When I was a young boy, My family and I lived in a small quiet redneck mountain town. Now, I don’t want to age myself specifically, but it is necessary to create temporal context for the sake of relatability. This was decades before the marriage of the words “redneck” and “quiet mountain town” were connected in the cultural zeitgeist.
In any case, at the time we lived in “town” rather than in “country”…
And by that, I mean that the parcel of land our abode sat on was very small comparatively speaking. It was only about three acres.
Yeah, out west, when I was growing up, the mass migration of the rich, wealthy, and/or those who wished to get legally high had not yet started.
Land was not yet as bespoiled and choked by the discarded scabs of soulless unmitigated capitalism that has now ensyphilated Grandmother’s sacred mountains. As a result, the American poor could, mercifully, still find land and a shack to raise their offspring. The American rich had not yet found the frontier where the Refused took refuge under Grandmother’s skirts.
(If you don’t understand that paragraph, put down your Ayn Rand-fascist cosplay-paint-by-numbers-hentai picture book and actually read something that may have been written by someone with the skills to challenge your worldview. If you don’t have the courage to do that, approach your education this way: It is not physically possible, mentally or otherwise, to constantly and incessently wank off. Self-pleasure is a necessary function for Homo Sapians and I won’t demonize that particular pursuit. However, during your refractory period, start with some Edward Abbey. He may not always be right. I am still not sure which character in the Monkey Wrench Gang was righteous, but at least it will help you broaden your perspective.)
Anyhoooooooo……
Behind my boyhood home, there were two ancient structures that have helped to clothe my journey.
One was an extremely old chicken coop. I say old in the American sense, to be clear.
This chicken coop had been resurrected many times over the years by the dirt-poor litany of previous occupants. I could tell this fact by the stratum of historically identifiable garbage that my toy shovel unearthed from the floor.
Now, a contemporary mother who is raising children in what we colloquially call “civilized” America may be horrified by the idea of a young boy whose own loving Momma or gradeschool couldn’t afford to administer vaccines, and yet still allowed the afore mentioned offspring to exume increasingly ancient layers of rich, loamy, bacterially diverse chicken shit in an attempt to find an entrance to Moria.
However, this imagined anachronistic parental revulsion may be attenuated by two factors….
1. When I say “toy” shovel. I am referring to a real shovel repurposed for play. At 5 years old, not only did I know how to actually use a shovel properly, due to the penchant that “Christian” organizations embrace regarding the use of child labor for their purposes. (Yes, times were different back then, but “Teaching a child to work hard” probably shouldn’t ever encompass things like roofing commercial buildings to lure small business owners into the church with the promise of “free labor for higher profit if you trust in Jesus”.)
2. My objectively observable lack of self-preservation skills. This debatable deficiency exhibited itself very early in my childhood development.. I didn’t have to achieve the age of 24 before I understood the dubiously efficacious wisdom of blaming one’s parents for their owies.
All that said, in my parent’s defense, I can honestly say that at that age, I was far more adept at navigating an honest day’s work with dangerous tools in dangerous environments than the vast majority of Americans at any age who may or may not ever read this.
(That statement is at least true this morning. We have not yet seen our apparently “beloved” rapist-fascist-felonious president/bible salesman destroy the global economy yet. (That nom de plume is Public Record, not opinion. Put down the personally tailored Mein Kampt porno feeds that you stupidly allowed the algorithm to sissy-brainwash you into relishing and Grow-The-Fuck-Up. Figure out the difference. It’s your civic duty. If you don’t know what THAT is……))
Tangent: I imagine, like other historical periods, the morality and/or necessity of child labor may change in the future depending on how many families are reduced to abject poverty (ergo: desperation) by the scientifically predictable consequence of the achingly Kafkaesque choices our currently socially defined “adult” aggregate have made.)
Back to the two ancient structures in a Knight’s childhood backyard…….
I spent many many hours in that chicken coop, disassociatedly exploring the afore mentioned concept of Knighthood, imagining the wielding of Theodin’s sword, and shooting grasshoppers with whatever gun I had enough ammo for. (Usually just my bb or pellet gun. Ammo for the small 210 shotgun I was given as a gift on my 5th birthday was far too expensive to waste on such things. Only grasshoppers were allowed for “sport” kills, as I had been taught by Old Man Ohlson… never any other creature unless there was a definite purpose. More on that should be written someday.)
I never found an entrance to Moria. I didn’t really have good shaft shoring materials so I couldnt effectively delve “too deeply or greedily” as it were.
That chicken coop has become, in essence, the Helm’s Deep of my childhood. It became a bastion and fortress of solitude when I had to retreat from the gaze of Sauron.(“his eye is on the sparrow.” Indeed.) Even now, when I meditate or prepare my shamanic spirit-tools for some form of conflict, be it a conflict of pleasure or of necessity, that stronghold of calm from which all forms of commitment and action spring is clothed in the garment of 1920s style clapboard and tar paper.
The other mysterious structure though………
That structure….. In the intervening 5 decades I have endlessly daydreamed of the day I would be allowed to explore and plumb it’s depths. Who knows what scraps of former humanity I will/would/have uncovered. I imagine myself like Gollum, rejecting the world and the cruel cruel sun, crawling into that sweat lodge with my metaphorical shovel to explore the roots of things….. old laudanum bottles filled with secrets, chipped arrows discarded after the wild hunt by red faced pagan knights, or perhaps my eyes will behold unknowable, weathered textures of driftwood bleaching in the sand and alkali; between time and the sea of human realities… Perhaps if I had a talent for it, I could learn something from the relics that I alone may judge either sacred or profane.
Or perhaps, in the unearthing, I would learn to decouple my own spirit to lightly tread Bifrost to confront the ghosts of my father’s Gods; so that I could bring back proof the knowledge that…….
THEY
ARE
US
The country behind our home was Navaho. Now, that phrase may not even have parlance anymore, but at the time, it meant that the Navaho family who lived there had done so for so long that only Grandmother knew the truth of it.
This family was comprised of beautiful, caring, flawed, terrifying, fascinating, deeply wise, and profoundly flawed individuals (You know, homo sapians. just like my own family; a rebellious and vaguely sacrilegious thought for me to have at the time.)
They offered a 5 year old son of a fourth generation Louisiana circuit preacher some modicum of insight into the fascinating world of the actual mechanics of Satan’s contract; how “primitive” superstition and “generational devil worship” was used to lure the ignorant savage (them) and the impressionable white youth whose blood-destiny as a proto-man was to wisely shepherd the lesser races (me) from the cliffs of eternal demise and into the “accepting” god of the whites/christians/whoever took up the banner of the lost cause. (Or at least that is how my Father described it to me when he forbade me from speaking to them about that second ancient structure in my backyard. Well, mostly. He may not have had either the courage or the self-awareness to use the words “lost cause”. Discerning the truth of that delineation is not my job. I’m his son. I have done my job. His god can judge him on the rest.)
When this family, with an open and honest heart, offered my parents the gift of answering my questions regarding parts of their culture in an age appropriate manner, as all good neighbors would do, my parents forbade it.
And so the second structure behind my house became, in my mind, yet another example of the delta between the obviously sacred and the socially profane. The well maintained sweat lodge that had been there for generations remained inscrutable, steadfast, and unknowable to me. I could not bite the adobe underneath with the metaphorical toy shovel of my curiosity.
And so I stayed in Helm’s deep looking across the moat of society wondering if I was looking at a Fons Honorum, or a well stocked larder for hell’s stationary.
(“Would thou live deliciously?”)
In the intervening years, births, and deaths, I have pursued my own Hero’s journey and tread the wild and dark paths of my own blood’s vision quest tradition. I have stood my vigil and been ordained as a Shaman of my people as factually and as symbolically as is modernly possible in the barren wasteland of spirit that my own birthright’s profane, christianized, colonially canonized lusts have wrought upon the bosom of our Grandmother.
But sure as I know…. as sure as my feet were covered in steel when I danced the sacred dance of blood, submission, and franchise; as sure as the Sacred Ordination draught filled my mouth with the taste of innocent and dusted blood fused with my own bile and filth; as sure as I have smelled the ozone-truth that the Holy Mountain must be climbed for our species to survive; as sure as i know that each Shaman with the courage to seek wisdom for the sake of their tribe must find his own path… As sure as I have meticulously studied the harvesting of men’s lives and reveled in the sheer fucking intoxicating beauty of destruction; As sure as all these truths are an expression of sacred and profane Holy Art constructed from and by the dead bones of old stars; for my kind, the road back to Edin may not actually pass through the door of the ancient temple that still haunts the dreams of this Knight’s backyard…. The cathedral where I, and the blood I carry, may actually be profane….
I still………………
Long to delve into that soil.