This week, a brother of mine died. I had known him since he was just 15, and in the time between, we were friends, brothers, bandmates and partners in crime. My tribe, his tribe, had our wake for him, in true Wolves fashion, which lasted throughout the entirety of two days and nights. The event culminated in a ritual during which runes were sung, so that even in death, he could find his way back to the wolf-road, and join us again as we wept, and laughed, and loved and fought in his honor.
I woke up today feeling like the last few days had been one long dream, an experience that occurred outside the boundaries of standard reality. As if my life was a train on the tracks, and I was somewhere at a campfire out in the prairie watching it from a distance. I felt washed out, faded and tired from the events of the last few days, and drained from grief. This theme has run the entire thread of my life, and I am no stranger to sorrow and loss.
Discussing our brother’s death was hard, but it reminded us all of an important fact- when we give our lives over to something greater than ourselves, it no longer belongs to us to spend as we choose. That final confrontation with King Death will come when He wills it, but our life belongs to an idea. Our days must be spent thereafter in service to that idea, shaping ourselves, and through will and action, molding ourselves into an archetpye that physically represents that larger concept.
Life is often brutal, and can wear down the best of us, so that in moments of weakness, we may say “there is no purpose,” and succumb to the crushing waves of despair that threaten to drown us forever in empty slumber. But our lives are not ours to give. They belong to our brothers, our tribe, our ancestors, our ideals.
A million million years of mathematical improbability have led to this very moment that I sit here writing this, or you sit here reading it. The combination of our genetic make-up is one that has never happened before, and will never come again- we are the tip of the spear, the leading droplet at the forefront of a waterfall of blood that rushes behind us with power and awful weight.
It becomes our responsibility to not waste this glorious realization. Our destiny is waiting for us, and it should be discovered and seized with strength and power. We must find joy in overcoming, and look at sorrow as a sweet luxury to be tasted like ambrosia in order to remind ourselves that grief for the dead is a grief for how short our time is. To remember that the only thing that matters while our flame briefly burns is that we create a lasting effect on this reality with our deeds, deeds so great they shake the web of Wyrd and alter the world to its foundations. To leave behind us a legacy that matters, that will survive a thousand years, and our names will be spoken by those who come after us, long after our faces are lost to the sands of time- WE LIVE FOREVER.
Some days it becomes more important than others that we remind ourselves of the reasons we exist, and the reasons we must be harder than life, and continue to draw breath. We who subscribe to an idea, and choose to become it, LIVING RUNES in a world of grey banality, will be the legends of tomorrow’s sagas. Hail the victorious dead.
