fyribua

Latest Posts by fyribua

A must-read for all Norse mythology fans! :D

Not so long ago, I was telling you I could not find anymore the thesis I had read a few months ago about the Norse goddesses, and that contested Riccardo Ginevra's paper about Sigyn's name, but I did not remember its title... Well I found it on Academia.edu, and EVEN BETTER, I found the academic who wrote it, the amazing and very knowledgeable Ellis B Wylie , aka @loptrcoptr.

Her Master thesis is truly interesting, and give us more information on the Norse goddesses, allowing us to get to know them a little better :3

academia.edu

A Full(a) Roster: Re-addressing the Ásynjur in Snorra Edda and Beyond

The Ásynjur, goddesses of old Icelandic myth, do not draw much scholarly attention. When they do it is fairly dismissive, labeling many deit

Thralls of Skuld - Chapter 6: Eyes in the Sky

Read on Wattpad and AO3

After a night of scarce and fretful sleep, she sought out Geir. He had come to see her, briefly, when she was still bedridden, but she had not seen him since. Still in pain, the walk to Geir and Siv’s family house left her shaking and pale. When she sat down next to Geir on the wooden bench, there was a sheen of sweat on her brow, and her breathing was hard.

The house of the Geir was one of the largest in Eiklund. It had a well adorned boat-shaped oak exterior with carved wooden dragons on each end. Inside was a large central health and many benches and beds on either side. As the custom bid, four generations were living under Geir’s roof, all eating well thanks to Geir’s prowess as a warrior and subsequent investments in livestock. 

Eira indicated with her eyes that what she was about to tell Geir was not for the ears of everyone.

Siv looked none too amused as Geir and Eira shuffled to the far end of the house to carry on their conversation in hushed tones. As they settled on a small bench, Eira began telling Geir what had happened the night before. The quiet that had taken hold of Geir since Svidland reigned for a few more moments, before he said “Strange things are happening in our time” to no one in particular. 

Desperate to get back on the side of camaraderie with this sullen version of Geir, she pledged “Old friend, I need you to tell me your thoughts about all of this. I know you want to protect me, to protect everyone, and that is why you’re against it -” 

Geir cut her off: “Eira, I’m not against it. At least not anymore. What Rolf said in Roskilde.. It has stuck with me,” he took a deep breath, as if admitting to a deep secret. “What if we could really have changed all those terrible things that have happened?” His eyes moved to his wife, before looking back at Eira, deep wells of dark grey water.

Eira bent her head, pulling at a loose thread in her tunic. Without looking back to the wells of Geir’s eyes, she said quietly: “The vølve also taught Unn seiðr. That’s how she saved Ulf’s boy last winter.” 

Eira did not want to break the trust of her friend, but she knew this might sway Geir. She could not be alone in what she thought she might be getting herself into. Geir’s eyes glimmered more brightly now, ignited by her words, and Eira knew  she had cast the right net. For Eira, she was driven by the deep injustice of some people being born to power while others were born to thralldom, both figuratively and literally. But for Geir, it was a sorrowful need for bargaining with the universe, and she had just presented him a way to do it.

“There’s a far leap between whatever happened in Svidland, and saving the lives of children. Maybe I can only wield destruction, and maybe Unn can only heal, who knows,” the words flowed quickly from Eira, now a bit frantic, thinking she had struck an ore of something in the rock that was Geir “But maybe there is more to it. We can all learn magick, that’s what the vølve said. At least that’s what I think she meant. Maybe we have all been beaten into submission for so long that we have been blind to the opportunities. Maybe Geir, just maybe, we have a chance of something that has not been bestowed upon anyone else in the memory of man, and I think we’d be as dumb as trolls if we do not see it through.”

Geir looked for a long moment at Eira’s imploring eyes. Then, the strained heaviness in the air lifted around them, as his face split into a toothy smile. “By the Gods Eira. I should think you are scared of me, the way you are pleading for your life. Calm down now. I agree with you.”

“You do?” 

“I do.” He reached out to pat her knee awkwardly. “I think you should find out what the vølve is on about. Eira, you are woven from a different cloth than Unn, even than the rest of us. There’s a drive in you that the rest of us do not have, I have always seen it. I worry that you may have to pull the heaviest cart in this. You’re brave, I’ll give you that, but your impulsivity and your principles make you stupid.”

Eira scoffed, but submitted to a small smile. Where Geir had needed weeks of reflection to come to his conclusion, she had known from the moment she woke after the battle against the Geats, that she was going to pursue this. She had not dedicated much energy to consider the dangers of learning forbidden magick, in the same way Unn had when it had been bestowed upon her. Eira had simply propelled herself into it.

Geir’s silence had now been broken by the many thoughts he had undoubtedly harbored in the past many weeks. “Promise me you will do everything you can to keep this from the Jarl. It might not only catch up with you, but all of us. Ingmar is not a soft man. And do not pull anyone unwillingly into this. One bird chirps quieter than a hundred. You need to stay undetected until we know what is at stake. And who knows, maybe this is all a fluke. There is no need to lose your head before we know for certain.”

Eira nodded, although she knew that it was not a fluke. The vølve had given her a clear mission to find the magick around her, and she was brimming with ideas of how to do it. She stayed at Geir’s house for a little while longer, as they discussed in hushed tones the many opportunities that may be before them.

Naturally, she went to the vølve’s hut next. The low wooden structure was covered in turfing on the ceiling and outer walls, blending it completely into the tall grass around it. It had none of the typical adornments of most houses, yet there was a mystical air about it as she approached and realised that she had never been this close to the seeress’ hut.

As she stepped in the door, an odd darkness engulfed her. Unlike the airy longhouses made for socialization between family members, the vølve’s small hut was divided into even smaller sections by large pieces of dark, musty cloths hung from the walls. She entered into a small receiving room, furnished only with a small open fireplace with sleepy embers in the middle of the room and a few stools. When Eira knocked, the vølve had called for her to enter, but somehow seemed completely unaware that Eira was now standing in front of her. The pale woman was dressed in simple, dark robes and sat on the stamped earth floor in front of the embers, staring blankly ahead.

It was as if a large, soft fur had been laid over all of Eira’s senses, and the silence and darkness felt suffocating in the small space. She waited for a moment, shifting from one leg to another once, twice. Then she cleared her throat. Still, the vølve said nothing.

“I have thought about what you said yesterday,” Eira muttered through the thick air. “I would like for you to teach me.” 

At this, the vølve’s eyes clipped to look directly into hers. It was the first time she had looked the odd woman in the eyes. They were like fog on bleak autumn mornings.

“I cannot teach you,” she declared.

“But you said-” 

“I said you must look around.”

Where the vølve’s eyes the night before had danced in and out of Midgard, they were now overwhelmingly present on her. Eira had to avert her eyes, pretending to take in the hut around her, although she could barely see a thing.

“How in the nine realms am I supposed to learn on my own? Nobody can do that, not even those born to it.” she protested. Had the vølve truly sought her out, opening a door so significant, only to leave her no better off? 

“To share my knowledge untethered with you will be to invite destruction upon all of us. There are eyes in the sky.” 

Something about the vølve’s reluctance to say outright what she meant provoked Eira. Perhaps it was a tool of the trade, she thought, but she did not appreciate it. “You taught Unn!” she blurted her words accusingly. “Why is it different with me?”

“You will see eventually. Now you have to trust the world around you. Be quiet, and listen. Find the magick, it is there, I swear it to you.” 

“Will you not even tell me how?” 

“No.” the vølve said plainly. “Now leave me to my rumination.”

The seer looked back down into the embers before her, and seemed to almost fade into the darkness as she did. The suffocating air of the hut pushed Eira out.

Eira stomped away on the path back towards Eiklund. Her mission had been utterly unsuccessful, but something the vølve had said stuck in her mind. There are eyes in the sky. Looking back over her shoulder, she saw two large black birds circling above the hut.

…

Sól and Máni chased each other over the sky for days on end, as she tried to do as the vølve had told her. 

She started with what she knew. She cast runes of Kenaz and Perthro again and again in a hundred different forms. Kenaz, the rune of knowledge and revelation of hidden truths, she had painted onto her skin in numerous variations, with both pigs blood and ink. She even carved it carefully with a small knife into her arm, although blood rituals were a darker kind of magick that she had never experimented with before. Perthro, the revealer of fate and the unknown, was carved into her floors, above her bed, on the amulet she wore constantly around her neck. She sang the galdr she knew, although the verses were meant for war, and she sometimes worried that if it worked, she might set her house on fire or worse. There was no need to worry. None of her efforts had revealed anything to her.

This was all the magick of the common people, warriors and old crones. Amulets and symbols, runes and song. It was not what she was looking for, and it yielded her nothing more than a hoarse voice, and maybe a number of enchanted objects or unintended curses that might backfire on her at a later time.

Next, she had sought out Unn, asking her to share what the vølve had taught her about seiðr. Unn yielded to do so, only after Eira had once again sworn herself to secrecy, a secrecy she had already broken. Unn admitted that she had indeed gone back to the vølve again several times, going at night until the early hours of the morning to avoid being seen by nosy neighbours.

What Unn taught Eira kept her engaged for days. The healing seiðr rituals were frightening and exhilarating at the same time. The galdr was long, breathy verses calling upon Eir and Freyja, less harsh than the galdr of battle spells, but somehow more forceful, more earnest. Yet far more fascinating was the act itself of drawing upon seiðr. When Unn had first explained it, it had made no sense: There should be a thread of hurt or malaide that could somehow be touched, pulled out of the suffering subject. Unn kept telling Eira over and over again to visualise it as they practiced the ritual on Eira’s own wound, and Eira kept failing. There was no thread, no unearthly manifestation of her wound.

They could not practice on anyone else, lest they give away their wrongdoings. So the two were bound to practice, repeating the same exercise until both their patience wore thin, their words short and snappy, and their familiarity with each other became a hindrance for progress.

Late one afternoon, Unn had been seated over her cauldron brewing herbal poultices, when Eira’s impatient complaints had overflowed her cup. Unn threw her arms at Eira, gnarling “By the Gods, your skull is thicker than a troll’s!” and accidentally tipping the cauldron to spill its boiling contents over her calf. Unn yelped loudly, her delicate features twisted in pain as the skin on her legs was scorched. Eira gasped when she lifted her dress. 

The ugly sight of broiled skin ignited something in Eira, and she drew close to Unn, placing a calming hand on her knee to inspect the wound as she raised her voice in the healing galdr she had been taught. Unn flinched at her touch.

The adrenaline led her voice to a booming undulation as she lilted through the verses of galdr. Looking deeply into the wound, somehow she saw it. Not physically like a vision before her eyes or a change in the world before her. Instead, somehow, inside the physical world in front of her, she saw that something else was hidden. It was not a thread, as she had been looking for all this time. Instead, a disruptive floating mass, of no particular color or shape or density. It was not in this world, not here in Midgard, but somewhere else. She had to reach into the else-ness to touch it. The sound of Unn’s wailing disappeared around her. With the delicate, precise movements Unn had taught her, her fingers rolled and danced around it, until somehow the mass dispersed.

She was not sure how long it had taken, she had lost herself in the process. Only when Unn sighed loudly in relief and thanked her, did Eira look up to see her pale and blotchy face. Eira blinked her eyes numerous times, not quite able to focus on the actual world in front of her. She remembered the vølve’s floating eyes.

Once she had mastered this method, practicing over and over on Unn’s quickly healing leg, she began feeling restless again. She had always wanted to learn the ways of healing, but now she knew that it was not the full potential of what she was seeking. 

She began sitting out at night again, trying to reach an absolute stillness of the kind she had felt in the vølve’s hut. For endless hours she sat concentrating until her head hurt and her eyes blinked slowly with sleep. Sometimes, the screech of ravens jerked her awake.

Ravens seemed to flock to Eiklund these days, often sitting perched on longhouses or roaming the skies restlessly. Eira thought she knew what it meant, but tried to shrug it off. 

…

On the second fortnight of listening intently to the universe, which offered no sound, and staring resolutely into nature, which yielded no clues, she gave up. Casting aside all that was known to her about how long it took for even highborne’s to learn magick, she stomped back to the vølve’s hut to demand more.

When she slammed open the door without warning, she was met by an entirely different house than the first time she had been there. Light streamed in from the open door behind her, illuminating the walls hung with rich red tapestries. In the middle of the room, a fire roared happily. The beaten earth flooring felt warm through the soles of her shoes.

The toastiness of the empty room took the built up tension right out of her lungs. She had prepared a speech of demands and complaints to the stubborn, uncooperative seer, but there was no one to deliver it to. 

She called out a hesitant “Hello?”

After several minutes, the vølve emerged from behind a woolen curtain, a bowl of porridge in her hand. Even the pale seer looked less ghastly in the warm light of the fire. Eira quickly snapped shut her gaping mouth, after realizing that, well, of course, even mystical seeresses with floating eyes probably needed to eat. 

“Good morrow Eira,” the vølve greeted with her sing-songy thrill, seemingly unsurprised by the unexpected disturbance “I think you may be ready now.”

Man with Two Rainclouds, Richard Cartwright.

Herbert Royle

Brünnhilde the Valkyrie by Arthur Rackham

Far, far away Soria Moria Palace shimmered like Gold

Loin, très loin, le palais de Soria Moria scintillait comme de l’or

Artist : Theodor Kittelsen

(by throughdarkforests)

📷: terez_ses

The Boat (Virgin with Corona) (Odilon Redon, 1898)

Тихая ночь. Сергей Данчев, 2020

Edward Okuń - Ave Maria (1902)

John Brosio (American, 1967) - Evening Dancer (2003)

Thralls of Skuld - Chapter 5: Freyja's Gift

Read on Wattpad and AO3

In the first days of healing she had been hazy and weak from the pain. She had been confined to her small house, close by the cluster of longhouses that belonged to Unn’s family and a few other neighbours. Unn stayed in her house, changing her dressings while singing songs of healing Galdr. Eira slept through the days, and in turn spent many nights awake. They shared Eira’s bed at night, like sisters did. Unn woke early before the break of every day, just as Eira was beginning to blink her eyes more slowly, overcome by sleep, and Unn started singing over her again. Unn had looked weary on those days, the dark purple under her eyes sinking into her usually plump face.

Unn had been horrified, at first, by the gravity of Eira’s wound, shocked that she was still alive. But as the days went on, Unn’s shock turned to disbelief at Eira’s speed of recovery. Eira wondered if Unn had visited the vølve again in her absence, but she did not ask. She had many, more pressing questions gnawing at her mind.

As Eira’s strength gathered, Unn returned to her own home. Still unable to sleep, Eira took to sitting outside in the late evening hours. She walked slowly to the grave mounds at the back of her estate, shrouding herself in a woolen plait to keep the chill of the night at bay. She would lean against a tree or sit atop of the small grassy hills, the resting place of her ancestors, sighing deeply with the pain she still felt as she moved through the world. And there, she would open her heart to the nature around her, hoping that an answer might reveal itself to her. 

She went over what had happened on the battlefield again and again, the many impressions having faded into distortion. It was clear that the force had come from her, Magnus had confirmed as much. But even he could not explain the nature of it. Had it come from her hands, as it did with the legendary battle mages, or from the earth around her? It could have been some divine intervention from above her. How had she felt when it happened? What had she done the moment before? She did not remember. 

Then she moved onto thinking what an odd coincidence it was, that somehow high levels of magick seemed to be swirling around the sleepy villagers of Eiklund, with the vølve’s arrival and inexplicable events visiting both herself and Unn in a short span of time. It seemed like the stuff of myths.

Some nights she drew the rune of Eiwaz in the soil at her feet, thinking it would evoke some sort of revelation, although she did not know which kind she was looking for. After casting the rune, she would sit for hours looking into the darkness, searching for a physical manifestation of an answer. 

She lost herself to thinking, and her mind would often land on how the children of Ulf never got to be buried in their ancestral home of Eiklund. As if struck by the thought itself, she would stand up as fast as she could, and scuttle home. She could not push away the idea that she might see them, the little blond children, in the ghostly form of gengangere - spirits that walked the earth again, driven by things left unresolved.

The thought visited her again and again. She was starting to think that perhaps it meant something, the thought stuck in her mind like a spanner in a wheel. The day the children died was the first day Eira questioned what was natural and unnatural in this world, what must be, and what, perhaps, need not be. Maybe it was the seed that had been planted, which had later bloomed into her own super natural actions in Svidland. Perhaps she had somehow… 

A movement in the darkness startled her. She gasped audibly, preparing herself to stand, but knew that would be futile. She was still weak, and in any case she could not defend herself from spirits.

“Who goes there?” she called, telling herself it could not be them. It was a single, dark shape, much too big to be the young children. She sat gaping and waiting for it to near her, when she saw that it was the vølve. The waiflike woman moved much like she expected a spirit would, almost floating. She was walking straight towards Eira. 

Eira was dumbfounded. She had never seen the vølve leave the surroundings of her small abode outside of Eiklund.

“Do you find what you seek?” The vølves voice was whispery and rasping, but it had a sing-songy quality to it. As if the songs required for her magick had settled permanently in her voice.

Eira was still stunned by the vølve’s unexpected presence, and thought hard to look for an appropriate answer. “I am not sure what I seek”, she said finally.

“I am sure you are finding more than you think.”

“Why have you come here?” Eira observed the vølve’s light, delicate features. Her skin and hair were both almost the colour of fresh fallen snow, but her face looked youthful. Eira did not know why she had expected a vølve to look deeply furrowed and lined, like the famed Elli who was old age in human form. Her eyes were pale too, and they did not look directly at Eira. Instead, they floated as if between worlds. If it had not just been the two of them, it would be unclear if she was addressing Eira at all.

“I have been waiting for something to be set in motion. It seems that it has now happened.” 

The vølve was standing beneath Eira, who was seated halfway up on side of a grassy burial mound. The vølve was incredibly tall, thin like a draugr, but almost meeting Eira’s eye sight. 

Eira’s brows furrowed, the confusion of the nonsensical statement gripping her, making her wonder if she had fallen asleep without noticing. She decided to ask the vølve a question that had been on her mind for weeks. “You taught Unn seiðr?”

“Yes.” the vølve replied matter-of-factly. 

“Why?” asked Eira. 

“For the same reason that I am here for you now.” the vølve replied, as if that would explain everything. Eira felt a pull of impatience, unprepared to be disturbed by nonsensical riddles on this night of introspection. But she knew that it must be something significant that had moved the vølve to seek her out. Eira for the second time asked her why. 

“I came to tell you a story.” The vølve stood unmoving at the foot of the small hill, looking up at Eira, or perhaps at something behind her or inside her, as she continued her whispering song:

“The first war of time was between the Æsir and Vanir. It was a war that has since been unmatched in force and violence, waging on endlessly, neither side gaining grounds, until both the Æsir of Asgard and Vanir of Vanaheim agreed to strike a truce. Do you know what happened next?”

The impatience gripped Eira again. The vølve had come to her home, in the middle of the night, to tell her fables of skaldic poetry, children’s stories? Of course Eira knew, every child had heard of the legendary creation and divine history of the universe a hundred times over.

“They exchanged hostages,” Eira replied, willing her voice to be neutral, patient. “Some of the best Æsir were sent to Vanaheim, and likewise Vanir were sent to Asgard.”

The vølve shook her head slightly, murmuring dismissively “Yes yes, of course, but not that.” as if Eira’s answer was too glaringly obvious. “I mean what happened with Freyja. The seiðr.” Eira now listened more attentively, as the vølve sang on: “The hostages who came to Asgard were three: Njordr and his children, Freyr and Freyja. Njordr, who guards the sea and Freyr who guards the fields and prosperity of nature, were both named overseers of sacrifices from the mortals of Midgard. Their vanir magic still casts the rains of spring and the waves of the ocean to this day.”

As she continued, Eira noticed how the vølve swayed slightly as she spoke, like a seedling tree in the late summer breeze. Eira still questioned whether she was fully awake.

“Freyja also came to Asgard, beautiful Freyja who wields the most important forces of mortal life and doom. Love and war, and above all, seiðr. Freyja’s knowledge, power and skill is almost without equal. Except, of course, for Odinn, who is the Æsir allfather and in his own right a God of exceptional power and knowledge. 

As unison of the Vanir and Æsir settled in Asgard, it was Freyja who shared her seiðr with the Æsir. She bestowed this gift of unification to Odinn, teaching him to alter destiny and weave prophecy. Freyja did so generously, without corruption or fear of being overcome by her former foe.” 

The vølve’s melodic flow of whispers stilled. After a moment of silence, she asked Eira “Do you understand?”

Eira did in fact not understand anything. She strained to fit the pieces together. “Seiðr can be taught.” Eira started slowly. This was not new wisdom that had been bestowed upon her, and she thought she might be missing the mark as she followed up with: “Like how men of the Jarl’s court are taught magick?”

The highborne wielded much more powerful magick than the simple galdr and runes that the common people relied on. It was not quite the legendary manipulation of the natural world and bending of fate that the Vanir and Odinn wielded, but highborne magick-wielders could heal complex wounds and cause incredible magickal damage. Some could even spur simple but effective illusions. There were also stories of mortals changing their day of death, pushing it in front of them through the Gods’ mercy. Many suspected that was why the King Gorm, known as Gorm the Old, was still fierce at his old age. His wife was said to be blessed with strong traces of seiðr.

But all of that was not readily relevant to Eira. Those people were born with Odinn’s blood - and she was not.

“Magick is bound by blood lines.” Eira was shaping her answer slowly. “Odinn was not just the king of the Gods in Asgard. It is fabled how he once walked often in Midgard, siring many noble bloodlines. When he left to rule over Asgard, he placed his mortal sons as rulers, bestowing upon them some of his magick. Thus, magick can only be passed down through bloodlines, or obtained through deals with the Gods.” 

That was the reason, aside from puritan elitism of course, why marriages between high-magick wielding individuals and the common people were forbidden. Some said the only reason the commoners had their rudimentary magick in the first place, was due to frivolous copulation through the ages. Eira thought maybe the vølve was alluding to this - the nature of how magick was learned and taught, trickling from the goddess Freyja through Odinn to mortals in Midgard.

Lost in her thoughts for a moment, the vølve’s soft tutting brought Eira back to the present. “The magick wielded by men is not the magick I speak of. Seiðr, real seiðr can weave threads into the Web of Wyrd, commanding spirits and bending time. With real seiðr, the unseen can be made seen, and the seen made unseen. Real seiðr can alter destiny.”.

Eira wondered if the vølve somehow knew, as the pale lady recited her deepest desires back to her. If the vølve knew the depths of her despair as she thought of all those senseless sorrows that need not happen in Midgard while the Kings and Gods feasted in their halls.

“This seiðr, it is meant to be shared, Eira. In the spirit of Freyja. I have waited for you to be ready.“ 

“You have been waiting for me?” Eira sputtered. She knew that what had happened in Svidland had been an exceptional force of something entirely inexplicable. She knew that it was unheard of for a commoner to wield battle magick of the kind that had flown from her. It had not been in her control, and to this day she was still not sure it had truly come from her. She told the vølve as much.

“I am not talking about what happened in Svidland. You are practicing seiðr right now.” the vølve continued, a wistful smile floating in her eyes with her last few words: “Well, at least you are trying to.”

Now, Eira had really lost the plot of what was happening. She groaned loudly, struck by a sudden sharp headache as her blood pressure rose and the wound on her neck pulsed. The vølve was unphased by her exclamation. 

“Seiðr requires a deep connection to the threads of the world. Sitting out, like you have done for days, is the simplest, yet purest form of seiðr there is. If you just listen..” the vølve’s words trailed off softly. She lifted her chin slightly to the dark, cloudy night sky stretching endlessly above them, half closing her eyelids as if listening intently to something in the air. Eira only now realised that she had been holding her own breath for a long time, as the vølve took in a long, slow lungful of air and a smile tugged at the corners of her lips.

“It is late,” the vølve broke the silence. “You will find seiðr is not just at your fingertips, Eira, but all around you. I encourage you to look for it.” and with that, the vølve whirled around and walked into the night.

Kehoe art

Giulia Maria Belli - L'Alcove du serpent, 2021

What I’ve always longed for is a kind of soft silence. The kind one finds in the midst of green fields.

Glow worm cave, New Zealand By danielkordan

'The Hill' by Aron Wiesenfeld.

Escape To the Stars, Pleiades Sisters by Ashley of GhostlyInnovations

"Never reproach another for his love:

It happens often enough

That beauty ensnares with desire the wise

While the foolish remain unmoved."

Hávamál - The Sayings of Hár, stanza 93 (Hollander trans.)

Odin and Brunnhilde, Ferdinand Leeke (1898)

12 Days of Medieval Illuminations. Today, 11 medieval suns. (Getty Museum)

rain circles

Bathed in mist

Theodore Kittelsen

crypt of the cathedral of Anagni, 12th century

"Exercise for 'reversing space,' which involves sitting very still, with all attention focussed in the centre of the chest, and slowly surrendering and realising that instead of looking you are being observed; instead of hearing, you are being heard; instead of touching you are being touched; instead of tasting you are food for God and are being tasted... it is most certainly necessary to seek, to ask the question; rather than pushing away the answer by chasing after it, one must ask and listen at the same time, in trust and good faith that the answer is contained in the question."

~ Reshad Feild, 'The Last Barrier'

[Ian Sanders]