"What's Wyrd?"

They're thinking of course of weird... which is, historically, an adjective. Wyrd, in fact, is a noun. However, there is a certain amount of accuracy in the assumption that wyrd is... well, weird.

Throughout the ages, there have been many legends of fate. Take, for example, the Greek tale of the three sisters: Clotho who spins, Lachesis who weaves, Atropos who cuts. They share one eye which is passed from sister to sister; there is no sense of choice, they control the whole fabric of one's life. Each individual only has one thread and the Fates have the choice; there is also a strong sense here of blind chance... quite easy, with this world view, to become fatalistic, to hand over all choice to the Fates, a method which does not The alternative is to follow what many New Age books have written - "Take control of your lives!" spoken in a loud, booming, compelling voice... Yet, when we try it out, it doesn't really happen, for who can control every last detail of one's life?

What's left may seem weird, or wyrd... But then we come across another version of the tale - the Norse perspective, where fate is quite literally the weaving of a rich tapestry by the three maidens of Giantland. They work an inifinite number of threads to form a three-dimensional tapestry of all life; all the possibilities cross and re-cross both inside and outside each individual. It's therefore up to that individual to work through their own wyrd, picking which threads they prefer to present to the world. The goddesses provide the framework of life; we, however, choose where to go in that life.

In the Greek myth, we quickly note that we have no choice; the blind Fates decide what's going to happen and the thread is the be-all and end-all of one person's life. By considering the Norse view, however, we discover that we do have a choice in what we allow to be woven, though the knots we make sometimes resemble an almost impenetrable tangle...

The very word wyrd stems from the Norse Urðr. And when we examine the various legends, already there is an idea of interweaving, of same-ness, when we notice the similarities (and the differences) between the legends of the Fates in different cultures.

In this context, the boundaries between time, space and objects merge and become much less rigid than we are accustomed to. There is a multi-dimensional interweaving where weirdness can really let rip. This is something of how we experience past lives - although there is a very real idea of the rebirth of souls into a new body, there is also the rebirth of ideas, of legends, the repetition of patterns on a worldwide, intercultural scale. It's quite mind-boggling when one tries to imagine its scale... almost better in some ways to stop trying, and to simply accept, to trust, that it's part of what we call life's rich tapestry...

Wyrd is everywhere, everything, everywhen; we cannot get away from it and, as I've discovered as a keen maker of my own needlework tapestries, tugging at the knots just makes them worse. It's better to accept the weirdness and the twists, to quietly unravel the knots and tangles, slowly and gently, to go with the flow and not to fight - whilst at the same time avoiding the trap of simply giving in and avoiding responsibility.

And here's the key: there is always a choice, though we'd often claim otherwise. Sometimes, the choice is in not choosing to do anything; sometimes we choose to run away. There's also a twist... nothing ever quite repeats, though sometimes we try to recreate situations and discover that all we've got instead is a twisted version of what once existed - and that we really could do without it, too...

It's a real case of be careful of what you wish for, since you might get it... and want to give it right back again!

Wyrd books

The way I came to these books was also wyrd - Positively Wyrd was simply sitting on the bookshelf at Gothic Image in Glastonbury. It had apparently just been published a couple of weeks before. It appealed to me; just a few minutes' reading in Glastonbury Abbey told me that I had a book which made the most sense of any similar material I'd come across. It was like having a friend guiding me through the glitches and hiccups of my own life. The wyrd part of it was that right then I was in sore need of some direction; I was not a happy camper at the time and the help I needed to sort out where the heck I thought I was going was just sitting there on a bookshelf in a shop I only visited in passing. Funny old world.