In the land of the Gods

It's been (as usual) longer than I intended.

In June, my family and I - my wife, my mother, and my two dearest friends and I, flew to Iceland for a week. Four of the five of us are pagan, and three are heathen or heathen-ish. 

We spent the Summer Solstice in the land of the midnight sun, and saw a legitimate 24 hours of daylight on the Solstice day. 

Being in a land which doesn't see real darkness is a really bizarre head game on your sense of time. At 11:30PM, it is easy to be outside casually walking around, not realizing it is 11:30PM. 

We spent the first two nights in a house literally beside the sea, at the beginnings of the Westfjords. We saw more sheep than people, and saw some of the most wondrous, bizarre, barren but beautiful landscapes I have ever seen. We spent a night nearer to the south of Iceland, with a beautiful endless field for a backyard. We spent our last three nights in the capital, driving around to various places of interest, and parking the car and exploring the downtown areas on foot. From a purely tourist perspective, Iceland is beautiful, the people are wonderful, and the horses are wonderful creatures (coming from someone not overly used to horses.) The air is clean and fresh, our accommodations were all absolutely lovely. 

On the spiritual side...that is a whole other level. 

The spirit of this country is alive like I've never felt before.

For the Solstice, we went to Þhingvellir--it's a national park, the historic seat of the Alþing, and a very powerful place, having been there now. It was wildly windy and rainy for most of our time there, but we - inclusive of my mother - found a flat rock to use as an altar, and placed on it what things we'd thought to bring with us, and did several rounds of a blöt with a bottle of Brennevin. 

A waterfall at Þhingvellir

A very dear and very sacred-seeming encounter with Goose

I of course loved birding in Iceland, and was especially excited by the possibility of seeing Greylag geese "in real life". Goose is my totem, the greylag specifically - while we sometimes get the odd stowaway here in winter with the flocks of Canada geese, the odds of seeing them are rare. We saw them in Iceland almost right away, but never up close and never within photography range.

After our ritual, we continued down the path for a ways, and there they were. A few geese settling in for the night ("night" being relative - it was after 10pm but the only dark was cloud cover.) We watched for a bit and I crept a little closer for photos - and the geese were kind enough to let me in on their little secret - goslings! 

I'd see them again later at a pond in Reykjavik, and closer up, but that night at Þhingvellir there was magic at play. 

It's a pretty surreal feeling now to wear my Mjolnir pendant, knowing it's been in the sea of the Westfjords, and has laid upon a rock as an altar at Þhingvellir. I've been wearing it practically nonstop since I got it as an iniation gift from my wife so many years ago - the silver is starting to show the sort of deep worn tarnish that can't be polished away. And now it's been on this amazing trip with me.

In other news, I lost my grandmother last week to a long battle with Alzheimer's. It was thankfully very quick when the time came - she did not have to linger or suffer too long. As I've been puttering in the garden this past week, I've been thinking of her a lot. 

It's good to be back - maybe sometime soon I'll get back into posting more than every 6 months, perhaps? 

Glad Yule!

Hello everyone. I hope your various holidays have been treating you well!

I've been busy but also less busy than normal for this time of year - it's pretty awesome, actually.

We've had an abnormal month weather wise - with several small snowstorms back to back, with a lot of freezing and thawing. The past week has been our more typical mild rainy December - but it was weird to see snow and ice on the ground, and have minus double digit windchills, before mid-January.

Garm and I did our runic initiation - I pondered for awhile on "sacrifice", and what I could possibly offer to the Alfather in exchange for the knowledge of the runes -  what I could give up to Him, that I had not already given. And then I had a small epiphany - as Odin sacrificed himself to himself, so should we - not a sacrifice to him, but to ourselves.

I gave it some thought-- and decided to shave my head.

 

It may seem silly, but as a woman, a shaved head is an unusual thing, usually relegated to butch lesbians (and I am a lesbian but definitely not butch) and cancer patients. Women with shaved heads purely for the fuck of it are rare.  I also have a very strong attachment to my giant floofy mane of curly hair. But this is something I've always wanted to try, just to shatter expectations of me and embrace my femininity in a different way. Nootls did the honours.

It's already growing back a little (I may shave it again because the low-maintenance nature of it is lovely for the winter.)

Back at the middle of the month, I started mixing together some ingredients to make a kyphi-style incense. I say kyphi style, because the general proportions and amounts of things were more or less following this recipe, but used a pretty varied list of resins and herbs, trying to make a sort of "Northern Forest" scent - evergreen resin, birch and pine bark, and juniper berries. I just combined the wet and dry ingredients tonight, and since benzoin powder wasn't available, I rolled the little balls in ground gum arabic to help it set. I had way too much "wet" ingredients left, so I mixed up some other stuff on the fly to combine with it, just for the hell of it - waste not want not! We'll see how it turns out!

Tracking my recipes in a messy, scribbly fashion.

My winter altar, updated just a little with some red berries (dried multiflora rose hips)

My incense, all balled up and ready to cure for a bit before use! Fingers crossed! 

Yule was lovely - we had a small ritual with our friends, had a candle processional through the house, put up our tree, and drank warm mulled cider. Christmas, which I celebrate in secular fashion with my friends and family, was lovely also. 

Together my little pack and I will feast on roast goose for Old Christmas (otherwise known as Little Christmas) since our schedules didn't align well over the holidays and Yule fell in the middle of the week.

I got out for a good long forest hike today - it's been long overdue, and was delighted to confirm that wintergreen carpets the ground in my local woodsy park. It's harvest-able far enough off the main path that I feel safe using it.

Such a pretty little plant!

 I've taken to trying to understand my hamr - here in the concept of the shape one's soul takes if it wanders away from the body. I've taken the shape of a Grey Goose for over a year now - but another animal has also arisen as prevalent. I've mentioned her vaguely before - a creature with a rather snarly reputation perhaps being debunked by modern science. I'm not quite ready to talk about her yet - we're still learning to understand one another and her role as a fragment of my soul.

But winter brings with it many journeys inward.

I hope some brightness shines for you--in my part of the world, the worst of winter lays before us, with the heaviest snows and most treacherous ice and the cruelest of the cold winds-- but knowing that now each day will be a little longer and brighter than the last gives me hope.

May it for you as well.