Heimlich A Laguz Interviewed on Weird Web Radio

I was recently interviewed on the Weird Web Radio podcast by fellow Elhaz Ablaze book contributor Lonnie Scott. We talked about runes, occultism, mystery, Loki, ghosts, chaos magic, Odin, doubt, and the processes of healing. It is a fun, freewheeling stream of consciousness and for the most part, I think I managed to avoid embarrassing myself.

The only thing I forgot to say was that, while I make some criticisms of Edred Thorsson’s whole “you have to memorize five pages of my second-rate poetry to do the most basic magic” trip, I myself do write and memorize long and complex ritual passages, and believe that this can be a deeply worthwhile way to approach magic and devotional practice alike. I just don’t think that it is necessary to get results, and also, well, gods some of his stuff is awful. But I digress…

Part of the podcast is a subscriber-only section (it is super cheap!). If you enjoy the main interview I definitely recommend flicking a buck or two to Lonnie so you can hear the rest; I actually think that last part (which ran close to 30 minutes if I recall) was the most interesting.

http://weirdwebradio.com/episode-29-heimlich-a-laguz-talking-chaos-magic-heathenry-runes-and-spirits/

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Tearing the Veil of the Mentally Blind

From the mentally blind come ideas that are poison; take away the power, a shallow person you will find.

What would you do without your pathetic narrow-minded approach to life that reflects your lack of abilities?

– “Mentally Blind,” Death (Chuck Schuldiner)

I could just post these two quotes from the above-mentioned song, but perhaps laboring the point is warranted.

The more that Trump and his cronies lash out, the more empty and pathetic they feel. The more pathetic and empty they feel, the more they lash out. The more they cultivate the cowardice of ‘ends justify means,’ the more they abandon faith in inner spiritual power and embrace their slavery to the veil of Maya. ‘I can only feel ok if you do exactly what I want, and I want you to go away forever!’ What contemptible weakness.

Thus the genesis of the endless hyperbole, straight from the Hitlerian playbook: make the lie ridiculous enough and people will start to believe it. Keep them caught up in their anxiety, fear, confusion, and anger and you can make them do whatever you want: “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” (Voltaire).

Eventually the edifice of tyranny, the tower of xenophobia, paranoia, racism, sexism, undisciplined militarism, and above all the funneling of ever more wealth into ever fewer hands, will fall. The more engorged this leech of arrogance becomes, the more explosive will be its demise. That’s bad, because the rest of us will be the collateral damage.

So fight these small-minded, shallow scumbags. Defeat them before they reach terminal bloat detonation. Fight the infectious stupidity that they seek to promulgate. Fight their pathetic, narrow-minded approach to life that reflects their lack of abilities.

Now, more than ever, magic must be marshaled against the buffoon brigade: the Trump administration and all the white supremacists who have forgotten that the Nazis lost World War II because their philosophy is weak.

Magic must be marshaled to shatter Trump’s mange-riddled egregore of mediocrity and hatred. The rabid pig must be dealt with, and magic must play its part.

Magic must be marshaled, with fierce and unrelenting delight. Delight in the downfall of the jotun in the White House, in the downfall of all his twisted hypocrisy, delight in the technicolor possibilities of a world wrested from the clutches of late-stage authoritarian capitalism.

A simple enough sigil will suffice: Thurisaz Jera Tiwaz. Add a valknut to conjure the blessing of the master of death. Invoke with delighted fury and banish with furious mirth.

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My Version of the Death Posture

File:Corvo teschio - Julien Champagne.png

The death posture, as far as I can determine, was invented by Austin Osman Spare as a tool to fire magical sigils into the Great Unknown. I first encountered it in the writings of Pete Carroll, who evokes practices such as staring at a mirror into one’s own gaze until total vacuity and trance ensue: gnosis, the spell is fired, the work is done.

Well I never really jived with any of the versions of the death posture that I encountered. Maybe I am just a difficult person, I don’t know. But the basic concept – of dying a kind of brief psychic death in order to unite a magical, sigilized intent with the currents of causality – was appealing.

Recently I retrofitted some of Carroll’s writings to come up with my own version of the death posture. It requires a minimal level of able-bodiedness but otherwise is pretty broadly applicable. It is fun, too (pretty much a prerequisite for any kind of magic worth the doing).

Here’s what I do. First, I determine my intent, the outcome I wish to achieve. Second, I allow my imagination to furnish me with runes that express the intent in sigil form. I’ve studied the runes so long, in particular from a reconstructionist perspective, that I don’t have to think very hard to get a combination that seems right. Sometimes it is one rune, sometimes several, whatever works.

Then I chant and visualize the runes. When I finish chanting them, I maintain the visualization. Standing upright, I begin to lean straight backward. Lean, lean, lean, as I get more of an angle as my back arches over. Still visualizing the rune sigil. Then suddenly I lean far enough that I fall.

Snap! In a split second the reflexes kick in and I catch myself. At that moment, total vacuity occurs and the sigil is released into the void. It is impossible to do anything else at that moment but catch oneself; there is no room for thinking. It is lightning-quick, but intense. After all, it feels a little scary – I am about to fall over and hit my head!

As soon as I catch myself I declare: does not matter, need not be, that or something better. Then I move on, because the magic is done.

Once you have this down you can set off spells very quickly and easily. I am getting a pretty good hit rate with it. It is a nice controlled way of injecting a brief moment of helpless terror into consciousness, just the ticket for releasing the magic will into motion.

Go ahead, try it! You might like it. Or hate it. Either way, it will probably trigger something interesting.

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Belief is Not Your Friend

Why Chaos Magic and Heathenism fused together? The guiding thread is skepticism about the importance of belief.

Christianity ushered into prominence the notion that right belief (orthodoxy) is fundamental to religious or spiritual life. This notion has profoundly shaped how most modern Westerners understand spirituality and religion. However it is not a notion that is particularly relevant to ancient paganisms.

Therefore it is important for anyone who wants to explore Heathenry or other reconstructed spiritual approaches to develop a sense of irony about the importance of belief that modern Western culture still seems fettered by. Otherwise any attempt to re-enter old spiritual-historical currents will be hiddenly and thoroughly warped by the ubiquitous notion that spirituality entails the holding of beliefs.

One of the reasons that Christianity jived so poorly with Roman paganism is that the latter didn’t place much emphasis on belief. Individuals were able to have whatever theories about the metaphysics of divinity that they wanted. The important thing was not right thinking, it was participation. It was knowing the right way to make spiritual (and cultural) contributions and observations.

This is a really, really radical idea for anyone in the modern Western world. Spirituality for pagan peoples had little, perhaps nothing, to do with right belief and everything to do with what we might term ‘right participation.’

One consequence of this attitude is that syncretism was a common religious phenomenon in ancient times. Everywhere one looks, one finds cross-cultural hybrid deities. Apparently no one thought this to be problematic, perhaps because they had a sense of irony about belief and recognized that praxis was the more important thing.

(Or maybe they had no sense of irony about belief at all and never even pondered the vexing, burdensome dilemmas of early Christian moral philosophy, where for example the thought is as ‘bad’ as the deed, and the abstraction of ‘purity’ is elevated above all else).

When we review Havamal there is a section that appears to be referring to magical or spiritual (perhaps runic?) practice, here is what it says (Hollander translation):

Know’st how to write,                   know’st know to read,
know’st how to stain,                    how to understand,
know’st how to ask,                       how’st to offer,
knows’st how to supplicate,       know’st how to sacrifice?

Observe that the knowledges here referenced are not about dogma or belief, but rather about the practical dimensions of spiritual or magical activity. It might shock many modern Heathens, but there is no rider along the lines of “and if you don’t believe that Loki is anathema then I’ll never let your magic work!” It seems like anyone with the technical knowledge could participate. Right belief? Whatever, pal.

Ok, so this brings us to Chaos Magic because the stanza quoted above could be straight out of a modern Chaos Magic grimoire. Chaos Magic is the first Western occult or spiritual tradition in many centuries to openly express contempt for right belief in favor of a focus on correct technical practice. Chaos Magic is ridiculed for inventing deities or using pop culture figures as spirits, yet its methods are effective, and they are effective for the same reason that ancient pagan religions were satisfying to their adherents – the emphasis is on praxis, not belief.

Modern Heathenry is so bound up in obsession with orthodoxy. I do not believe Heathenry could be used to justify racism and other bigotries if it were not polluted by the Christian obsession with ‘pure,’ binary thought processes. The more we look at ancient paganisms, the more we find they had their moments of outrageous free-for-all. Even the runes, supposedly the unique spiritual DNA of the Germanic peoples, appear to have been cribbed almost wholesale from the Etruscans (or Romans, depending on your biases).

Chaos Magic offers a useful model (the map is not the territory!), a way out of unconscious adherence to orthodoxic thinking. Combined with the grounding of a Heathen perspective that takes reconstructionism seriously yet playfully, the yield is a model of Heathen spirituality that has at least a small chance of recapturing the character of the ancient ways (which is about as good an outcome as is likely possible, given the gulf of time and the lack of information).

It won’t be perfect, and many mistakes will be made, but that’s why we have to keep trying to keep up with the academics and the archaeologists, a problem that all Heathens, whether they have achieved a sense of irony about belief or not, must face. Better to be honest with ourselves than boxing with our own shadows.

Naturally, Chaos Heathenry is subject to any number of uninformed criticisms, often based on the notion that it professes or promotes false beliefs. Oops. We can only say that we never claimed to be anything other than what we claimed to be. There’s no shame in syncretism when it is embraced consciously, in an informed way. That’s what the ancients did, and we are reconstructing that.

This statement should not be understood as an attempt to excuse sloppy thinking or new agism. We have our own particular kind of discipline, and Loki is only as subversive as the dominant culture is repressive. Belief is in various respects an epiphenomenon, the cart put before the horse. Let’s set it back into its appropriate place, and restore playful, open-minded, and fumbling-toward-rigor praxis to its rightful role.

*

(Don’t forget, our first ever book is out and available!)
Print edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692984712
Ebook edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/Elhaz-Ablaze-Compendium-Chaos-Heathenry-ebook/dp/B079WCH3RK

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Elhaz Ablaze Book is Now Available!

Long awaited, finally here: the very first official Elhaz Ablaze publication, available in both print and ebook editions. You can order the book on Amazon:

Print edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692984712

Ebook edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/Elhaz-Ablaze-Compendium-Chaos-Heathenry-ebook/dp/B079WCH3RK

Our back-of-title screed:

There are those who hear the phrase “Chaos Heathen” and instinctively know what it means. This book is for you.

There are those who hear the phrase “Chaos Heathen” and do not know what that could mean. This book is for you.

There are those who hear the phrase “Chaos Heathen” and get upset, confused, or angry. This book is for you.

Elhaz Ablaze: A Compendium of Chaos Heathenry dives into the fractal spirals of contemporary magic from a Heathen perspective. Ranging from the bizarrely philosophical to the vigorously practical, the book’s contributors – artistic and literary – dare to dismantle Chaos Magic, Heathenry, and themselves…just in time to serendipitously discover ever more novel, playful, and artful modes of magical and spiritual being.

The book explores diverse themes including rune magic; meditation; mystical interpretation of Norse mythology and deities (Odin, Thor, etc.); sigil magic; trance work; alchemy; the ideas of Aleister Crowley, C. G. Jung, and others; historical martial arts and fitness; and the philosophy of the occult.

Created by authors and friends of the notorious Elhaz Ablaze website, and lavishly illustrated, Elhaz Ablaze: A Compendium of Chaos Heathenry promises to smash a Mandelbrot set’s worth of paradigms, all the while artfully romancing the mysteries of Heathen spirituality.

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Reverse Engineering Sigil Magic

bindrune

What if you could use runic sigil magic to reverse engineer a situation and then transform it? You can.

  1. Create a sigil of a situation that you want to change. Not as you would like it to be, but as it is as closely as you can identify. The sigil could be runic or otherwise, it doesn’t really matter. Tune into all your fear, anger, doubt, confusion, and determination and feed all that into the process of making the sigil.
  2. Now unpack the sigil into pieces. Draw and sketch and scribble until you have exploded that neatly packaged sigil into as many elements as seems appropriate.
  3. To each element of the sigil, assign a rune. Go with your intuition on this (you have thoroughly studied the rune poems and mythology and history, right? If not, this might be harder. You get out what you put in when it comes to rune magic).
  4. Now you have a runic formula that describes the problem situation.
  5. Start adding, removing, and swapping out runes from your ‘as it is’ formula. Try to make the smallest number of changes as possible – we want to work efficiently. No pointing throwing your energies at changes that you don’t need. The Chaos Butterfly is your friend, kids.
  6. Now you have a new runic formula which describes your preferred outcome. If you like, you can use it as the basis of creating a bind rune or even freely extemporized sketching into a more elaborate sigil (the post-Conversion Icelandic staves are good inspiration for this sort of thing).
  7. Fire your new sigil in whatever manner you see fit.
  8. Forget – does not matter, need not be, that or something better.

It is my suspicion that reverse engineering sigils in this way could produce more precise, efficient magic that more faithfully reflects the practitioner’s true will. I hope you will try it out and share what came of it!

P.S. yes the forthcoming Elhaz Ablaze book is almost here. A matter of weeks! Some last minute computer failures are holding us up: a final invocation of chaos, no doubt.

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Abundance as a Key to Results Magic

NKS_1867_4to,_92r,_Mead_of_PoetryMagic likes an atmosphere of luxury, or rather, a state of mind that encompasses abundance. Grasping for an outcome, for a result, with an attitude of greed and lust does not impress the warp and weft of wyrd. The Norns laugh at those who clutch in a spirit of desperation. This is not to demean those who find themselves in dire straits, but it is to say that the Norns find it hard to want to reward those who dwell in greed and doubt.

Greed and doubt are killjoys for sure. What deity, what spirit, what force of nature would reward magic cast in a spirit of meanness and faithlessness? There is nothing attractive about the bulging eyes, the sweaty palms, the clumsy gestures, the bloated, yet self-destructive, ego trip of greed and doubt.

As much as the chaos approach to magic emphasizes technique, attitude is the keystone of getting a result. All the technique in the world, indeed, all the ornate ritual pomp in the world, will fail if I cannot detach myself from my desire to achieve an effect. The problem isn’t the wanting – wanting something is powerful magic. The problem is the attachment to that desire, as though my own existence were at stake.

This desperate attitude, this misuse of desire, sends out a radiance of lack. And lack is not attractive to plenty. And plenty is what our magic is supposed to be attracting. The law of sympathy: like begets like. My magic spells need to be exercises in magnetism, or in other words, my desire is counterproductive if I do not harness it to the wagon of playfulness and non-attachment.

The emptiness of non-attachment is the vehicle of the attitude of plenty. This isn’t so much a paradox as a hand in a glove. If I fill my glove with attachment to lust for result then there will be no room for the fingers of my true will, let alone the palm of my highest destiny.

How to achieve non-attachment? Adopt a mentality of luxurious abundance. Oh look, we just traced a circle!

We live in a world that constantly tries to tell us that there is not enough. The scarcity mentality is a tool used by the tiny elites to keep the rest of us in line. It is fuel to the fire of every kind of bigotry, destructiveness, and stupidity. Ironically, it also triggers tremendous waste – witness the gratuitous squandering of modern corporations with their faith in the disposability of things and people alike.

Abundance mentality, therefore, is a kind of political subversion. Note, however, that abundance mentality is different to greed. Abundance by definition is non-attached because it does not assume any reason (e.g. scarcity) to adopt an attitude of desperation. With an abundance mindset there can be passionate desire for something, but it is free of fear of missing out. In other words, capitalism is predicated on scarcity, so abundance is inherently anti-capitalist.

Right, so anyway. An attitude of non-attachment and abundance – wrenched from the maw of this ridiculous consensus reality – makes all the difference between crap magic and wonderful magic. This is why, if you want to get good at magic, you can get a lot out of practicing by doing magic on behalf of others.

The other day my other half and I were having breakfast in our favorite restaurant. The place is amazing but rarely well patronized. Which is ridiculous! I decided to cast a little rune magic – just scrawled Isa, Fehu, and Wunjo in the window and whispered their names over and over with a self-satisfied smirk.

I hadn’t even finished the spell before a table of five walked in. In the space of 10 minutes four more tables filled up. Not bad given we were the only customers prior to casting my spell! It worked so fast that I almost didn’t realize my spell was the cause.

Now that’s a pretty trivial thing to cast a spell for, and not something I was particularly attached to, so an abundance attitude was easy. I am not sure I could so easily access an attitude of playful plenty in the midst of a personal financial crisis. But perhaps by practicing magic under low stress conditions we also begin to inoculate ourselves against scarcity mentality and make ourselves more attractive to abundance mentality.

I suspect that a master of Abundance Mind needs rituals and spells less and less (though they might like to keep doing them for the fun of it). Such practices are ultimately attempts to break the tide of scarcity and attachment and self-defeating lusts. With Abundance Mind, desire becomes unburdened by attachment, and perhaps every gesture, thought, and smile becomes an act of positive manifestation.

But don’t worry if you’re not such a master (who is?). Just set a symbolic intention to become such a being, then let it go. Does not matter, need not be…or…that or something better. Two mantras you can use to seal the deal of a magic spell…and to get closer to approximating the lightness of touch that grants the true power.

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Rune Sigils Versus Mansplaining

Guru-Guri Dhar - Nicholas Roerich, 1931I have a pet peeve against mansplaining. It doesn’t serve anyone at all, not even the men that indulge in it! Luckily it turns out to be manageable through the judicious application of sigil magic.

Last night while dining my companions and I were forced to endure the nearby mansplaining monologue of another patron. He held his audience hostage without the slightest clue that he was boring them to death. He was very proud of his love of beer – apparently a gift for which he has been praised at breweries near and far. His primary mansplaining victims were two women, although he was also using it (quite without conscious awareness) to try to impose a pecking order of manliness on another male.

Well I don’t enjoy having to listen to shallow, trivial nonsense be used as a vehicle for imposing social dominance. I suppose a more outgoing chaos magician might have just walked over and politely embarrassed the gentleman in front of his captives. Being an introvert, I did a sigil.

I just started tracing shapes in some puddles of water on my table. The rune ISA came to mind – stillness. Then he mentioned the number eleven (maybe something like “I’ve drunk eleven kinds of craft beer from Massachusetts!” or the like). Well eleven is Isa’s number in the Elder Futhark, so now I knew it was the rune of the moment.

I drew Isa over and over in the water, obscuring and reinscribing it. It was surprisingly easy to access some irritation and attach it to my intention to have his wagging tongue fall still. Then I banged the table, leaned over to my other half, and whispered “does not matter, need not be.” We had a nice little conversation about the merits of this phrase versus “that or something better” as a tool for sealing off a sigil magic episode.

Meanwhile, the loudmouth beer-bore suddenly fell silent, then had to go to the bathroom. His companions looked visibly relieved in his absence, then made up their mind to leave. Oh well. We enjoyed the rest of our meal in peace.

Mansplainers: you aren’t impressing anybody. Stop putting on a front and let your genuine qualities show. You don’t realize it but the more you push your (mostly female) victims to the margins, the more you impede your own genius from shining forth…and the more you miss out on all the wonderful things they might otherwise have shared if you’d only been able to get out of that suit of ‘manly’ armor.

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Generosity Means Resistance

Sutton.hoo.helmetRecently I wrote about the importance of hospitality within Heathen tradition, as well as about the importance of generosity. Something I did not point out in that article was this: the virtues of hospitality and generosity were of particular significance when it came to rulers. The tight fisted king could not expect to win good regard, nor expect to have a comfortable reign. The community was worth more than any one individual, and was not afraid to flex its muscles.

As I discussed in my essay on Heathen Harvest about why universalism makes infinitely more sense than folkism, the picture of unitary ethnic tribes ruled by monarchs was something more or less invented by Christian missionaries. It was a tactic, since it legitimated the fiction that converting the ruler of a tribe or group was de facto converting every member of the community. A transparent bit of political sleight of hand, yet history teaches us that even the flimsiest pretext can be enough to excuse all sorts of outrage. (I love the irony, too, that the folkish notion of ethnic exclusivity was originally a Roman Catholic concoction to facilitate the pacification of the Northern barbarians).

Let’s compare these two ideas: on the one hand the miserly king, on the other, the pretense of uniformity as a device for making a monarch into a tool. We can see how tight-fistedness in a ruler saps the strength of the people ruled, rendering them both more and more vulnerable to abuse and less and less empowered to be creative, magical, and vigorous in their lives. No wonder the mean master was deplored and the unwelcoming lord held in contempt.

The original Heathens, I suspect, were conversant in what we now call game theory; they recognized that a co-operative strategy for dealing with life yields richer rewards than a war of all against all. This doesn’t mean there was never conflict, greed, or selfishness of course; but individualism and aggression for its own sake would have likely been seen as absurdities and death wishes by anyone grounded in the lore of Heathen spiritual tradition.

Underlying this co-operative approach to life, I suspect, was the awareness of the concept of wyrd, the recognition that all events have some degree of significance, and that all things are interconnected in profound ways. As such, rash actions easily have undesired consequences, possibly far in excess of anything that could be expected (who could have predicted, for example, the unfolding crisis triggered by the decision so many years ago to start burning fossil fuels in industrial quantities?).

Generosity makes sense when one recognizes the interconnections of wyrd and grasps that the value of another person cannot easily be gauged by first impressions. When we consider that the smallest action could have incalculable implications (the classic chaos butterfly at work), and that we are incapable of guessing which, when, and how, it makes sense that generosity and hospitality should be default stances. In other words, generosity and hospitality are not just noble gestures; they are expressions of self-interest, and expressions of care for the horizon of mystery, that which rune magicians  refer to as Runa.

To trust Runa is to embrace the unknown. One who is strong with mystery, who has powerful will, is able to trust in all the unimaginable threads of the web of time, in all the infinity of rivulets that trickle down from the fleeting present back into the well of the past. So generosity and hospitality are gestures of grace and power and trust that one can become aligned with Runa for the betterment of all.

Modernity has been rife with masters who have been misers. Colonialism, capitalism, (ironically, given its stated values) communism, and (especially) fascism have been built on principles of miserliness. Of tight-fistedness and inhospitability. Indeed, one could argue that modernity has been a process of attempting to abolish mystery, to abolish uncertainty and the awe and fear that is inseparable from Runa herself. It does not work of course; the tighter the fist is clenched, the less it is able to grasp.

And so that brings me to the topic of January 20, 2017. The day that one of the most flagrant misers in the world, one of the pettiest haters of all time, will ascend to mastery of the most powerful empire in human history. This man, who has done so well at convincing his own victims to vote for him and celebrate him, does not understand generosity and hospitality. He fears and hates wyrd, for it is the omnipresent threat to his callow ego. And in his (and his followers’) attempts to clutch to illusions of certainty (such as illusions of lost glory days that never were), he will gladly sacrifice anything. And for a man with that much power, that means sacrificing everything.

Heathens must stand against this fool and his lackeys. Trump and his gang of thieves have  nothing but contempt for the institutions that have elevated them, for the people that have elected them, and for the people their actions have and will hurt (which includes those who elected them and many others besides, nationally and internationally). We must not be fooled, distracted, discouraged, or bought off. The ancestral ways are clear: Trump and his lackeys are terrible rulers, guided by nothing but cowardice and willful ignorance.

This is not to pretend that Trump is an accident, or that the pointless greed of the corporate-controlled Republicans is an accident, or that we should be surprised that the Democrats have become so ineffectual, bought off as they are by the same masters as those who rule the Republicans. It is apparent that few in positions of power have the slightest interest in service. That the institutions of the US have never protected its citizens with even a pretense of equality.

Yet here is where we stand. We must fight the miser with weapons of generosity and hospitality that can build unbreakable communities. We must reach out without stint and resist every outrage. This new master, who holds his own office and responsibilities in contempt, must be contained and constrained. The institutions of power and governance must be reclaimed from the control of the corrupt. Because of our values of generosity and hospitality, our honoring of wyrd and Runa, we Heathens have more obligation than most to stand up and be counted. Let us not waste any time.

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Across the Wild Seas

Infinite SeaOne year ago, almost to the day, I crossed the Pacific Ocean to begin a new life in a different land. shortly before I left my band Ironwood released an album called Storm Over Sea, a sonic exploration of oceanic voyages as a metaphor for psychic transformation. For a song entitled “Will to Live,” I penned the following:

Lonely, lashing through the swell
Blackened sky of seething blight
Driven from forgotten lands
Into the sea’s raging night!

Hail-struck with self-disdain
Need-fire set our lives aflame
Thorn piercing the veil of pain
Longing for new Odal to claim!

Laguz light the way!

Ocean lured us to depart
Fled Alfheim, embraced Midgard
Wove our wyrd to wrathful waves
Praying Logr will ward our path

Sang oaths on bright-shining gold
Honest fearlessness to hold
When at last our fleet finds land
We’ll burn our ships and make our stand!

The significance of these sentiments resonates throughout me as I read over them now. Though they were written years ago, their full meaning has only now come into resolution. And I will embrace the sentiment.

I was born on a day of the year when the walls between worlds are considered thin. And often I have felt like the proverbial changeling, an otherworldly child swapped for a human at birth, ill suited to the dare and challenge of being present in a terrestrial, human world. Being what I am, existence in this world has proved a difficult problem, and if I have had some success in bringing myself into material manifestation it has nevertheless been tempered by much pain and reversal.

The will to be present in the world does not come naturally to me by birth, and too many times I have chosen to avoid the struggles that forge depth of character. Yet I have also striven mightily to reach terms with incarnate life, and it is true that my victories are many. The difficulty remains though: when one is coming from a long way behind, a great slew of advances may nevertheless seem to produce little progress.

I say this not in an attempt to extract undeserved sympathy; I am more than conscious that there are others in the world who have overcome much harder biographies and genealogies than I. No: I say this to express my determination to fulfil the vow of the lyrics of “Will to Live.” For truly those words were a vow, though I did not know it when they were composed.

My first year in this new land has been difficult. Many of the structures I have built around myself to allow myself to function emotionally and spiritually were left behind; yet somehow I expected myself to meet a slew of new challenges without any replacement for those supports, and this absurd expectation caused much gratuitous pain. It is only now that I recognise the extent of my self-inflicted folly. I am fortunate to be loved and known in this new life.

Well: I have burned my ships, like the Tuatha de Danaan on the shores of Ireland. If Ireland is incarnate life, then here I am, declaring myself to be for life itself, to be willing to grasp and reach and risk and dare. There was reason in my decision to throw myself into a new life: to give myself no more opportunities to avoid committing to the fine art of being present, of occupying my life.

For it is true that mind and body are one; and too long have I indulged a schizoid fantasy. I recognise that. If for a year I have tangled myself between acceptance of my path and absurd denial, then my errors and confusions stand redeemed in the perspective that I have been given. The encroaching threat of meaninglessness and bewilderment comes into a new light, and the sense and beauty of my chaos and lostness stands in relief.

So: the formula for a full life. One: acceptance of what is, unconditionally. No more fruitless rage and despair that the world does not gratify my every small desire. No more denial of the self-evident. Two: Lust for life. The willingness to reach out, to dare, to risk, to struggle. To embrace the joy of personal power, to cease to cut myself down in the name of supposed enlightenment. To embrace struggle as the terrain of transformation, not as an impassable foe.

“Riding is in the hall easy,
but very hard for the one who sits
on a powerful horse, over miles of road.”

I call my ancestors, literally and figuratively. I imbibe the infinite concatenation of liquid memory from which I am spun.

777  times the Norns I call.

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