The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/iceland/page/2)
I was twenty-one, and that was the first time I had ever seen the ocean. I slept that night as close to the window as I could, straining my ears for the sound of waves. The ocean was a poetic trope, the longing of Tolkien’s elves, a setting for adventure and tragedy. I loved the idea of it, and I wanted to be lulled into sleep like the heroes of my favorite books, but that was all I knew of the water.
Sometimes, the Mead of Poetry works indirectly. An old rock ‘n’ roll song is stuck on repeat in my head, spinning unceasingly between my ears. Actually, it’s not even an entire song. It’s just a verse or a chorus or sometimes only a line or two. Someone else’s creative creation gets lodged in there, doing work on my mind that only I can hear.
“Nexion is wrath,” the Eddas, and Michael Jordan: The second part of Lyonel Perabo’s conversation with Joshua Rood.
“Even though Ásatrú might not have been quite where I had imagined it, people were actively trying to work toward something. You don’t get temples and songs and chants and beautiful ceremonies and certainly not a deep knowledge system overnight. You need to discover and build these things. And you need a community to do it with.”
I know I’m in a tiny minority, but – as a practitioner of a tiny minority religion – I’m used to caring about things that are way outside the mainstream of our cultural discourse. And I wonder what we practitioners can offer during this cultural moment in which the majority of us are passively experiencing a major paradigm shift, in which most of us are just unquestioningly along for the ride.