Roz:

 

I had been put in touch with Krei through my High Priest in order to learn more about Northern Religions, so she had begun setting up a series of Eddic lessons for me in order to teach me a little bit about Northern Mythology.  I'd grown away from Wicca and over the past couple of months, I have began really and truly coming home and falling in love with the Norse Gods. 

 

The focused love I feel made me think about the many different types of love Goddesses within Northern myths.  You have Frigga who watches over the love in the family - a mother's love personified.  Then you have Freya focused on physical love, pure passion.  Then Hela, boundless compassion.  Then Sigyn, who loves with a deep sense of responsibility and devotion.  Of course there is also Geifjon who watches over the unloved, unmarried women and children.  Syn for the loves that dare not speak their names.  And of course there is Nanna who loves so completely that it is one and the same with her life force, selfless and all consuming - love in its purest state.

 

Getting to know the Norse Gods has definitely been a ride and an education.   The story that I found the most beautiful was the one about Baldur's death and the way that Nanna was so grieved by her husband's passing that she literally jumped into his funeral pyre and covered his body with hers and burned to death rather than be without him.  Instead she went with him to Helheim and sacrificed her life for love.  This was the most noble, most pure expression of all consuming love.  It awakened something deep in me.  When Krei mentioned the 30 Day Altar Project to me, I knew I wanted to honor Nanna and her intense and insane wholly innocent love.

 

Overall, this was an incredibly moving experience for me.  Nanna's end reminded me of what is pure and untouched inside of myself.

 

 

Krei:

 

Roz approached me about doing an altar project together honoring Nanna.  As I have had a number of conflicts in my own life in this area, and had honestly never worked much with her because I considered her to be a dormant Goddess, I thought this would be a wonderful excuse to do so.  The innocent nature of her self-sacrifice had always intrigued me, as did the notion of her eventual restoration.

 

We chose to erect the altar on a little strip in the middle of Williams Island Blvd in Aventura.  Aventura is quite typical of American urban sprawl.  It is literally against the law to have weeds, every patch of land is either artificially manicured with palm trees and turf or is the site of a future luxury high rise condominium.   250 yards away is a two million square foot high end shopping mall that is the most repulsive ever shrine to object commodity fetishism.  This land used to be swampland and home to a rich ecosystem.  Even ten years ago there were native trees and egrets would nest along the water.    The landwights here are wounded and rather angry.    In the middle of all of this "progress", there is about a 200 foot strip of mangroves left undisturbed in the middle of a busy street surrounding a Starbucks, a high end market, a six story mega-bank, and scores of shiny white high rise condominium developments.  The mangroves represent the wild and natural in the most unnatural possible surroundings.  This seemed a really apt metaphor for the purity and innocence of love, wild and unfettered inside of every person, even with all the neat ordered rules of civilized culture and buried among other emotional and psychological sprawl.   I instantly knew when we came up with the idea for the project where the altar should be placed.

 

Roz and I cut hearts out of biodegradable rice paper and strung them to the mangrove trees using raffia, a natural fiber.  On each heart, we wrote down some of the virtues and charachteristics of love.  At the foot of the trees, we sprinkled rose petals, symbolic of love.  We said a prayer to Nanna after erecting the altar. 

 

Thirty minutes later, the town maintenence had "removed" the altar.  It was sad to see it dispatched of so quickly.

 

This was a really interesting process for me.  It forced me to think about the wilds and untouched recesses within my emotional landscape, and to work on being conscious of what is pure and unsullied inside my nature.  While I never really felt Nanna, as Mother Hela keeps what she holds, I do think that this altar was a way of honoring her sacrifice, one made so that purity would be kept alive in the next incarnation of Yggdrasil.

 

--Miami,

August 19, 2007