Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Ansuz Meditation

Creation, Wisdom, Order
After the thunder of Thor grounds the destructive force of the lightning, the rain that falls along with it fertilizes the fields. So too does Ansuz follow Thuriaz. All experience is a lesson, when seen correctly, and all can be use for growth and inspiration. From his suffering, Odin gained wisdom. If Thuriaz is chaos, destruction, and fear, Ansuz is orderly, creative, wisdom. In spite of being orderly, it is not always simple. Even well organized systems may be extremely detailed and complicated. Just consider Celtic knotwork!

Consider, even, the complexity of a good speech. First, a being must be complex enough TO speak – something bacteria, for example, or even human babies, cannot do. The speech, on top of this, needs to be well organized, with wisdom in its ideas, and well chosen words, in order to be effective. Even the simple act of uttering a sentence begins with an invisible thing, a thought, something which cannot have its existence proven, beyond which chemicals are attached to it and where it fires. Is dopamine itself a thought? Is the thought based on where it is? Would it fire in the same place in everyone who tries ice cream, enjoys it, and is then made to remember the experience? Perhaps, perhaps not. We have no proof of the content of thoughts, external to the mind of the thinker. Such is the difficulty in treating those in comas, as well. All we have are chemicals and ionic charges, surging and flowing.

We take this invisible thing and give it form, in tangible, measurable soundwaves, with detectable physical vibrations in the objective world, recordable, provable, but still carrying the unobservable, hidden, and unknowable. No wonder we miscommunicate, when we rely solely on sharing invisible ideas across a medium which must be learned through itself.

We hear too often what we want to hear, and only learn language as it is passed on – by parents or guardians, teachers (in our native tongue, and in other languages), friends, business associates... directly or through observation, language IS system, and tradition, and order. Without this system, one cannot even communicate ideas of anarchy! (How dangerous extremism can be, if one thinks this far into it!)

While sometimes organization and tradition fail us, this merely means we passed down the wrong lessons. They must be periodically revised when needed, and other times kept. Traditionalists don't like new ideas, revolutionaries don't like old ones, and a balance must be kept. Sometimes there are problems best solved in ways we have solved them before – for all their flaws, our ancestors were not inferior beings, as we sometimes like to think. Indeed, we have our own flaws, still. Sometimes, old systems no longer apply, or must adapt. If we cut and burn all old knowledge, we may abandon something not needed now, which will be later. There is, perhaps, no greater historical warning on this than the burning of the library of Alexandria. The knowledge it contained may have been scoffed at in those days, but how much we could have accomplished if we hadn't had to rediscover its ideas, like a heliocentric universe, all over again! While its treatises on a geocentric universe were perhaps no great loss, how much else did we lose when the knowledge of the past was burned indiscriminately!

This is how we received the wisdom of the Norse gods, as well – through records which were kept. We also lost many of the oral tales told in halls, and what a loss! In this way, oral tradition is much like a volva or mystic – sharing echos down the ages, or of the voices of the gods, filtered through a living mind. Too often we filter difficult messages, then become angry when “reality happens” and breaks through anyway, in spite of not being “invited in.”

There is interdependence between Ansuz and Thuriaz, wisdom and difficulty. The gods made what they did from the primal chaos, and chaos and destruction clean the slate for creation.

So it is.
So it will be.

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