Let’s take this to a more practical level. Why do you do anything for anyone else? Why does anyone do anything for you? Do they have to do anything? Do you?

To be human and have a connection? To be human is to accept your inheritance, to accept the legacy of experience that was handed to you, and to which you have only been a partial party to, a small player in. Do we not ultimately do work for another? Because without our sense of place, in this great collective domain, our lives would be empty? Like the concern over the tribal lands, but in a more universal sense, perhaps more abstract sense.

I expect this is why people say children change their life. Indeed. I can say that from experience.

And having a partner in life gives you that sense of place as well, family, even a pet. Indeed. If you see life as alive and full of people… Well, what is life without the experience of a living world? Even the virtual world of Second Life is a living world, if in a second hand and strangely disjointed sense.

Do we like anything that we would call “lifeless”?

I like barren landscapes…desolate beauty. Even those are not lifeless.

Material stuff you mean? We like material stuff to the degree that it makes us feel plugged in, caught up with our neighbours. Even movies are primarily interesting in that we get to share in a story told by another and that will be retold in one way or another by all who went to see it. Is this not so?

Then we do like lifeless stuff, because it makes us feel alive? It used to be believed that every thing created by human hands had life. In fact, this was the basis behind the belief in rune crafting. That time, and that energy, were considered to be taken from, and still connected to, the creator. The sword was only as strong and sure as the hand that made it.

And the hand that used it? Yes. It’s only in the recent age that we have given over so much of our creation to machines, second hand creators.

Someone alive made it, if that is what you mean. Machines are made by someone also. Machines are made in a spirit of divorcing the self from the work. Labour saving, time saving, spirit excluding. Many require little or no direct oversight during the process. This rune was the sign of lineage, including the pains taken in apprenticeship to learn your craft, and was the symbol of the mother/father.

Perhaps in the grandest sense, it’s the eye of Odin, and they would mark this rune on anything in front of their signature to designate it as their personal property. This differed from the habit of the crafts-person who would also make their mark on an object, but without the sign. It’s the origin of what we now call the trademark. The habit of marking the name of the creator in runes on the finished product.

Where putting ‘x’ as your mark, if you couldn’t write, might have come from? Yes, an adaption of this symbol. Finish the x and you have the symbol meaning me or mine.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~