#66.2, Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

         Maybe it was after a snooze, or another day and night altogether when I awoke to hear the seiðr bargaining with the sailors to give us passage for the journey to sail across the sea. And so, we are sailing now. We two passengers are just riding along when the sail is all that is needed and even the oarsmen seem to have little to do. Only the tiller needs a man, and that is because we are human, and we think we know better than the wind how to choose a direction for our wanderings.

         The seiðr speaks softly, under the sounds of sea and wind creaking the mast and rope lines of this little boat. She tells me something of this journey.

         “I’ve not been back to my homeland since I was carried off so many years ago.”

         “You were carried from your home as a young woman — all alone?”

         “I was an infant. But of course, even Jesus was rejected in his own land.”

         “You know that of the Christian story?” [Mark 6:1-13]

         “I know that is true for seers, prophets, truthtellers, maybe even time-traveling rune signs.  People fear knowledge from a distant source that just comes to one who is common among them. Older generations only want the children to know what they, themselves, have to teach. If there is a mystery to be found from another source it is perceived as fearsome.”

         I understand what she’s saying. My thoughts are unspoken.  The invisible God with no name has so many ways to speak through Creation to all humankinds and maybe even to critters too and once in a while someone listens. Then the voice of God becomes known. It is human nature to grab the tiller of that wind driven craft and create a religion, or a cult of ritual, or a system of obedience, to allow some to be included and some to be excluded. It becomes smaller than the mystery, smaller than the universe, smaller than the flames of the gathering fire, until it is small enough to be all in human control.

         What can I say to her?

         “How is it that you know the Christian stories?”

“I don’t know all the Christian stories. And if I ever came upon a great binding of bible, which I’ve heard tell of, I wouldn’t even know how to read it.”

“How is it you know the Christian stories?”

         “They are all around us always being told.”

(Continues tomorrow)


#66.1, Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

          “Don’t you have to be back soon?  It seems we’ve already come a long way and you must have obligations.”

She takes a long swallow from the skin of wine strung across her shoulder, and answers, “no.”

         This village seiðr has brought me to a land that would end here at the sea, but she tells me she can’t answer my questions about the love loss here until I understand the sorrow that has come to all these places; and for that, we need to travel on.

 “The sailors will come soon and take us across to the other lands.”     

         I don’t see sailors or these “other lands.” Looking across the water it seems open sea all the way to the horizon. I wonder if her trust in sailors showing up is a seer’s mystical vision or if she knows something earthly. 

         She answers my unspoken question.

“It is the west wind that carries these ships back to their home ports. It takes oarsmen to bring them over to this shore, against this wind. So, if the ships from the lands to the east are here, it’s only because there are oarsmen who brought them over rowing against the prevailing winds and very soon, they will sail back on a more reliable wind.”

         Of course. Ships sailing on westerlies is nothing mystical.  And engravings on rocks are barely mythical. I think it is this magical presence of her that gives mystery to the hero stories, as well prophecies of ships which empowers everything she says with omniscience. She even has power over time, so that the now, where we are, is always wrapped in a rune that she can call forth into a story of once upon a time. That same timeless now is this waiting time for the inevitable to unfold and make her prediction of a ship true. Her magical powers then, are wrought in the waiting, the silence, the spreading of time beyond its boundaries.  The magic here is simply created out of patience.

         So it isn’t really magic. It is dependable and normal, like catching a west wind. In Christian, the waiting in silence is the stillness where prayers are unstrung and heard. The timelessness is God’s own answering space.

         Dear God, thank you for offering the brilliance of cold sunshine on the seas and shores of this land. But why are the people of this wondrous place so deeply grieving and raging? Please guide me to see through the hurt to the love. Amen.

(Continues tomorrow)

#65.12, Thursday, February 27, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

          I still have questions. Why are these people, already empowered by the magnificent nature of being human — already rich with power — setting their hearts on taking the riches of others? There must have been a disaster that skewed the human values. Love, in all its varieties seems taboo. Here is a world of men and where women are few. The few women who aren’t slaves are powerful oddities. Maybe this void of women is filled by capturing thrall. It seems a people always striving become lost from the simple peace of goodness. 

         I ask, “Why are women so few here and mostly they are women captured in raids?”

         “If I attempt to answer you in your own language, I know what you will ask me next. And before I tell you about myself you have an obligation to explain who you are. How is it that you are a young man with an ancient memory?”

         Over and over again, I’ve clearly failed to explain my oddity of life and life again to a pagan seer who really has no interest in a gospel story and surely not a Christian sermon on resurrection. So, what can I say?

         “Once I was a Jewish kid living with my family near Jerusalem. I was best friends with an artisan, a builder, a smiðr. He was a teacher with a radically simple message about an intangible spiritual life — living in a world apparently made only of earthly works – tables, benches, walls, ships. So, in his teaching he used metaphors of tangible things to help people understand the invisible goodness.  He built the fishing boats and set them on the seas to gather food for the hungry and bring comfort for the sorrowing – it was the opposite of Viking raids.

         “He used things of earth as signs – using the visible to explain the invisible.  He was looking for a physical sign to explain the notion that even death has no power to destroy this invisible nature of love. And it happened that he came back to my family when they were mourning my death. And then he called me back into life and I became a physical metaphor for a spiritual truth.  I was bestowed with the same healing every living being has, but in the extreme – healing — even from death. So, here I am a forever sign of life.”

         “So, you are telling me Jesus carved a rune and you are that rune?”

         “Indeed. And now you will tell me who you are.”

(Continues Tuesday, March 4)

#65.11, Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

         The seiðr has chosen to teach me things of this new world where I find myself now. We’ve walked miles along a shore, and now we are in a larger village where rune stones are placed as monuments to heroes. But learning the names of Norsemen who died as heroes for a king, doesn’t make me yearn for this life. It doesn’t even appease my curiosity. Apparently, writing is not really a thing here. Carving art and story into stone or metal or wood for keeps becomes the sacred scrolls of these people.

         She asks me, guessing at my long life, “So why do you keep asking about writing? Touchstones with names give credence to our stories. So why do Christians need the full gospels all laid out in letters?”

         “You make it sound as though written stories are simply a failure of memory. But in Christianity, gospels and writings about saints (hagiography) tell the stories over and over again with one foot on earth and the other in heaven. The written word seems empowered to speak beyond the tangible earth. Even with a good memory, I can only tell the stories of Christians from a mortal, earthly point of view.”

         “Thank you, I’m glad to know you don’t mean to speak for Christian heaven.”

         “Well actually the unseen things of Spirit are the very things that all of us who are skin and bones, and all of the touches and senses of the physical creation, speak for. The Creator makes all of earth its rune stone.”

         “If that were so, then Creation would speak of courage and honor and power. And that is not so. The powers of nature may seem great, but they fail us, so people have to fight through adversity.”

         “Well, maybe in nature, the virtues of heroism aren’t limited to people. Where is there any fledgling bird on the edge of a nest that isn’t also showing courage and honor? Is not flying, its power? And what of the wolf cubs exploring the hunt. And surely, a sapling oak just up from the acorn, breaking through the earth is heroic.”

         “That’s nothing like human heroism, risking one’s life for honor’s sake. – winning a battle.”

         Dear God, I fear maybe honor and courage have become euphemisms for brutal force — gaining the win at any cost. Now I’ve awakened in this strange world made of the same familiar stuff of old kings, driving these people to become senseless, brutal monsters of themselves. What could have led them to this?

(Continues tomorrow)

#65.10, Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

         Apparently, in this strange new world where I find myself, the only known virtue is power and that can only be kept in check by something that can be chipped into monuments – honor. 

         For me, I’m always learning new ways and now that I’m in a new world and new time I’m groping for any connection with the past as a link to this new reality. I always try to connect the new with the known. But this kind of perception requires stretching my imagination around old things and that doesn’t please the seiðr who is only interested in showing me the differences between what I once knew and what I have yet to learn. And she just keeps noticing the “Christian” in my thinking not even because of the Jesus things – the love laws — but in my erroneous conclusions about a god she wants to show me. “Christian” is my notion that goodness is a feature of a creator god. Now I fear there is no imagination at all for a loving God in this new, warring world.  I was apparently wrong in grasping for a metaphorical Rome, where, in another time, I had already witnessed the Jesus love message getting crucified then skewed into war chants by Rome.

         We walk back toward the sea now and follow a road that seems well-traveled. A gentle climb onto a ridge over-looks the sea. Here in this prominent place is a brightly painted runestone.  The artist or the scribe laid the runes between two lines that look like the tracks of a sled meandering a twisty path to suit the contours of the stone itself. In my imagination the runes are the footprints of the beast towing the sled.

         The fingers of the seiðr touch each carved line as tenderly as a mother’s hand touches the lips of a child, speaking secrets.

         She reads it to me. “First, we know who honored him and had this stone made. Here, they were two of his fellow warriors. He fought to the death to save these companions who honored the king, so he died a hero, and his companions assume he is now honored in the great hall of Valhǫll, (Valhalla). That is the great reward and comfort for all hero warriors.”

         “You won’t find me making Christian connections to that.”

         She must know something of Christianity, as practiced in a Roman world, to think that was a sarcastic remark, but I really didn’t mean it so.

(Continues tomorrow)


#65.9, Thursday, February 20, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

            The seiðr tells me that the story on this stone tells of the death of the god Odin.

         “It’s well-known. It is marked on this stone as a picture of an often-shared story, so you don’t even need to know the runes to know this story.”

         The whole face of this rock is one picture. I imagine, were this made by monks it would be a full page of art that separates gospel from gospel, all made to share a common symbol and maybe to show off the skill of the artist. As with the illuminated gospel page, it is a story for the illiterate.

         I see the seiðr brings me to see this first as one illustrated here. It has a certain simple beauty: a frail little fellow with a bird on his head and a monstrous fanged creature gnawing at his foot, maybe even devouring him.

         “This is the creator god, Odin. He is shown many ways, but I know it is Odin because he has a raven. Footnote 1 He is considered the god of gods.” She explains.

         “So, this creator god is all goodness, and yet being devoured here?”

         “Of course not. Why would you think that? There is no goodness or badness among the gods.  They are gods.”

         “If he is the creator is that not good?”

         “You are so deep in such the Christian thing to look only for goodness or evil.”

         “He hardly appears all-powerful here, skinny fellow being devoured by a beast.”

         “The wolf that eats Odin is Fenrir.” She explains, and she places her omniscient first finger exactly on the fang.

         “What does that mean that a wolf devours a god? Oh, wait. I think I know this story. The wolf is Rome?” [Footnote]

         “It is so Christian of you to say that. You say that just because Rome devoured the Christian god.”

         “It is an obvious symbol since it is said that the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus were raised by wolves.”

 Of course I would assume the wolf is an ancient symbol for Rome. But personally, the actual wolves I’ve known have no taste for gods, or even any desire for the meat of a human man.”

         She ignores my reference and lectures on. “This story is clear and simple. It is told many ways in many places, and always it is an important story.  That’s why I brought you here before we look at the more complicated tales?”

         She leads me on to another stone with abundant markings.

Footnote 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledberg_stone retrieved 11-23-24

Footnote 2: (https://carlos.emory.edu/htdocs/ODYSSEY/ROME/romulus.html)    Retrieved 6-15-24, a succinct telling of the foundation myth of Rome, which apparently, eluded Laz groping for a familiar symbol

(Continues Tuesday, February 25)

#65.8, Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland
 

         The seiðr is taking me north up the shore and now we have come to a river to cross on this path flowing into the sea. I’m hoping she doesn’t intend to wade this river, as cold as it is. But, we don’t.  We walk back from the shore where a drydocked row of boats is set as a fortress wall around a village. She calls up to the guard and asks if we may enter. Had I tried to find this way alone I would have missed the protocol here. But I would have brought firewood for these people.

         The seiðr tells me to stay close behind her and to speak to no one, so no one will know I’m a stranger.

         We still haven’t had to cross the river because here is a path laid low between the river and the bank to follow along until now we come to a crossing place with a fallen log as a bridge.  Here, in this river lowland is a pagen temple made of planned wood boards. It is stacked up like a house on a house, with each little house higher and smaller, until the temple is a towering edifice reaching skyward. She leads me behind the structure where there are several of these rune stones, weighty enough to demand a circle of strong men just to put them in place. Yet each is as precisely set as the pillars of a Greek temple.

         She places her walking stick aside on the ground before she enters; I follow her, laying my tree branch aside also. We enter the circle of stones which is clearly sacred. There is no starting place or most prominent stone but the seiðr goes immediately to a stone that is familiar to her. She moves her fingers over the markings in the way I’ve seen an abbot read a precious scripture freshly copied onto velum. Maybe the abbot was touching velum, imagining stone.

         I know she isn’t reading this for the first time, but, as happens with any familiar touchstone, she is reading it through the fog of time, adding carved lines to the straight with all the memories of meaning in her own recollections of names and events. She brings to it her own voice in the years since the carving. 

         Does it clear the fog of time to have the stories of a god and a people detailed with the inks, or are lines cut into rock all that is needed to speak the forever stories?

(Continues tomorrow)

#65.7, Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

         This elder seiðr and I are walking north along the shore. I was hoping we would only be talking about the nature of runes so that I might learn of the meanings of these markings and learn more about this time. She carries a walking stick engraved with runes. My walking stick is a broken branch I found along the way. Mine doesn’t speak stories of heroes and history or offer any legacy. It only mentions a tree that withered in the forest. But the seiðr questioned my oddity of life and life again, based on simply taking notice of my awareness of past things, like aurochs for example.

         She interrupts the thoughtful quiet of this walk.

         “Here, we chisel our gods and the heroes’ tales into rocks and stand them by the pathways. I know Christians try to capture stories with inks. But here, in the trusted way of eternity, we pass our stories from kingdom to kingdom as stories that are spun around the names that are chiseled into pillars of stone and those don’t change with whims or winds.”

         “You’re right about the inks.” I answer, “With Christians, we keep our stories of faith as gospels written and added on to the ancient tradition of Jewish writings. It is all copied again and again and bound as books or rolled into scrolls.”

         “I’m well aware that different gods have different ways of keeping the stories. But, Christians, with all their books, can’t explain how this one Christian man right here can speak from his memory of seeing an auroch?”

         “It was actually two aurochs we saw that day.”

         “So, let me ask you, have you ever listened to a stone?”

         “You are taking me on this long walk so that we can listen to a stone?”

         “Inks aside, it is a stone that speaks of forever. In the runes carved in the stones are the names and the battles and the intrusions of the gods. From the runes, the stories are drawn to life, fat and fleshy, breathing, thumping with life as only a mortal can speak them.”

         “But then can you also say the stones would be silent, without a mortal seiðr to read the runes and speak for the stone? Don’t the runes need a translator?” I wonder.

         “A storyteller.”

         Walking a winter beach with shoes still dry is something I am accomplishing in this trek, at least until now when we come to a river. 

(Continues tomorrow)


#65.6, Thursday, February 13, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

I expected to walk with the seiðr so that she could answer my questions; but now, it is her questions that fill our conversation.  She asks me the source of this gift of ‘eternal healing’ as I explained my circumstance of life and life again. 

         I try, “This unlikely twist of nature was intended to speak a message of spiritual resilience, ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ My friend bestowed this on me so that I would be an earthly, mortal sign. Now, here I am the earthbound metaphorical example of life and life again. I am a tangible sign for the spiritual nature of resurrection.”

         She answers, “Umph.”

         I try to amend the confusion, “It’s a Christian thing I guess.”

         Maybe she guesses, but apparently, she isn’t interested in the identity of this gifting friend.

         She asks, “How is it that you say you saw a creature who is considered to be mythical?”

         “You mean an auroch? It wasn’t mythical several hundred years ago. People hunted it. All of the giant oxen were felled by well-placed arrows. So, tell me of the ancestors of your own people and your gods.”

         “Were you not there to see them for yourself in the ancient times?”

         “No, I wasn’t. Mostly what is in my memory is narrowly Christian.”

Actually, my oddity would easily be explained to any Christian who knew the gospel story of the raising of Lazarus. [John 11] But to a Pagan, probably unfamiliar with Christian scriptures, there is a conundrum or at best a sermon. I’m sure she wouldn’t like a sermon. What can I say?

         So, I turn the question. “What about this time and place? I still want to know about your runes and writings so that I may better understand the language and the people where I am right now.”

         “You know, for someone who claims all the time in the world, you aren’t very patient. It may seem long and slow, but we are walking to a better place of understanding.”

         It is possible she is taking me to what some call ‘thin places’ as are on an island of Christian saints. I’m thinking maybe these gods actually are many names for the one God who speaks to each spirit, touching us with understanding, needing no voice or words.

         But not so.

(Continues Tuesday, February 18)


#65.5, Wednesday, February 12, 2025

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)