ABOUT WYRD'S FLIGHT

BEHOLDING "WYRD" IN FULL FLIGHT!

In following/shaping my own Wyrd, it is very fitting that I chose Sunday 12^th August 2012 to create this page: on such night until the early hours of Mondaythis year’s Perseids meteor shower blazed through the night skies.

Since I was a small child I had been taught to look up to the night-sky. At elementary school I dreamt of life beyond our planet, some kind of angelic creatures who would come and save us (I was not quite sure what from, but I felt humanity was in some danger), and - as a lone but quite contented child - I wholeheartedly sang along the most beautiful and exciting "alien" I had ever seen, Ziggy Stardust:
"There's a starman waiting in the sky
Hed like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds
There's a starman waiting in the sky
Hes told us not to blow it
Cause he knows it's all worthwhile"

Music had become my link to the cosmos, and in my early teens I fully realized that our inner universe was also hiding some amazing secrets, which I intended to explore. Thanks to my mother's love for Pink Floyd I had started early on a journey into experimental rock music which married to perfection my precocious love for the sciences, but my boundless creativity also had a strong fascination for something more... "dangerous". Discovering extreme music did not come through the usual infatuation for Iron Maiden (I confess, they sounded really silly and awful to me!) but through British hardcore punk, namely Discharge in its earliest incarnation: the very band that made the birth of thrash, death and black metal (Venom started soon after them), possible. 

From Pink Floyd to Voivod, from Discharge to Napalm Death and Emperor, everything has always seemed to be moving along the same flow of life and towards the same goal to me... and it still does. My personal "Wyrd" is deeply intertwined with Music and freedom, the two main pillars in my life, and nothing, not even the inexorable passing of time will change that.

You might be familiar with psychologist and author Brian Bates and his renowned work on Anglo-Saxon shamanism. He describes “wyrd” as “the unfolding of our personal destiny” in a non-predetermined way, but rather as active awareness of the deeper unifying forces that interconnect the universe. This is not a concept exclusive to Norse lore (Wyrd is indeed Urd, one of the Norns), but the essence of ancient shamanism worldwide; and today, modern physics of the amazing quantum realm give us a glimpse into such wonders.

So here we have it, the coming together of the profound, uncontaminated spiritual understanding and wisdom of pre-Christian times with the incredible new conquests of scientific knowledge. Too many go through their life without acknowledging the might of Nature, ignoring the existence of a force, yet beyond our cognitive understanding, that is capable – even without a mastermind – to unfold into a cosmos whose unthinkable destructive/creative power spawns countless life forms taking their turn into the cycles of existence.

“Spirituality”, “transcendence” (intended as searching beyond common thought or experience) allow us to “feel”, and in doing so we can grasp the deeper connection with the natural world around and beyond us. Creativity and dreaming are a huge part of the bio-chemical thrust of life as inbuilt, powerful life-saving tools. In our struggle for physical and psychological survival, individually and as a species, we employ our imagination and creativity far more than we need violence. We learn to fly beyond the threshold of reality from the day we come to life. I seek no justification for gods, politics or whatever else in my journey though “the veil of Maya”, it is merely my search for “the other place”. In doing so, I wish for solace, empathy through sharing our deepest natural riches: emotions.