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A frequently asked question is: How do I get an authentic Viking tattoo? There are lots of art designs that Asatruars and other heathens wear, but if you you want something historically accurate to the Viking Age, there are a few things to keep in mind.

Picture the Platonic ideal of a cloud. Is it oval, white and fluffy? Set against a blue sky? Pretty, static, happy in a mild and calm way? Or did you imagine a thundercloud squirting rain and lightning and booms and rainbows and wind in all directions, wild and raw? Starting wildfires and putting them out? Fertilizing the earth, growing crops, and also flooding them, knocking them over, sheeting them with ice?

We are not always talking about the same ideal when we picture something as natural and observable as a cloud. How much more nebulous-- how much cloudier, as it were-- is the picture when we talk about such a thing as masculinity, in toxic and non-toxic flavors? Or any other quality that is socially constructed?

There is always something good somewhere, even in hard times, even in hard lives. "Stop to smell the flowers" has become a cliche, but we said it so much because it's useful.

In Taoist and Buddhist traditions they have the concept of the yin and yang, which are depicted always having a tiny spot of their opposite inside. Like the good in Darth Vader (lol, sorry, I'm such a geek I couldn't resist.) Heathen philosophy doesn't put this concept so starkly in a visual symbol, but in our mythology the entire universe was generated out of the dynamic combination of two opposites, the runes fehu (primal fire) and isa (primal ice.) So everything we see around us is both matter and energy, both power and pattern, both potential and the universal laws of physics that make potential reach its physically manifested form.

My new book Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path is now available for preorder. It is scheduled to be published in August, and preorders will turn into live orders automatically when the book goes live.

I'm really excited about my new book! Of course I won't be able to go to as many in-person events as I had hoped. Any festivals and so forth I miss out on this year I hope to be able to get to when they reopen. I'll just have to plan on a post-pandemic belated book tour.

In planning my kindred’s Ostara ritual for this year, which we canceled, I ran across an interesting association with similarly named dawn goddesses. The goddess Ostara may be older than we think.

My paper on Bersarkrgangr recently published in Enheduanna Journal #3 was based on a lifetime of learning. It includes an analysis of the raw data from the reader survey I conducted via Bersarkrgangr Magazine. The raw data had been published in Bersarkrgangr Magazine in the 90s but the analysis had never been published before, so finally seeing it in print brought both excitement and relief.

I had a work in progress version of this paper on academia dot edu but it was not edited and did not have the citations. Enheduanna's editor helped me organize my paper, and greatly improved it thereby.