A Jump In the Right Direction

Earlier tonight I had the opportunity to spent a long time creating music with friends, tapping into my creative side — something that’s very satisfying. Afterwards, as the night went on, I was given the opportunity to go with some different friends and partake in other activities, unmentionable here, that may be more questionable and less healthy for the mind, body and soul. An herbal experience to say the least.

Being the logical guy that I am, I considered this option long and hard. I am always the type that is constantly learning; even if I subject myself to highly dangerous situations, it is to learn from these situations and thus become stronger. I suppose that meets eye to eye with existentialist thinking, but also much of what I feel the god Odin embodies, a patron deity of mine.

I had trouble figuring out whether I should go into this experience or not, so when I couldn’t decide (it takes me long enough which type of root beer to buy, let alone a mind-altering choice like this) I consulted the Runes. I am a caster using the Elder Futhark, and have been studying both divination and rune magic for about seven years now, give or take a few months. The experiences I’ve had have been profound to say the least. It was a rare occasion tonight, however, that I would cast the runes and then ignore their response.

They advised me strongly to simply stay home and go to bed. When I defied them, and sought wisdom for the night, I was given a slap in the face. In what seems like an event beyond anything naturally physical, a rune literally jumped out of the bag and hurled itself against a nearby wooden box. I watched this effect in awe. There is no way my idle hand could have somehow jostled the rune very much, especially not in a way that would send it hurdling out of the bag and into my face. Thus, it was a jump in the right direction. I listened to its advice, and went anyway.

Lo and behold, the night did not work out and I gained as much as I would have going to sleep. I am glad that this was the case, and that it took defiance to prove to me once again that there are supernatural things in our world, and the Runes are one of them.

Metaphysical

I pull out two quartz crystals from a decorated wooden box. They smell like the pine and white sage they have been resting in. I roll them around in the same hand. Even though they are about the same size, there is something strangely different about them. Yes, the one on the right feels warmer, heavier in some strange way superseding the physical.

I set down both of the stones, then pick up the strangely warm one in my hand again. There is a dark radiance within. Clutching it tightly with my right hand, I flex my muscles and apply a great deal of pressure to it. Although it is natural for my muscles to get tired once they have done work, something is different now. The more I press, the weaker my arm becomes, as if it is going numb and I am losing blood, losing my very strength.

The vibrations that permeate from this stone are more than dark and mysterious. The unfriendly character of it bodes badly. Something must be done.

A sacred bowl is found and filled with water; rock salt is cast into the water, rippling as it sinks. The stone leaves my hand and is thrown into this water, surrounded by lavender, to be purified and sanctified, in order to banish what lies beneath its glassy, gorgeous surface and exists in the airless world within the stone. It screams. I watch as it sinks and sits among the salt, its energy nullified, utterly. Only a weeks time can cure these ailments.

The Mind Revealing Itself To Itself

My trip away from the grind and groginess of daily life in the modern world has many desireable aspects. First and foremost, I am able to do just about anything I want — provided it does not involve driving, illegal activities, large expenditures of money or similar unreasonable things. Yet with free time comes perhaps more responsibility than with the necessary duties of life as an adult.

I often jest of losing my sanity during the intense months of the semester, most recently the struggle of finals week. Time to myself, recreational activities and affection generally keep me stable. Now, as I near the end of my break between semesters, I find myself more stressed out than during the most difficult parts of my college life.

Once I stepped through the door to my house and realized that I had over a month to do whatever I wanted, I immediately became sedated. It is untrue to say that getting large amounts of sleep and relaxation time are not beneficial to my overall health; especially as an epileptic, I’ll take what I can get! Beyond that, though, I get sucked into mind-numbing activities, most recently my old love of video games.

I sit around for many hours at a time, so long that when I move or get up to do something else not only is my posture stuck in a crooked, stooped way, pain springs up around my body and my bones creak. I know I have sat far too long somewhere when I feel older than an old man for the first minute or two of walking around. Worse, each day I can feel my muscles atrophy more. Where once I had rock-hard calves and powerful thighs, I now see muscles shrunken with disuse. As a hiker and somewhat pragmatic guy, there are surely some problems afoot. No pun intended.

So now, after wasting away like a wizened plant for a month (and probably exaggerating my case a little bit, as writers’ do) I’m grappling for answers, attempting to find a solution to a self-created problem. I’ll tell you how I do.

Until next time…

-hrafn

p.s. check back regularly and look for a new series I will be writing on food, culture, and advertising. First up on the chopping block: Lay’s “Natural” Potato Chips. I’ll seek out where our food comes from and put companys’ claims to the test of my analytical eye.

Untitled 12/9

The soles of my boots weather;
time flows on like molasses.
I wander, knowing no general
direction, feeling my way forward
into the premature dusk of
northern winter evenings.
During the daylight hours
I may be caffeinated, timid,
or tame; Come night, I wish
to dance with you, to play
and make games, to hasten
about in a crazed yet
idyllic way – to spread
my wings, blacker than
the falling twilight,
and breathe in the deep,
cool air.

11/8

I have a drug addiction — perhaps it does not seem like it on the outside to those unknowing onlookers, but what I desire most is an end to the seizures (the spells, the episodes, the visions).

Drugs make that happen, at least for awhile — hard drugs, not by traditional standards, but enough of them to be measured in grams per day, intense enough to keep me in a perpetual, paradoxical high, a great slowdown of the mind.

My waking, striking eyes are always in struggle against the tremendous forces of the anti-epileptics; yet, I feel when my body revolts, when it speaks to me and says for me to rest. I do not lest, for as the busy world goes, each day closer to strangling itself in the global chains and wires of its norms and infrastructure, about to keel into cardiac arrest, so too do I follow and drift in a drug-laden stupor, hallucinating dim images of future success and liberating peace among this catastrophe.

Sleep is never enough to shake off the effects, no matter six, ten, or twelve hours — it is a waking coma that I am in, unable to fight the burden from my consciousness.

10/19

Watching my ticking pocket-watch.

It’s going too slow, I’m going mad. Not quite eight yet, can’t take my drugs and bask in their effects. Drinking Captain Eli’s, reading Jane Eyre, wishing I had a real beer, that I knew what the French ladies were saying — that’d be true gorgeousness.

Impossibilities, I’m crippled under hundreds of pages of text — for what reason? What’s the expectation anyway? My hands are trembling, my jaw is jerking, I want to scream confessions into the open air and onto deaf ears. I pretend play that I’m in a cafe snapping my fingers to the heartbeat of expression — no more apprehension, depression, or falling behind the imaginary pack.

Cliff Bar, too much sweet in my mouth. Just swallow the pills.

Smoking, 17 Years Old

The darkness molested by the
pollution of city lights and
street lamps blazing through the
summer night hung low over
the pond — we called it the
puddle — and there we sat,
near the edge of the murk, in such
stark contrast to the relative
order around us, illuminated in
sharp blacks and whites like in
those old movies.
Cigarettes hung loosely from our
lips, smoke poured and streamed
into a poisonous plume,
in a smooth and sophisticated way –
as we fancied ourselves to be –
silently pondering the existential and poetical,
smoking cigarettes at seventeen.

Untitled #19

Autumn. A distant smile.
Laughter accompanied by
receding attention.
Rain patters through the
open window. Friends
depart, each looking into
the other’s eyes, searching
for glistening feelings. She
stifles a cry from the swirling
void within her heart.
The front door opens, and
I leave alone to embrace the wind,
decades ago. Cold rain patters onto
my face.

A dream during twilight

She bears a burden that chills her heart,
takes away the aches and pains,
slows the rhythm of life to the minimal
pulse excited only by alcohol and running
away from fear, fear of solutions to what seem like
indelible problems yet are as evanescent
and fleeting as fireflies.
Her body becomes colder and her frozen breaths
can’t sustain her for much longer.
Her warm appearance is unlike that which lies within;
while perhaps thoughtful, calm and capable of true
acts of humanity and love, she is as broken and twisted trees,
mangled not of their own accord,
yet still holding with a firm grip on to the power of life
through each brittle winter that howls and roars to claim.
It will take a year of working,
a year of sun, fertile rains and the
loving being of all that is, but she who
once stumbled in the frigid dark and
grasped blindly for a hand to hold
onto may know herself as herself,
alive and empowered –
nothing trivial, not any more.

Living on an Island — Coyote, Moose, & Angry Beavers

This past weekend my August was kicked-off with a wild biking, canoing and camping trip to Marshall Pond, probably 15 miles from home. Rather than using a motor vehicle, my friend Rob towed our full-sized canoe, loaded up with some camera equipment, a boom-like camera jib arm, sleeping bags, and the like, on a bicycle trailer bolted to his seat. I carried our water supply, my gear, an underwater camera, and a few other things a day pack that, once packed, was bulging and full. The point of our voyage was to catch get some great shots in of different animals, interesting things that live in ponds, and of whatever else we could find.

We got a few strange looks on the journey there. Those were surely merited; two young, shirtless guys on bikes carrying several hundred pounds of gear and an 11+ foot, blaze-orange canoe (we named it Moxie) biking down the road is an unusual, if not insane sight. They were all well and good, though; people chuckling, giving us thumbs-ups, cheering. At about mile 10 of our grueling trek, we stopped at a farm stand and explained to the farmers what the hell we were doing with a canoe on our bike.

Finally, after three to four hours of biking, taking short rests for water and granola bars, we reached Marshall Pond. Initially, we were quite unsure of ourselves. There was an island in the center of the pond, no more than 50-60 feet in diameter, that would be our base camp for the weekend when we weren’t in the water filming. Our issue, here, was that we brought everything but the canoe paddles; somehow, those had slipped our mind. We were able to borrow two paddles of sorts from a generous neighbor who had a camp on the lake. Within the course of an hour to an hour and a half, we made two trips out to the island, first to drop off our gear, then to drop off our bicycles so that they wouldn’t be stolen.

Living on an island is an interesting feeling. We had probably eight to ten trees around us, most of them quite old and venerable, as well as masses of blueberry and other bushes. Luckily, for us, there were ripe berries just ready for the picking. In the center of the island was a shale firepit that we used for cooking our dinner of creamed corn, a can of tuna, a cucumber, and triscuts between the two of us. Even though we had already caught and documented a very large garter snake and a painted turtle, it was after dinner that the real action started.

We decided to go canoing at sunset. Marshall Pond is made up of three different pond and bog segments that are connected by passageways. By the time we were nearing the exit of the first, and out of view of our island-home, twilight had almost completely taken effect. There was perfect stillness and silence on the water, sans the sound and wake of our canoe and our gentle strokes. Suddenly, an object flew by my face. Then, for the next ten minutes or so, we were surrounded by little brown bats out for a dinner of insects. Some of them came within only a few feet of our heads, others inches from our paddles or the canoe. Unfortunately, we did not have the bat detector with us, but even so we could hear their social calls later on — a loud, incredibly high pitched screeching vocalization.

Unafraid of bats, we kept on canoing. When we entered the second pond, a horrific call sounded from the bog — that of a great blue heron. Shortly after this, there was an explosion in the water near to us, startling both of us. Rob reassured me that it was just a beaver doing a tail slap to fend us off, but nevertheless the volume and intensity of the sound is frightening. At one point during the night, we were surrounded by three beavers all doing tail slaps. In the morning we discovered that there is a beaver lodge in that area.

The most compelling sounds of the night came around the entrance to the third pond and the woods on the shore next to it. At first, we heard something continuously moving around. We stopped paddling, listened for awhile, and then intermittently used our flashlights to try and spot something. Eventually, we paddled the canoe ashore, but did not get out. The sounds continued. Large sticks and branches were being broken by an unseen creature. Rob and I bet that the only things large enough to make that sound were moose or black bear. He’d of a black bear in that specific area before, but there was no way we were going to get out in the middle of the night, unarmed, and try and “catch” a black bear on film. We could be shredded by an angry mother bear defending her cubs no matter how fast we could run. When nothing came in sight, we decided it was safest to get back in the water and leave that sound for later.

On our way back around the pond, before we got to that location again, we whispered about how it would be awesome to hear some coyotes — how that would basically finish off our night of amazing creature sights (mind you, much of this was filmed!). Only minutes after we said that, coyotes started howling from the mainland — luckily not our island — with their terrible yipping, screaming tones. Rob and I attempted a coyote call back to them somewhat unsuccessfully. Nevertheless, they called again a few minutes later and sent shivers up my spine.

Just after the coyotes called, we were unknowingly back near the beaver lodge again. A tremendous boom and a splash of water, as if a cannon of sorts had been shot at us, erupted less than 20 feet away. We quickly paddled out of beaver territory, adrenaline pumping us forward. When we were near the end of their area, however, we heard some more rustling in the woods that made us stop to try and film whatever was moving around in there. This, perhaps, was the most perplexing sighting of the night.

Every so often, there would be a splash of water as if something was getting in and out of the water. We were dead silent, floating about fifty or so feet away from the shore as to give us a safe distance if it was a predator, and so that it would have less of a chance of being bothered by our noise. There was a lot of twig breaking and rustling — the sound of something big moving through the woods. We turned on the camera and began filming and explaining what was going on. Then, we heard a very deep grunt of sorts, similar to something that a large horse might make. Almost immediately the two of us said “Moose”. Several more grunts followed that and the sound of things moving around. Both of us quickly turned on our lights to try and spot whatever was right there in the bog near us, but because of the density of trees, we couldn’t see anything. The evidence of moose was there, though.

We went back to the island, amazed and excited, made a small fire, logged our day on film, and then went to sleep. Somehow, after just a day, the island felt like a home. There wasn’t much to take cover under in a storm, there wasn’t much to use as fuel for a fire (we burned most of the available fuel in one day), the sharp shale around the island was mostly inhospitable and smothered in slippery algae that would send someone flying forwards, probably only to be slashed up on rocks, and the ground was filled completely with roots. There wasn’t much of anything desirable there, but it was private and in the middle of a pond with no one — most importantly, the outside, fast-paced, technological world — to bother us. There is the special feeling of making it on your own, like in those survival or adventure stories (I read Gary Paulsen non-stop when I was younger) where the hero has everything working against him but manages to make it. We weren’t crashed in the middle of the Pacific, but we didn’t have a whole lot of food with us, not nearly enough water, had only rocks and roots to sleep on, and had to use some sort of survival skills to ration what we did have and make a cook fire.

Being an islander is a unique skill — or way of life — that must take some getting used to. I can imagine nearly a thousand or so years ago Iceland first being settled, and the other islands in that area and around the British Isles. The challenges presented to settlers must have been phenomenal, more than to other pioneers because there was no way home but the open water. While we only had to canoe back to shore in order to start making way for home, it has given me a good deal of respect for islanders across the world and I’m ready to do some island hopping of my own.

-hrafn