Yesterday's post - Waterfalls, Runes, and Asatru in Nature - got so many comments that I decided to follow up with a quote by Edward Abbey, from page 6 of his book Desert Solitaire. He captures exactly the concept of letting Nature, and the Gods, speak for themselves.
The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultual apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly-ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific descriptions. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.
Abbey was a gun-owning, beer drinking, poker playing defender of wilderness and a man of character. He was not Asatru, but in many respects he would have fit in very well with us. I recommend Desert Solitaire and his other writings. Various Asatru-related archetypes have been found luking, presumably without his conscious intent, in his tales.
Steve McNallen
Asatru Folk Assembly
http://runestone.org
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