Urd Offers Choices

Let the world teach you how to be old ; let death teach you how to be inevitable, unstoppable, inextricably woven into the heart of things. Life is a frightening adventure of peeling back fear to reveal treasure and grandeur, if we will dare to step out from our petty, little hovels from time to time and listen to what the widelands say in their breadth and depth. This world was shaped by divine hands out of the remains of monsters. All reduces to formidable miracle. The tough places are the learning places : stop to listen, for hints whisper in the cracks. We begin pimpled geeks struggling to learn maturity from a world of elders. Let the world peel your geekdom and age you into a masterpiece, a sculpture of time, with all inessentials carved away. An opportunity awaits. Urd offers choices.

Inevitability

There is a certain bleak inevitability to the Northern way that superficially has gloominess and grimness to it. But beneath this is great joy, and endless faith in life's powers. The hands of Urd the Great hold us all, and this is a deep, loving inevitability mediated by the Gods and our gambles. Beneath the flavor of bleakness lies the hope. There are smiles hiding in hidden crevices.

Inevitability, which at first seems so bleak, is an embrace that holds one close, a level of deep being one approaches, and if a heathen, then with panache and flair.

Bleakness may just be the roar of the distant ocean singing a world-song far more profound, and thus more alien and at times more cold, more ancient, than a human tune. The great is-ness of the objects in their grandeur of old, old being, having found themselves long ago, and not at all new to world, is formidable and steep and strong, full of very deep comfort, if you can feel it. But it sings a drone, a hum, a didgeridoo so ancient it is strange, and wisdom is in part accommodating oneself to the strangeness of the world, to sing with the coldness of rocks, and dance in the bleak beyond the human pale, and there in the cold, to affirm your own human warmth, as an addition to the song.

The grimness, in the end, is just a shield, like the ice that keeps the greening earth intact in winter's grip. There is great warmth beneath the surface. There is an awesome party raging in Hel : hear the horns clink and the sounds of baritone laughter, and the honey of the dwarf's yeast upon rhythmic lips and wooed, wondering ears.

Folk foreign to this way do not imagine the simmering mirth beneath the dour, Stoic face, the endless fund of faith in life that lies beneath the grizzled grimace at a world gone cynical, that studies the bleak for signs of endless power, hints on how to become eternal. The angels, one might say, sing strange and potent surf-spells. Hear them roar.

Bring the Gods Together in Your Heart

You must find the Gods and bring them together. They have left their traces deep within the sinews of the world, but within the world, to surface-eyes, and minds scarred by the axe, they appear to be in contradiction in the tangle of complexity. To have faith in them, you must find them, every one, within the world, and bring them together as a pantheon in your mind and heart and soul. They are already pantheoned in the macrocosm ; to find faith, you must bring them together beyond contradiction in the microcosm.

Remember that the Abrahamists and Puritans are half-atheists : they have emptied the world of the traces of divinity, and see all immanence as empty materiality, their deity existing alone in transcendence.

Ea ch God holds high very pure principles, principles so polyvalent and potent, they manifest as complexity in this world. Each one represents a complete and ample vision of deity, and one would suspect, from externals, that these are incompatible, and yet we know they are coordinated and richly interstrewn. Yet for us, it is as if they are lost in the tangle, and our journey is to find them, and bring them together so they may fund and multiply our possibilities for bringing life alive again in our lives and those around us.

These are reflective Gods ; they appear upon reflection and not naive realism. It takes depth to perceive their movements. Often in the midst of things we do not perceive them, and only upon reverie or dream do we catch the traces of their movements.

Understand you are holding together forces and principles that assembled together in the world of appearance and seeming would seem in complete contradiction. The pantheon presented by the myths should appear counterintuitive, and is only the result of deep, Hegelian synthesis of meditation, contemplation, and gambles tested over hundreds and hundreds of generations. You are bringing together something bold and impossible in your heart, and asserting to the world that there are higher solutions to what seem contradictions, which may never fully resolve themselves in time, but which are transcended through perceptions of wisdom and wyrd, and there the Gods are. You are asserting great faith, audaciously, that some mystery guided by higher powers is riddling itself out beyond our powers to fully grasp, yes, in this world, in this world so deeply touched already by corruption that it has become opaque to the light of the Gods. Yet that is but the depth of the surface. Faith says beneath, the deep movements of the Gods still endow foundations, if they can be found. The goblins, for all their might, allowed for a time to have their illusion of reign, are but spooks, whom the Gods in time will mop up and literally wring out of this world.

You do not need to divide yourself and choose a single vision ; you only need choose good over evil, yet when you do, you find goods so diverse, so seemingly contradictory, so calling for risk and gamble, that they are truly alive. The vision of unity, of high Asgard on high, is not a simple one, simply attained, through throwing all together in a mush. It is a pinnacle of epiphany achieved in the spiritual struggle of the soul with a difficult world, and wrestling to untangle the divinity wrapped inherent in its great complexity. Dream bold.