But A Long Prayer

Writing these rants is an exercise in faith. I try to put myself on the line in these writings, to expose my soul, to open myself to the danger of aliveness and the encounter with risk. I try to stay true to that which my soul seeks to reflect from the world of the Gods, and speak it, daring to say things which my intuition tells me others need to hear as much as I need to hear them, too, even if they seem edgy.

I don't know what will become of all this. I just know that I am called to explore and speak, and I believe that something will come of this. This will have some effect, it will gather some together, it will bear fruit.

We are here to bear fruit, not just to twiddle our thumbs, feed our mouth, or kick the can. Oh, there is plenty of time to shoot the breeze, and that is important. Every tree must let its limbs blow in the wind. But we are here to bear fruit, and we'd better remember it. That means we are called into the scary aliveness of fertility, and the responsibility that comes with fertility coming on line within us.

This is a garden, and I trust it's going to take me to the next level. I don't know what that is, or how it will happen. I trust it even against the part of me that doesn't buy it because I have gotten so used to living in a barren world where hoped-for connections and opportunities never happen, where life has lost some level of fertility we all desperately need to come alive.

Yet I cannot sit around and complain about that lack of fertility unless I am turning and tending the soil. And to turn the soil means to overturn, means to upset a little, means to undo the status quo to get some breathing room into the mix. I have got to let the green speak through me and grow through me, and tendril and vine its way out to whatever connections might come.

I'm certainly not aiming at a small and narrow group that identifies itself as a heathen subculture. No, this is something far more ancient and broad. Heathenry is a language to speak something more indigenous, something specific, but something universal. Those who are frightened of the word "universal" ought look around and see that trees and flowers grow everywhere on earth, although they each grow in different ways in different places.

The need, the hunger that is out there, that often doesn't even recognize itself as hunger, but has simply acclimated its gnawing emptiness as a characteristic of life itself, goes far beyond any subculture. It is far deeper and simply awaiting a language that will speak to it, something that comes from integrity.

Hel, we don't have to be perfect to speak. We're bumblers and fuckups and just plain idiots, but we are trying to respond to the good that is in our hearts, and listen a little to that nagging voice of spirit that speaks of debts to the earth and to the spirit of place and to ancestors who worked their lives off to lay down legacies of freedom and prosperity for us. And we're going to mess up, and keep messing up, yet we shall cling to that sense of good and let it be our guide, and never lower the standards of integrity simply because it is a struggle to attain their heights. We grow up from roots, we stretch towards sky.

A tree has faith. It doesn't know in advance what or how it will become. It has the seed-pattern within it, but how that will manifest in the vagaries of soil, rocks, obstacles, sun, rain and drought, wind and years ... like us, it has no clue. Unlike most of us, it has an organic faith that is subtle yet more powerful than we can know.

I know there's something better than all this mess we've got, even with the good stuff in the mess, even with the voices that say we've got to keep the filth to keep the goods ; and I also know that to get to that better place, we have to develop every talent and capacity alive inside of us, and take some risks, and speak vulnerably but powerfully from the heart, and dare that one's true voice, no matter how strident, no matter how persistent, no matter how passionate and probing, is not "extremist", and will break through the obstacles to reach the grass roots in time. There's something better than all this, but it requires us to mature, to re-begin with humility, and grow ourselves up, and reach out and say, this is my truth, and this is my dream. Who else wants to share this dream with me?

The land-barons have stolen our odal from us ; they've laid taxes not upon monopoly and usury but mere use and livelihood ; they have taken away the family farm, and have spat poison, whether pollution or slander, everywhere.

Yet the land still calls. It calls for inhabitation. It calls for inhabitants. Not for exploiters. Not for zombies driving over its paved surface in astronaut suits. It calls for inhabitants.

And I think if we will learn to inhabit again, we will remember what it means to love. We'll find those taproots from which we've been wrenched, away from which love is but a cut flower soon to wilt. We'll relearn trust. And we'll come together, not to slander each other, not to excoriate each other for not being perfect, but to seek together the common and exceptional good that is, beyond illusion, native to our being, if only we will seek it, and seek it together. With faith and love and trust and strength and wisdom.

My writings are but a long prayer.