Spaces And Behaviour

Source: The Abstruse Goose


The artist that drew this comic, gets it. He or she gets it far more than a lot of Heathens I see in the wider community. We are the product of thousands upon thousands of years of struggle to survive. We are the product of courage, strength, persistence, heartbreak, joy, hope, survival, love, passion, and a myriad of other facets of the human experience. How do we compare? How would we measure up in their eyes?

That is something we each have to judge for ourselves.

As for myself, I've judged myself somewhat lacking over the past few years. Instead of building and growing, I've torn down and stagnated.

In the book, 'The Well and the Tree; World and Time in Early Germanic Culture', Paul Bauschatz wrote:

"For the Germanic peoples, space as it is encountered and perceived in the created worlds of men and other beings, exists, to any significant degree only as a location or container for the occurrence of action...whether of individual men, of men acting in consort or in opposition, of men and monsters, or whatever. In all cases, immediate actions are discontinuous and separable deriving power and structure from the past."

Read that quote, read it again, and when you're done, read it yet again.

The idea that space exists as a container for actions, and that the immediate actions that take place in that space derive their power and structure from the past, is something we should all take into account when considering the places and groups we frequent.

In the modern world, I believe that includes cyberspace, and that some particular spaces on the internet are nothing more than containers for unhael behaviour that just perpetuates itself ad nauseum. Perfectly decent people can go to these places and become perfectly horrible. The oft-mused upon question of 'why do Heathens behave worse online than in meatspace?', I believe is down to this. It's almost become tradition to eat our own. It's almost become desirable to act in certain ways on certain groups - and so the bad behaviour is perpetuated without apology or further analysis.

And I have done my fair share of this over the years, I'm not just standing here and pointing fingers. It's one of the main reasons I feel disappointed with myself, and the single main reason why I don't frequent certain groups anymore. I continue to lurk on some of these groups, not to mention the pages of certain characters that I think are harmful and going off the deep end. There are some truly unhael people out there that are sucking people in to their miasma and then playing victim when questioned. This won't last forever. Eventually the truth will out - it always does.

As for me, I'm focusing on building again, on trying to be hael, and on educating. It's an exciting time, and I very much feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing with my life as opposed to fighting against the tides, conversely, if things go the way they should, this may even turn out to be far more efficient at getting what I was trying to do done, when I was fighting against the tides.

Gæð a wyrd swa hio scel.