The chain is broken, the tie to the deep past lost. Heathenism is a path for which we strive, yet I, like so many of you, am a detribalized descendant of tribesmen thrown flotsam into the Roman world. It is those moments I seek, epiphanies where one can feel coherence pulling together a dissipated world into a sense of meaning that is present, that is now, that is ever and has been. Is that what a sym-bol once was, not a mere glyph, not just a sign, but a vision that threw together and glued in a knot of coherence what so much conspired to keep separated and fragmented?

Look at us, surrounded by fossils, bits of lore, the crushed glass and stone of temples. And how we cling to these pieces, hoping to sing the spirit out of the stone. But it takes a tribe to sing the spirit from the stones and make it live in flesh, on earth.

Drowning in a sea of atheism, apathy, anomie, looked upon as quaint, strangely attached to old fairy tales, as perhaps missing a bolt or two, and gorgeous upwellings of drum-beating vision are given blank stares, and fade in the wilting eyes of willfully misunderstanding strangers, strangers who call themselves my friends, call themselves my family.

When a genuine moment was found in old days, how it echoed, how it trilled and choired and swirled about the tribe. How it hummed in days to come beneath the surface. How it was recognized and seen and heads nodded in worth.

Not annihilating eyes, that look on and turn to dust, and scatter dust to wind. Not dessicating eyes, that dry and shrivel, and turn away from ancient beauty.

We are thirsty sojourners with pierced water-skins. Nothing holds. The hands lift water, and the toes are wet ; the hands hold nothing.

I am a creature running on automatic. It takes faith to live amongst the apathy and keep one's troth. Lost in the banality, one often feels nothing, cannot smell the ancestral scents, cannot feel the presence of the holy Gods. One posits. One lives as if in suspense, in the hopes of, in the projection beyond nothing, in the absurd stance of reaching towards what all deny. And sometimes one feels nothing, yet one hopes to feel.

I am sent out into a strange world. I know it well, but it has not lost its strangeness. Estranged. Not a tribe in sight to hold things together. The freeways rip my local soul away and toss it to the smoggy winds. I struggle to find a word that will hold. That word is weighed on the moneychangers' scales, who shake their heads and shrug. A word is air. Cheap, smoggy air. Yet a word was once wyrd ...

I have seen the numb eyes. Numb, electrocuted eyes. Eyes that can no longer believe. Eyes that are weary, heads that sadly shake no at any talk of magic, ears that are deaf to poetry. Ringed by people for whom soul is a word, worthless air itself, and no treasure. Language that wells from Anglish tribesmyn but it cannot bridge the gap at all. I speak words but no one understands.

Is it genocide to have flattened masses of the same bloodline bleached of their common root? Or to sing of ancestors who are always gone, because culturally, their descendants have disappeared? If their descendants were swallowed by the Roman wolf, and became bleached, stripped soldiers, do they have descendants at all? Or what does it mean to have a heritage that is all nostalgia, with few hands to carry it forward?

I walk into a hall, but the hall is empty. No cheers to greet me, no fires burn in braziers, no feast in hall. What is a vision quest when you return with a vision and everyone yawns and simply talks about the ballgame?

Broken chains.