The Deep, Old Things of this World

The deep, old things of this world, that have grown comfortable with themselves, and weathered the storm, and joined the bedrock : let these be elders.

It took a long time to grow this world. It has been through many tremors. Lost stories lay in the land, and every being carries a tale in its body. Old things carry the wisdom of depth. They have taken their due time to become by learning to cohere. They know the way of things. They know the way of wyrd.

A mountain, a boulder, a redwood tree, the sky ; a lake, a tortoise, a herd of elephants, and hawks circling in the wind. Herbs sprouting through cracks in the concrete, kelp and plankton tossing at sea, lichen growing on the rock. Rivers cutting bedrock through slow, moving groove and etching the canyons in slow motion. The crash of salt-water sud as the tide churns and beats the sand.

How long did it take each one to mature? How long did it take each one to find its place, to leave uncertainty and learn to surf flux, in order to grow old, to pass over the crests of time? They know. They remember in their bones the struggle. Often they still struggle. They resonate knowledge, and wisdom, and empathy for small, young, little beings like ourselves who are still trying to find our place in this world. It takes a long time.

The soil, the stone, the moistness that trickles through humus, breeding warmth and microbes, sinking down to aquifers. The warmth of the sun, the glow of moonlight. Into these, you shall melt, and you will speak through the saga of the earth, scion of soil and stone and sun. And when your spirit rejoins the stone, that resonating bone that hollow tones its low and lonely keen throughout the cosmos, crickets, such small things, flickers of eternity, will fiddle for eons above where melting bones lay. And you shall be part of the deep, old things.

The deep, old things of this world : let these be elders.

We Are Our History

We need to be careful when we say, "We are our history," to not confuse this with being stuck in the past. The historical flow is important to connect to because it is the dynamic of genesis from which we all emerge, but we have to look at it dialectically, because history is a process of continuity and change. It is a unity on a dialectical level of continuity and change, and so it is a flow. We would be better served by seeing "we are our history" in terms of flows, in terms of intertwining ribbons and helices of turbulent streams, as can swirl through the vortices of a river, in which there is a level of connection to the past and also discontinuity, and that flow is important. We don't have to be just like our ancestors, even though having a connection to them can be meaningful. We don't need to freeze our connection at a particular, historical stage, say, the Iron Age. Those people themselves looked back to their ancestors and all the way to how they understood genesis from the very source. That understanding of what source is will change over time.

We honor on the mythopoetic level, of course, the story of fire and ice coming together in the great abyss, and forming the substrate of the world, and the bedrock of reality (Jormungrund) from which the Gods made the world, and there is something poignant to being in touch with that folk grasp, that imaginal connection. At the same time, our minds have expanded and stretched out, and through utilizing science, we have greater understanding of our genesis from the source, through evolution, and through the very process of the formation of matter at the beginning of the universe. And that vision itself will be expanded and revolutionized throughout time, so that at some point in time, our present understanding, though there will still be truths that cohere from it, will be seen in the same light as we might look back upon the previous understandings of our ancestors. So unless we are committed to being reactionaries, "we are our history" does not mean that we are not also our future. We are both. We are streamings in time that have the possibility to weave the best of the past into the excitement of the future, and it's the interplay between those two processes, of carrying forward that which was good in the past, and often in a transformative way, that matters. Sometimes it can't stay in the same form ; it must be transformed. But so that something of its essence stays with us. We don't want to turn the world back to medieval villages. There's little about that that was paradisical. We must move forward, but we will, if we are wise, take the best of the past in a transformative way and integrate it into our flowing-into and creation of the future.

The Solidity of this World

That this world is solid is good. It is so good. That this world resists change by the movement of thought allows such solidity, such grounding, and rooting. The world is not all fire. Fire is complete change. It is revolutionary change taken to the nth degree, where all matter is burnt up. All is not fire. There is a good element of ice, of solidity, that things stay the same, that the world has a foundation, that it cannot all be changed by thinking it away. It is good that the New Thought movement is wrong. It is good that just by thinking of something you cannot make it change, because it allows there to be continuity, there allows there to be a sense of home, it allows for some type of permanence in the midst of transience. There is a dialectical unity between permanence and transience in this world, because of the very solidity of things, and that is something that matter allows.

In the middle-zone between fire and ice is where good things happen. We do need change, we do need fluent flow, but it's good to know that no matter what our imaginative flights, the world is able to maintain some identity. An identity-in-movement, but an identity all the same, and this is something to praise! This is something to praise the Gods for! That they took Ymir's bones and his flesh and made the world out of it, even though it was monstrous, it was a wonderful eye, a beautiful, brilliant idea, providing a real matrix in which our consciousness could take shape. The world of solidity became the body in which our minds could grow, and feel cradled, and have support. So, in a sense, if you want to think of it that way, the world is like a giant hand in which the Gods hold us.

Now some will try to push aside the solidity of reality and matter by pointing to quantum physics, and saying, "You see? Most of even matter is empty space filled with swirling energy." But you see, the mistake that they make here is they equate energy with ghostliness, and that's not what energy is. Energy is force. Want to think about force? Think about when you take two magnets of the same polarity and you try to press them close together. Think about the strength of that push, and how they force each other apart. Those fields of energy, while they aren't solid in the ordinary sense of things, definitely demonstrate a force that has a solidity to it. These swirls of energy have push and force, and they constitute a strong, elastic net that is very, very real, so you can't ghost away matter simply because of quantum physics, and the fact that there is a flux at the heart of things, at the atomic core, does not mean there is no solidity, because those patterns, through their probabalistic logic, maintain the solidity of things at our level. It does mean that matter is far more dialectical than we had ever thought. It's not just inert stuff. It actually is force-in-motion and in pattern, and that is a significant nuance and change in how we view things, because it means that there is an element of change and a way of approaching matter differently than just inert stuff. Rather, it is a stable dynamism, and that dynamic stability makes all the difference in the world.

In fact, it makes a world.

Rede for Midyear

Love with all your heart, and never allow bad behavior to be unchallenged or tolerated. Summon strength as a source from goodness overflowing all around, and share it out amongst your kith and kin, in earth-outgoing ripples. Cherish depths of soul loved ones share ; open thyself to forays into the world to find new kith with whom to shake the world and let loose its fruits. Courage is a choice in the face of fear, that stands one's ground against shaking to choose a more creative path than cowering. Raise thy spear high and shout your passion to the winds : make thy heart be known to the hills and burrowed stone-wights! All the sky is thy higher canopy, all the earth below is the domain of the beloved.  Stretch out to dance circumferences of majesty ; stick to and consolidate the core. Nurture the source, and sow widely. Hope is an unseen seed in the darkest of night. Subpoena from the unseen the will of your ancient folk, who hold this worldview in the sacredness of strength ; with this heirloom, you shall know the cosmos well, and long shall drink its beauty and heartiness. There is a secret trust in the will of faith that invisible reinforces the love in your heart. The world swerves, in its twists alongside wyrd ; do not allow its wild veer to unsteadfast your cleave to the middle. Disappointments fall aside ; real deeds sink into myth and there subsist, eternal. Your questions open ; your doubts corrode : nurture questions, disperse doubts. Crises that seem to pull your threads apart require reassertion of will : fall back to earth and call her main of firmness to you -- ever defy the cackles of disenchantment and woe and ward off with will encroaching ill. Let unease wilt before practice and calm, the essence of your odal. Do not consent to the fraying of sacred fabric : sew, and darn, and weirdly weave integrity back. All is Gift ; make thy giving strong and smile-bold.