Where did January go?
Published: Tue, 02/03/15
Happy Imbolc, or Winter Thing as it is less imaginatively described as a Stav festival. Celebrating the end of winter, signified by the arrival of the first lambs. There is a dusting of snow on the ground today, pretty much the first I have seen this winter here in Somerset. But the days are getting longer, it is already light and we can work outside until well after 5pm before we lose the light, we have a project to build a substantial fence at the moment, should be finished this week.
Anyway, January is gone and we are well into 2015 and I intend to make the most of this year, I am certainly not getting any younger so I can’t afford to waste time. I have been thinking quite a bit about Thor and the challenges he was confronted with on his visit to the Giants in Utgard. The challenges he was given were effectively impossible, drinking the ocean, lifting up the world serpent and wrestling with old age. But the bigger problem for Thor was the illusion that what he was attempting should have been relatively easy, drain a horn of mead or ale, lift up a cat, wrestle with an old woman. Yet even Thor failed in each task, the horn only went down an inch, he could only lift one foot off the floor when struggling with the cat and the old woman eventually forced the mighty Aesir down onto one knee. Thor’s Joten (giant) hosts afterwards admitted that they were actually much impressed with their guests refusal to give in, but
Thor was very angry that he had been so comprehensively tricked, if you read the whole story you will discover the other illusions Thor and his companions were under during their visit to Jotenheim.
Sometimes the illusion is going to be that a task will be very difficult when if you actually try it will not be too hard at all. Taking part in events where one teaches alongside experts and hope to be taken seriously can seem pretty terrifying. I pretty much avoided such situations until quite recently, I didn’t think I could make any kind of impression on people who train in ‘normal’ martial arts, eg not Stav. However I have been accepted to teach at Fightcamp for several years now and this year taking part in MACE. Don’t get me wrong, I consider it a great privilege to take part in such events and I put a lot of effort into preparing for, and teaching at, the event. It just isn’t such a big deal as I would have thought it would have been a few years ago.
Actually much harder for me is communicating the value of Stav training to my local community and getting people to train seriously. I have a core of six people who are and I am very grateful for that, but it needs to be rather more to make the project of a Stav centre viable. I am doing various things on that score and one of them is building an autoresponder sequence which will effectively be an introductory course on the Younger Futhork. There will be a series of emails with links to web pages teaching the basics of the 16 runes and other relevant topics. The first one is on the web and I will shortly be posting Fe and Ur, the pages are built and the text is written so I should be able to role it out in the next week and you get a preview. http://iceandfire.org/runes/w.html and I will post links to the other pages as the project builds up.
regards
Graham
PS Stav self-defence seminar in Crewkerne this Saturday morning 10am until noon, more details at http://somersetstav.co.uk/sd.html