Happy new calendar year! I don’t always feel the New Year very strongly but, this year, as Loki’s Chariot makes its way into Sowilo (where it will stay for all of 2023) a new pattern feels like it is emerging. The way may seem unclear but a tune is playing and inviting you to catch the rhythm, your body feeling its way into the dance. The counsel of the other planets is: take your time, there is no need to launch yourself onto the dance floor just yet. They remind us that, in the northern hemisphere we are still deep in the season of winter and hibernation.
Watch the recording of Middle Earth Readings below for more on the planetary movements and rune readings for this week.
In the Hearthspace we are starting a new year of exploration working with the edge-dwellers and exiles of the northern tradition. From the shadows the giantess Jarnsaxa emerges. An ancient power rising, cracking the husk of Rind: the winter-earth. Giant. Jotun. Thursar. An old, old power surging up from the deep earth, descending from dim faraway stars. Primal magics reaching out from the forgotten realms. Shadows chasing across the land, creatures of rock and stone and hidden places emerging in the winter twilight. It is, as yet, unclear in their minds, or ours, whether they come to strike us down or raise us up. Here on the knife-edge where the balance tips dangerously towards the edge.
Long has man dwelt alone within Midgard, seeing the otherworld only dimly. Blinded to the light of etin, wight and elf by the blazing heart of a long Summer Sun. Now the ancient ones are coming. The edge-dweller and the exiles. They are preparing in crevasse and cave, mountain-top and riverbank. Now is the time to listen, if ever there was one. For the earth may whisper, or it may crack wide and roar; swallowing all who have forgotten the sacred bonds of land kinship. Ready or not, an ancient power rises. The giantess comes and splits the veils that separate edge from centre, utangard from innangard.
