Primal Becoming
Nourishing the Roots of the Tree of Life
They are as old as time.
And yet before it.
Time is not line but layers.
The Norns are among the Old Ones within Northern European cosmology, their existence documented by written traces of pre-Christian oral culture, preserved in a trail of contradictory fragments, pointing to a completely different relationality with time and process.
We think we know what time is.
A story arc that shapes a linear path.
Yet all the while they hold the pulse, the growing.
Primal strata. Geologic time.
A process fed by what has come before us.
At the center of reality is a tree and a wellspring. The Nornir tend the edge here, the border between life and death, a liminal becoming. They are the ultimate arbiters of fate. Fate not as static predestination, but as a relational layering, a participatory dance between what is and what must necessarily grow.
Some say they carve our fates into the tree.
Some say they nurture roots with clay rich water.
The dew from the leaves falls into the well.
The change gets in and so becomes the order.
The law is tangible and silent. It hums with life.
The Nornir bring nurture to the roots of reality, to Yggdrasil who grows through all the worlds. They lay down Oorlog, primal law, the geologic strata of what has become. The Norns contain the sacred wellspring, honoring the sourcing, tending the cycle through which primordial waters nourish the tree of life.
Where have they gone, The Nornir, in our time?
How can you grow when all you are is waiting?
When the roots are parched with silence?
When the tree has been forgotten?
Who will carry the seeds of what might yet become?
We may resent The Norns. We may blame them for the pain we carry. We may wish the fate we live inside of had not been laid down. Especially now, in this time of sacrifice zones, perpetuating legacies of violence, where does fate end and agency begin? What is fate within a culture shaped by so many generations of pain pushed sideways into others’ bodies or absorbed as impact from within? So much expression from so many lives—creativity, intimacy, play, stewardship, integrity—that has not had the resource to unfurl. How do we disentangle the primal law of our becoming from what we have inherited from culture, unravel back to where the curse got in?
It’s said the Norns aren’t weavers
Though they’ve been cast as such in recent times.
For we need fate that’s mutable and prone to mending.
Yet delicately once they plied the threads
Giving a child a thickened strand of life
An oorlog web of layered primal strata
fixed at three sides, strengthened by combination.
This next six months in the Mundane Mycelium, we will be exploring the process of Primal Becoming through experiential relationship with the Nornir. Each month we will connect with a pattern being from this primordial cosmology, spending a moon cycle in presence with each of the three Norns—Urd, Verthandi, Skuld—and with the ones they tend—Oorlag the Primal Law, Urtabrunner the Source of Becoming, and Yggdrasil the Tree of Life. We will invite a relationality with each of these beings that deepens beneath the conceptual and into the potency of actual energetics that can transform our perceptual reality.
What did we never learn?
It’s not so much time travel,
as travel to a place where time doesn’t exist
and potency is dreaming into form.
How do we tend the growing?
The Membership Mycelium is a practice space for seeding an awareness of energetic integrity while opening up a subtly widened perception of reality and the movement of consciousness across many scales of a system. It supports us in learning that as humans we have the ability to sense from many parts of the web simultaneously. The Mycelium attunes to subtle ways of feeling into relational field energies, inviting in the just right support from radiant ancestors and nature beings, moving more from the rhythm of your animal body and sense of embodied agency, while deepening your access to creative potency and sourcing from primal intelligence.