What a wonderful book. I can't recommend it enough!
I cannot begin to say how much I loved this one. It's one of those rare psychology memoirs that didWhat a wonderful book. I can't recommend it enough!
I cannot begin to say how much I loved this one. It's one of those rare psychology memoirs that didn't feel like a rant on the topic 'parents did it to me'. While parents do a lot of stuff both for and to us, it's rarely up to just their frivolous decisions how we turn out. Anyway, no matter how we grow up we'll have stuff to scare our psychologist into going to theirs. LOL!
A great read. A lot of cooking. An interesting take on prescriptions and on 'Eat, pray, love' (or maybe 'cook, love, travel?')
Q: I drop my head back onto the floor, close my eyes, and think of my mother. She always said it’s like she was born with the curtain half open, like the barrier between the perceived human experience and the soul’s purpose never quite closed. From the time she was little, she says, she could “see” beyond the three-dimensional world in front of her and tap into a level of existence that seems to elude most everyone else. Over the years, this gift has led her to understand the world through a distinct ethereal lens, one that goes beyond the constraints of religious doctrine and constitutional law. (c) Q: It goes something like this: It is all a game. An eternal game played by eternal beings; a universal Easter egg hunt of sorts, with players who incarnate as humans into this world, again and again, embodying a particular play piece each time. Round and round we go, born into families and cultures telling us the game we’re playing is about money and power and fame, separation and segregation and dark versus light. But really, the whole point of the game is to figure out it’s a game—a game about discovering we are all one, each of us a spark of the same source. (c) Q: Clues appear like hidden eggs, my mother says. Little eggs of light that show up through everything from compassion to art to nature to heroic acts. Reminders of our true identity. Think Buddhism without the whole “life is suffering” bit + Christianity without heaven and hell + a good dose of The Matrix thrown in. But since this is the most difficult game ever created, we begin each hunt blind, deaf, and dumb. Extraordinarily dumb. So dumb we don’t even remember we’re playing a game, or that there are even any eggs to be found. We rig the game from the start with whatever economic, racial, physical, political, and familial bullshit exists in the sliver of the world we choose for ourselves. We think suffering in a Mombasa slum is different from suffering in a Manhattan high-rise, but pain is pain is pain. We all spend most of our lives just trying to avoid the suffering, occasionally tripping over an egg in our most untethered moments. Still, we often don’t realize what we’ve found until we trip over it a few times. And even then we’re not sure, because we start to wonder if there are better eggs around. (c) Q: When we inevitably don’t figure out the game at the end of our life—no matter, there’s another round right behind it. And another and another and another. As many as it takes. Maybe it’s a new scenario, or maybe it’s one we’ve done 1,000 times before. We get to choose, since we have to experience them all in order to understand we are of the same source, just wrapped in different skin. Besides, we can only win the game together. Only when every last one of us learns to see through the illusion of difference and embodies unconditional love will we all move forward in peace. But this unconditional love cannot exist without all that is ugly and threatening in the world. Because how can we learn unconditional love if we have never felt hatred, disgust, and resentment? (c) Q: “I believe our souls live outside of physical reality, and that the soul knows what is best and perfect for us. Imagine that our fully enlightened soul projects its light through us, like our mind and body is a camera lens. The light goes through the lens and projects a picture of everything that is good or bad in our lives—our job, our health, our relationships. If we don’t like the picture, it’s because our soul is trying to shine its light through a cracked lens. Instead of getting the things that bring us joy, we get sadness or despair or frustration or anger.” (c) Q: Here was a woman who, after being widowed at forty-seven, survived breast cancer, underwent open-heart surgery, kept a business afloat with forty employees during the recession, and did it all while raising an only child with suicidal tendencies. And yet she never succumbed to rage, never lost that sparkle for living. Maybe it is time to do as my mother would do, not as my father did. (c)
Merged review:
What a wonderful book. I can't recommend it enough!
I cannot begin to say how much I loved this one. It's one of those rare psychology memoirs that didn't feel like a rant on the topic 'parents did it to me'. While parents do a lot of stuff both for and to us, it's rarely up to just their frivolous decisions how we turn out. Anyway, no matter how we grow up we'll have stuff to scare our psychologist into going to theirs. LOL!
A great read. A lot of cooking. An interesting take on prescriptions and on 'Eat, pray, love' (or maybe 'cook, love, travel?')
Q: I drop my head back onto the floor, close my eyes, and think of my mother. She always said it’s like she was born with the curtain half open, like the barrier between the perceived human experience and the soul’s purpose never quite closed. From the time she was little, she says, she could “see” beyond the three-dimensional world in front of her and tap into a level of existence that seems to elude most everyone else. Over the years, this gift has led her to understand the world through a distinct ethereal lens, one that goes beyond the constraints of religious doctrine and constitutional law. (c) Q: It goes something like this: It is all a game. An eternal game played by eternal beings; a universal Easter egg hunt of sorts, with players who incarnate as humans into this world, again and again, embodying a particular play piece each time. Round and round we go, born into families and cultures telling us the game we’re playing is about money and power and fame, separation and segregation and dark versus light. But really, the whole point of the game is to figure out it’s a game—a game about discovering we are all one, each of us a spark of the same source. (c) Q: Clues appear like hidden eggs, my mother says. Little eggs of light that show up through everything from compassion to art to nature to heroic acts. Reminders of our true identity. Think Buddhism without the whole “life is suffering” bit + Christianity without heaven and hell + a good dose of The Matrix thrown in. But since this is the most difficult game ever created, we begin each hunt blind, deaf, and dumb. Extraordinarily dumb. So dumb we don’t even remember we’re playing a game, or that there are even any eggs to be found. We rig the game from the start with whatever economic, racial, physical, political, and familial bullshit exists in the sliver of the world we choose for ourselves. We think suffering in a Mombasa slum is different from suffering in a Manhattan high-rise, but pain is pain is pain. We all spend most of our lives just trying to avoid the suffering, occasionally tripping over an egg in our most untethered moments. Still, we often don’t realize what we’ve found until we trip over it a few times. And even then we’re not sure, because we start to wonder if there are better eggs around. (c) Q: When we inevitably don’t figure out the game at the end of our life—no matter, there’s another round right behind it. And another and another and another. As many as it takes. Maybe it’s a new scenario, or maybe it’s one we’ve done 1,000 times before. We get to choose, since we have to experience them all in order to understand we are of the same source, just wrapped in different skin. Besides, we can only win the game together. Only when every last one of us learns to see through the illusion of difference and embodies unconditional love will we all move forward in peace. But this unconditional love cannot exist without all that is ugly and threatening in the world. Because how can we learn unconditional love if we have never felt hatred, disgust, and resentment? (c) Q: “I believe our souls live outside of physical reality, and that the soul knows what is best and perfect for us. Imagine that our fully enlightened soul projects its light through us, like our mind and body is a camera lens. The light goes through the lens and projects a picture of everything that is good or bad in our lives—our job, our health, our relationships. If we don’t like the picture, it’s because our soul is trying to shine its light through a cracked lens. Instead of getting the things that bring us joy, we get sadness or despair or frustration or anger.” (c) Q: Here was a woman who, after being widowed at forty-seven, survived breast cancer, underwent open-heart surgery, kept a business afloat with forty employees during the recession, and did it all while raising an only child with suicidal tendencies. And yet she never succumbed to rage, never lost that sparkle for living. Maybe it is time to do as my mother would do, not as my father did. (c)...more
Q: “Right in the middle of my life, I realized that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. It was like I’d wandered off the right path into a very, very bad neQ: “Right in the middle of my life, I realized that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. It was like I’d wandered off the right path into a very, very bad neighborhood. I don’t even want to remember how scary that space was—makes me feel like I’m gonna die or something. I’m only telling you about it because a lot of good came of it in the long run. So anyway, I don’t even know how I ended up so far off course. I felt like I’d been sleepwalking.”—Dan, age 41
This story could have come from any one of the hundreds of people I’ve met in my office, classes, and seminars, but it didn’t. As a matter of fact, “Dan” is short for Dante, as in Dante Alighieri. The paragraph above is my own exceedingly loose rendition of the first twelve lines of The Divine Comedy, written in 1307. Sometimes I tell clients about it, because it helps them believe they aren’t the first people who’ve ever snapped awake at midlife, only to find themselves dazed, unhappy, and way off course. It’s been happening at least since the Middle Ages, and not only to the middle-aged. (c) Oh, this hooked me right in!...more
The universe talks to us, all along. But sometimes we are all too engrossed in the mundane to notice the daily miracles.
In this one, LLJ gives us a tThe universe talks to us, all along. But sometimes we are all too engrossed in the mundane to notice the daily miracles.
In this one, LLJ gives us a ton of examples which illustrate what we're missing on, how this communication happens and what it could mean for both us and our dear ones. Both the ones who have already crossed over and the ones who haven't.
Weird happenings, unusual finds, recurring messages, the form these messages take occsionally - all these are a part of this wonderful language that the author imparts to us.
Reread, reread, reread. A must-have instafav....more
Nope, this is not about just weather... This is about responcibility and ingeniousness and how chance encounters and seemingly minuscule decisions andNope, this is not about just weather... This is about responcibility and ingeniousness and how chance encounters and seemingly minuscule decisions and turning points rule over our lives. Q: It just so happened that I briefly entered the equation at what, for him, proved a crucial inflection point in his life. A small nudge in the right direction would inevitably have an enormous bearing on his future. (c)
I'll just quote this: Q: Sometimes people walked their dogs through the main hallway. The architecture was labyrinthine. The teachers were equally eccentric. My history teacher had a “pilgrim voice” and character he occasionally slipped into; another routinely donned a colander to impersonate the former Soviet satellite “Sputnik.” My Spanish teacher had just turned twenty-two, and my mustache-sporting art teacher sprinted into class the first day wielding a hammer and an unhinged stapler. Our chemistry teacher sometimes taught while doing snow angels on the floor “for [his] bad back.” Mr. Carah, the physics teacher, could get away with saying just about anything—no joke was too off the wall. And my math teacher once sprinted home from class mid-lecture to make sure he had shut off his stove.Since the school didn’t have a designated vehicle to transport goods, they relied on a donated vehicle that the administration fondly referred to as “the creeper van” to shuttle around band and student council equipment. Every March, we had a fundraiser called Tape a Teacher, where a $5 bill would earn students a piece of duct tape to affix a teacher to the wall. One year we inadvertently taped Mr. Dunigan-AtLee, a math teacher, to a utility pole in front of the school with his arms outstretched in a Christ-like state… on what turned out to be Good Friday (that led to an unfortunate article in the Cape Cod Times). We also made the news when four hundred copies of a yearbook reading STURGIS CHARTER pubic SCHOOL were delivered. That may or may not have been my fault. It was an erratic, unconventional school where everyone was as quirky as I. Within a week, I knew I was home. (c) I'm vacillating between whether I would've been tempted to shoot myself at such a place or feel at home.
This is one of the most important books I've ever read... I only wish I read it earlier.This is one of the most important books I've ever read... I only wish I read it earlier....more
I think this guys's one of the rare-ish people who got about as many (or maybe more? or maybe not) different and diverse cultures stacked upon other cI think this guys's one of the rare-ish people who got about as many (or maybe more? or maybe not) different and diverse cultures stacked upon other cultures in his heritage.
What I didn't like was how he praised Jesus about being unopologetically Jewish... Seriously, man, they had different hangups at that time. Like, being crucified or needing to develop Christianity from scratch. Totally different scale of stuff. They didn't have time to be apologetic. And... uh, being Jewish in Roman empire was radically different from being (Jewish) anywhere today.
Okay, this is weird, you know? Today I purchased a most wonderful icon of Lazarus' being resurrected. And, tadam (!), I'm finishing reading a book, this book, that I started earlier but left unfinished and it refers to what? To Lazarus being resurrected by Jesus! Holy sinchronicity!
I was probably too harsh with my initial rating of this book and upping it now. Hail Jesus and Lazarus and Martha and Mary and everyone else!
Q: When Mary asked Jesus to do it, He kind of lips off to her. Look! He does! “Woman, why do you involve me?” (verse 4, niv). He seems a bit put off, but it’s His mom. And, of course, He does what she asks even after a little bit of attitude. Nobody ever said Jesus never had attitude. And I love how Mary takes His words and turns to the servants and, like what I would imagine an Italian mother saying, she says, “Do whatever he tells you” (verse 5, niv). (I hope you read that with an Italian accent.) So, it says that Jesus asked them to fill the thirty water jugs—thirty!—with water. And it says that “they filled them to the brim” (verse 7, niv, emphasis added). This is an important detail. So let’s do the math. There were 6 jars of 30 gallons each. That equals 180 gallons, which would be 682 liters, which would be the equivalent of 908 bottles of wine.Nine hundred and eight bottles of wine. That seems preposterous. Who does that? Who gives above and beyond what anyone is expecting? No way they can drink that. ... But, my friend, this is how to human. This is how we are supposed to give: above and beyond. And that’s why when people see this sort of love in action, it changes their entire lives—not because of the gift, but because of seeing the giver give. It’s a whole vibe. (c) Q: We died laughing. It felt so good. That love felt like freedom. (c) Q: You see, this ridiculous generosity thing? It not only frees someone else, but it frees you. Something unlocked in my heart that night, and I wasn’t going to throw away the key. I just didn’t know who I was gonna give it to next, nor did I know how much they would need it too. (c) Q: Jesus knew He was gonna raise Lazarus from the dead. So why in the world did He weep? Why in the world did He expel emotion from His eyeballs when He knew the outcome? It’s because of empathy. You see, Jesus wasn’t weeping because He was sad that Lazarus was dead. No, Jesus was sad because Mary and Martha were sad. Jesus wept for them, not for Lazarus. Jesus had empathy. Jesus knew that in a matter of minutes, Lazarus was gonna come dancing out of that grave. He would have had every right to look at those mourning and roll His eyes, because their pain was gonna last for only a few more minutes. It was so temporary. But Jesus didn’t give those who mourned a speech to try to talk them out of their grief. He didn’t give them data that proved they were really grieving for no reason. He didn’t make them feel small for their lack of faith. Jesus simply saw people hurting, and it made Him hurt as well. He empathized so much with those who mourned that it made Him weep. (c)...more
I'm so deeply sad that I found this book just now. I needed it a bit (lot!) earlier so much! OK, I'm still needing it but ... it's far too late a findI'm so deeply sad that I found this book just now. I needed it a bit (lot!) earlier so much! OK, I'm still needing it but ... it's far too late a find. One I love with all my heart nevertheless......more
I'm so late reading this! I'm much too much darn late to this one!!! I wish I had this book way, WAY, yearlier! ______
Ну да, я, как всегда, как обычно,I'm so late reading this! I'm much too much darn late to this one!!! I wish I had this book way, WAY, yearlier! ______
Ну да, я, как всегда, как обычно, как всегда... опоздала найти и прочесть эту книгу... Как же мне жаль!...more
I've never ever wanted this much to replace 'magic' with 'mathematics' in a book ever before. I don't think it's just me since magical books in this oI've never ever wanted this much to replace 'magic' with 'mathematics' in a book ever before. I don't think it's just me since magical books in this one keep being called things like 'Twelve Theorems' (which I adore!). Plus all the hardnosed academia (which keeps making me want to gag). Q: P.S. “CHEERS”? (c) Q: Of all the things one could want, why could he not even have himself? (c) Q: She liked reading because it made the world feel like a book written in unlimited third-person perspective, her favorite since the fantasy novels of her childhood, whose chapters traded names and narrators with the avidity of little girls swapping dolls or Pokémon. To the skilled reader, the world was just one narrator after another. Sometimes she wondered if anyone was reading her, and imagined herself saying, in some way, take it, you’re welcome to it, it’s little enough use to me. (c) Q: You obviously belong together in the sense that her name sounds like a set of specialized organs, and yours sounds like a charity telethon to raise money for distressed Jons. (c) Annae and Jonathon. LOL! Q: she had admired him because he had written a wonderful book about magic for children called Twelve Theorems. She could still remember the bliss of reading it, like the bliss of licking the crystallized salt from the inside of the microwave popcorn bag: finally, here was a pleasure for her alone. (c) Q: ... she put one foot in front of the other, telling herself with every footfall that this was what happened when you allowed yourself to feel brilliant, this was the cost of knowledge. (c) Q: She stroked the fire with her mind, looking for its root, replaying the exercise just as she’d learned it from the book, at eight and ten and twelve years old, a book that had always grown with her. It wasn’t a book that taught you magic, exactly; it was a book that taught you to think like a magician, to become all mind, all air, to float above your circumstances on a cloud of thought and feeling. The root of the fire. Magicians think about system, symptom. And this fire, she thought, was a symptom of a magician who had lost control of his mind’s ability to affect the world—it might have been anyone; it might have been her. Her vision expanded, a delicate gas swirling in the clear clean night air.And then it happened, the grandeur of knowing something. A feeling like a building with a million floors, a million blocks wide, prismatic windows and inconceivable arches and a terrible weight that collapsed the caves below. She walked into the fire... (c) Q: Much though she longed to disappear without dying, her face alone would never let her. (c) Q: She’d known no one liked her shrill voice, the keening sounds she made when she ran. She knew they didn’t like how smart she knew she was. And so she had studied style, studied whimsy, studied poise. Style, because it was a shield; whimsy, because it was a sword; poise, because it was a suit of armor. Of the three, she became best able to use whimsy. It was the only one of the three that struck her as an offensive weapon, something you could use to slash forward, something that would let you devote your life to thinking without fear of mockery. To be whimsical was to be wonderstruck, and wonder intimidated no one. On the contrary, everyone could look down on you for your naivete. ... She had invented a translucent veil that allowed her to meet people’s eyes. (с) Q: “Small talk is the most important talk,” said Ariel, cupping his drink between his hands as if to warm either it or them. “It’s when we tell people everything. What we think is polite to ask. What we think they might like to hear. By extension, what our family is like, and our town, and our country. I don’t mean to load too much meaning onto what you think of Starbucks, of course. Small talk says more about the asker than the askee.” (c)...more
OMG, once again (another yearmore!) I get yet another wonderfully magical Christmassy read. Twisty and turny but so warming and glorious enough to getOMG, once again (another yearmore!) I get yet another wonderfully magical Christmassy read. Twisty and turny but so warming and glorious enough to get me in the festive mood early!
Q: “I will miss all of you,” whispered Elatha. “We will always be here,” said his brother. “As all our people remain in this world, in some form. We are part of the stones and the moors, part of the mists and the mountains. Our voices travel in the wind, and our spirits sail through the water. You will feel us again, every time you walk this wood.” (c) OMG, this is so beautifully sad! I think this could be said of anyone, fae or not. Q: Six of the Fae, relinquishing the world. Their magic and memory, gone. Their voices rose together, a soft chant, a hymn to the eldritch world of their youth, a eulogy for the past. (c) Q: If I could only save up a little money, I would take a week off to be with my girls, and to search for a better job. If I could only get ahead, just a little, I could buy a better car, one that would let me commute further to work. I would have more options. More money. More time, more choices. (c) Q: Then she stepped back into the forest, and she grew still. Not still as death, but still as the towering evergreens, still as the snow glittering in the glen. (c) Q: “I suspect the world is full of Unwanted things—and Unwanted people.” (c) Q: Sometimes, when Mary shrieks in the wee hours, I cry into my pillow because I am so tired and the thought of getting up again is torture. But I always find that last scrap of strength, the bit of willpower I need to go to her. To keep her alive. (c) Q: Someday this will be over, I tell myself. Someday I will be healthy again. Someday I will be happy again. (c) Q: ... I turn, and I walk back into the bedroom. Just in time to see my daughter Ellie change her shape. (c) Q: The low melody of his voice catches my attention, and I look up at him. He’s tall, well over six feet, and his face—handsome isn’t the word. Beautiful, maybe. Angelic. Maybe he’s an angel. Of course he is! A guardian angel, sent to watch over us. (c) Q: “I love that doll, Mama! She’s already mine. She’s just waiting for me to bring her home.” ... “I do love this time of year, despite its warped traditions,” he continues, with a glance at our pitiful spindly Christmas tree in the corner. “There’s magic in all the world, Ellie, and people are never more likely to believe in it than right now. So don’t give up on your doll, love. She may be yours yet.” (c) Q: “Ellie,” says the man. “Do you believe in magic?” “Magic?” I frown. “We believe in God here, sir.” “Who is God without His power?” he says. “Maybe that’s simply another kind of magic.” (c) Q: I don’t really want to know his name, because if it’s Peter or Barry or Bob, something inside me will shrivel up and never bloom again. I need to be able to pretend that his name is glorious, angelic, like Michael or Gabriel. (c) Q: “I’ve crossed enough strong women to know that you’re all to be revered and feared.” (c) Q: “Well, I don’t want to survive by not caring. I want to care—I just don’t have the energy for it most of the time. Or for life in general.” “I’ll tell you a secret,” he says, leaning closer. “When you feel that way, do something new, something you’ve never done before. It could be anything. Pick a new thing, and do it, and you’ll find you have more zest for life than you thought. You can go on for centuries that way.” (c) Oh, my. Self-help nicely inbuilt in one of the coziest reads of the year?! Yes, gimme more of this goodness. Q: “Let’s put it this way, love,” he says, leaning toward me and smirking. “I’m perpetually, eternally on the naughty list.” (c) Q: The Far Darrig. Fear Dearg, the Red One, in the Old Tongue. (c) Q: I know that pain—I’ve seen it in the mirror. It’s the pain of not being seen, or heard, or loved, by anyone. The pain of being invisible. Whatever he is—he saw me. He listened to me. (c) Q: When I wake up, I’m so toasty warm that I don’t want to move. Golden morning light pours into the living room, shining on the thick, soft blanket that covers me. A blanket I didn’t put there. (c) Q: If you remember anything of me, let it be this warning—do not live in the darkness of what is gone. Find something new. Let yourself hope for the future. (c) Q: And he gave me something more than money. Because now I want to put on makeup and my best clothes, and go dancing. I want to have friends over for tea and gossip. I want to take Ellie skating. I want to make cookies and tell the girls stories, and get out my drawing supplies again and sketch an angel’s face. And I want to feel a human man’s hands on me again, his lips on mine. I want life. (c) Q: Weeks of changing the old woman’s soiled clothes and spooning broth between her wrinkled lips had sapped every soft emotion from Ember’s body. She was cold and frosted at the edges, like the sun. (c) Q: I stand in a clothing store all day, smiling and speaking softly to women who buy beautiful things that I will never be able to afford. I smile while my feet are throbbing in my shoes, and my head is aching from lack of sleep. (c)...more
This goes to show that not everything should work in 10 sessions, one should not trust everything one reads in a newspaper or hears via grapevine and This goes to show that not everything should work in 10 sessions, one should not trust everything one reads in a newspaper or hears via grapevine and no, some specialists are way too special to get with them in the same room/boat/you get it.
Now, careful, spoilers ahead(!)
Then again, something really is off here and we learn at the end what it was, precisely. The reader can't really blame anyone in anything since things were, should I say, preordained the night of that misguided alibi.
I'm deeply disgusted that the 'English teacher' had his life ruined by this. All of this. Poor guy. I'm also kind of feeling none of the MCs are seeing the last and best of Bennett. He's bound to be trouble with such genes. Then again, we aren't 100% determined for anything by genes only and he's still young....more
Interesting that the proper culturally correct Russian word for Babel (on cover!) should've been 'Вавилон' not Babel. Well, unless the author actuallyInteresting that the proper culturally correct Russian word for Babel (on cover!) should've been 'Вавилон' not Babel. Well, unless the author actually meant the literal translation of the English pronunciation into Russian script....more
Q: Years later, while reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I was excited to find this passage: “I saw the backyard cedar where the mourningQ: Years later, while reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I was excited to find this passage: “I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.” It was, Dillard writes later, as if a great door had opened on the present, and the tree flickered with “the steady, inward flames of eternity.” Same sentiment, different tree. Dillard calls these moments “innocence”: “the spirits’ unselfconscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object . . . at once a receptiveness and total concentration.” My friend Dawn, more prosaically, calls them “Matrix moments,”after the film’s signature frozen-in-air martial arts scenes. (c) Q: ...more
Takeouts: Galdor (incantations), wyrd (destiny), wiglung (soothsaying or divination), wortcunning (the art of working magic with leaves, roots, and floTakeouts: Galdor (incantations), wyrd (destiny), wiglung (soothsaying or divination), wortcunning (the art of working magic with leaves, roots, and flowers, all beyond herbology). The Hyge (Conscious Thought) The Lic (Physical Body) (pronounced like “leech”) The Willa (Willpower) The Wód (Inspiration) The Mód (Self-Identity) The Mægen (Spiritual Strength) The Hama (Astral Body) The Myne (Memory and Emotions) The Fetch (Guardian Spirit)
Q: Although runes can be used for more than divination, a chapter devoted to wiglung (soothsaying) is essential for a book like this. An aspiring Saxon sorcerer will be much more effective at tackling a problem if he or she can discern potential forces shaping wyrd (destiny) as it unfolds. It is in this later chapter (rather than in the rune chapters) that we will explore runic wiglung, or divination, a topic that tends to dominate the numerous rune books available today. The primary difference between this book and many others is that the Saxon sorcerer will be using the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc runes, which have nine more characters than the Elder Futhark symbols commonly sold as “rune stones.” We’ll also look at a smaller but extremely effective set of symbols that I call wyrd stones. These are usually painted or engraved on small rocks. As an alternative to these symbol-oriented techniques, I will also discuss scrying, as well as methods of “world walking” that were briefly described in Travels Through Middle Earth. (c) Q: The chapters on runes are followed by a discussion of galdor, or incantations. This word, galdor, is related to the Old English verb galan, meaning “to sing or call out.” The power of the spoken word is well attested to in Saxon lore, and we have many Old English charms to illustrate the basic techniques for producing effective “sound magic.” We will look at some of these techniques and also explore how to combine galdor with other modalities. (c) Q: After this we will look at wortcunning, the art of working magic with leaves, roots, and flowers. This is a favorite topic of mine. It is often called herbalism or herbology, but I feel that these words focus one’s attention specifically on remedial (healing) herbs. Wortcunning includes this aspect, especially when the healing procedure falls into the definition we will establish for “magic,” but it is also much more. (c) Q: Magic does not shatter reality. Magic shapes reality to your advantage by subtly shaping your wyrd. (c) Q: The Wód (Inspiration) You Know and you Will, now you must Dare. The part of the Self that corresponds to daring is called the wód. This is your passion. This is what inspires your willa. Pure wód, when undirected, erupts into madness and rage. But when guided by the willa, it becomes a powerful tool. (c) Q: The Mód (Self-Identity) In my opinion, it is the mód that we are usually thinking of when we speak of the “soul.” Our modern word mood comes from this Old English term. Mód can be interpreted equally as heart, mind, or spirit. Your mód is what might be called self-awareness. It is your sense of identity. The mód does not have an immediate, obvious connection with magic. With the hyge, willa, and wód, you have Known, you have Willed, and you have Dared. (c) Q: The Mægen (Spiritual Strength)Mægen (MY-an) is an Old English word meaning “strength” or “vigor.” When we say that someone has a lot of guts, we are speaking of that person’s mægen. (c) Q: The Myne (Memory and Emotions)Your memories, all of them, good and bad, are the part of you known as your myne (pronounced MU-neh). I honestly do not think the myne comes directly into play in magic work except when the wyrdworker is memorizing a chant or the meanings of the runes, but it is one of the nine parts of the Self, (c) Q: Our emotions are our memories, both painful and pleasurable. Lovers once gave sprigs of rosemary to one another, because that herb strengthened the myne and thus helped ensure that they would be remembered. (c) Q: These, then, are the nine parts of the Self: lic, hyge, willa, wód, mód, mægen, hama, myne, and fetch. Most of these will have a role in your magic work at some time or another. (c) Q: The Telga (Wand) (c) Q: The Seax (Knife) The seax (SAY-ax) (c) Q: Weland is an elf, or spirit, who attained the status of a Saxon god. Known for his ability as a smith, Weland was captured and imprisoned on an island. There he was forced to craft jewelry and other items for his captor. But eventually Weland escaped the island using a pair of wings he had made for himself. (c) Daedalus, is that you?...more
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