Jormundgand's First Lesson
I was sitting at the
computer, as I had been all evening and well into the night, attempting to
concentrate on my work. It didn't do much good. Periodically I would
twitch and start, or realize that I had drifted off into a fog and lost several
minutes. I'm often one to lose time on daydreaming,
but usually I have a nice imaginative full-sensory experience to remember. I
don't
just fall into blank-mind states; my mind is too busy for that.
Then the urge hit me, strong and hard. "I have to go to the lake," I said aloud.
"Now?" asked my assistant. "It's midnight."
"I have to go to the lake," I repeated, trancelike.
"Then let's go." He'd had too much experience with these things to argue. We drove to the lake in silence, me clad only in a ragged black cotton skirt/loincloth. There didn't seem to be any need for clothing; it was fairly warm, I was cold-hardy, and I knew that any clothing I was wearing would be shucked anyway. I was pretty sure that this was not going to involve just sitting by the water's edge. "Someone's knocking, aren't they?" my assistant said knowingly. "I can tell by the way your aura feels. Like you're full of static electricity."
"I don't know who it is," was all I could say. We parked at the lot at the bottom of the hill; I went up past the locked gate toward the town beach. He stayed in the car, waiting for me. I remember going up the hill, seeing the moonlit lake like a mirror in the gap between the trees, and moving toward it. Then nothing....
...till I suddenly surfaced, staring at the sky. I was not in control of my body. It was neck-deep in water - I didn't remember going in! - and spinning, spinning around in a circle, fast. How could I move that fast, in the dragging water? The stars spun around and my brain felt squeezed aside, the language circuits missing. No words. Yet something was speaking, saying something, to something else. I was a telegraph pole, a medium for communication that was tongueless, languageless, communicating in images. Then I felt my body sucked down under the water and I prayed, with my last thought before I blacked out again, that whatever it was wouldn't drown me.
I came to underwater, the surface a mere inch above my open eyes. I was lying on my back under the lake's shore. My head rested on rocks; I could see the stars through the distorting water. I panicked, wrenched myself gasping for the surface, sucked air into my starving lungs. Staggering out of the water, I dragged on my ragged skirt and limped back down the hill. I could not make head nor tail out of the incident at first, but much of that was because large pieces of my brain were still not back on line. I couldn't speak, at first, to the concerned queries of my assistant, except to croak out, "Cold. Big. Cold." In a minute, another word was added; oh, the joy of being allowed sentences! "Big. Cold. Snake."
Hours later, at home in bed, having been fed hot tea and tucked shivering under my covers, I sorted it out. The Great Serpent had moved through me, borrowed my flesh, that much was sure. Whatever I had been used for, I figured it wasn t about me and that I'd never know. Yet the Gods never do anything for only one reason. I still do not know why the Snake was using me to communicate, nor with whom ... but a trace of memory remained in my brain, like a stain on the wall that, squinted at, reveals a runic message.
Jormundgand 's lesson to me, left almost as an afterthought on its way through to its unknown, mysterious purpose, was not phrased in words at all. It was entirely images, some with such depth and complexity that putting them even into the most poetic words seems clumsy and superficial. Still, this is my job, whether I like it or not, so I tried to translate it as best I could into the poem-lesson I write here.
In
Between.
Star and sea.
Light and dark.
Water and wind.
Earth and sky.
Midgard and Not-Midgard.
Not of Midgard,
No longer of Not-Midgard.
The place between,
The point of all perspective,
The way of all clarity.
Clear and not-clear
Clear as an inch of water
Not-clear as the depths of the sea
In
Between
Clear and Clouded
Is where sight begins.
In
Between.
Male and female
The place so much both
That it is neither.
The place where two are not two
Mashed together but still visible
But are one, and have never been other.
Completion. Wholeness that needs no other
To balance it. Only itself.
The place of Third. The place
Of earliest memory, floating in the salt waters
Of birth, this place of perfect balance.
In
Between
One and Other
Is where shape begins. In
Between.
Here and There.
This is where you start.
If you cannot find this place,
You cannot move anywhere.
This is not here, where you are,
Not there, where you want to go,
And you must know this place,
Intimately, comfortably,
And this means you must know how
Here and There look from this place,
And how you look to the
Upturned downturned faces that watch
When you live in neither.
Do their eyes widen? Do their feet retreat?
Do their lips curl? It matters not,
When you are Here you are part There,
When you are There you are part Here,
But mostly you smell of
In
Between
Touch and Faraway
Is where soul begins.
In
Between.
Beginning and ending.
The perfect circle,
Tail in the mouth,
Eternal spinning of time.
Beyond understanding spins
Sea and sky.
In
Between
The heat that birthed
And the cold that reclaims
Is where we begin.
Artwork at top by NessieValkyria.