I am not a fan of New Year’s Eve. I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s Eve.
So, I was delighted to see such an apt quote on my social media feed today..being the last day of December, the last day of 2017.
Like Sam Shepard, I detest endings….but perhaps it is simply that my perception is faulty.
May 2018 be a worthy beginning for all of us ❤
I don’t think people have demons.
I think they have themselves and things they aren’t ready to be honest about yet.
It is not easy to come to grips with the fact that we’re capable of hurting people with the same instrument we love them with.
The heart is a hungry wolf
and it is made of glass.
~King (Austin) Longton~
(Artwork: wolf heartline by linhopereira on DeviantArt)
Though my intent is to write every day, sometimes I struggle to write about certain topics.
And this topic – and its array of sub-topics – is one of them.
How important is ritual? How important are offerings?
How – or why – would anyone do any of this? How important is it to do any of this?
And then, this article came across my feed this morning, and I immediately thought to share it.
Why?
Because this part especially, hit me hard:
“Have you ever heard about people who accomplish amazing things, and been jealous? I know I have. There are many ways to be successful. I’m not the prettiest, not the smartest, and definitely not the most talented or luckiest. But the one thing I have always been is as stubborn as the day is long – not in some petty way (mostly), but in the kind of way that makes me get up when life knocks me down.
I’m not the fair-haired hero. I’ve never been the chosen one. I’m that other guy. My power isn’t born of charm or good looks. I was born to wear a t-shirt that says, “it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.”(1)
We live in a cynical age where our fair-haired heroes have revealed themselves as paper cutouts, our leaders have sold themselves to the highest bidder, and the world gets less friendly every day. We wake up and go through the motions and wonder if there’s a damn thing we can do about it.
And you know what? There is.”
Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/agora/2017/10/the-other-side-of-the-hedge-four-hundred-days/#1Vu07d2lKj39HT1A.99
Because, much like Christopher Drysdale, I too, am as stubborn as the day is long.
And yes, I have been jealous of the success of others.
And yes, I have realized that I am not special nor am I particularly disciplined all of the time.
I have wished that my week could be stripped of Tuesday nights and Wednesday mornings, because sometimes, what I am doing is not easy nor is it particularly rewarding…
But then it is.
And when it is rewarding…when I look back at the trajectory of my Tuesday nights and Wednesday mornings
That is when I realize that that is the essence of why I do what I do, and why it is important that I keep doing.
You want the carrot…you gotta be stubborn.
You gotta chase the stick.
Happy Wednesday.
(or something like that)
I was reading an article the other day because I was feeling like sh*t and this article caught my eye as I was scrolling through my media feed.
This article was broken into four parts, each headlined by an action, and each part discussed scientific reasons why that action would help bring one out of a temporary ‘funk.’
(I say ‘temporary funk’ as this post is not meant to address the situation of those who suffer from clinical depression or other mental illnesses…just as I believe that the article was not meant as a replacement for seeking medical help, psychological therapy, or taking prescribed medications either.)
These are the 4 strategies as I listed them in my notebook, and the descriptions are my take on the information as it was presented in the article:
1.) Ask yourself: What am I grateful for?
2.) Label negative feelings.
3.) Make a decision
4.) Touch people
~~~
I would link to the article – if I could find it – so I will keep looking for it, and update with it if I can…
Found it: http://theweek.com/articles/601157/neuroscience-reveals-4-rituals-that-make-happy
So I was finally catching up on Doctor Who this past Sunday, when the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) from the Christmas 2016 episode, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, has this exchange with a young boy named Grant who asks the Doctor who he is:
YOUNG GRANT: Who are you?
DOCTOR: The Doctor.
YOUNG GRANT: Yeah, but who are you?
DOCTOR: The Doctor.
YOUNG GRANT: Which one, though? There’s lots of doctors.
DOCTOR: The one. I’m the main one. The original. I started it. They’re all based on me. Now everyone who wants to sound clever calls themselves Doctor. Bandwagon!
YOUNG GRANT: In a comic book, you know what you’d be called? Doctor Mysterio.
DOCTOR: Oh, I like that. Doctor Mysterio! I’ll have that. Nearly ready.
But it is this line that first caught me off guard:
YOUNG GRANT: What is it?
DOCTOR: Well, in terms that you would understand? Sorry, there aren’t any. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a time-distortion equaliser thingy.
YOUNG GRANT: A what?
DOCTOR: Well, there’s been a lot of localised disruption here in New York, so, er, my fault, actually. Hopefully this will make it all calm down.
YOUNG GRANT: I don’t understand.
DOCTOR: Do you know what a lightning conductor is?
YOUNG GRANT: Yeah.
DOCTOR: Well, it’s not like that.
I hate to get all Pop-Paganism on y’all, but this particular Doctor evokes so much of the essence of Them for me that I am continually being thrown off guard by those sorts of random side comments. Especially when I find myself wondering what the heck They mean…because there is so much about Them, what They do and what They want that I have gotten to the point that I am beginning to wonder if it will ever make sense.
But as Madeline L’Engle wrote:
It’s kind of funny that the word “learned” is used here, since what she’s learned is that you can’t know everything.
Instead of learning as gaining knowledge, here it’s recognizing a lack of knowledge.
In the summer of 2012, I had one of the first of a series of strange vivid dreams that involved Loki:
In this particular dream, I found myself searching through a building of many rooms, and while I didn’t know what or who I was looking for, I knew I was looking for something…or someone.
Most of the rooms were spacious but empty – white walls, sparsely furnished, lit by buzzing fluorescent ceiling panels. Like an abandoned office building, which I sensed may or may not be underground.
And then I was surprised to come upon what appeared to be a middle-aged man with dark auburn hair in one of the rooms. As I’d mentioned, though most of the rooms were nothing more that white empty walls, the room this man was in was full of brightly colored yarn. Skeins of various colors and in various states of unravel lay scattered all over the floor. While a few seemed no more than tangled handfuls of yarn, others were neatly wound and stacked in piles of three or four bundles, sorted by color.
Meanwhile the biggest jumble of knots lay closest to the man’s right foot. I could also see that he was barefoot…. and he wasn’t exactly sitting in the chair.
This man was sprawled in an elaborately carved wooden chair large enough to easily be mistaken for some sort of throne. I say sprawled because though I came upon him sitting upon this odd throne from behind and at somewhat of an angle, I immediately realized that this man was quite gangly; one of his legs casually dangled over one of the arm rests, and I couldn’t help but wonder how he’d miraculously found a way to fold the length of the rest of his body comfortably within the confines of the seat.
I don’t think he noticed me at first, as his head was bent in concentration upon his hands and the tangled mess of colored yarn in his lap.
However, when he did finally look up at me
He grinned….and casually asked me
if I knew
who he was.
Loki.
And Loki appeared to be knitting.
But not with needles, mind you; He seemed to be knitting with His fingers.
(from my notebook, 17 July 2012)
~~~
But I learned something interesting today.
It occurs to me that Loki may not have been knitting.
He may have been nålbinding (“needle-binding”), an ancient technique which may pre-date knitting and crocheting by 1500 years, where a single length of thread or yarn is passed through loops by use of a single needle, and the resulting fabric is sturdily connected by interlocking these loops of yarn or thread with one another. Nålebinding is also called ‘knotless netting.’
I came across this information today – though honestly I was researching something else that had nothing at all to do with Norse clothing -but a reference to socks caught my eye and I found my way to Hurstwic.org:
“However, Norse socks were not knitted (which apparently was unknown to the Norse). Instead, they were made using an ancient technique called nálbinding (needle-binding). Using a single large, thick needle, it was a method of knotting the yarn. Although time consuming, this approach resulted in a nearly indestructible garment. If the thread were to break or wear out, the garment would still be intact, since the thread was everywhere knotted to neighboring threads. Mittens and caps were also made using this technique. The sketch to the left shows the steps involved in making an article of clothing using the nálbinding technique. Note that the fabric grows in a spiral pattern. Once the spiral is large enough, it is knotted back on itself to create the shape of the finished article.”
(Photos: l-r: spiral nal-binding_sketch; Sock found in York; from Hurstwic.org.)
~~~
How does this personally relate to me in regards to Loki?
Loki has been referring me to knots and knotwork for many years now, and as it is with His method, I hadn’t any idea as to why He was always referring to such things, either literally or metaphorically. But I’m starting to connect some things about knots and knotwork today.
But, barring that, it does give His references to ‘creating sockpuppets’ a whole new meaning, eh?
“There is no way to suppress change…not even in heaven; there is only a choice between a way of living which allows constant, if gradual alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals. Those who panic and bind the trickster choose the latter path. It would be better to learn to play with him, better especially to develop skills (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident, and some acceptance of the changes that contingency will always engender.”
— Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
Even though I am over a month late in posting my thoughts, I could not wait to read National Geographic’s most recent article on the Vikings, which appeared in their March 2017 issue.
While much of the article concerned recent discoveries made about Viking culture of which I was already familiar, an intriguing theory concerning Ragnarok was mentioned on pages 38-9:
In the nearly three centuries before the raids on foreign shores began around AD 750, Scandinavia was wracked by turmoil, [Neil] Price [of Uppsala University, Sweden] says. More than three dozen petty kingdoms arose during this period, throwing up chains of hill forts and vying for power and territory. In the midst of these troubled times, catastrophe struck. A vast cloud of dust, likely blasted into the atmosphere by a combination of cataclysms – comets or meteorites smashing into the Earth, as well as the eruption of least one large volcano–darkened the sun beginning in AD 536, lowering summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for the next 14 years. The extended cold and darkness brought death and ruin to Scandinavia, lying as it did along the northern edge of medieval agriculture. In Sweden’s Uppland region, for example, nearly 75 percent of villages were abandoned, as residents succumbed to starvation and fighting.
So dire was this disaster that it seems to have given birth to one of the darkest of all world myths –the Nordic legend of Ragnarok, the end of creation and the final battle, in which all gods, all supernatural beings, and all human beings and other living creatures die. Ragnarok was said to begin with Fimbulwinter, a deadly time when the sun turns black and the weather turns bitter and treacherous–events that eerily parallel the dust veil that began in 536, Price says.*
I had never considered that there could have been an actual historical event upon which Ragnarok was based.
Fascinating.
~~~~
