In a country that’s dealing with an MP and mother of two being shot and stabbed to death by a man in the street in broad daylight. A man who, according to some witnesses, shouted “Britain First” before firing. A man who had a history of mental illness and had connections to Neo-Nazi and right wing groups, as well as books and materials in his home.
A man who obtained an illegal firearm and, just over a week before the Referendum on whether Britain should remain in the EU. A country where the Daily Telegraph (one of the country’s most conservative newspapers) calls the murder “An Act of Far-Right Terrorism”.
I’m sat here, and all I can think of is all the neo-nazi scumbags in Heathenry, who rather than recognising that the elder heathen cultures valued hospitality and kindness to strangers, seek to expel and belittle people on grounds of sexuality, ethnicity, or physical ability.
All I can think is how wrong they are. How this island I call Albion has welcomed wave after wave of immigrants since the ice-age, including the Norse and the Anglo Saxons. How, for all the battles, the mixing of cultures occurred, how the people and land prospered together,
All I can think of is how unbelievable their fear must be, how much they must be certain that they are not enough, that they’re going to be swallowed up, everything they are is to be lost.
I’d call them frightened children, unable to face the possibility of Change’s elder brother, Death. I’d say they have no grasp of the old ways, of the knowledge that our ancestors knew – that there is no safety, and that the world is full of Life with its own agenda.
But that would, I think, be petty. Instead I wish more understanding upon them. Instead I wish revelation upon them, wondrous as it is – the knowing of the fact that we are inextricably bound together, across space and time. That all of us on the island are nourished by the same dirt, and the bones of all those incomers and outgoers. Those roots, our variegated multi-woven twining roots are what keep us alive in an uncertain world.
Our earth, our dirt.
Doesn’t matter where you come from, you eat the dirt, you’re welcome, y\’know? Muslim, Black, Gay, Straight, Polish, Syrian….you eat her dirt in the food and the water and she\’l take you, mix your bones with all the others yeah?
And the holders of those bones surround us – Roman cavalry from the Black Sea, African legionnaires on Hadrian’s wall, Brigantian tribesmen strengthening the arm of those who farm on holdings established by Norsemen a thousand years ago.
We’re bound together. That’s not hippy talk, but a fact of life and death. The ancients called it wyrd. And wyrd goes as it should.
It’s time to remember humans were made from trees, as in Norse myth. The land is us and we are the land.
Albion sang to William Blake once, gave him great visions and poetry of that vast giant. Its gods and goddesses, songs and stories, still remain, If we are to survive, we must do as our ancestors did, and learn to listen – to join our voices once more to the great song of adding and taking away. To go down Below and across the borders of Here and there. To answer the call to be watchers, singers, makers, dreamers and shapers again.
To drink from the well of Memory, and bring forth vitality from that freezing stream, to answer the Lady of the Lake, not with requests for swords, but with song and poetry and story.
I may be a cripple, I may me weak, but my heart beats under the skin, same as the mighty, and I have my Dead all about me. The lines and maps of men mean little, but the land remembers.
So we must learn to listen. To remember, and recall we were NEVER alone.