Arrived in the mail: a photo of my grandparents, parents, brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and myself. This had been taken at my parents home about 1959. We are all standing in the corner where the Yule tree usually was during that season. I'm not sure when the photo was taken, but I'm guessing autumn. These people are descended from courageous, adventurous, ambitious people who arrived here from Europe to thrive and love.

My theory is that it was ancient Old World values and magic that created the Kindred in Montana. The photo was essentially from a gathering in a central Hall, a Kindred Lodge. The image elicits a sense of a meeting of a spiritual tribe. These people were, and are, winners in a Living Tradition.

For my own part, I can see that my personal failure to adhere to the values, metaphysics, and life-force of that Tradition has led to recent losses in my life. One value that I have embraced is 'not giving up' so we will prosper again while I reconnect with ancestral values and metaphysics. The recent losses in my tribe could have been prevented with greater intention on my part. That I failed in my basic humanity was perhaps not entirely my fault. I believe there has been a vacuum of teaching in lore, theology, and philosophy that leaves us vulnerable. We are free-associating, ungrounded, and flailing about in modern confusion. We are ignorant of the teachings that describe the natural Spiritual impulse we sense in our beings. Instead we now live in a maelstrom of alien imposed manipulations. It was in this maelstrom of non-relevant and detrimental alien ideas that was my only choice of where to look for answers to my spiritual quest. It was perhaps in seeking the spiritual philosophy responsible for our well-being and in my hope to continue this presence and influence that paradoxically led to me to what was immediatlely available to the general modern public as a 'universalist' denial of immanent tribal values. These 'universalist' teachings of life-negation were all too available, but that is the nature of evangelism. My effectiveness to the Kindred reality was diminished far beyond those folks who never studied the available metaphysics at all. If the real teachings hadn't been taken away and hidden from us all, I would not have needed to go astray into life-negating slave universalisms. So perhaps I can be forgiven for taking a wrong path.

Yet within the challenge of seeking the hidden, reclaiming the lost, individual strength can grow in the process of finding the truth. Perhaps this is the greater plan. Small comfort when I have failed myself and failed my people. But that is part of the challenge or quest -- the possibility of failure. I can reach again for victory. The positive that will come from this is when I take up the Allfather's greater plan and lead myself back to Right and leave some clues for those in the Kindred who care.

Action is more important than words right now. So I'm going to post this part of the "Heathen And Heretical Ways" introduction and take care of some business. Back later to polish this up a bit.