Dwarves grind down ore to reveal iridescent gem. They utilize the Mill to make beauty out of the hard and unyielding, bearing in and hunkering down into the solid walls of bedrock reality, and magma-summon crystalline magnificence, through hard, long, patient, Saturnian work, guided by the faith so spirit-strong embedded in the work, a work they inherently believe in. The offal dust they blow off as husk, fertilizer for the soil from the disappointments, for what remains is jewel.

    Solid in their work and their ethic, they blow out the innocence from the ore so it may bloom. Dwarves were known for their virtue :

    'Absit ut inter nos unquam regnaverit hace fraus! non tam longaevi tunc essemus neque sani. Inter vos nemo loquitur nisi corde doloso, hinc neque ad aetatem maturam pervenietis: pro cujusque fide sunt ejus tempora vitae. Non aliter loquimur nisi sicut corde tenemus, neque cibos varios edimus morbos generantes, longius incolumes hinc nos durabimus ac vos. Non mihi diffidas, faciam, mihi quod bene credas.’

    “Forbid that amongst us we should ever be soured by the rule of crime or fraud or deceit! To that very degree, one experiences neither longevity nor health. Amongst you, nobody speaks without a deceitful and cunning heart, and because of this, they do not reach a ripe and mature age ; according to one’s trustworthiness is the span of one’s life. Do not speak in any other way except as if it preserved your heart, nor eat such foods as beget illness ; because of this, (our discipline), for a long while we have remained unharmed and alive, and so might you. Do not despair in me, for I make things happen for he who trusts well.” ( The Protest of the Dwarf, in Ruodlieb XVIII, 18 – 26, translation mine.)

    Closer to the lava-flows, where the earth churns and boils its minerals until they are cooked, and cooled by the breath of dwarves, they oversee the matter-streams, in touch with the dynamism at the heart of stones, alive to the dormant sparks still sleeping in the rocks' springs.

    They live at the foundational bedrock of the living cosmos, the substratum from which the roots of the galaxies-tree, branching out into endless flowers of milky ways, emerges. Stars are their ovens from which matter is baked, plasma-cooked fusion to fusion, stepping up and down the periodic table, and brought out into the cold of space to cool and find their own. They are the deep alchemists of the prima materia, and do not brook interference or interruption in their Great Work, for from the roaring chaos of the flow brought blizzard to solid ice, they carve out the crystalline building blocks for worlds. Their foundational proximity to core gives their heart and word solidity. Upon their sparse terseness and gruff rede-of-the-deep one may place one's trust. The no-nonsense of the beneath shines through as well-worked gems. Are not stars the scintillating gemstones they necklace weave above the bosom of Love? For Love descends and fills the depths with delight, so those wombs of rock and lava-lore shall birth and bloom beauty for all.

  We are housed, in this life, in Homo Sapiens bodies, a rich conduit of DNA synthesis that brings its own joys and trials, but we must not forget our elvish heritage (that spark of odr placed in us by that great Heron, Hoenir, breathed into life by Odin), for the Homo Sapiens lineage has its own limitations stemming out of its primate line of evolution.
   
    The elvish in us never loses touch with possibility, and has a rich sense of that possibility, of opportunities literally embedded in the fabric of things, like secret, unseen sparks that linger just out of reach to those who do not stretch, yet which may be grasped through extension.

    Of course, things do not always turn out exactly as we anticipated (and in many ways, thank the Gods! we are still yet poor dreamers!), because we are dreamers in a multifactorial, ever-synapsing and switchboarding mesh of twist and turn, in which the things that have come to take on weight carry weight, and groove out their carve in the etching tumble with a will and weight of their own, and against this inertia, our sense of possibility can sometimes despair, and even turn to cynicism.

    But to grow that elfin sense within, we must vie it against its disappointments, enlivening as a form of prayer or meditation again and again to the virtual everpresence of possibility. We cannot know in any one situation what outcomes will be. Outcomes are not given to us in advance, but gambles. We are given gambles. What we wager shows our faith. It takes faith to wager difficult, counterintuitive choices, because doubt speaks crosswise, but the audacity and the panache of the gamble is often measured against its contrariness to the grain of doubt, which so easily etches itself upon easily-disappointed creatures such as ourselves, locked still in a linear view of things whereby we expect our desires to come to us in straightforward ways, rather than strange, marvelous, and altogether awesome ways. Note our ambivalence towards awe : if something is full of awe, we call it awful ; if it participates in awe, we call it awesome. Our ego is awesome bruised in the fulfillments awe brings.

    I do not believe this universe is a mill intended to grind us down, and that erosion is our only fate. It is true that the Mill grinds, but it is meant to grind down those too big for the world's own good, those who have thrown in with the monstrous. Does that mean the Mill doesn't grind the rest of us at all? Perhaps as a raw gem is ground, to polish it and render it multifaceted, bringing out its inner integrity and beauty. We may be disappointed countless times, because we start from ourselves and never bother to tune in to the web, to feel the vast aliveness and strange wonder of the crisscrossing currents and conduits about us, and lose our sense of the possible for what we merely want, or moreoften, think we want, which is too often pissant.

    Realism means to acknowledge what has happened, but it doesn't require us to etch it onto our souls. When things happen that should not have happened, we are not required to believe in them. Belief implies being in love, and being loyal to. We are not obliged to be loyal to events which we can sense rose lower than they were capable, of which there are many fallings-short in this world, that failed to meet their skuld, their should. We acknowledge them, watch their linking in to the chainmail lightning-and-wind-weaving about us, as they fade into the fabric, but we are not obliged to believe in them, as if they were our own, or moreso as if we belonged to them. Many events we will meet, but not all will be our own : we must let them pass, and not cling on to them. Other events, reflecting deeper possibilities, do speak to us and call us by name, a name washed in whitest water, a name cleansed of all filth, a designation that speaks to a deeper sort of fulfillment. These we may call our own and pledge loyalty to, and often, against the cynical grind of the world's disappointments, these good things will call for loyalty indeed.

    The Gods hold out the possibility of thriving to us. They want us to be fulfilled, to be a part of the fruition of the world, of weaving a richer and richer fabric of vibrancy, a Brinsingamen net of jewels where each facet gleam-reflects its spark of light to add to the awe-overwhelm of iridescence. Of course, we know that we are still students, bumbling learners tripping over our own toes, and how often we fall short of that full thriving. Our mistake would be to conclude that our own blundering proves that possibility is forever out of reach, or an illusion. Great things await us. There is a magic in the heart of things we have yet to learn to tap and cultivate, and bring up from source. That sounds naive to jaded ears, but often our best daring begins with the naive, and daring to stick to an innocence that brings ridicule, but which pursued unravels the green sap of ever-renewing life. What will you dare?

Let drift happen ; open to breeze ; Woden soars in currents. Urd crosspollinates ; fulfillment lies in the unanticipated ; what is hidden from view may transform. Forward thrust may brachiate and accelerate centripetally, pulling in vital, unexpected talents into the ongoing weave.

Your secret dreams are not barred from you, but come from the crossroads, strange out of the way places just outside of town, and require open definitions of self ready for renewal.

Let web-of-wyrd dream-reflect in neural net. Squirm-shift between interstices and drift within the fabric. Breathing room within lattices allows passage. Mind permeates all about. Beyond yourself, beyond categorizations. You are the protoplasma outside taxonomy.

Radical openness to being inherent in neotony and ongoing imprinting by world itself beyonds us across categories. Neither human nor animal nor plant nor mineral, but all of these and between. Not to be pinned down. Mercurial, as Odin moves, squirming between fish and bird and serpent.

Walk outside, warm air, move to where knees say crouch, hold knees, look about, close eyes. Mind soars. Outside routine lies currents truly current, and ancient. Like wisps of smoke, easily they corridor you into the ancient meander. Easily you are something other than you are. Truly your chance lies in the luck outside. "You" as the accumulation of what you have been is husk. Ask Odin to breeze one as seeds with parachute wings out from husk, into the world's blur-squirm, high-speed, slow-motion retina traces. A body is nothing but a set of possibilities for motion.

Urd is kinder than thought. Things work out just right, in the strangest ways. Everything is messed up and beautiful. More beauty awaits. This drama has not yet ended. Our adventure just begins. Doom speaks the blind ore, counterfeit of the sun, which cannot see beyond its day to the day beyond. A communist world of weirdness, where rye shall self-sprout, and the oak again yield up its nonbitter fruits. For we shall be blur, such color and vibrancy bled into world-flow itself, rejoined to the universal gift. Gebu. For when we are so undefined, the world's crannies await to niche-embrace us into unforeseen labyrinths. We are the nomads moving from form to flow through uncanny vital force. Drift happens. And in those drifts, the secret treasures. The never-imagined wonder. The ambiguous opportunities. It is yours, for free sharing, if you will undo your clinging. Is your hoard a soul-lock? Who owns whom? Self may step out from self at any time, any age, and youth begins again in that chrysalis-blooming, wing-unfolding moment. Fly. And if you do not fly, then skate. For the elves skate. And the elves are light and wink-behind-the-woods beauty, such mischief giving tiny hints in the bright eyes. All will be well ... in the strangest ways.

The deep, old things of this world, that have grown comfortable with themselves, and weathered the storm, and joined the bedrock : let these be elders.

It took a long time to grow this world. It has been through many tremors. Lost stories lay in the land, and every being carries a tale in its body. Old things carry the wisdom of depth. They have taken their due time to become by learning to cohere. They know the way of things. They know the way of wyrd.

A mountain, a boulder, a redwood tree, the sky ; a lake, a tortoise, a herd of elephants, and hawks circling in the wind. Herbs sprouting through cracks in the concrete, kelp and plankton tossing at sea, lichen growing on the rock. Rivers cutting bedrock through slow, moving groove and etching the canyons in slow motion. The crash of salt-water sud as the tide churns and beats the sand.

How long did it take each one to mature? How long did it take each one to find its place, to leave uncertainty and learn to surf flux, in order to grow old, to pass over the crests of time? They know. They remember in their bones the struggle. Often they still struggle. They resonate knowledge, and wisdom, and empathy for small, young, little beings like ourselves who are still trying to find our place in this world. It takes a long time.

The soil, the stone, the moistness that trickles through humus, breeding warmth and microbes, sinking down to aquifers. The warmth of the sun, the glow of moonlight. Into these, you shall melt, and you will speak through the saga of the earth, scion of soil and stone and sun. And when your spirit rejoins the stone, that resonating bone that hollow tones its low and lonely keen throughout the cosmos, crickets, such small things, flickers of eternity, will fiddle for eons above where melting bones lay. And you shall be part of the deep, old things.

The deep, old things of this world : let these be elders.

We need to be careful when we say, "We are our history," to not confuse this with being stuck in the past. The historical flow is important to connect to because it is the dynamic of genesis from which we all emerge, but we have to look at it dialectically, because history is a process of continuity and change. It is a unity on a dialectical level of continuity and change, and so it is a flow. We would be better served by seeing "we are our history" in terms of flows, in terms of intertwining ribbons and helices of turbulent streams, as can swirl through the vortices of a river, in which there is a level of connection to the past and also discontinuity, and that flow is important. We don't have to be just like our ancestors, even though having a connection to them can be meaningful. We don't need to freeze our connection at a particular, historical stage, say, the Iron Age. Those people themselves looked back to their ancestors and all the way to how they understood genesis from the very source. That understanding of what source is will change over time.

We honor on the mythopoetic level, of course, the story of fire and ice coming together in the great abyss, and forming the substrate of the world, and the bedrock of reality (Jormungrund) from which the Gods made the world, and there is something poignant to being in touch with that folk grasp, that imaginal connection. At the same time, our minds have expanded and stretched out, and through utilizing science, we have greater understanding of our genesis from the source, through evolution, and through the very process of the formation of matter at the beginning of the universe. And that vision itself will be expanded and revolutionized throughout time, so that at some point in time, our present understanding, though there will still be truths that cohere from it, will be seen in the same light as we might look back upon the previous understandings of our ancestors. So unless we are committed to being reactionaries, "we are our history" does not mean that we are not also our future. We are both. We are streamings in time that have the possibility to weave the best of the past into the excitement of the future, and it's the interplay between those two processes, of carrying forward that which was good in the past, and often in a transformative way, that matters. Sometimes it can't stay in the same form ; it must be transformed. But so that something of its essence stays with us. We don't want to turn the world back to medieval villages. There's little about that that was paradisical. We must move forward, but we will, if we are wise, take the best of the past in a transformative way and integrate it into our flowing-into and creation of the future.

That this world is solid is good. It is so good. That this world resists change by the movement of thought allows such solidity, such grounding, and rooting. The world is not all fire. Fire is complete change. It is revolutionary change taken to the nth degree, where all matter is burnt up. All is not fire. There is a good element of ice, of solidity, that things stay the same, that the world has a foundation, that it cannot all be changed by thinking it away. It is good that the New Thought movement is wrong. It is good that just by thinking of something you cannot make it change, because it allows there to be continuity, there allows there to be a sense of home, it allows for some type of permanence in the midst of transience. There is a dialectical unity between permanence and transience in this world, because of the very solidity of things, and that is something that matter allows.

In the middle-zone between fire and ice is where good things happen. We do need change, we do need fluent flow, but it's good to know that no matter what our imaginative flights, the world is able to maintain some identity. An identity-in-movement, but an identity all the same, and this is something to praise! This is something to praise the Gods for! That they took Ymir's bones and his flesh and made the world out of it, even though it was monstrous, it was a wonderful eye, a beautiful, brilliant idea, providing a real matrix in which our consciousness could take shape. The world of solidity became the body in which our minds could grow, and feel cradled, and have support. So, in a sense, if you want to think of it that way, the world is like a giant hand in which the Gods hold us.

Now some will try to push aside the solidity of reality and matter by pointing to quantum physics, and saying, "You see? Most of even matter is empty space filled with swirling energy." But you see, the mistake that they make here is they equate energy with ghostliness, and that's not what energy is. Energy is force. Want to think about force? Think about when you take two magnets of the same polarity and you try to press them close together. Think about the strength of that push, and how they force each other apart. Those fields of energy, while they aren't solid in the ordinary sense of things, definitely demonstrate a force that has a solidity to it. These swirls of energy have push and force, and they constitute a strong, elastic net that is very, very real, so you can't ghost away matter simply because of quantum physics, and the fact that there is a flux at the heart of things, at the atomic core, does not mean there is no solidity, because those patterns, through their probabalistic logic, maintain the solidity of things at our level. It does mean that matter is far more dialectical than we had ever thought. It's not just inert stuff. It actually is force-in-motion and in pattern, and that is a significant nuance and change in how we view things, because it means that there is an element of change and a way of approaching matter differently than just inert stuff. Rather, it is a stable dynamism, and that dynamic stability makes all the difference in the world.

In fact, it makes a world.

Love with all your heart, and never allow bad behavior to be unchallenged or tolerated. Summon strength as a source from goodness overflowing all around, and share it out amongst your kith and kin, in earth-outgoing ripples. Cherish depths of soul loved ones share ; open thyself to forays into the world to find new kith with whom to shake the world and let loose its fruits. Courage is a choice in the face of fear, that stands one's ground against shaking to choose a more creative path than cowering. Raise thy spear high and shout your passion to the winds : make thy heart be known to the hills and burrowed stone-wights! All the sky is thy higher canopy, all the earth below is the domain of the beloved.  Stretch out to dance circumferences of majesty ; stick to and consolidate the core. Nurture the source, and sow widely. Hope is an unseen seed in the darkest of night. Subpoena from the unseen the will of your ancient folk, who hold this worldview in the sacredness of strength ; with this heirloom, you shall know the cosmos well, and long shall drink its beauty and heartiness. There is a secret trust in the will of faith that invisible reinforces the love in your heart. The world swerves, in its twists alongside wyrd ; do not allow its wild veer to unsteadfast your cleave to the middle. Disappointments fall aside ; real deeds sink into myth and there subsist, eternal. Your questions open ; your doubts corrode : nurture questions, disperse doubts. Crises that seem to pull your threads apart require reassertion of will : fall back to earth and call her main of firmness to you -- ever defy the cackles of disenchantment and woe and ward off with will encroaching ill. Let unease wilt before practice and calm, the essence of your odal. Do not consent to the fraying of sacred fabric : sew, and darn, and weirdly weave integrity back. All is Gift ; make thy giving strong and smile-bold.

Heimdall's coming thus represented the catalysis of the next stage in human development, and thus a divine mandate that man at the beginning, in his embryo, is necessary but not sufficient. The isolated homestead, cut off from full relationship with the outside world, from abundance, and therefore from liberality, which is the quintessence of humanity, is nothing but the pigsty of a thrall : drudgery divorced from genius, stunted deformity shrinking from full development of gifts and talents. Nobility is the potential developed essence of all humanity ; Rigsthula is a genealogy of types, not of "races", utilizing kinship, as all cognition at the tribal level does, as a metaphor. The installed nobility is a vanguard put in place through the merit of its passionate dedication to transcending parochiality of personhood and association, into larger fruition and collective blossoming. The ambassadorial function of nobility, in its liberality of spirit and hospitality, is an image of where we may rise. Through this, we become political, rather than parochial, animals. But if the speciation of humanity that merely functions as a metaphor for an evolutionary typology becomes translated into literal caste-and-class divisions, then humanity becomes divided from itself, and thus by definition, frith is impossible.

Heimdall-Scef's inauguration of the Neolithic utopian village thus looks beyond the Neolithic, with the Neolithic as a crude approximation in stone and straw of a divine image etched in silver and gold. We ought not mistake the first approximation as the finale itself. It is a telos-in-modelization, according to best conceptualizations and material capacities of the time, and turning that into idolatry, all too prevalent, is only ultimately prevented by the contradictions in the system which drive it on to transcend itself. In that tutelage-period where humanity has yet to collectively blossom its nobility, and thus is divided against itself into classes, the process of evolution may be hindered and slowed by the privatizing forces of greed, which incapable of ambassadorial genius and liberality of spirit, tend towards hoarding and competition rather than expanding community and public spirit.

Heimdall comes to inaugurate the republic, the wide sphere of the public realm as an arena for human expression and development. This vision of public life, tied together by gifts, is grander than the narrow, privatized view of human potential, enabling a "we" rather than a "me first" which leads to a "me only". In the wake of greed follows narrowness, pestilence, and war, engendered by self-deception. (Gullveig-Angrboda, and her children Jormungand, Hela-Leikin, and Fenris, engendered by Loki. Why is Jormungand the first to emerge? Because the image of a snake squeezing to death its prey in its coils is the perfect expression of the narrow, constrictive vision of life which begins manifesting in reality once greed becomes empowered. From such a narrowness, the loss of cooperative production which would lead to abundance, is replaced by a dearth that eventually results in famine and in its wake, plague, the twin purviews of his sister, Hela-Leikin. Ravenous war, the domain of Fenris, is merely the culmination of this.)

Of course, the privatized mind, alienated from its larger human potential, sees the extension of the public sphere as an encroaching, threatening alien power, and through this sorcery whereby the mind is turned against its own powers, the war of all against all, manifested on the economic level by the replacement of cooperation by competition, is inaugurated. The enthrallment of the pigsty to make it serve the polis, and work its way up to earldom with its international hospitality, is seen with nightmare-hysterical eyes as a terrible violation of its private essence. Because greed has captured the mind, it is unable to imagine freedom outside this limited, quarantined sphere. The reach of the divine to awaken larger munificence (envisioned both materially and spiritually) is experienced as the invasion of a hostile power to be resisted. Thus thralls approach the coming of Heimdall with suspicion and behind closed doors. Thralls are from this standpoint akin to cyclops that have been made to serve the unfolding of the further development of humanity, having refused to voluntarily participate in that development themselves. In the Greek conception, cyclops were cave-dwellers, confined by their narrow conception of kinship, to competition and cannibalism, and thus were the cognate of many of our giants. A thrall has become more like a giant than a human being, but remains, despite the refusal, a child of Heimdall.

Is the "leave me alone" of "live and let live" the best we can imagine? It may be a minimum, but are we content as bold ones to confine ourselves to such meagerness? "Don't tread on me" is the slogan of snakes! Are we snakes? The vision of freedom as isolation is paltry, and lacks the boldness of blossoming inherent in the word freedom. A pantheon is about bringing energies together, in a higher place and level of organization. If we imagine that freedom is never possible in social unity and alliance, but only in being scattered, do we not implicitly invoke a vision of the Gods as separated and potentially at odds with each other if they came together? How might we then explain their strong unity, their high centralism, their very city in the stars itself? What is our true vision? Do we, as warriors, fear the clashes that might be necessary to establish unity? Do we fear and shrink before that foundational struggle? No one likes to be told what to do, least of all a heathen. Will you thereby wall yourself off from all that is bold and inspiring? Will you shun battles because they might at times involve subordination? Or do you have a stronger vision of freedom, one that can shackle itself for a time to larger vision which will release it when mature to greater liberties yet?

The utopian Neolithic village-community, endowed with redistributive laws of equity, and shepherded from its parochial centrifugality by an ambassadorial class (which represents the vanguard at the point of progress) which opens it out onto international connections (remembering that when Odin inaugurated a city, Maeringaborg, during his exile in Mannheim, it was, as the Nibelungenleid explicitly indicates, a cosmopolitan, international city), becomes the seed-form given by the Gods through Heimdall with which human beings may envision and develop their potentials. The village-community, it must be emphasized, through its ambassadorial class, imagined as a polis, as a broader-than-narrowness. The very institution of the viking as the initiation rite of young men, however it may have degenerated at times into mere piracy, is, as a project of going out into the world to explore its many customs and peoples, a testament to the internationalist flavor of maturity cultivated ambassadorially by this original vision. It may, and ought, be noted that an acorn is not an oak, and the sheafs of grain Scef brought were not the grainfields themselves. A seed contains the potentiality of its maturity, but transformatively, not in the vulgar literality of its diminutive form. No, it must fold out onto the world, taking the world up into itself, and expand, in order to grow and become what it may be. Thus, the utopian village-community, while an imperfect modelization, contains within it the vital hints necessary to blossom. This takes an act of imagination (a faculty empowered and encouraged by the song-smiths) rather than mere mechanical expansion. All of this richness Heimdall has offered us.

Why Heimdall? As the bringer of the sacred hearth-fire, Heimdall fosters that alchemy of expanding awareness that begins in the home but moves out in increasing concentric ripples. Fire is an activator, a bringer of light, an alchemical catalyst. The ancients imagined the fire's smoke carrying up their contemplations and inquiries to the realm of the Gods. (We need not imagine in this that they were literalists, but deeply imaginative philosophers who saw the analogies of reason inherent in nature.) In this way, particular concerns and thoughts are universalized, through that philosophic attention for which Heimdall, as the watcher, the witness, is known. As the guardian of the gates to the Gods, he wards over the passage from particularity to universality and back. Man from the standpoint of Asgard is something grander than man trapped in narrow travails and troubles ; prayer becomes a way of elevating concerns, through poetic imagination and songsmith, to a more universal level, a way of viewing the valley from the mountain. Prayer, which is nothing more nor less than this imaginative contemplation whereby we expand ourselves towards greater cosmological perspective, allowing that transcendence to fructify our immanence and particularity even as our locality and earthiness offers the transcendent divine a form and temple in which to dwell, is a power that brings us up from the tangles and brambles at the trunk, to the very height of the Tree, and from there, below to its roots. Through prayer we activate our larger human gifts, turning on the technology, as it were, through which the divine acts to realize itself through us in this world. Prayer, explicitly tracing the leaves and branches back to the trunk, and thus caressing the web of wyrd, reveals that "no man is an island", and that islandhood, therefore, is an insufficient image to encompass humanity. Humanity is not an archipelago, but, at its height, a globe unto itself, inasmuch as it recapitulates nature and harmonizes therein. Stop pretending you are less than you are ; stop believing excuses for such pretenses. The Gods call us out into our full being, both individual and collective, neither of which can be fulfilled except through each other.