Tag Archives: A Little Folks Alphabet

How to Navigate by the Sun

I do not advise navigating by the sun. It’s a mathematical mess with all parts in motion, the sun, the sea, you. Pure chaos. If you must get in a boat, stick to the coastline where you can see landmarks, read the marine life, always the same fish in the usual places, watch the birds.

If you have to cross the open sea do it at night, when you can travel by nice comfortable starlight. The stars are dependable, they never deceive, but the sun will burn you the first chance it gets. It’s shifty, you can’t trust it, not unless you know it really well. Look at it right now. Don’t look at the sun. Remember where it was yesterday? It’s shifted its position along the horizon. it does it every day all year long, and not uniformly. Its movements vary depending upon your longitude and the time of year. If you … More

Say something. Go ahead, you heard me, say it and listen to yourself. Now say it about a hundred years ago. Hear it? You can hear it. Different. Speech sounds change. Accents change. You’ve changed. You think you sound the same but go back home after some distance and they’ll tell you different. And they’ll tell it to you differently. English has changed, big time, my God it’s different. It’s old. It’s medieval. Let’s think of a famous medieval person, to see how old. Somebody with a real mark of distinction. Dante. Dante Aligheri. He finished writing the Divine Comedy in 1320. He’s really really old, hundreds of years. Think of this, in this current moment we are closer in years to Dante than he was to the start of Old English. And from the Rune Poem to us he’s in the middle of the path of life. Not the runes, they’re even older, the … More

Byþ

Remember your future, what you thought it would be. Put yours in mind, it’s different for different people. You know that, obviously, but I’m not talking about individual people. I mean groups of people, peoples, whole societies of people past and present. They way we think about future and what the rune carvers thought about it is not the same. To find the difference, if you want to know the root and the soul of a culture’s sense of future, get right up close to one specific word, and take an embarrassing long look. Make you both blush. Be. That’s the word. To be. This is the word for reality, and the way this word is treated always reveals a culture’s idea of temporality, and so much more. Be means existence, which precedes essence so some philosophers say, that we are neither nature nor nurture, but something foundational to both. This is true for people … More