journey, treat well those beside you, learn from them as you can, share with them as you will, and perhaps more of us can return home to our gods and ancestors with the truth that we have begun rebuilding our communities.

Huginnseye

 

Silence is shattered
The raven reaves
Huginn’s beak sword side
skull-fruit did reap.

Blindness blessing
He leaves me not
For blue fire dances
Like Aurora on the ice
No memory does he bring
Just the pain beyond pain
Shadowed wings hie
To the tree
The hanging tree
The noose draws tight
Skull eye raped
Neck groan the gallows grip

For the runes I won
I reach with fumbling hands
And failing sight

Elhwaz slips from me
Strength fumbled from failing hand
Algiz bites my reaching hand
Wisdom failing
I howl my rage
Thunder shakes the heavens
The tree lashes
I scream defiance
Lightning lights the raven
Eye gulper
Wide beak laughing

Lighning flare
Ansuz burns
Inspiration offered
I hurl my rage
Rune-writer’s will
Feed the flame
Scar the tree
Nauthiz mars Ansuz

Needfire burns me
Inspiration rejected
Rage becomes the battle-bliss
Wunjo blossoms
Rage joy
Pain and pleasure drunk
The raven laughs
My laughter booms
The thunder quieter

Huginnseye flaming
Sight broken
Tree bound
Nauthiz to win power
Wunjo for the struggle
Ansuz the madness
The vision no eye can see
Wisdom no sane may hold

When cut my thread
Fear my coming
For I am too much
His creature

—–For those who are the Tree-Hanger’s own, those days the chronic pain o’er tops the controls we set upon it, usually when one pushes the flesh past the limits that will can ignore the costs, you get to discover where your current 10/10 resides on the pain scale.  Oddly enough, you can find Him there.  Stupidity has a god, and his laughter helps me find enough anger to survive paying the price of my own idiocy, again.