Noun

inspiration /ɪnspɨˈɹeɪʃən/

1. The act of inspiring or breathing in.
2. breath
3. (physiology) The drawing of air into the lungs, accomplished in mammals by elevation of the chest walls and flattening of the diaphragm.
4. The act or power of exercising an elevating or stimulating influence upon the intellect or emotions; the result of such influence which quickens or stimulates; as, the inspiration of occasion, of art, etc.
5. A supernatural divine influence on the prophets, apostles, or sacred writers, by which they were qualified to communicate moral or religious truth with authority; a supernatural influence which qualifies men to receive and communicate divine truth; also, the truth communicated.

from Wiktionary

Last night I stood before my altar and took a few deep breaths. I closed my eyes and tried to empty myself, but found myself filled with words and moved to pray regardless. I have never spontaneously spouted poetry; usually when I pray it is conversational, offering thanks and beseeching blessings the same as I would speak, though with more respect and reverence.

I cannot remember the words, but it seemed like their ephemera was part of the magic. Giving voice to the words that are moving you, letting them be heard, and letting them “die” and fade back into the well or cauldron of creativity once more. It’s the fire that moves them into being, quickens the elements of the collective pool of memory, and for a moment you serve as the tree that bridges the Over and Underworlds in the temporary Midrealm.

The thing that scared me most was when I was praying for the Gods not only to see me and aid me but also to “forget” me. When I came to that part of the ecstatic prayer I choked and had to pause, repulsed, waiting for an explanation. Why was I asking to be forgotten?

There was something filling me at the edge of my mind, reminding me of my mortality and how, like these words that will be forgotten after their purpose has been fulfilled, I will also fade back into nothing after I do what I am here to do: live. Of course the identity/ego we create for ourselves with dissolve when we do, and the Gods will not remember us as Lindevi or whoever (our egotistical selves/identity) but as their children collectively. The relationship becomes abstract: the energy goes on, though the exchange has changed.

The past and future that constructs us will no longer have a reference point, and there will only be the Now again, until I am renewed into another body.

The Midrealm stands, subjective to the objective realities of Above and Below, being shaped by them and destroyed by Them, the conflicting bodies of Chaos and Cosmos.

I picked up my prayer again, scared but resolved, until I came to its end. With that I inclined my head and thanked the Powers, feeling perhaps a little more sure of my footing on this new path.

One of these days I will have the courage to offer up my voice as an offering. To sing for my Gods a song of prayer, full of intention and praise, as opposed to the little vocal exercises I have been to give to Them during the day, in the car or at my desk. I feel shivers down my spine and wonder if I’m just imagining things, or if is an actual response from SomeOne/Thing.

But it will be some time before I learn the words, the melodies. There is definitely something powerful about certain “riffs” that I have heard, a sort of permanence and timelessness that has affected me since I was young. You hear a song and instantly are transported back to a childhood memory that doesn’t exists, and are elated. “I must have heard this as a child, because it resonates with me so thoroughly, it’s like I’ve been searching for the notes my whole life and have finally heard them again.” I have identified some of those sacred melodies in modern songs, but it scares me to offer these parts that have been used in such mundane ways. But there’s something about them, that’s for sure. I want to weave these parts into perhaps my own song, or songs, but will need some more training before I can do so.

To that end I’ve decided I need to learn Old English. It shouldn’t be that hard, given the similarities to my own language, but it would set certain lyrics apart from the mundane, find a common ground between the Gods of my culture and me. I will have to experiment and give serious thought to the difference between praying in English and praying in the Old Tongue. There are certainly arguments to be had both ways.

Maybe, just maybe, it is time to approach Woden, whom I’ve avoided during my devotion to Tiw. Now that I’m not destined for a political path, and have dedicated myself to writing, the tables have likely turned. I am trading the upright sureties of law and order for the fluid gray areas of literature and human life. And perhaps I owe Woden a horn of mead as I begin to tread on his domain.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Wheel of the Year, Hallows marks the beginning of winter. I had always thought this to be a more northern phenomenon, as October would frequently be warm and we wouldn’t even begin to see frosts until November at least.

Not so this year. Our First Big Snow hit today, cancelling Halloween celebrations across the valley as we hunkered down and braced for a predicted 10-14” of wet, white slush. I was thankful to have gone in to work at 5am, meaning I would get out “on time” at 2pm, theoretically just in time to beat the storm home.

Three and a half hours later I owe this entry to the Gods-sent snowplow that blazed the trail up the mountain even when the main road was shutting down. Otherwise I’m not sure if or when I’d even have made it home, confronting steep hills or accident-laden highways in every direction.

Nothing like a natural disaster or two to get you back in touch with your region’s geography. Hurricane Irene taught me to look to slopes and ravines—where the water flows. You don’t realize how your entire town is bordered by streams until you are trying desperately to find a crossing that hasn’t been flooded over yet. Or how you’re incredibly lucky your house is situated on a ridge and blessed with drainage on either side to avoid devastating flooding.

This storm has taught me why trees lose their leaves in winter: surface area + sticky snow = disaster. Fall hadn’t even come full force in my town, and the roads were lined with green-leaved trees buckling under the weight or with branches missing—some had even split in half down the middle of the trunk. The river was veiled by a grey fog as I pulled into my neighborhood. A herd of deer crossed the road in between fallen debris, bounding over drifts. They are clearly more used to this than I.

I creep out of my car after enduring a ride more than eight times its usual length only to discover power is already out at home. My brother announces a single remaining cup of coffee left in the French press and I bask in its warmth, realizing that any hot meal tonight is going to require a moderate amount of effort on my part. You don’t realize how much the sacred fire is taken for granted in the modern era until simple conveniences like microwaves, lights, and heat go away. It was all you had left against the cold, the dark, and death, a theme echoed in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire to great effect.

I will be spending tonight in darkness save for the candles I have pilfered from the closet and the sacred flame of transformation of fueland air to light and heat. I will be spending tonight in cold save for the warmth of modern fibers and the companionship of my kin. I will be spending tonight in contemplation of the beauty, the awe, and danger of the dark half of the year. And I will be spending tonight in gratitude for all that the Kindreds have given me to protect myself against it.

There is nothing quite like coming home after being truly afraid you’ll end up stranded in a winter’s storm.

The Guardian comments on the burgeoning fascination with Norse culture in British popular media and two new television series to watch for:

More than 50 years after actors Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis donned their woollen tunics for Hollywood blockbuster The Vikings, a television series of the same name and a TV version of British writer Neil Gaiman’s Nordic gods-inspired bestseller, American Gods, are both in development. The Vikings, which picks up on interest aroused by Kenneth Branagh’s recent action film Thor, is being produced and written by the team behind BBC2 series The Tudors, and will tell the story of Ragnar, the great Viking leader and his two wives and four sons, who travelled to Ireland, England and France. The semi-mythological figures of Ragnar and his sons were also at the centre of the Curtis and Douglas epic, but this 10-part drama will chart their conquests while aiming to correct misconceptions about Viking society.

American Gods, Gaiman’s mystical cult saga, tells the story of Shadow and his dealings with a modern-day incarnation of the Norse god Odin, or Woden.

– “It’s a new Viking invasion of Britain – but this time it’s cultural” (10/22/11)

I wonder if either will be on BBC America or if I’ll have to wait for them to be picked up on Netflix. Boo.

We have an outdoor nursery where I work, and while I was covering one of my cashiers’ breaks I couldn’t help but notice two things: one, that there was a very cute tree with a few red leaves poking around the corner of the other garden booth, and that two, said tree was half off along with all the other trees and shrubs. I set it up on a will call at my first opportunity (a mere $15!) and took it home with me after my shift, its branches extending all the way into the front seat with me from its spot in the trunk. I set it on my front yard and went in to inform my father that I had “brought a pet red oak home.”

“Okay,” he said, “you’ll have to show it to mom and do your homework if you don’t want the deer to eat it or the frost to kill it.” Fine, I can do that.

The Specs

Quercus rubra, says Wikipedia: the northern red oak. Likes shade (we can do that), slightly acidic soil (good, there was a blue spruce growing there before), mulch in winter and fertilizer in summer.

Okay, what kind of mulch? Red, brown, black, cedar, pine nugget, Scott’s Naturescapes? Dear, sweet Jesus. For all that I’ve sold hundreds of dollars of the crap I have no idea what the difference is. To the internet!

With a small application of Google-fu, it seems the colors are simply an aesthetic difference, but looking at the ingredients list for the Scott’s Naturescapes, particle board/composite filler? You mean like plywood? I was then considering an “organic” variety, but apparently organic mulch is just leaves and grass clippings and the like. The cedar or pine nuggets seem to be my best bet–at least they’re natural and may help to keep the pH where the tree wants it.

I’ll have to dig a hole three times as wide and a little less deep, plant it, mulch it three to four inches, and water it with a soak ball so all of the roots get wet. Then I’ll get a deer wrap to keep my neighborhood’s herd away (I’ll have to account for my mildly-rational fear of the animals in another post), and cross my fingers. Hopefully we have a few more weeks before the first frost hits hard.

I’m not going to lie, if this thing dies I’m going to be a little upset, especially after I invest the time to get it situated and protected. Its leaves weren’t in the best condition near the middle, but at the top the leaves were healthy and green. At the same time, it might be too late to plant a tree in this region (contrary to what my coworkers assured me). I wonder if Home Depot’s one year plant guarantee applies to trees as well… hopefully it won’t come to that.

The Spirit

The real motivation behind my getting the tree was my recent affiliation with the ADF: it’s a beautiful reminder of my faith, rich in symbolism, and will definitely help me with the nature awareness requirement of the Dedicant program, if only because I’m getting my feet wet in landscaping (gardening will come next spring, hopefully with some onions and garlic–yum). I feel inclined to give it a name, though I may want to try and listen for it from the leaves themselves.

It’s strange to think that this tree, if it survives, will outlast me and my children and their children–it won’t even begin to produce acorns until I’m gone. There are trees all around you and you don’t realize just how old they are, like the sugar maple that died outside my bedroom window. Its trunk is easily three people’s arm-spans, maybe four. I can’t even how many centuries that must have took. My neighbor had the branches cut maybe ten years ago, and I always wondered if it had housed a wight, and whether that wight was displaced (or angry) afterwards. It was right about then that our families started to fall apart.

I’ll take some pictures once the sapling is planted. If some of the leaves are any indication, the rest of it will turn a stunning shade of red before winter arrives fully-fledged. Rubra indeed.

I am now officially a member of Ár nDraíocht Féin (or, as I like to tell my friends, “I’m now a druid IRL”), albeit a loose one. The closest Grove to me is in NYC–doable, but not easy (or cheap), and I only see two other members on the official map for the whole of Orange County. I’ve reached out to my local witches meetup group in the hopes that there are some hiding in the woodwork there, and might just have a lead. In the meantime, I seem to have found an eclectic mix of pagans in the midst of my friends and coworkers, though their paths lead in different directions than mine.

Yet, the ADF’s Dedicant program is what intrigued me most, with its formal course of study and practice to be completed at your own pace. Having almost ten years of background in paganism, I thought a year-and-a-day length would be doable, and as I’ve said before on this blog, I intend to take my first official step towards oathing on Hallows.

The hardest part will be learning the symbolism and values of ADF itself. The Fire, the Cauldron, and the Tree mean little to me as yet, nor does the awen or triskele, though I’ll be exploring them in depth in the coming months. Seeing the Fire and Ice Kindred and the number of northern tradition practitioners on ADF’s home page is encouraging, and hopefully I’ll be able to find my own footing within the parallel currents of Celtic and Indo-European cultures that run through the organization.

I’ve converted Linden Leaves into an online journal in the interest of staying on course, but also so I might be able to connect with other druids or witches out there who are treading a similar way. I’ve updated the layout and will be adding more content on rites and holy tides, prayer and meditation as I work my way through the 52-week program. Subjects of interest that I hope to be treating on include:

• Galdr
• Devotional Work
• Runes
• Totemism
• and Witchcraft

in addition to the three Kindreds venerated by the druids, the Gods, the Spirits, and Ancestors. Though these pages are spare as of yet, over the course of the next year they will hopefully fill out quite a bit, and perhaps some of the entries here might even serve as inspiration to the next seeker that comes along searching for relationship with the Gods and magic of the Old English.