Sworn beneath the old gods (and new).
Carried like iron under the cloak.
Faith · 2026-07-21
The thick black lines looked harmless on the red painted wood. That was part of the problem. They had not gone there casually. I used pencil, string, painters tape, measurements, and paint because the shape needed to belong. The lines had to be centered. The angles had to balance. [more]
Life · 2026-07-07
An algorithm is a set of rules that takes information, weighs it, assigns values, and makes a call. Sometimes it’s simple. Sometimes it’s dressed up in machine learning and enough math to make investors excited. They chew through historical data, recent results, trends, weighted variables, guestimates, and whatever else you feed them. [more]
Life · 2026-07-05
and that's the headline, not Brazil lost to Norway 2-1. But that's a different rant. This one, in typical FIFA tradition is about the refs. That first goal being pulled back still does not sit right with me. If the player is offside, make the call. Raise the flag. [more]
Life · 2026-07-03
Over a decade ago I drove across the country in a jeep to begin a new chapter in my life. I didn't know I was coming home. I didn't know that for the first time in my life I was going to find someplace that felt like home. [more]
Faith · 2026-06-21
Midsummer itself belongs to the feast, to the long light, and to the simple fact of having survived the dark half of the year. It is the day for naming what was accomplished, by me, by those bound to me by blood or by choice, by the people who remain when things turn hard. [more]
Faith · 2026-06-16
I usually meet Jörmungandr before I put my feet on the floor. The phone lights up on the nightstand. A storm warning from the county. A message from work sent after midnight. War footage from a country I’ve visited. A stranger furious about something another stranger said six hours ago. [more]
Faith · 2026-02-24
A virtue list can become a costume faster than a man notices. Capability. Courage. Hospitality. Restraint. Oath-keeping. Honest work. Put the words in a row and they look like a religion already. They are clean, serious, and useful. They also ask almost nothing while they remain words. A coward can praise courage. [more]
Faith · 2026-01-20
The body is not an idea that happens to need shoes. It is the first tool most of us are given and the last one most of us lose by increments. It lifts, carries, kneels or refuses to kneel, works, aches, eats, sweats, sleeps badly, heals slowly, and remembers old injuries at inconvenient times. [more]
Faith · 2025-12-23
The beard sits where policy can see it. That is the plain trouble. A religious practice kept privately can be misunderstood, ignored, or tolerated by accident. A visible practice has to pass through other people’s eyes every day. It becomes inspectable. It becomes administratively convenient. [more]
Faith · 2025-11-25
The dangerous part of prayer is not asking. The dangerous part comes afterward, when the words have been spoken and the old excuse is still sitting there, alive and patient. A man asks for courage and then has to decide whether he meant courage or rescue. [more]
Faith · 2025-10-28
A clear record is a small mercy. That sounds dull until it is missing. A box of unlabeled parts. A tool no one can identify. A story with three names and no dates. A family habit nobody understands but everyone keeps defending. A repair made twice because the first person left no mark. [more]
Faith · 2025-08-26
Genealogy is not a list of clean names. It looks that way at first: dates, places, marriages, children, migrations, military service, occupations, causes of death when the record is willing to say. A family tree can make the dead seem orderly. Put them in rows. Connect them with lines. [more]
Faith · 2025-07-29
The worst use of divination is obedience. That may sound strange from someone who casts runes, but the point matters. A rune reading that lets a person surrender judgment has already failed. It may feel holy. It may feel relieving. It may even feel severe enough to be mistaken for truth. [more]
Faith · 2025-07-01
Ancestor practice gets awkward when the dead do not all belong in the same story. The record may be neat. Names, dates, marriages, children, places, maybe a grave location if the paperwork held. Then the religion starts asking questions the record cannot answer. What did this person believe? [more]
Faith · 2025-04-29
Thor is often reduced to the moment of impact. Hammer raised. Giant struck. Thunder answering the blow. The image is not wrong, but it is too convenient. It lets protection become a single dramatic act instead of the continuous labor that makes human life possible in the first place. [more]
Faith · 2025-04-01
A weapon is the least interesting part of being armed. It draws the eye because that is what weapons do. Steel, polymer, leather, weight on the belt, a tool placed where the hand can find it: all of that is visible. [more]
Faith · 2025-02-04
Forn Siðr is a dangerous phrase if it is allowed to become pretty. Old Custom sounds stable. It sounds like something received whole, cleaned by age, and carried forward with both hands. That is not the religion I practice. [more]
Faith · 2024-11-05
In Iraq, one of our soldiers was being medevaced to JBB. At the same time, a senior leader was more concerned about late and missing NCOERs. The evaluations were late. Some were missing. That mattered. NCOERs follow soldiers through promotions, assignments, schools, and the long administrative memory of the Army. [more]
Faith · 2024-09-03
Odin is easier to admire at a distance. Up close, the old man is trouble. He seeks wisdom with an appetite that does not know when to stop. He sacrifices, bargains, deceives, questions the dead, gathers the slain, wanders under names, and keeps arranging the board as though every piece exists because his problem is the central problem of the world. [more]
Faith · 2024-07-09
Most people do not die at the high point of a story. They die in beds, chairs, vehicles, hospitals, kitchens, nursing homes, fields, and ordinary rooms that were not arranged for symbolism. They die after long decline, sudden accident, bad luck, age, disease, foolishness, exhaustion, or the body simply finishing its work. [more]
Faith · 2024-04-09
Some roads should not be argued with. That is not a romantic statement. It is a practical one. Ice does not care what the schedule says. Wind across open country can make a capable driver look foolish. Snow can reduce the world to taillights, lane markers, and the small circle of attention left after fatigue has taken the rest. [more]
Faith · 2024-03-12
The heroic version of work is usually too late. By the time somebody is praised for saving the day, the day has already come close to being lost. The pipe burst. The roof failed. The system crashed. The family meal became a scramble. [more]
Faith · 2024-02-13
I pull the books down one at a time and spread them across the table. Tacitus. The Eddas. Sagas written after conversion. Law codes. Translations with arguments buried in the footnotes. Archaeological reports describing buckles, graves, burned bones, and the dark stains where wood used to be. [more]
Faith · 2023-11-14
The easiest mistake is to give Loki horns and be done with him. That mistake has a certain administrative charm. It sorts the file. Odin can remain the wise father, Thor the honest defender, Baldr the shining victim, and Loki the devil who explains why the story went bad. [more]
Faith · 2023-10-17
Calling Týr my patron saint is useful in exactly the way a borrowed tool is useful: it reaches the nut, more or less, and then reminds you it was made for a different machine. The phrase explains something quickly. People know what I mean, or think they do. [more]
Faith · 2023-09-19
Fragments are not trash. They are also not whole buildings. That is the first discipline of reconstruction: refuse both contempt and fantasy. The surviving pieces of Germanic Heathen religion are uneven, damaged, regional, late in places, Christian-filtered in places, archaeological in some places, poetic in others, legal, linguistic, folkloric, comparative, stubborn, and incomplete. [more]
Faith · 2023-08-22
Blood can make a claim. It cannot make a lie true. That is where a great deal of family, tribe, community, and religious talk begins to fail. Loyalty is a real obligation. It is not a decorative word for liking people who make life easy. [more]
Faith · 2023-07-18
Planting a tree is an argument with impatience. It is not a very loud argument. The shovel goes in. The root ball is set. The soil is returned. Water is carried. The little thing stands there looking inadequate to the size of the claim made for it. [more]
Faith · 2023-06-20
The worst person in the room is not always the one raising his voice. Sometimes he is calm. Sometimes he has good posture, correct paperwork, and a tone of weary professionalism. Sometimes he uses phrases that make cruelty sound like process and cowardice sound like prudence. He does not need to snarl. [more]
Faith · 2023-05-23
Anyone who thinks a beard is just not shaving has never kept a decent one. Neglect grows easily. A beard worth wearing does not. It has to be washed, trimmed, combed, oiled, shaped, corrected, and watched for the small rebellions hair stages when it believes it has found a better command structure. [more]
Faith · 2023-04-25
Waiting is not the same as being absent. That is the part easily missed by people who only respect force once it has made noise. A raised hand is obvious. A shouted order is obvious. The man who acts first gets counted. The weapon drawn early proves itself to the people who confuse display with readiness. [more]
Faith · 2023-03-28
Fear is often right about the danger and wrong about the cure. That is what makes it hard to judge. The foolish kind of fear invents monsters where none exist. The more dangerous kind sees something real and then becomes convinced that any answer is justified because the threat has a mouth big enough to swallow the future. [more]
Faith · 2023-02-21
A gift does not stay clean in the hand. The moment it passes to another person, it changes the air between them. Food, money, shelter, a tool, a ride, a cup poured at the right time, a spare room, an introduction, an offering set down before a god: none of these things remains only itself after the giving. [more]
Faith · 2023-01-24
The dead are easy to abuse because they cannot interrupt. That may be the first rule of ancestor work worth remembering. The living can quote them, polish them, recruit them, soften them, sharpen them, and arrange them around whatever argument needs an old face behind it. [more]
Faith · 2022-12-27
A carved mark is not an opinion. Once it is deep enough, the wood has to be worked with that mark present. The craftsman may curse it, hide it, follow it, or make the whole piece answer to it. What he cannot do is pretend the cut is not there. [more]
Faith · 2022-11-29
The hardest part is not finding five minutes. It is surviving them honestly. I sit in the dawn light with my eyes closed and try to breathe without turning the breathing into another task. The door is shut. The phone is left alone. Nobody needs an answer, a decision, or a useful version of me. [more]
Faith · 2022-11-01
Some holy days are easy to keep when the table is full. The harder test comes later, when nobody is impressed, nothing smells especially festive, and the work has become ordinary again. The cup still needs to be set down. The space still needs to be cleaned. [more]
Faith · 2022-09-27
Blood is a record. It is not the whole archive. That sentence will irritate two different kinds of people for opposite reasons. One kind wants ancestry to be nothing but biology, a chain of bodies and names moving backward until the records fail. [more]
Faith · 2022-08-30
The bird on the fence does not owe me anything. That is a useful thing to remember, especially in a faith where ravens already carry heavy weather. A raven is easy to promote. It lands at the right moment, looks too intelligent for comfort, tilts its head like it has read your mail, and suddenly the whole morning has a plot. [more]
Faith · 2022-08-02
The useful kind of misery has an exit. That sounds almost indecent in some religious rooms, and in plenty of military-adjacent ones too. People like pain better when it looks meaningful from a distance. Cold becomes discipline. Hunger becomes purification. Exhaustion becomes proof. [more]
Faith · 2022-07-05
By Midsummer, the year has stopped asking politely. Everything is up and moving. Grass, weeds, insects, heat, work, appetite, repair lists, plans that looked manageable in March and now stand in the yard with their hands on their hips. The light stays late enough to remove excuses. [more]
Faith · 2022-05-31
Some places answer badly to being treated as a bank. That does not mean they speak. It does not mean every floorboard complaint is a spirit, every cold corner a warning, every bird on a fence a message. Human beings are talented at loading the world with our own weather and then pretending the sky sent it back. [more]
Life · 2022-05-22
I sat down to watch The Northman in a nearly empty theater in Arizona not knowing what to expect. What it going to be Viking movie? You know the sort. Longships cutting through cold water. Axes catching the light. Men with questionable hygiene shouting about Valhalla before running into a shield wall. [more]
Faith · 2022-02-08
A guest changes the room before he says a word. The chair moves. Food is counted differently. The stove, the table, the good cup, the spare blanket, the tone of the conversation, the path to the bathroom, the volume of the house after dark: all of it adjusts around the fact that someone has crossed from outside to inside. [more]
Faith · 2022-01-04
Protection begins before anyone sees it. That is the part people miss when they turn protection into theater. The visible moment gets the attention: the raised voice, the locked door, the weapon, the hard look, the body placed between harm and the person who cannot meet it. Those moments can matter. [more]
Faith · 2021-12-07
"I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it any futher." Darth Vader. The promise changes after you have already acted on it. That is the part that does the deeper damage. Not the ordinary disappointment of being told no. Not the irritation of a plan failing. [more]
Faith · 2021-11-09
The hand matters because it stayed. That is the part I keep returning to. Not the wound as decoration. Not the missing limb as a convenient symbol for sacrifice. A hand can be lost through accident, punishment, stupidity, courage, or bad luck. [more]
Faith · 2021-10-12
The first lie is usually reasonable. Not dramatic. Not wicked. Just reasonable enough to pass inspection when a man is tired, comfortable, successful, or surrounded by evidence that nothing has fallen apart yet. I will do it tomorrow. I have earned the rest. This season is different. [more]
Faith · 2021-09-07
A house can tell when it has been treated as a storage unit. The sink gathers evidence. The floor keeps its own record. Hinges complain. A loose step waits until someone carrying laundry finds it with the wrong foot. None of this requires poetry. [more]
Faith · 2021-08-10
The comfort in Ragnarök is not that everything burns. Any fool can admire a fire from a safe distance and call the wreckage profound. Destruction is easy to make impressive if the reader is not the one standing in the ash. [more]
Faith · 2021-07-13
I wipe the shrine surface with a cloth and the cloth comes away slightly gray. Not filth. Use. A fine film of dust that settles on every horizontal plane in a lived-in house, plus the faint stickiness that follows drink offerings and the dull bloom that candle heat leaves when wax has been warmed and cooled a hundred times. [more]
Faith · 2021-06-15
I set the offering bowl down before it holds anything. Olive, ash, and pine under the fingers, three woods joined into one working object that has already outlasted several clever theories about what an offering is supposed to purchase. The bowl is empty at that moment, and the emptiness is useful. [more]
Faith · 2021-05-18
I keep a small stack of books and printouts near the shrine, not as decoration, but as working tools. Some pages are marked. Some arguments have been crossed out after better evidence arrived. Dust settles on the shelf the same way it settles on everything that sits still long enough in a New Hampshire house. [more]
Faith · 2021-04-13
Most people meet the Norns as three women sitting beneath a tree, spinning the lives of men. It’s a familiar picture. Three sisters. Past, present, and future. Thread passing between pale fingers while the rest of us stumble around above them, unaware that the length has already been measured. [more]
Faith · 2021-03-16
A storm rolls over the mountains and somebody points toward the clouds. Thor must be busy. It’s the sort of thing people say when they know you spend too much time reading old Norse poetry. Thunder shakes the windows, lightning cuts the sky open, and there he is in the modern imagination: Thor, God of Thunder, swinging Mjölnir somewhere above the weather. [more]
Faith · 2021-02-16
If you've spent any time around modern Heathenry, you've probably heard Týr described as the god of war. Or justice. Or law. Or honor. The reality is both simpler and more complicated. Germanic gods are not really "gods of" single things in the way modern people often describe them. [more]
Faith · 2021-01-19
Ask most people what happens after death in the old Norse world and they will give you one answer. Valhalla (or Valhöll for the purists). A roof of shields. Benches crowded with warriors. Meat, mead, and the daily pleasure of killing your friends before everyone gets back up in time for supper. [more]
Faith · 2020-12-15
At Ragnarök, Fenrir kills Odin. The wolf breaks loose from his bonds, crosses the ruined field, and swallows Odin. None of the time he spent gathering the dead, seeking wisdom, and preparing for this day saves him. Then Víðarr steps forward. He does not give a speech. [more]
Faith · 2020-11-17
Most mornings, after I claw my way back to consciousness, I sling a worn leather sheath around my neck. Inside it is an iron knife. That is usually followed by pants, a shirt, my Gibb’s knife, and my EDC. The ordinary liturgy of leaving the house. Most people never notice it. [more]
Faith · 2020-10-06
Heathenry has no clean little filing cabinet where every god, ghost, oath, and doom sits waiting under proper labels. It is older than that. Messier. Recovered from sagas, ruins, folk memory, family instinct, and the quiet pressure felt when a man stands alone and knows he is not entirely alone. [more]
2026-07-21 | faith
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