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Morning rune pull: Hagalaz. Hail, disruption. By noon the forge roof was leaking. Fixing it Saturday. The runes are not subtle in this house.

Testing a sunstone in Oregon fog

The sagas mention a sólarsteinn, a sunstone, that could show where the sun was on an overcast day. Plenty of researchers now think it was Iceland spar, clear calcite, which splits light in two and can help you locate the sun through cloud if you know what you're doing. As a blacksmith I love things that actually do something. So I bought a chunk of Iceland spar and took it out on the grayest morning this week. Looked through it at the sky, rotated it slowly until the two faint spots evened out, and marked the direction. Checked it against my phone compass and the sun's position: off by maybe ten degrees. My ancestors crossed the North Atlantic with tools like this. I can barely cross my driveway. Hail to the navigators.

Two ravens at the offering stump

First Sunday of every month I pour a horn of mead and leave a heel of bread at the back of the property, where the forge yard meets the trees. It's for the landvættir, the spirits who were here long before my mortgage. Usually it all just soaks into the moss. This time two ravens came down to the stump before I'd even turned around. Took the bread, ignored the mead entirely, looked straight at me and made that deep knocking sound ravens make. Critics. My daughter (8) watched from the porch and announced, 'They're Huginn and Muninn and they're reporting back.' I'm not going to be the one to argue. Next month the bread gets a little honey.

Winter Nights in the rain, as is tradition

Winter Nights blót this weekend. Oregon delivered its usual sideways rain, which honestly feels right. The old calendar marks this as the turning toward winter, the time to honor the dísir, the ancestral mothers, and the land-wights who put up with us all year. We kept it small. Me, my wife, the two kids, and my brother-in-law, who isn't heathen but has never once missed a meal. We stood at the edge of the back field under the big Douglas fir. I forged the stand for the horn myself this summer, so of course it leaned. We hailed the land-wights first, since it's their place and we're the guests. Then the ancestors by name, as many as we could remember: my farfar Olav who fished out of Bergen, my wife's grandmother Ruth who taught three generations of her town to read. The kids poured apple cider from their own little cups and each said one thing they were thankful for. My daughter (8) thanked the wights for the blackberries. My son (4) thanked them for "the mud." Can't argue. The mead went round the horn once and the rest went onto the roots of the fir. Afterward we had a fire in the iron bowl with the hose already uncoiled beside it, because a blacksmith who disrespects fire doesn't stay a blacksmith long. Nothing dramatic happened. Nothing needed to. The rain eased right as we finished, which my daughter has decided was the wights saying "you're welcome." I'm not going to correct her.

Last Sunday my eight-year-old watched me pour mead on the offering stump and asked, very reasonably, why we give good mead to nobody. I told her it isn't nobody. It's the land-wights, the ancestors, the gods, depending on the day. But mostly I told her about gifts. The Hávamál says a gift always looks for a gift in return. Our whole way is built on that: you give, they give, you give again, and over the years it becomes a friendship. She thought about it, then poured a little of her apple juice next to the mead. 'In case the small ones don't like alcohol.' Fifteen years I've been doing this and it never once occurred to me to offer the small ones juice. We do now.

Starting the Yule mead

If you want mead for Yule, you start in early October. Today's batch: three pounds of local wildflower honey, a gallon of good water, a handful of raisins, the peel of one orange and a packet of wine yeast. Everything sanitized like a surgeon, because the wights may be patient but bacteria are not. Airlock on, jug wrapped in an old wool blanket in the corner of the shop. The kids helped stir. At the blót they'll get spiced apple cider, same pour, same toast. Mead isn't a personality. It's honey and time and paying attention, which is most of what I know about worship too.