Mankind is in a unique position. He has been given the mid-most world amongst many, and this middleness is not merely spatial, nor merely symbolic, it is also lantent with energies and powers. For just as green is mid point in the spectrum, and all other colours blend toward or away from it, each joined as a facet of the same thread of white light, so too is Jorth mid-point in the worlds, and all other forces, powers and possibilities meet at its crossroad, converge, flow toward and away from it. Now mankind has been given two sides of awareness, one awareness that works through his senses to bring in image and form from outside, and one awareness that is turned within, that gives him a sense of self-hood, emotion, identity. What combines these two into one whole, and gives them life, is experience. Man must not only take in, but process what lies outside, and find use for it, and that usefulness must be centered in the self to grant reason to life - self within an interconnected network of life - else life would have no reason at all.

We are not merely conditioned reflexes, we are thinking creatures. In our act of reflecting on what we take in from the outside, we have a great freedom from the start. There is no logical reason why our minds should begin their reflection with what comes in through external sources, we could as easily begin with what comes from within. Yet we are, in this age, conditioned to look outward first and foremost, to take in only what we have been taught is worthwhile, and similarly conditioned to accept from the self within us only those things we have been taught are valid. No great discovery, no soul-stirring song, in fact nothing truly "worthwhile" has ever been a product of such conditioning. It has come to men, farmer, artist and scientist alike, through a process of letting go of that conditioning, for even a split second; of their trained intellect falling back from the forefront, their conditioned minds letting go, even if for the briefest of moments, and the self inside them oberseving for itself, of itself, and saying "there is more to this than what I observe, there is more to this than what has been offered me, I the Self am free of these false restraints of paradigm and procedure, look..." And the scientist leaps beyond, suddenly, and realizes what has heretofore been obscured, the artist knows what is within his material as if it were merely awaiting release by his hands, and farmer realizes the life force within his grasp. This ability comes to modern man seldom, as it is never dependent upon high intelligence, nor preseverence to some code or ideology, nor any amount of university schooling: nor does it come through training. It is the breakthrough moment so few ever experience, the "ah" that comes after the mists of analytical murk just suddenly break apart and let show the immensity of the skies.

All first postulates rest entirely upon faith, in science as well as every other human endevour. And our ability to choose them, set them out and allow for what follows in our belief in them, is mankind's freedom, what sets him apart from all other thinking creatures in these worlds. To be told what to believe and rely upon what is told as the only means of knowing is a false and failing endevour. This is how we have come to miss out on the greatest most beautiful, most lofty things of this world, or so those who have truly seen them have insisted to us down through the ages. This is also how we come to callously destroy what is natural, and in frenzy for it seek again to build it back by artifice. Yet we cannot endow the life back into a marble form, a polyester tree, nor a paper rose. And so we feel some odd sense of loss and lack of meaning in our creations, never stopping to consider what is truly lacking.

We have heard tales of other worlds, other ways of being, just as in past centuries there were tales of rocket ships and railcars. If we have allowed for any intuitive feel in our lives, we are likely to admit the possibility, yet fall back to the rock hard sense that was our training, the sense that says these things cannot be because this is what we have been told. Yet I reiterate, the precious gift of freedom we have as human beings allows us to keep that sense of wonderment toward what is as yet unseen and as yet unknown open, if only a hair's breadth. The key to leaving that door unbarred and open wide is our excercise of freedom in its ulitmate form, and for the heathen this is called tru, or "faith". Faith is then not idle wishes, nor contructed fantasies, not blind belief, nor taught or preconditioned responses to the worlds. Even in its very definition, depending as it does upon the root sound "tru", with all the sense of truth that word carries, it would show to us that our definition of faith has nothing whatsoever to do with falsehood and fantasy. It is a prop that leaves open the door to wider observation, liberal acceptance of what enters, and eventually leads to true knowlege through intimate contact with those things that exist which the conditioned mind has always been swift to ignore, suppress and even destroy.

And so our spirits suffer with incomplete information, under the delusions rife in this age, under the reigns of preconditioning; compulsion, isolation, material and sensual boundries. Our experience of the worlds is stunted and thrawted nearly before it begins to walk, and we accept what we have been given to accept, merely this and nothing more. Our Elder Kin granted us unbounded freedom at our creation. That some would choose to use it to stifle and swallow whole the handiworks and very lives of countless generations they surely would not have chosen for us. This world is replete with life and soul, with interconnectedness beyond the minds ability to grasp or reason, and the freedom They granted us to have faith in their gift and see, know, experience for ourselves, is still ours. If it is hidden from us, it is due to our own inability to accept and claim it.

When my father said, "you can ride that horse", I did not choose to cling to my fears or my "reasons". I believed him utterly, a matter of purest faith, and that act of faith opened all doors wide to the spirit stirring life of riding. Just so, our Elder Kin say to us, there are souls in the trees, the waters, the orchards, there are spirits abounding in the thunder and the rain. The animals are your younger kin, for we have created them for your health and your aide, and your enjoyment. We have created compassion and reason and intellect and love. We have given each of you inner spirits that can fare through the worlds, if you so desire, and kin to travel with, before and beyond you to aide, to comfort, and to share your triumphs and sorrows. Do we not catch glimpses of these truths, these overarching realities, in our times of letting go and believing? Do we not have faith in their gifts?

If our ancestors communicated with their disir, their house wights and fulltruar on a very personal basis, if the landvaettir blessed their lands and the waves cared for their sailing, if they healed and nurtured by the weaving of word and nature, if they were cared for and gifted back in recompense by all the energies and spirits in the worlds, what has happened to us to be denied these things, but that one thing we have been told we no longer have? Freedom -to see, to hear, to feel, to intuit, to give and receive, naturally and fully - that experience is dead within us, unless we are bold, as the virtue we hold it, and we pry open the bars and bolts on the doors of perception, through the hammer of faith, and let what is truly without and within us again meet midpoint in our hearts. If we do, our lives have interconnectedness and meaning beyond any telling or sense of time, if we do not, we accept the chain that locks that door forevermore.

Constructed paradigms, agendas, ideologies and "isms" have no meaning to the truely natural man or woman who stands fully open as a child of the Regin. To accept any of these artificialities we pull shut the door of the vast, and mostly lost on us in this age, abilities of human perception; most often building walls around our spirits that remove even the slightest chance of peering out. Adamant faith in anything is a product of experience, just so, true natural unbridled experience as our creators wished for us is a result of faith. From actions done under such state of experience we naturally follow the way of positive orlog, as ethics and reasons come spontaneously to those who tangibly feel the living interconnection with all things alive. We step out that door into a stream of living vyrd, and the momentum continues on, carrying us into the infinite experiences available in these worlds of wonder and joy.

Religion is too often a mental excercise, liable to corruption and disease. On the other hand, faith is propping open the door, a release of power through experience, an unending, self-perpetuating cycle, an excercise of the spirit alone. Open the door, be bold. Know tru.