Slipping

Slipping

As I slip through the Veil
Silently
In my dreams, in my trance
My mind convulses.

It is rich and deep here
What I see through the mist
Still and cool.

Like blood pulsing through my veins
The intricacies take my breath away
The beauty, and the horror.

It pulls me to stay
To escape the pain and harshness
But is is not to be yet
Only to visit, briefly a glimpse,
A longing for stillness, yet clawing to life.

~Nyx Moirae

Dreamland by Lewis Carroll

When midnight mists are creeping,
And all the land is sleeping,
Around me tread the mighty dead,
And slowly pass away.

Lo, warriors, saints, and sages,
From out the vanished ages,
With solemn pace and reverend face
Appear and pass away.

The blaze of noonday splendour,
The twilight soft and tender,
May charm the eye: yet they shall die,
Shall die and pass away.

But here, in Dreamland's centre,
No spoiler's hand may enter,
These visions fair, this radiance rare,
Shall never pass away.

I see the shadows falling,
The forms of old recalling;
Around me tread the mighty dead,
And slowly pass away.

Space, The Final Frontier

Oddly, I seem to be among a very small minority of pagans who can reconcile my religious beliefs with science. I wonder about this. I have come across so many pagan types who apparently think they cannot practice their religion and their craft and still study and be curious about other things. People who want to discuss and learn about absolutely nothing but their chosen path, and I think they are missing the whole point of life.

We were given our life to learn lessons, knowledge and wisdom both. And they are different things. While it is important to gain wisdom through our religion and arte, it is also important to live in the world around us.

There are lessons to be learned from interactions with people and other species. With different forms of life. Everything has spirit, and broken down to it's smallest self, everything is alive and moving. On an quantum level, everything hums with constantly moving tiny bits of life. Compassion and strength of character must be learned. We must learn to learn from everything.

As practitioners of Arte and followers of the ancient ones, we hope to receive the gift of wisdom of the full nature of reality. What comes after, so to say, as well as knowledge of and interaction with beings that can transport us to another place and time, another realm of being, and can answer the questions we have of the fullness of being that most people will never see. But we should also be using all of the senses that we have to dive fully into our experiences of this life, for they feed and strengthen our spirit and everything we do tugs at the web of wyrd and affects everything else. I am an animist, I see spirit in everything. While everything may not have the same level of consciousness or awareness, I respect that everything is connected intimately, and without that awareness and respect to the spirit of everything, we kill our spiritual growth and limit ourselves to a dull ignorant existance.

Why is this part of our experience ignored by a large percentage of the pagan community? Why do so many people think they cannot possibly have anything important to learn from anything outside of their particular chosen "path" of religion or craft?

I have an insatiable desire to acquire knowledge, and I find the study of the sciences to be utterly fascinating. Astronomy and the interacting physics and geological studies engage my imagination, and fulfill a need to know about not only the world I live in, but what is all around it. And in Space, I find a delight and awe that sets fire to my mind. Through much study, and it is not easy to wrap your mind around much of what is out there, I find a correlation to my religious beliefs everywhere I look. Because I know how something works, does not take away the sense of the divine and sacredness of everything.

I spend a lot, and I mean a lot, of time studying our earth and how it came to be, and how it works. I spend an equal amount of time if not even more studying space and the wonders that inhabit it, and what it is made of. I theorize, and I think and I let my imagination run wild. There is more in the heavens and in the earth than we can imagine, and there is a symbiotic relationship between everything. Space is filled with what is called the Cosmic Web. It is an interconnectedness that fills the universe. Does this not concur with our idea of wyrd? The interconnectedness of everyone and everything? We and everything else we know of are made of stardust. Literally. The elements that make up everything are formed in stars and through catastrophic violence, eventually released into the universe until they come together in a cosmic dance. The death of a star creates new life. And yet, there is still the question of what actually created the spark of "life", consciousness and spirit. Science does not answer this, my spiritual studies and practice do.

There are so many questions that I want the answer to. And I am delighted with the answers I find. This to me is a part of a life well lived, truly lived. I believe that we are not alone out here. Our little blue planet is precious to us, but there must be so many more. There are billions of suns in our galaxy alone, and billions more galaxies out there. I hear people say they believe the gods came about when we did as humans. I find this utterly ignorant. I believe the gods created everything and they let it play out as it will. This universe is at the very least many billions of years old if you believe the big bang theory. Perhaps eternal if that is what you believe. We as humans, as well as our Earth are not even as old as the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. And yet some have the arrogance to assume we are the top of the food chain, and we created the gods.

I see pictures of the vast forces of chaos, and the order born from it in space and the beauty of them can make me weep. There is so much more in front of our eyes that we need to see, to fully appreciate how special we are, and how special we are not. I follow the life of a star, that lives for eons, planets born from the remnants of the star and the moons born of the remnants of those planets. How those moons affect things gravitationally on their respective planets. What becomes of those planets, does life form? How is this place different from where I live? And some day in a vast and almost unimaginable space of time, the processes that allowed that star to live, slowly grind to a stop, and in a moment of utter force and destruction, the star explodes, and implodes, and from the remnants of that star, the stuff of everything, stardust is thrust out into the universe, to some day reform into new stars and planets and life. And from the implosion of that star, perhaps a thing of complete and utter destruction is created. A monster of unimaginable gravitational force and pull that devours everything around it, even light itself. What becomes of what is pulled into that beast? We do not know, but whatever is yanked into that abyss is torn apart on an atomic level and perhaps becomes energy itself, or infinitesimally tiny bits of matter that travel unseen ...to where? Where does a black hole lead to? Where does what goes in, come out?

Stars cluster in galaxies, galaxies collide and merge, constantly moving. At the center of all galaxies it is believed, is a massive black hole. All galaxies and clusters of stars are connected and part of the cosmic web. Nebulae gleam, the birthplace of galaxies.

And at the farthest reaches of the universe that we are capable of seeing the light from, is the distant, ancient past. Stars are the portals of time travel. When we look up into the night sky, we are looking back in time. What we see, is so far away that it may not even exist anymore, or it may be radically different. As far into the universe as we can see, is close to 14 billion years old, can you imagine? The pictures of deep space from the Hubble telescope ...those blurry colorful, brilliant images of billions of galaxies that encompass only a tiny little degree of the night sky, the light we see and the images we see of them is actually what they looked like billions upon billions of years ago. And that is only as far as we can see. We are limited by light speed. The age of things is staggering. And not enough time has passed yet for light from farther reaches to reach us. All of this makes my head spin and makes me burn to learn more.

Space and time are a long graceful dance everywhere we look. Everything in space, pulls on everything else. As it should pull on our imaginations, as it should make us want to learn.

And that is just astronomy. What of the secrets our own earth holds? Much of which we are still clueless about. Yesterday I saw a rock. That rock has been dated to within a couple of hundred thousand years of when earth was created. Back when the surface of the earth was a hot, molten, volcanic, harsh place, where life could not possibly exist in any form. That rock was pulled deep from within the earth, far deeper than we can ever go. Through the force of eruption, that rock came to rest and cooled and for billions of years has sat undiscovered. Inside that rock was water, radically changing how scientists thought water developed on our planet. In the blink of an eye, history changed, minds were set afire. But that is another story =)

Have you ever...

Felt such a deep longing for a place that it is an ache in your heart that will not go away?

This is how I feel about my homeland. Although I have traveled the world extensively, this ache will not go away, and gets deeper and more painful the older I get. There is nowhere in the world like Britain to me, it has a seductive call that lingers in me, it has it's claws in my soul and will not let go. And I do not want it to. It is where the bones of my ancestors rest.

Most days I feel a hundred years old. I was born in a place and an age that was so different than it is now. I do not understand people these days, they are alien to me.

I was born in an age and a place where we knew our neighbors. Where children could run free like the little heathens we were, from sunup to sunset. Where you could run out for fish and chips after dark and were completely safe. Where you could walk into a stranger's house and eat a cream puff and a glass of milk and not worry about it, nor did your parents. Where if you were being a little twit, anyone could lay down the discipline and when you got home and your parents heard about it, you got it again from them. You didn't sue someone if you slipped and fell on their property. You didn't get away with being an horse's arse to people. We were raised with manners, we learned how to write genuine letters to people, by hand. We said please, and thank you. We helped and respected our elders. We knew the intristic wisdom that came with age and there was not much as fun as sitting down and listening to stories told by them, tales of days gone by.

People were closer to the land then. There was a respect for it, and for what it produced. There was a village blacksmith, a butcher ( and the butcher slaughtered and cut the meat himself ), a pastry shop, corner stores. People read books, real ones. Everyone knew everyone in the village, and while there was still a fair bit of gossip, when needed people pulled together to help each other. Just about everyone believed in using herbal remedies and the power of the old ones in the land. Tales of spirits were common, and people didn't panic over them, or try to get rid of them. Families were close. We all knew the names of our relatives alive and dead. We knew our family histories and stories about our ancestors. There was a deeper understanding of death, and it was not something that was hushed up. We talked about it. We laid out our dead in our parlors and washed and clothed them ourselves. And when we buried them, everyone turned out to say goodbye.

Men went for a pint in the evening, if women went into the pubs, we sat at tables..not the bar. A lady was treated well, because men were taught that it was the right thing to do. We always dressed as well as we could when we went to see a film or visit someone. We were taught to work hard and enjoy our lives.

Yule holidays were about the family, we visited and brought gifts to people, we all spent time together. We had real trees, mistletoe and holly. We decorated and gave thanks for what we had. We had traditional meals, and everyone helped out. We played out in the snow and built snowmen, we walked through the forest. It was a time for reflection, winter. We built fires, and warmed ourselves before them. And at night when we went to bed, we listed to the wind, while burying ourselves under thick eiderdowns and couldn't wait for dawn so we could head outside again. We would sit down with the family to a big breakfast, then head out into the morning mist and sit and watch the sun burn the mist away. The air smelled clean.

People were tougher then. We lived off the land, and appreciated, truly appreciated what we had. There were no credit cards, we lived off what we made, and we paid cash for everything. There were yule accounts, with the milkman and the stores where we could make payments every week so that at the holidays, we could pick up all our goodies and have plenty, when most of the rest of the year we got by on much less.

Sound odd? I would wager to most people that would read this, it does. I wouldn't give a moment of it up for the world though. The memories I have from those days are precious to me. I miss those days, and that land. I feel like I am in the wrong time, as well as the wrong place. For now, I hope and long to return.