Odin’s Love Travels: a Personal Romantic Myth

I don’t know how long i’ve been on this journey for. Sure, it has been nearly two and a half years of meeting Odin at the tree and following in his footsteps, but is this the only measurement of my time out here in Midgard. I’ve been here before, and the Gods have known me by name. The other day, whilst sky gazing from a small cottage in the Icelandic wilderness, I re-viewed that this entire journey has been formed by love and for love, and often chasing love. Everywhere I have wandered has been for some medicine woman or another, a goddess, a healer who would take me in, a pure spirit of the feminine, Freya’s daughters have eluded me over and over again. This sounds familiar then, to Odin’s love journeys, three intoxicating nights with Gunnlöð, a sacred marriage with Frigg, his concubine with Freya, not to mention what might have been included with her handmaidens, Fjorgyn, Idunn, his love in with Skadi and not to forget the other Asynjur. Freyr and Njordr have had their own shares of love dramas. These divine women inhabit far away halls, and a man doesn’t travel to others worlds to simply ‘check it out’.
Love has brought me halfway across the world, into the Atlantic islands, where the bonds were shattered by a cheating heart, leaving this one to starve, over thee ocean to overwinter with a sweet mother in her woodland homestead, deceived and told to leave, lured by the deep southern into the arms of a lover, a sacred bond to be destroyed by fear, and doubt, then seduced by a magic mistress in the northern states, only to be taken down from the clouds by the black magic of a younger witch in her tipi. These relationships all have something in common, and I can only admit these personals because of a new found openness and honesty. Judgement, distance, and age. Though I do not prescribe to the idea that age is a factor of loving someone, for surely it has not been. Thee women I have loved have been older, but it is this, the age old myth, that he takes, the man, Odin, the hero, in his quest for love. Some may become a Goddess to him, his one, only to reveal they are not who he thought, but this is not always bad, rarely the case. I have found these women, for the same reason every man on a journey has, these medicine healers, mothers, sisters, dreamers. Because I have had to. For the rainbow light is reflected in all colors, so the bands of love take many forms. Man needs his woman, as Jack London in Son of the Wolf knows:

“Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least not until deprived of them. He has no conception of the subtle atmosphere exhaled by the sex feminine, so long as he bathes in it; but let it be withdrawn, and an ever-growing void begins to manifest itself in his existence, and he becomes hungry, in a vague sort of way, for a something so indefinite that he cannot characterize it”

Odin goes on a quest for love, and has many lovers, sisters, and wives, he learns his shamanic wisdom and prophecy from the Volva, the Runes from modir Jord, his seithing abilities from Freyja, his storytelling from Saga, a thing or two about the household from his loving wife Frigg, and I would maybe say his medicinal knowledge from Eir. Would Odin be the man we know him as without the women in his life? I can ask the same question of myself, for I would not be where, who, what I am without those in mine. For the woman is a perfect manifestation of beauty, teaching, healing, love, she is Berkano in the Sun, she is the Goddess of the crops, she is the sweet Lover through the dark cold nights, she is the caregiver to a rambling soul, the loving mother of the world, the powerful seeress and we are lost without them.

I would never choose to live without women in my life, and this journey’s steps have not yet been accompanied by a second pair of feet. Simply, I have not been with a woman who can keep up, is there any who can? Is there any who will face this wide garden of the world the same way I have? Now, my sweetheart lives apart from me, and tomorrow is the day of one year, our lunarversary if you will, for it is also thee blue moon, and yet I will be alone, sitting quietly in this wooden cottage in the shadow of icelandic cliffs, moon gazing, remembering, thinking… I try to understand, what is this new medicine, it is far more powerful than anything I have had before. How to mend this distance, these miles of space, or maybe it is not as it seems, another delusion of the heart and mind? Sometimes I don’t know, but it’s not the unknowing that causes me to pine, the myths are never known for sure, that is why they are myths, that is why they are us. I pine because I know what happens to those who don’t love. If my heart was the only thing I had left, I would be a rich man. My sisters of this world family, some of them call me by name, and I know a love with them. It is strange how they turn up, how they reveal at the right times, to answer the questions I have for Freya. And perhaps, her daughters will be kind, as they have before, and welcome me in their arms when the moon rises, and the hours of the night are my only solace.