Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland
Walking with the seiðr on the edge of the sea, I meant to be asking her of the runes, but now she is asking me how I know of other times.
“I am one who tells a Christian story from a time before Christian was a religion.”
“So, you travel through time?”
“But isn’t traveling through time every person’s journey? An infant comes from the darkness of the womb into the bright lights of the keepers of time — the sun and the moon and the stars — and from birth, one moment of life is always the next moment in time.”
“That would make every old person a far traveler, though you have seen aurochs and I have not.”
“The life journey only travels forward, always into what was once future. To go back requires a good memory which is tethered to imagination because the past is always imaginary. It is always not the now.”
“So how deeply must one remember if he were to believe he saw a giant ox roaming the earth?”
“For me it was only one generation, because then I was dead for nearly two hundred years. My sons, who knew of aurochs were with me when we saw two of them in the King’s hunting grounds. My oldest sons were children then and aurochs were already very rare. I lived to see these sons become men, but we never saw any more aurochs in our lifetimes.”
“So, you travel through time from death into life?”
“I believe that is my oddity. I wish it were normal, then my grief could be shared with others. If others were like me, I could know them with daily touch and sight and the sounds of their voices and footsteps, the smell of their hair… Now when I find them, they crash into my grief wrapped in all the spirit of ancestors, invisible, inaudible with words, but present. And so, now I want to ask you how know my language?”
She doesn’t let me change the subject so easily.
She answers, “I’ve wondered if we people weren’t mortal, would we still cherish life? And now I want to know how does one attain this ‘oddity’?”
“My oddity or gift, as I received it, is simply radical healing, even from death to life. I am a physical sign for a spiritual truth.”
“This is a long journey we walk.”
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 