One often hears the statement, "We keep the dead alive by remembering them." But what if this is, once more, a mortal arrogance bred by our fitful myopia, and in fact, the dead keep us alive by remembering us? What if this world of matter is held together at the quantum level by a strong force deeper and stronger than the strong force, the will and memory of the ancestors? What if this world flows out of the Well of Mimir and only therefrom maintains its strength and longevity?
There are times -- granted, they are only times, and you might say it is just a mood, yet it is such a strong mood, overpowering -- when I can feel the aliveness of my friend who took his life three years ago. I will grant you that I do not feel this all the time, and sometimes I doubt, and think, this is just wishful thinking on my part, and who am I fooling. Yet I must say that in these times when I can feel him so strongly -- and it is not so much a "psychic" feeling as it is a feeling in the heart, a feeling of love -- it does not feel like how denial feels. It does not feel like I am fooling myself to console myself. It feels as if this world of ours is but an echo of a subtler world, and we hold hands across the abyss.
It's like the feeling you get in moonlight, when you are bathed in a lunar ocean of fluorescence, and everything feels not only eerie, but eerie in a way that opens the door to uncanny. Seldom blatant, yet pulsing with some secret heart, one can feel, this is a different kind of time, a different kind of moment. And peace can overtake your heart, and you can feel, wow, this is the norm ... all that strife and doubt and anguish is but some strange, momentary aberration that overcomes me.
Yet when it does, how it does consume us, yes? Seized by anguish and strife, somehow in that moment, we think that is the all of reality.
The human heart is a mystery. Somehow in the heart of love there is no death, and yet the world's bodies still ever turn in the mill, shredded back into the soil. What does not prove fertilizer for the tree's roots must sing in the sap-halls of the root-world, and the echoes of that song hold the foundations of this earth together. That is the world-view that emerges out of our ancestors' poetry.
What to do with metaphor, eh? Do those poems express a literal place, or do those images capture an essence that is experienced as a feeling-state? Does the Tree and its roots express something astrally experienced on that level, or does one's lovebody after the dissolution of the primate-form no longer exist in that way, but drifts evanescent in states of subsistence at the root of things where our metaphors of Tree and Root, Well and Sap, speak as well as any analog might, and we must simply understand that for a growing primate, and mortal to boot, that's as close as we're likely to get? These poems were distilled from thousands upon thousands of shamans' seances, after all.
Can you trust the human heart? Does the world reflect our love, in the final analysis, if not in the immediate? That is a question of faith. It is a question of what level of confidence you can glean from those special moments when you can really feel it, and how far you can extend those strange perceptions back into a zone where more normal concepts rule. Can you withstand the silliness of seeming quaint in a world of lasers and computers and honoring the tribal heart, and bringing it back home?
Wherein does truth reside? In simple things, in stones or carvings, atoms tinkertoyed to make such stuff as we everyday see? Or does it walk the halls of our hearts, leaving traces in its footsteps, ever wandering, like Odin, named Saðr, "sooth"?
My ancestors tell me that it is the well between fire and ice that brings wisdom. The atheist materialists tell me that matter is all I can trust, or ever have. The dogmatic spiritualists tell me that spirit is all I can ever trust or really have. Like fire and ice, I can hold each in one hand, and like the scales of Libra, balance them in the still point. No angst towards matter, no angst towards spirit, and blending them as one in the middle place, my heart. That sounds as close to wisdom as I am liable to get. And I am grateful if I will prove worthy of getting it.
There are times -- granted, they are only times, and you might say it is just a mood, yet it is such a strong mood, overpowering -- when I can feel the aliveness of my friend who took his life three years ago. I will grant you that I do not feel this all the time, and sometimes I doubt, and think, this is just wishful thinking on my part, and who am I fooling. Yet I must say that in these times when I can feel him so strongly -- and it is not so much a "psychic" feeling as it is a feeling in the heart, a feeling of love -- it does not feel like how denial feels. It does not feel like I am fooling myself to console myself. It feels as if this world of ours is but an echo of a subtler world, and we hold hands across the abyss.
It's like the feeling you get in moonlight, when you are bathed in a lunar ocean of fluorescence, and everything feels not only eerie, but eerie in a way that opens the door to uncanny. Seldom blatant, yet pulsing with some secret heart, one can feel, this is a different kind of time, a different kind of moment. And peace can overtake your heart, and you can feel, wow, this is the norm ... all that strife and doubt and anguish is but some strange, momentary aberration that overcomes me.
Yet when it does, how it does consume us, yes? Seized by anguish and strife, somehow in that moment, we think that is the all of reality.
The human heart is a mystery. Somehow in the heart of love there is no death, and yet the world's bodies still ever turn in the mill, shredded back into the soil. What does not prove fertilizer for the tree's roots must sing in the sap-halls of the root-world, and the echoes of that song hold the foundations of this earth together. That is the world-view that emerges out of our ancestors' poetry.
What to do with metaphor, eh? Do those poems express a literal place, or do those images capture an essence that is experienced as a feeling-state? Does the Tree and its roots express something astrally experienced on that level, or does one's lovebody after the dissolution of the primate-form no longer exist in that way, but drifts evanescent in states of subsistence at the root of things where our metaphors of Tree and Root, Well and Sap, speak as well as any analog might, and we must simply understand that for a growing primate, and mortal to boot, that's as close as we're likely to get? These poems were distilled from thousands upon thousands of shamans' seances, after all.
Can you trust the human heart? Does the world reflect our love, in the final analysis, if not in the immediate? That is a question of faith. It is a question of what level of confidence you can glean from those special moments when you can really feel it, and how far you can extend those strange perceptions back into a zone where more normal concepts rule. Can you withstand the silliness of seeming quaint in a world of lasers and computers and honoring the tribal heart, and bringing it back home?
Wherein does truth reside? In simple things, in stones or carvings, atoms tinkertoyed to make such stuff as we everyday see? Or does it walk the halls of our hearts, leaving traces in its footsteps, ever wandering, like Odin, named Saðr, "sooth"?
My ancestors tell me that it is the well between fire and ice that brings wisdom. The atheist materialists tell me that matter is all I can trust, or ever have. The dogmatic spiritualists tell me that spirit is all I can ever trust or really have. Like fire and ice, I can hold each in one hand, and like the scales of Libra, balance them in the still point. No angst towards matter, no angst towards spirit, and blending them as one in the middle place, my heart. That sounds as close to wisdom as I am liable to get. And I am grateful if I will prove worthy of getting it.
