The spirit of the deep in the sensations, the metaphorical translation of the dormant intelligence sleeping in the stone (once in magma-days much more awake), the grasping through the imagination of the life declaring itself at the base of our perceptions, from the nooks and crannies of the world really breathed in with full awareness and presence. It is thus a truth to the deeper feelings speaking in the foundations of profound perception. To animate and make manifest (through imaginative theatre and ceremony, as well as poetry and narration) these feeling-perceptions as reflections of a truly animated world bursting with life is to keep truth alive in its depths against the dominance of surface impressions which too often not only rule, but suppress the deeper sides of being human. All over the world people have felt this sense of presence burgeoning and bursting from the things around them, and although the imaginative forms with which they have clothed them have differed, the profundity and innocence of their insistent declarations ring true, if you know the register in which to hear them. Sometimes in the long unwinding of ages in spiral and shadow, this register is lost even to those who carry on the tradition, but there are usually at least those few who know, who are sensitive to how life calls out to them, offering treaty and the opportunity for relationship and allegiance, a mutual aid in recognition of sharing presence on the planet, who will speak this to the rest of the people in imaginative forms, and thus restore the tradition to the register in which it truly rings.
Autistic rationalists who have never even attempted to give this level of perception a chance do not have the tools to be able to understand the register that rings the tradition alive, and thus in their incredible anthropological insensitivity and arrogance, simply mow over the whole thing, as if it all were useless, pernicious superstition, rather than sifting through with great respect for the wisdom of the ages, to peel it from the irrational exudations which have covered it in layers of ignorance. Something still lives, and a living feel for life itself is important to develop in people. This can be done rationally, but there is nothing wrong with these heirloom forms which have for millennia brought out these deep echoes and resonance of the primal environment from the heart of humankind. So if we speak of elves and dwarves and other things which sound nonsensical to your ears, it may be your inability to conceive the register we invoke when so speaking -- that does not disconnect us from the real world, but actually directly connects our intuitive feelings with deeper perception of the world -- that is crazy and kooky, and not us. Wise up, in the ancient way.
