(no subject)

Tonight, I was taking the dog out and I looked up at the stars. It's a clear night - there are little wisps of clouds and a blustery wind blowing them around, but there are a lot of stars. So I threw my head back and stared up at Orion, which is my favorite constellation, both because I can reliably find it and because it's one of the few constellations that we know a pre-Christian Germanic name for. The three stars of Orion's belt are Frigga's Distaff.

I looked up until I started to feel almost dizzy and a line of a song occurred to me - We are not lost in the mortal city. And I thought about how big the sky is, how deep and dark and vast. I thought about how vast the universe is, the scattered Nine Worlds, how huge the area is that's contained, mythologically, inside old Ymir's skull. And I kept thinking, "We are not lost."

We talk about this thing, in heathenry - the web of wyrd. The idea is that everything - all the plants and animals and humans and spirits and planets and gods - are all bound up together in a huge weaving of fate, where each thread impacts all the others. Intellectually, I understand that. But tonight, for the first time, staring up at the sky, I knew what it meant. And I looked down at the ground, at the Earth, at the land that my home stands on. I am rooted here and I am part of that vastness. The universe is huge and I am very small, but I'm still a part of that web, that great weaving. We are not lost.

I don't think I'm saying this very well, but I wanted to write it down so that I wouldn't forget. And now I have.