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tanadrin · 6 years

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Reordberend

(Part 10 of ?; start; previous; next)

They ate lunch in the shelter: dried fish, and something that might have, in theory, once been bread. The afternoon was spent on more walking; they went more slowly this time, even though Leofric seemed impatient to arrive at their destination, but Katherine still struggled to keep up. On those occasions when she found herself next to Leofe, and not completely out of breath, she made a few halting attempts to ask exactly where they were going, but she didn’t understand any of the answers Leofe gave. She repeated them to herself anyway, trying to puzzle out whatever words they were made up of. Leofric overheard her once and gave her a funny look.

The afternoon’s walk was much longer than the morning’s, and as they proceeded up the valley, the view remained as beautiful and as desolate as it had been all day. But by four or five o’clock (she guessed), it was all Katherine could do to keep her eyes on the path in front of her, and not pitch over again into the dirt. But she kept up this time. That was important to her. Finally, after rounding a scree slope, she caught a glimpse of a little dark patch, up against one wall of the valley ahead, just barely differentiated from the stone around it. It was another village. Leofe pointed at it, when they got a bit closer.

“Ham!” she said to Katherine. Home.

It took them another two hours to reach the village proper. This one was bigger than the one they had left that morning; it had two large stone halls in the middle, joined by an enclosed passage; the smaller of the two halls had a squat tower at one end, topped by a cross. The square in the middle was tiny, and houses seemed to huddle around it for warmth, like bodies around a fire. As they approached, coming up the slope, a few figures wrapped in heavy coats seemed to take notice. They disappeared inside houses; but they reappeared a few minutes later, with more people, staring as they came into the village.

It was like the meeting in the little house all over again; all eyes seemed to be on them as they approached, but especially on Katherine. She thought she was rather unremarkable, dressed as she was in the native habit, but she realized, looking at her companions, that she still stood out. They walked differently for one. It wasn’t just that they didn’t seem nearly as exhausted by the journey, or the cold. They strode confidently ahead, while Katherine hung back, looking around at the unfamiliar place with trepidation.

Leofe barked something irritable at the people closest to the door, and there were a few scattered chuckles. Gradually, the conversation resumed. But eyes occasionally still flicked in Katherine’s direction. In the case of the smaller children, they openly stared.

“I guess you guys don’t get a lot of tourists,” Katherine muttered to herself.\

Leofe led Katherine to a side room in the hall. There was a small, low bed against one wall, and a table. An unlit stub of a candle, was jammed in a hole in one corner of the table, and next to it was a wooden chest. Leofe set the Gospel-book she had been carrying all day down on the table carefully, and gestured to the room.

“Yours,” she said--very slowly--in Old English. “You sleep here.”

Katherine nodded. “Thanks, I guess,” she said. “This is your hometown?”

But Leofe didn’t seem to understand, or care. She went to the door and beckoned to Katherine.

“Eat,” she said. “Then,” she pointed at the book. “More words.”

“You’re not serious?”

But Leofe, Katherine was beginning to suspect, had only one setting, and that was “super fucking serious.” She sighed, and followed Leofe back into the main hall.

Dinner proved to be more savory broth with unidentifiable bits in. Well, perhaps in this case, ignorance was bliss. But it still proved delicious. Katherine did find herself wishing longingly for a green vegetable, but, she supposed, you took what you could get when the most the climate supported in the way of local flora was lichen, and weird species of anaerobic bacteria. She lingered over her bowl, picking out the juicy bits at the bottom, slowly sipping the broth that remained, hoping in a desultory sort of way that maybe if she held out long enough, it would be bedtime. But Leofe gave her increasingly annoyed glances across the table, and finally, she took Katherine’s bowl out of her hand, and pushed it down the table.

“Come,” she said.

She sat Katherine down at the table, and lit the little candle stub, which sputtered and offered a dim light. Between the bad light and the thick, curled letters on the page of the book, Katherine struggled to make out anything clearly, much less words she could recognize. But to her surprise, Leofe proved a much more patient tutor with something to work off of in front of her. She would point to a passage, and wait for Katherine to read it; Katherine would stumble over it for a little bit, then Leofe would correct her, word by word.

The letters were hard. The first kind of r proved not to be an r at all, but to have the sound of an s; o and a and their weird little compressed æ were hard enough to tell apart in the dim light, and for all the world Katherine would have sworn that they were using p to write w for some reason. But, slowly, she began to get the hang of it. Sometimes, Leofe would point to a word, as if expecting Katherine to identify it. But Leofe never knew the English for it--not the modern English anyway--and Katherine realized she could just act like she recognized it, and they would move on. But here and there, there were words that were familiar. Something stirred occasionally in her hazy childhood memories of Scripture. Something about fire. Was that in the Gospels? Or was it somewhere else?

It was an exercise in frustration. She had never really read the Bible, not much. She knew it, in the way you could not help but know pretty much all the stories if you grew up with them, if your whole society had been steeped in one book for more than two thousand years. It was an ugly irony that now it seemed to be the vehicle for her survival--a much more literal form of salvation, she suspected, than anything Mom and Dad had ever alluded to.

She had been eleven the first time she asked her parents About Religion. All her life, of course, they had gotten together with other families on Sunday mornings, in their living room or someone else’s. Her parents called it going to church, even when they never left the house. And there were the singings, once a month, out of hundred-year-old songbooks of those big, loud, brassy hymns. She remembered fondly the sound of voices rising in complicated harmonies from the other room while she sat on the floor and played with her toys. She never identified those things as Religion. It was just what you did. One day, out of the blue, Mom and Dad announced she would be going to school. She asked why; to learn, they said. But I do that at home, she had answered. You teach me stuff. Why do I have to go to school?

She suspected, as an adult, that the answer was “It’s complicated.” Something between getting your slightly weird nerdy kid to socialize, so she wouldn’t be a complete pariah, when she entered the big bad world as an adult, and getting her out of the house for some peace and quiet for a few hours each day. But the only way they had been able to package this, in a way she couldn’t argue with, had been “Because we said so.” And so, grumpy more at the change in routine than anything else, she’d started going to school.

That was the first inkling she had had that she lived a life different from a lot of the children around her. They didn’t go to church. They didn’t know the songs she knew. Her teachers looked frankly alarmed when she sung for show-andtell one day a cheerful, major-key number about a fountain filled with blood from Emmanuel’s veins. And she felt for the first time in her life, a life that until then did not even have a word for a place where you were not welcome, where people did not instantly recognize you as some species of friend or family, like she was an outsider. The only word she had for the things that made her feel that way was religion.

So she went to her parents one morning, sat down at the breakfast table, and, as though it were a contentious question to which she could not possibly expect a straight answer, looked them in the eye and asked, “Are we religious?” Her mother smiled. Her dad just looked sort of pained.

She had felt like an idiot for not understanding that sooner. It wasn’t that she believed, necessarily. Or that she didn’t believe. Nobody had ever demanded an answer from her one way or another on that point. Religion had just been this collection of things, things that had been there her whole life. It seemed… normal. And it wasn’t like what other people seemed to talk about when they talked about religion.

But the whole thing only seemed to confirm her parents’ desire to see her spend more time with kids her own age. They signed her up for clubs and other Improving Activities. Katherine remembered the years after that as being ones of profound alienation. It made her question herself, compare her family to the rest of the world. Why was she the only one who seemed to assume there was a God? What the heck did you do on Sundays, if not go to church? Why were all the songs she knew so strange to them?

Her own parents were what the rest of the world called Jordanites. They were devout in their own quiet way, in an age of the world where religion was deeply unpopular. Worse, they were conventional, clinging to positively ancient ideas. People would smile and bemusedly tolerate the technopagans, or the syncretists, or the college kid who decided to go on a Zensufi retreat for a few weeks. But her parents were Christians. Just Christians. No modifiers. Not New Witnesses, not Theravada Christians. Certainly not, to themselves, Jordanites. They weren’t fundamentalists, not in the true sense of the word. They had no desire to be outsiders, opposed to everyone around them. They had not shut themselves up behind the walls of a compound, hurling curses and epithets at Babylon beyond. It was just that the rest of the world had moved on, and quietly, without intending to, had left them behind.

And confronted with that, with the option of being on the outside looking in, or being part of the whole, enormous world around her, Katherine found that slowly (at first), then quickly (once she reached adolesence), she could not help but choose the latter. Her faith, what little there had been, quietly dried up. And when she moved from Georgia to Ireland for university, it was the easiest thing in the world to simply leave all of that behind.

She had remembered how her parents struggled to reconcile themselves with the world. She remembered how they feared for her, after she admitted to them she didn’t believe. She remembered, even when she was a kid, the suspicion her family garnered for their unusual ways. Not least the questions of adults, who could not really believe everything was quite all right at home. As long as you’re happy, their voices said. But that culty shit creeps me out, their eyes added.

They did not understand what faith was to her parents. What it could be, depending on your experience. Other people read the Bible, and they saw hellfire and destruction and damnation. They saw laws forbidding this and that, and all the roots of shame and guilt and holy wars, and the apocalypse. That wasn’t what Katherine had seen. That wasn’t what her parents had shown her. These four books, the ones she pored over now in the hopes that it might save her life, well, maybe they contained all that, too. But there was something else in them, and there always had been for people like her father and mother. People who knew they were imperfect, but wanted to be better than they were. People who strove against the world, not because they hated it or scorned it, but only because the world was full of grief and pain and sorrow, which could only move their hearts to pity--for the suffering of the guilty and the innocent alike. People who did not believe in hellfire or damnation, but knew, in their heart of hearts, no one suffered in vain; that every soul, however unhappy, could look forward to salvation in the world to come.

Leofe’s voice had shifted; she had gone from correcting something Katherine had said, to reading out a few sentences at once. Suddenly, something snapped into place, and Katherine realized what she was looking at. It wasn’t the Gospels at all. Leofe’s voiced rolled over her, and each phrase fitted itself snugly against the familiar verses, and somehow, for just a moment, it was like the woman was reading to her in her own tongue. The sound that came from heaven, like a mighty wind filling the house. And on each one of them appeared tongues of fire; and, filled with the Holy Spirit, they began to speak the languages of every nation, and those gathered about them heard them speaking in their own tongue.

Katherine laughed; Leofe stopped reading.

“It was a good choice,” Katherine said. “I know this one pretty well.”

#tanadrin's fiction

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superbdonutpoetry · 3 years

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'The Branch Davidians'

‘The Branch Davidians’

I’ve been called a ‘Justinite’, a ‘Terry-a-nees’? And a few other choice words in my life lol, but thankfully I could never be called a ‘Jordanite’ or even a ‘Branch Davidian’ who now seems to be the new ‘flavour of the month’. Specially chosen by those ‘in the know’. I’m talking about David Osteen. The man is a rank Kenoticist. His take on Romans 3:2 is utter and total ignorant garbage…. In…

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#David Osteen #Justin Johnson #Kenosis #terry MacLean #Vagabond Preacher

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totallyawesomebabynames · 7 years

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My sons name is Jasper and that's a stone so I want to do a theme that starts with J of element. Help??

“J of element” is extremely hard. Stick to either “J names” or “element names” or even just nature names. I’m all for patterns, but don’t set it up to be difficult.

There's:

Jacobsite (Jacob?)Jadarite (Jada?)Jadeite (Jade?)Jaffeite (Jaffe?)Jalpaite Jamesonite (Jameson?)JangguniteJarosewichiteJarosite (Jarod?)Jeffersonite (Jefferson? Jeff?)Jennite (Jennie?)Jeremejevite (Jeremy?)Jerrygibbsite (Jerry? Gibb? Gibson?)Jimthompsonite Johannite (Johan? Johannah?)Jolliffeite Jonesite (Jon? Jones?)Jordanite (Jordan?)JulgolditeJunitoite (June?)Jurbanite (Jurban?)

Then there's Jade and Jet.

That's about it for minerals starting with J. Unless you love one of those, I'd suggest branching out and not limiting yourself to a specific pattern.

You could do gemstones. To start with, Jade is a great start if you have a girl. After that.... options aren't as obvious if you want J + gem/mineral/element/whatever.

RubyEmeraldOpalAmethystOnyxAlexandriteTopazPearlOlivineGarnetSapphireCoralAmberBerylJacinth Quartz

Here is a list of other nature name ideas you may like. Please don’t trap yourself unless you for sure have it planned well in advance with 4-6 possibilities.

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icey-pie · 7 years

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@mystreetheadcanons This is jordanite

#I found it on accident 3 years ago

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helpwithgems · 7 years

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What would a Kyanite and a Jordanite make? Thank you! :)

Perhaps Riebeckite or Labradorite! (Personally I’d go with Riebeckite!)

~Mod Opal

#fusion #anonymous #mod opal #gemstone advice

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trickypath · 5 years

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An Evening with the Jordanites

‘Why do those feminists go on about the patriarchy?’ - This was an overheard conversation in a pub after an evening watching a documentary film called the ‘Rise of Jordan Peterson’ at the Camden Odeon. I went there out of respect for a friend who asked me to go and also on some level to break the spell around Peterson that the online world has created. Jordan Peterson was a little known Canadian psychology professor until 2016 when he made a series of controversial stands on trigger issues like transexual pronouns and the position of masculinity in 21st century society. These views launched him onto the global stage of public intellectuals. His notoriety has been sustained by both his fans and detractors.

I personally have always felt a queasiness about the man and until tonight I couldn’t place my distaste. It isn’t so much that he pursues a very unoriginal socially conservative agenda under the mask of intellectual rigour, or that he seems to confuse, the accommodation of the vulnerable into society with authoritarianism, or even that like many self-help gurus before him mistakes personal revelation with universal truth - in fact my principle objection is all about instinct. That instinct is located in his general demeanour. There something in the pinched humourlessness and barely repressed anger that has echoes of past intolerant voices. His annoyance has two forms: his coquettish piques and then his more eruptive rants that seem to come from deep personal animus rather than considered analysis.

It’s always hard going to watch something with the fan boys because the audience is not there with open minds to the spectacle before them. I know this from my own bubbles of adoration for any film made by David Lynch or Jonathan Glaser I want it to be excellent. I am willing the experience to fulfill the expectations I have brought with me.

It was interesting to sit amongst the converted and feel their adoration from outside the circle. I could feel that every word uttered by the films subject would be a further building block for the belief system.

It’s also mystifying for the outsider to hear laughter in the audience to comments I could see no humour in. But I also realised that sometimes the laughter is a shared signal, an in-group reinforcement, from a shared meme I wasn’t party to. What I personally saw and felt was clearly so different from the reverence around me.

The film took a fairly conventional arc of describing the rise of Peterson through a series of set pieces and in fairness to the film makers there were a number of contrasting voices present, including transsexuals opposed to him and some fellow academics who had some clear points of difference to his world view but by and large the film operated as a biopic love-in. Starting with his early years teaching in Harvard, the publishing of his first book ‘Tracks of Meaning’ through to his more recent, internet ‘phenomenon’ status.

It’s focus seemed to be on exploring the human face of Peterson. Spending long periods at home with him in discussion with his wife and children and getting up close and personal with his daily routine and his huge oppressive collection of totalitarian propaganda painting. He waxed lyrical about these outsized socialist realist paintings of Lenin in his study, blanketing the walls. Apparently put there to remind him of the evils of socialism. He seemed happiest when he was picking away at the faults

of Lenin and Marx, yet a brief cut away revealing a painting in another room of a figure in Nazi regalia was not mentioned or discussed. In this collection of art I saw something of the obsession of the man, a mammoth project of immersing what seems a sensitive soul (long bouts of depression are mentioned frequently) in a cave of fury, where everything the left represents is simplistically reduced to the disastrous consequences of Russian communism and yet the dangers evident in his own attempts to harangue the marginal is never linked to the rise of fascism. The demagogue is always blind to the dark extremes of his own views .

I didn’t see Peterson as a committed right winger but as the film rolled on I saw a fragile ego becoming emboldened. His escape from the ‘black dog’ depression through personal discovery and his wife’s yoga is illuminating but too short. The delicate soul of the man is glimpsed but like his Nazi paintings never truly explored for fear of a soft underbelly being revealed. But this to me is the real source of his zeal. Tracking the classic new age hero’s tale, Peterson like Deepak Chopra or Eckhart Tolle before him has experienced a personal epiphany that lifts the cloud of anguish and reveals a path to redemption through a method. Peterson has converted his own personal salvation into a series of lessons to save humanity with his reflections . Suddenly the college professor with the righteous argument is exposed as simply another self help salesman. Leveraging his psychology background and Harvard tenure as respectable cover in a hum drum campaign for the hearts and minds of the emotionally fragile.

The clips of him signing books and greeting his fans (in largely empty venues) shows Peterson gleeful as his converts echo his divisive language, hugging a young fan as he talks of ‘neo Marxist’ take downs. Peterson uses the mantra of ‘personal responsibility’ to bring a set of political values into sharp relief. Rather than correct his awkward followers at their lack of intellectual inquiry he bolsters their shallow world view and plays the daddy role with dandyish aplomb.

What bothers me about Peterson is the fact that he does not want to question the needy assumptions of his fan base in the same way that he would his inquisitors on university campuses because he is a snob who knows his audience are followers, like all remedy sellers he doesn’t want to stop the consumption of the snake oil. Despite the fact as a professor he should be there to challenge young minds not play up to unhelpful language that boxes us all in.

This is a thread of conservative thought that dates back to the late 80’s. Peterson creates a set of pigeon holes to force the opposition into - ‘Political Correctness’, ‘neo marxist’, ‘social justice warrior’ all these are terms created by the right to define and target a series of affirmative actions undertaken on American campuses at that time. They are divisive and yet used repeatedly by a man who claims to be frustrated by both the right and the left. I agree that left wing pundits also bandy around terms like ‘fascist’, but if you choose to use these terms you choose a partisan position and it’s clear which one he has chosen.

I find his stand in transexual pronouns particular repugnant. My disquiet stems from his standpoint that a very small minority group (0.6% of the US population) and their desire for recognition in legislation is akin to a slide into authoritarianism. This in my view is particularly disingenuous. The outrage that is fanned by pundits like Peterson and Adam Shapiro is outrage at a non issue. The fact that cisgender white men may very rarely have to address a person by the pronoun ‘they’ or ‘them’ and feel some discomfort in negotiating this space is not a righteous argument it is just getting aerated by someone else’s business. They don’t have to like it, but they should accept it because essentially this helps transgender people negotiate their day in a hostile environment 24/7, so the fact it makes a white guy uncomfortable in the few small occasions when they have to talk to a transgender person is not a breakdown of civil society it is a reordering of who is included in our democracy, in the same way that language and law was adjusted to include women, gay people, and racial and religious minorities. Just as what name I call my child and which I then expect the world to address them by, is none of anyone’s business neither is how a transgender person wishes to be addressed. There is no history of transgender people creating fascist dictatorships. This is picking a fight with an enemy that does not want to fight or be your enemy. It is the kicking of the prone body just because it’s easier than taking on the real source of power in the world. There are deep philosophical questions about the root causes of our disintegrating political institutions and the co-opting of public life by corporations, that at least an eighth of the world’s money is stored in secret offshore vehicles for the benefit of a minuscule minority and that we face an existential collapse of all living systems as a direct result of this mismanagement of our economies. That is something for conservatives as well as progressives of all stripes to be concerned about. But that requires a mind with a more expansive outlook, a mind more embracing of complexity than Peterson’s. A man who’s narrow mind is not up to the task and I feel that will come to pass. I suspect that even as I leave the cinema his influence on public discourse is fading slowly from the public imagination so that at last, he can return to the bosom of his family and friend to carry on something he is competent at, the teaching of psychology at Toronto university.

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mjowatkins-blog · 5 years

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An evening with the Jordanites

There are deep philosophical questions about the root causes of our disintegrating political institutions and the co-opting of public life by corporations, that at least an eighth of the world’s money is stored in secret offshore vehicles for the benefit of a minuscule minority and that we face an existential collapse of all living systems as a direct result of this mismanagement of our economies. That is something for conservatives as well as progressives of all stripes to be concerned about. But that requires a mind with a more expansive outlook, a mind more embracing of complexity than Peterson’s. A man who’s narrow mind is not up to the task and I feel that will come to pass. I suspect that even as I leave the cinema his influence on public discourse is fading slowly from the public imagination so that at last, he can return to the bosom of his family and friend to carry on something he is competent at, the teaching of psychology at Toronto university.

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