Away From Abstractions!
Mind and heart are one. Odr is a single word encompassing all the inspired mind may gather. It is where feelings and thought come together and share. Their feast, that juice fermented, is inspiration and wisdom found.
Our lore therefore is one with heart and mind. The wordloc mind of Western scholars will never penetrate the fullness of lore. Their analyses may be helpful, their takings-apart interesting, their external comparisons even insightful. But lore is not the letter. Lore is what happens when odr meets the letter. What blossoms therefrom is lore.
This is not the same thing as wild fancy. It is not immature imagination gone bizarre. It is the meeting of mind and heart with letter and leaf, world and soul in close communion, finding their words, sifting their meanings.
Away from abstractions! If your Roman-trained wordloc mind seeks boxes within which to entomb the Gods, call that folly, not religion. True worship is mind and heart joined to spirit in ecstatic communion that steps away from all norms towards the sacred, that allows you to step out of your own box to look at life if but for a moment from a shifted perspective. To box the Gods and Alfar is perverse. Yet many do it. Patience, patience, we must have patience. This path is slowly being relearned, true. Yet corrections must come and scoldings given lovingly when needed, for the path back can be perilous, and tracing its scent requires proper attunement to the sinuous byways by which it meanders. Wordloc is prison-mind trying to cage wyrd in words grasped, letters lined up, paragraphs catalogued and collated. You will not find world's squirmy organic order there.
Heathen scholarship is important, but if it scholarship locked in wordloc, it will fail in its essential heathen task, for it will lack odr. Heart must take its essential place, for thought truly gathers there. There is too much dry shuffling of papers and dead leaves, not enough attendance to sap and green shoot. From whence did the leaves fall? Look up and see the Tree. There lies your wisdom.
We are becoming indigenous or we are becoming stuffy shirts gathered in tomb-lairs repeating silly rites that keep us city-spellbound, mockeries. Go beyond the page. Where is your heart? What does your heart say when your mind welcomes it into its midst? For we must have separation of neither. They must blend and make mead together. That is wholesome drink to sup and sate. It is their cleaving which is unnatural.
Heathen wisdom must be real earthy, even musty perhaps, the must of the wine-cellar, with its blacksmithed hoop-bound oak barrels, holding that special vintage of home, hearth, field and pasture. The mountain speaks in the mead. These are not abstractions. Poetry is the closest truth to be found.
Practice speaking more poetically. You may not have the skald's gift, but you must speak from the heart. Where will your sumble be if you cannot speak the only speech Odin utters? Cultivate your poetic soul, your mind-and-heart mix, where world gathers in inspiration. This means engage world. This means let world speak in silence. Why was Rig our first teacher? The guardian of the hearth-fires watches and listens. So when we sit round the flames and let world utter its seeming-incoherent mutterings and murmurs, eventually our mind finds pattern in the chaos : its language we learn, slowly over time.
Mind and heart are one. Make your practice the same. Only in this way will heathenism mature. And mature it must, if it is to thrive and prosper, and nourish the generations. If you would become indigenous, you must dare a little. You're welcome to dare -- it is a heathen value. Dare and step out from the written rite, the shy cityself bravado beer-toasting in circle, and find wild self, poetic self, self in world beyond categories, beyond definitions, closely in tune with nuances of living, pulsing life, and ask questions. Ask questions from the depth of your being, and listen. Keep listening. Watch as the answers transform over time. Take not the first batch and set it up as dogma. The answers mature as wine does. Give the brew its time to vintage. Then we shall drink together, friends. We shall drink deeper than you have ever known, and our hearts will know joy unending. Away from abstractions.
Our lore therefore is one with heart and mind. The wordloc mind of Western scholars will never penetrate the fullness of lore. Their analyses may be helpful, their takings-apart interesting, their external comparisons even insightful. But lore is not the letter. Lore is what happens when odr meets the letter. What blossoms therefrom is lore.
This is not the same thing as wild fancy. It is not immature imagination gone bizarre. It is the meeting of mind and heart with letter and leaf, world and soul in close communion, finding their words, sifting their meanings.
Away from abstractions! If your Roman-trained wordloc mind seeks boxes within which to entomb the Gods, call that folly, not religion. True worship is mind and heart joined to spirit in ecstatic communion that steps away from all norms towards the sacred, that allows you to step out of your own box to look at life if but for a moment from a shifted perspective. To box the Gods and Alfar is perverse. Yet many do it. Patience, patience, we must have patience. This path is slowly being relearned, true. Yet corrections must come and scoldings given lovingly when needed, for the path back can be perilous, and tracing its scent requires proper attunement to the sinuous byways by which it meanders. Wordloc is prison-mind trying to cage wyrd in words grasped, letters lined up, paragraphs catalogued and collated. You will not find world's squirmy organic order there.
Heathen scholarship is important, but if it scholarship locked in wordloc, it will fail in its essential heathen task, for it will lack odr. Heart must take its essential place, for thought truly gathers there. There is too much dry shuffling of papers and dead leaves, not enough attendance to sap and green shoot. From whence did the leaves fall? Look up and see the Tree. There lies your wisdom.
We are becoming indigenous or we are becoming stuffy shirts gathered in tomb-lairs repeating silly rites that keep us city-spellbound, mockeries. Go beyond the page. Where is your heart? What does your heart say when your mind welcomes it into its midst? For we must have separation of neither. They must blend and make mead together. That is wholesome drink to sup and sate. It is their cleaving which is unnatural.
Heathen wisdom must be real earthy, even musty perhaps, the must of the wine-cellar, with its blacksmithed hoop-bound oak barrels, holding that special vintage of home, hearth, field and pasture. The mountain speaks in the mead. These are not abstractions. Poetry is the closest truth to be found.
Practice speaking more poetically. You may not have the skald's gift, but you must speak from the heart. Where will your sumble be if you cannot speak the only speech Odin utters? Cultivate your poetic soul, your mind-and-heart mix, where world gathers in inspiration. This means engage world. This means let world speak in silence. Why was Rig our first teacher? The guardian of the hearth-fires watches and listens. So when we sit round the flames and let world utter its seeming-incoherent mutterings and murmurs, eventually our mind finds pattern in the chaos : its language we learn, slowly over time.
Mind and heart are one. Make your practice the same. Only in this way will heathenism mature. And mature it must, if it is to thrive and prosper, and nourish the generations. If you would become indigenous, you must dare a little. You're welcome to dare -- it is a heathen value. Dare and step out from the written rite, the shy cityself bravado beer-toasting in circle, and find wild self, poetic self, self in world beyond categories, beyond definitions, closely in tune with nuances of living, pulsing life, and ask questions. Ask questions from the depth of your being, and listen. Keep listening. Watch as the answers transform over time. Take not the first batch and set it up as dogma. The answers mature as wine does. Give the brew its time to vintage. Then we shall drink together, friends. We shall drink deeper than you have ever known, and our hearts will know joy unending. Away from abstractions.
posted by SiegfriedGoodfellow at 12:08 AM
1 Comments:
Hails, yes!
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