Indeed, you can.
The Gods imbued us with their gifts. We have ond, we have odr. We have the awesome power.
I'm listening to Duran-Duran's The Chauffeur. I cannot imagine a time when this sparkling beauty did not exist.
And yet it did not pre-exist the 1980s.
This stunning, elfish gorgeousness, this must-be?
This must-be might not have been.
If someone hadn't set out to create.
This is a piece of beauty this world never knew.
It is a real bringing in of something from nothing. It is a birth, a creation, a gift.
The absolutely real opportunity to adorn this world with beauty, with grace, with love, with inspiration, with strength, with courage exists for each of us.
You may bring jewels here that never were before, yet after they are brought, are as if they could not never have been.
What an incredibly rich chance! Grab it! Grasp it! There are subtle glimmering beauties unseen surrounding you in the ether. Reach out to them, seek them out, touch them, take them in, and find some way to give them birth and form in this world.
For the world is ugly, remember, not only because of the presence of evil, but the failure of the creative to fully develop themselves and give forth their gifts. In fact, it might be said that the only real way that evil prospers is through the sabotage and muting of that very creative potential.
If you fail to wyrd, the whole world will be robbed of how you might have enlivened its deadening normality into something sparkling and alive. Such life smuggled into this world through gifts on loan from the Gods is something that makes a difference and ensures that there is still inspiration to go on, so that this world becomes a place of soul-making, and not of soul-breaking.
It doesn't happen under conditions of stagnation. This is why Odin stirs up with wod. A little turbulence is needed in lives that get too complacent, for they may lose their opportunity in their slumber.
Every one of you has something you may create -- from nothing, pure magic developed into art and craft -- that will bless this world, and smuggle beneath the giant's notice some sustaining beauty.
Even the smallest authentic beauty can make a difference in a life, or several lives.
Remember, what enlivens us now might not have been.
In fact, very easily might not have been.
Shakespeare's works were not inevitable. Lucas might not have made Star Wars. Gene Roddenberry could have stayed in the LAPD. Snorri could have left the writing down of the myths to someone else -- or no one.
It might be frightening, and is, to imagine a world where Shakespeare might not have been at all, nor any of the other crafters of beauty who make this often hard-edged life just a bit more bearable, but it is to restore the past to the fragility and fluidity of its contingency, its might-have-been-elsewise, had a choice been made different here or there. But that very uncertainty, the frightfulness of that slippery reality, is the excitement of this opportunity here in the present.
What do the Gods have in store for you? What potentials did your ancestors work hard to have the Norns weave in to your fatelines? What beauties wait to birth through you? This is a religious question.
Beauty is part of the battle! When you make yourself an incarnation for the Gods' creations, and allow that holiness to pass through you and bless all who will have it, you have become a potent weapon in the Gods' hands against the Giants!
Don't think so? Ever noticed how easy it is to destroy, and how difficult it is to create? How casual comes criticism and slander, and how steep the road to actually build and get something off the ground? Tripfalls are laid everywhere, it's painting in a minefield, dancing on a seismic fault. Many will give up this battle. Will you? You're going to have to work hard to bring this to fruition. Who stands in your way? What stands in your way? However formidable, intimidating, gargantuan they seem, do you remember that what blessing comes to be created through you comes from the Holy Gods?? Now, are you going to let that Giant win? I mean, maybe you're not going to win, it's never certain, and sometimes you don't know how you're going to get out of this mess or how you'll ever push through, but are you going to let that smelly, messy, disgusting lump of stupid Giant-flesh stand in the way of that which the Gods would intend? Come on, get back up on your feet, go back to the workshop, stare at the unfinished blueprints again, and roll up your sleeves.
See, we've got good work. It's good work. We don't know precisely the outcome, we only know that if Shakespeare had never sat down at his workshop and began pondering lines for his actors, well, literature, which is what feeds the soul in a difficult world, would now be tremendously impoverished. And so he stole back from that nothing which is the shrouding of the Giants' absconding to bring us treasures. So we get back into the workshop and sit down to our good work.
Because it's the opportunity.
The opportunity of our lives.
