bloodteethandflame

A life in threes
December 4, 2012

Breakfast in America.

On my way to the supermarket, I noticed this sign:

dennyssign

It got me to wondering.  What if this sign meant what I’d initially thought that it had meant, and Denny’s had suddenly wanted to appeal to linguist nerds?

How long do you think that it’s going to be before Denny’s puts out a menu in Classical Greek?

Or how about ancient Hebrew?

Gaelic?

Or best yet, Proto-Indo-European?

That’s what I want to see:  a Denny’s menu in PIE.

Or, at the very least, a dessert menu.

 

Linguists don’t make much money, but linguists gotta eat.

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November 29, 2012

A connection.

Here’s the end of November, and as you may know, most of the time that I tried to write about Odin, the posts…got eaten by the interwebz.

Except for maybe, two.

Was it inevitable?  Probably.

But, I have to write about this before the end of November; before I forget.

You know, I meant to write about this the other day (Monday, November 19th) because I went to a concert at the House of Blues with my oldest kid.

It was a metal show, by the way, because we share a love for metal music, my oldest son and I.

Lamb of God was the main show, along with Hatebreed and In Flames.  The opener was an excellent band named…Sylopsis <–(something like that.  I hate to think that I can’t remember the opener band’s name exactly, but they were not listed on the bill.  That is so sad, because they were quite good.)

Now, how does this relate to Odin?  Well, others may disagree, but I’ll tell you this.   Almost as soon as I started really researching the lore — and that would be about two or three years ago — I had a lot of metal on my iPod, Lamb of God included.

And I’ve no doubt that the gods can and do try to get through to us through such ordinary channels as the music that we listen to.

Or at least, in my case, I do know that the first time that I ever heard Lamb of God’s Descending, all I could think of was… Odin.

The drums, the wavering, dark thrumming of the opening notes that launches into the lyrics sung in low, almost guttural voice, conjuring up imagery in my mind of one being bound and hung by knowledge…someone seeking what has been lost…

The visual began as a dark and powerful one, a vision of a man who hung from a great height, his arms extended, hands scrabbling for something that lay broken in pieces below him, just out of his reach.

He struggles to remain conscious, to make sense of the dizzying vision of those pieces, and I see his fingers straining to gather them up… because to touch them, to hold them in his hands would be to begin to understand them…

And this song seemed to play over and over on my iPod, almost intrusively, throughout those days.

Descending became an almost unshakeable ear-worm for me.

Hearing that song could call up the wind and the darkest clouds to surround me and haunt me and my thoughts on the sunniest day.

It was the most unsettling song, always stopping me in my tracks, and yet I would never think to click the shuffle tab to get past it every time it came up.

But anyway, that song is by Lamb of God.  A groove/thrash/dark/new metal band from Richmond, VA.  They’ve been around since 1990 or so.

And, while Descending isn’t the only song that I like by LoG — there are several more that I had become familiar with before it — Descending has become the one song that I have always, undoubtly associated with He Who  hung from the tree for nine days; He Who sacrificed Himself to Himself for wisdom and won the runes.

But sadly, I knew that Lamb of God wasn’t going to play Descending on Monday night.  Even if I’d heard that they hardly ever play it, I secretly hoped that they would.

They played other songs, of course – Walk with me in Hell, Now You’ve Got Something to Die for, Omerta, Black Label — and the crowd was a rollicking, energetic mosh pit from the front of the stage all the way back to the stairs, and my oldest son, his friends, and I, were within that mass of rough, human energy and movement for a good long hour and a half.

But I had another surprise — and it was an interesting one I might add — in lieu of hearing Descending, I noticed their bassist, instead:

This is John Campbell, bassist, and one of the original members of Lamb of God.

Doesn’t he kind of remind you of Someone?

(Gandalf, maybe? <–as my oldest son said.)

Or perhaps, the One whom Tolkien based Gandalf the Grey upon — which is actually the Old Man/ Wanderer himself.

😀

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November 28, 2012

The Impending Lesson.

So.

Here I am with things on my mind, and I’m feeling ashamed and ridiculous that I’ve allowed the situation in my life to come to this point.

I’ve no one but my self to blame, I know, and occurs to me that…maybe… what is about to happen to me is a lesson.   A lesson for me.  A lesson for my husband, V.   And, by association, my youngest kid.

And it is coming.

 

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November 17, 2012

Runes.

This post has been knocking about my brain for a few weeks, perhaps more. 

I’ve been having difficulty writing in this blog lately, and I’m not exactly sure why. 

I have no shortage of topics, actually, it’s just that once I sit down and start typing, things seem to go awry from there.

But I’m determined to write about my adventures learning about (Futhark) runes lately, because, dammit, I’ve been trying to learn about runes for a long time.

So here it goes.

~~~

I’m ashamed to admit that I bought a set of runes about six months ago. 

I’d initially ordered a set from a Norse shaman/craftsman around April or so, but after a few months, I received word from him that things weren’t going well.  The tree branches that he’d been intending to cut the blanks from kept coming up cracked and/or damaged, and therefore, the wood supply wasn’t any good for cutting blanks for a rune set.

I should’ve taken that as a sign that maybe this wasn’t the right time for me to learn about runes, but I’m an impatient sort of person, and I thought, well, I’d like to get a set to hold me over.

So I did this past June.

And when I took them out from the bag, I was immediately…depressed, for reasons that I’m not going to get into right now.  But I did what I had been told/read/seen that I was supposed to do next upon receipt of runes.  And everything seemed OK. 

Three different sources gave me an overview of different ways that one can ‘get to know’ the runes once they are in ones’ hands. 

One source said to say their names aloud, study them, meditate on each one, and that was that. 

One source said that I should sleep on them — one at a time — and write out the resulting dreams.

And another source said that the other two ways were fine, but the best way would be to do a ritual with them – involving fluids – that I’m still trying to sort out, because there’s debate on which fluids are best.

I don’t want anyone to think that I don’t take this seriously, because I do…  

But I will say this, it strikes me as very true that runes are interesting, and I’ve been having some very interesting times with the runes.

First, Laguz gave me some very interesting dreams way back in August.  Some of the ink came off of my Laguz rune when it got wet during that week when I first focused on it.  Somehow I wonder if that was, in some way, appropriate.

And the Ingwaz rune made for some very tasty baked goods, and an interesting time concerning yard work, physical work, and growth during the week that I first focused on it.

And then, Othala.  I would like to say that Othala upright is my favorite rune.  I’ve felt drawn to it the minute that I first saw it — but what Othala ended up being was a rather forceful representation of a few things that I *really* need to work on.   No matter which way I see Othala interpreted, it always seems to come up to remind me of things that I should work on, especially when I’d rather not.   Othala, I love you, but you can be a lot to take.

Kenaz is another favorite.  Kenaz, like Othala, could generate its own post, with all my feels about it.

Dagaz and Mannaz were tricky…as were Sowilo and Eiwhaz.  Just when I thought I was certain that that was the rune that I was seeing, I’d realize that it was actually another rune entirely.  Or maybe those four like to shape-change when I’m not looking. 

Fehu.  Fehu, no pun intended, is what started it all.   Because, if I never mentioned this, there is a mark on my bedroom door, that looks basically like Fehu.  I think that it has been here since the day that we moved in, almost 3 years ago.

But then again, there’s another person that lives in this house that thinks that it looks more like Ansuz.

And no, I haven’t focused on Ansuz yet, so I don’t want to speculate.  

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November 4, 2012

Month for Odin: Post missing.

The other day I wrote a post to open up the month of November as a month for Odin.

And now the post is missing.  It’s not even listed as a Draft in my Dashboard here…which is fucking strange, to say the least.

 

Did anyone see it before it disappeared?

Let me know.

Thanks!

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October 5, 2012

A drawing of Loki

This is a drawing that I did several months ago that I have been meaning to post.

 

Today is as good a day as any, I suppose.

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September 26, 2012

Crazy, but in an interesting and innovative way

cra·zy (krz)

adj. cra·zi·er, cra·zi·est

1. Affected with madness; insane.
2. Informal Departing from proportion or moderation, especially:

a. Possessed by enthusiasm or excitement
b. Immoderately fond; infatuated
c. Intensely involved or preoccupied
d. Foolish or impractical; senseless

 

Someone once said that to follow the path that others have laid before you is a very reasonable course of action, therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men.

— Adam Savage, American industrial/special effects designer, actor, educator, and host of Discovery Channel’s MythBusters

I wanted to be crazy, and I advise you to be crazy. To be weird. To be unreasonable. That’s my favorite one. People are always saying, “Oh, come on, be reasonable!” And I want to shout, “No! I don’t want to be reasonable!” I want to be completely unreasonable. I want to change the world. I want to change the world creatively. And I want other people to be unreasonable with me.

— Matt Goldman, American record producer, engineer, mixer, and songwriter

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September 22, 2012

On Clutch-jumpers and Crazypants: A Very Long Post.

Recently, I’ve noticed repeated references to this person and her shenanigans through several of the blogs that I follow on WordPress, and as much as I’d attempted to avoid it, I’m beginning to wonder if this is one of those Universal slaps upside to my head.

When I look at over the trajectory of my life, I cannot deny the propensity of folks like her crossing my path, especially lately.

Maybe it’s because I was raised by two parents who had once considered themselves ‘hippies’ with a streak of ‘bleeding heart liberal’ thrown in, who raised their children to care about the environment and to have a good degree of social conscience.  (The irony appears when I point out that my parents are also secretly closeted misanthropes, but I digress…)

There is the spooky-woo factor when I consider how I’d been told by several people since childhood that I seem to be somewhat of an empath…which could go a long way toward explaining why I often find it so difficult to resist being affected by the turbulent feelings of those around me.

Several years ago, I was gratified to discover in the pile of TheFerrett’s LiveJournal writings that there is a word for those folks that so easily incite, and sometimes, unconsciously manipulate the compassion of others – these people are referred to as clutchjumpers.

Once upon a time, I was an unfortunate magnet for clutchjumpers…if not, inadvertantly, a clutchjumper myself, before I learned the benefits of practicing a bit of discernment, and caution.

~~~

And so, the months have gone by, and I find mention of her again, again and again— and suddenly, it seems that several loosely related communities have had enough of her ‘grift’ as well as her story — and the length and breadth of that story goes a lot further back than I had previously thought.   What a tangled web…

Upon reading her story, I realize that I am re-reading her story, because I recall seeing a signal boost a bit over a year ago concerning a young trans Pagan couple who needed food and clothing desperately as severe winter weather was approaching Boston, and they were about to find themselves on the streets.    And seeing as how I didn’t have any warm winter clothing to send (I live in Florida y’all – I haven’t had to wear any ‘winter clothes’ with any regularity in years), I thought about sending her some cash.

About $25-50, possibly more.

And then I looked further into her blog, and I saw page after page of signal boosts and commentary, and I sat back and thought about it.  It was Wednesday.  My payday was Friday.  I told my husband about the couple, and resolved to send them some cash on Friday, when my direct deposit became available.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about them.  I even lit a candle for them, hoping good things for them.

I checked back the next day, relieved to see that they had gotten some help, and she was writing of being so close to getting out of the hole of financial instability.  Aw, sister, I’ve been there, I thought.  Good luck to you.**

Her story actually, in some ways, made me pause, because there was something about it that struck me familiar, and thus, I was hooked.

(Slight derailment…er, background follows:)

When my family and I hit our rough patch in 2004, we had to move closer to my husband’s family, and we ended up moving in with my husband’s older sister and her family, until we could get on our feet.  My husband was unemployed, and couldn’t seem to find work in his field (tech/communications) and neither could he find anything above minimum wage, and neither could I.

We both worked at our local Publix.

And then, with the help and reference of a friend in the tech industry, my husband got a job opportunity that really could bring us up and out of our financial hole that 3 years’ of unemployment/minimal wage employment had brought us to; the only problem?  The job was in Massachusetts.

So, while my kids and I stayed in Florida — we had just relocated to Florida from Massachusetts a little more than a year before, so it’s not as if we could’ve afforded moving back –  my husband went up to Massachusetts to live and work. (He did fly home for one weekend every other month or so.)

So, I stayed working at Publix.

And into the picture comes P, my husband’s sister, who offered to watch my two-year- old while I was at work.  It was supposed to be a mutually beneficial arrangement for the both of us.  I wouldn’t have to pay the high cost of child care fees and P — an unemployed widow with 3 teenagers on Social Security whose husband passed away the year before — could supplement some of her meager SSI.

But what ended up happening was something positively Sisyphusian: most of my paycheck seemed to go exclusively into repairing P’s ancient passenger van, just so I could get to work in the mornings — along with buying P groceries (she was always ‘short’ because she really didn’t know how to budget money, along with claiming her ‘handicap’ of dyslexia as an excuse to remain willfully ignorant of learning how to budget money, or anything else), so both of us were left with the boulder of poverty at the end of each pay period for well over a year.

(And it wasn’t just me who tried to financially help her.  A lot of people did…because it seemed so simple: if P could just get through this week, just get through this month; if P could somehow just get a hold of a little money — $30 dollars for gas, or just that $100 that she needed to settle up that late phone bill, or the $500 for her mortgage *just this once* — she’d be all set.  P was always saying that.  If only, if only…

But it was never that simple: P would  somehow end up behind on yet another ‘something else’ next week, next month… and it seemed apparent rather quickly to lots of folks that P was always in need of help.)

It never seemed to end.

 

Then, I stumbled on the Ferrett’s essay on clutch-jumpers…and I saw the situation as it was, an episode of mutual clutch-jumping from which I wanted desperately to break free.

And yet, I’m glad to report, that as painful as it was for her, when push came to shove, and when P burned out all her options, lo and behold, she actually went out, got a job.

Nowadays, she shares a home with her mother (and my MIL) at Mom’s request, and you know what?

P handles her job and her household pretty darn well, considering that a few short years ago, P felt that her life couldn’t go on after her husband passed away.

Between that loss, and her seemingly culturally sanctioned ‘learned helplessness’ (P felt it was the job of society to support her because of her ‘inability to learn a trade due to severe dyslexia’ as well as believing that it was her husband’s duty to take care of everything, financial and otherwise, and thus, P was never really pushed to learn how to take care of herself in many ways, that is, until he was gone.)

Yeah, P does still get a little clutch-jumpy at times — sometimes she doesn’t see the forest for the trees — but her life is loads more financially stable and wouldathunkit, much more drama-free.

~~~

And now, my family, and myself:   Several years ago, I realized that I am — we, as a family, are — finally in a comfortable financial place, wherein we could actually help others a little bit…

I honestly try to help, because I know what it’s like to be on the other side of things.

But…in the interest of being brutally honest with myself about this (re: Loki, here, especially), I want to admit that when I look back at some of my choices that I’ve made in the past –those years that my family and I spent on the other side of things — I can honestly say that I had been known to show some clutch-jumping, if not downright crazypants behaviors.

Yes, there were times, in leaner, tighter years, where I’d prayed for extra money in my budget, gotten it, and then turned around, only to focus on cheap, easy, temporary fixes for my hunger or other ‘needs’ by buying pizza and cheap furniture with some of that extra.  Yes, I’d even sometimes let some bills slide further as a result, because I felt so desperate to have temporary happiness (mmm pizza! hey, movies — with popcorn and candy!) rather than to be responsible and pay my bills with every last bit of that money that had been budgeted.

So yeah, I wouldn’t always use all of the money for responsible stuff — just some of it.

But I imagine that some would call that clutch-jumping or crazypants behavior because buying pizza and going to the movies with ANY of the money might seem like I wasn’t entirely willing/focused on digging myself out of my financial hole, right?

Right?

Well…maybe.

~~~

And so I find myself not totally pure on the rush to judgment front.

I admit, it’s difficult not to judge her.  I mean, why can’t she get her act together?  Look at all the people helping her…

*sigh*

Well, it makes me think, you know…and I have to be careful.

It makes me think of all the folks along the way — when we were in the financial rough patches — who helped us here and there.

Family and friends who’ve let us live in their homes until we got on our feet, to keep my family, and me, from being homeless.

People who lent us cash here and there.  (We couldn’t have moved our stuff to Florida without the financial help of one particular generous friend, for example…)

People who gave us rides to work and school and back home when we didn’t have access to our own transportation.

And so forth.

It is entirely possible that I may have been no different in several ways.

I haven’t always known how to help myself get out of a hole.

So,  concerning my interactions with clutch-jumpers and crazypants people:  While I still seek to be cautious and discerning, I still find myself seeking a balanced, thoughtful way of looking at the situation.

And so, I stumbled upon this post, which I came across just the other day.

In this post, I think that the writer, Abigail Norman, conveys her message with incredible compassion and grace concerning ‘crazypants people’ — without judgment, without rancor.

And lots of balance.

I heartily recommend that you check it out.

**And then, I got distracted by another signal boost of another form, and it was strange and almost inexplicable.

Well, let’s just say…I ended up sending Jalkr  my very small donation…mostly, because of…well…horses.  And one very large pig.

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September 10, 2012

Earworm

This song is stuck in my head:

http://youtu.be/S9MYXr9gY5U

And no matter how many other songs that I listen to, it just won’t budge.

I don’t know if it’s stuck because it makes me think of my girlfriend, J, our upcoming weekend (Sept 14-17th), and my various small anxieties about that…or if it’s some other thing that the Universe could be nudging me to think about.

Either way…

I don’t want to look like some kind of fool

I don’t wanna break my heart over you…

I’m building a wall, every day it’s getting higher

This time, I won’t end up another

Victim of Love…

.

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August 12, 2012

Wolf/mother

On Friday, I went to the mailbox, and found that V had ordered me a gift.

I wasn’t expecting it.

My newest piece of jewelry

V says that when he saw this anklet on display, he thought of me, and he thought that I should have it.  He also claims that it seemed to be the only one that they had that struck him this way.  (Which is odd, since I don’t wear a heckuva lot of jewelry, so neither of us are prone to buying jewelry very often.)

It’s sterling silver, and V tells me that the beads are amber.

Personally, that would be interesting, but that’s not what surprised me about his unexpected gift of jewelry to me: it’s the wolf that surprises me.

V said that other anklets had dolphin, flower, or bird charms, or, barring that — more beading — but that this one was the only one that had a wolf.

And it was the last, perhaps, only one.

So he bought it, and had it mailed to the house.

So, I put it on, and I find that I can’t stop thinking about wolves, and especially about exactly why he’d been drawn to pick the wolf.

I mean, if he’d chosen something with a bird charm (perhaps something raven or sparrow like), *that* would make a lot more sense to me, because I’m always thinking and talking about crows and ravens…or the fact that we’ve had a few interesting interactions with birds lately…

But a wolf?

I was puzzled and a bit surprised, because I don’t talk about wolves at all nearly as much as I’d talk about birds or horses…and yet, it’s not as if I don’t like wolves.  I do.

More so, and here’s the interesting part:  it’s not as if I hadn’t been thinking of wolves lately, it’s just that those thoughts weren’t something I was sharing with V.  (A few days before, I had shared a text with Heather S that described a strange dream that I had in 1997…but I’d never told V about the wolves in the dream; just that I shared a text of it with Heather.)

And yet, there it was.

He couldn’t explain it either.

So, first, I thought, as I had done this before, that the wolf might have attracted V because it was his attempt to find something ‘Morrighan-like’ or ‘Freyja-ish’  because we had been talking a few days before about how I’d thought of the Morrighan as my patron goddess for years, but it wasn’t because it was maybe, possibly Freyja…but even then, he would know that a bird would have been the more appropriate choice for either of those two with the options that he’d described as being in front of him.  (Though he also knows that Freyja likes cats, too.)

He did admit on the Freyja note, that he did like — and thought that I would  like –that it had amber.  But that was secondary to his attraction to it.

So, then I thought that he’d picked it because it was ‘different’ or ‘only’ or some such, but he did admit that the amber was the only thing that had any connection with his thoughts about my spirituality.

So, not the wolf, the amber.  But there were other ones with amber, he said.

But still, a wolf.

I then told him about Loki’s wife/consort, Angrboda – whom he admitted that he’d never heard of before — and I even showed him the simple (and I think I find somewhat oddly adorable) picture of Angrboda from K’s D’Aulaire’s Norse Myths, to help him out with a visualization of Her, but he shrugs.

Does she have something to do with wolves? he asked.

To which I replied, Well, They had a kid who was a wolf… and I pointed him to D’Aulaire’s toothy grey blobbish rendition of the Fenris-puppy.

He shrugged.

To which K helpfully added, See, Dad?  She’s a wolf-mother!

And now, so are you, K giggled at me.  You’re a mom…with a wolf!

Great band, V grins.

~~~

Do you like it?, V asks.

I nod.

So I hope that you’ll think of me when you look at it, V said.

And think of me too, blurted K, just wanting to be involved in the conversation.

~~~

But then, there’s today…

And things have been grumpy and difficult.

So, the only thing that I can think of when I look at the anklet today is that it is a reminder that when things get rough…

This mother gets thrown to the wolves.

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