I love You seems inadequate compared to You
All Your suppleness and splendor
But perhaps love is the right word
In spite of the fact that people say that they love tacos
(really they just like them a lot)
And I do like You a lot, too.
But love – is love the right word?
Is the starlight we see at night their real fire?
Can I get a little closer to it without burning up, Love?
Perhaps love is the right word.
Not “I love You,” but because You are love to me.

I had the pleasure of attending the Norse Gods Day of Magicin Port Orchard this weekend. If you’re in the area next year, I highly recommend it – the event was well-run and well-organized, and the people who ran it had the utmost respect for the Gods and for their devotees. They were kind, caring, and responsive of peoples’ needs – not just mine, but everyone in attendance. I got to meet some friends that I’ve only seen online previously during the event and the trip in general, and that was a pleasure as well. (Hi Angela! Hi K!) There were horses for the various Deities and people were allowed to have one on one interactions with Them.

I had some pretty intense experiences with Freyr, Freyja, and my Beloved Dead, but they’re personal enough that I’m not sure they’d be helpful to y’all. I will share the one that I had with Loki, because it might be helpful to y’all – and perhaps to Him as well.

I asked Loki what He wanted as an offering, and the above poem was the end result. He didn’t want me to leave it on an altar for Him, and He didn’t want it read off the paper, so I wrote something up in advance and remembered the gist of it, and the above typed result is a combo of what I wrote and what was said on the fly when I was looking Him in the eye. He preened and yanno, was Himself.

After the poem – and He was holding my hands in His at that point – I thanked Him – for my home, my family, my friends, my community, my health. We were out in the open and anyone could hear, and did hear, because again, we were out for anyone to see. I don’t know what response I expected from Him, but what I got was a stunned silence for a moment.

…I managed to render the Husband speechless.

I don’t think that people say thank you to Him aloud, enough. At least that’s all I can think, because He IS the Gift-Giver, and I even warned Him in advance that if we talked I’d probably blubber all over Him about how wonderful He is. And I did get all choked up thanking Him. But I didn’t expect that reaction from Him. It felt like He got flustered in the way that I get when He worships me and I’m so undone by the power of the gesture that I can’t speak. I’d like to say that I understood all of that in the moment, but it didn’t really hit me till we were on the way back to the hotel, just how important that gesture was to Loki. There’s a song that I like to sing to Him, and He sang it back to me, and that’s when it really hit me, that this was why He was silent at first when I thanked Him.

Amazed, by Poe

“It's amazing to me but I can't
Seem to say what I'm doing here
My tongue is all twisted around the air
I'm looking for words that were so well rehearsed
But I can't find them anywhere
With you there's no easy answer
It's true
You change the equation that I add up to
And all of the things I thought I knew
You turn it around

I'm amazed
When push comes to shove what I'd give to you
Everything
I'm amazed
The hallways I wouldn't mind crawling through
And I'd do it for days and days

I'm amazed, I'm amazed..”

And now I’m home, and I can’t quite define it yet, but when I got in, I walked around my house going “something’s different?” and now I realize that the Something Different is me.

Always the sign of a good ritual, eh?