Many moons ago I met Odin among the stars. We sat at a large campfire set upon a great comet sailing through space near Earth. Sitting to Odin’s left, I stared into the fire then into his eye and confessed. At that time I felt lost but I was ready to find my way again. He smiled the most warm and still somehow wild smile, then he drew me close. I leaned into his warmth and chuckled with tears in my eyes. He whispered to me of the importance of storytelling and learning from the past in order to improve the future. The Earth turned, the comet sailed on, the stars pulsed around us, and the sun seemed to shine a little brighter at the edges of my awareness.
What I describe above, a bit of mystical experience from my recent history, was inspired by contemporary cinema, in this case the scene in Cloud Atlas at the end where Tom Hanks’ character is teaching the children history around the fire. Contemporary books and also movies are stories, modern tales told for the same reasons our ancestors told stories around their communal fires. The tales told in modern movies and books are contemporary sagas, present day chronicles of consciousness, being, community, and identity. And Odin and the other gods speak through them as easily as they speak through ancient myths. The mystical moments seeded and inspired by modern stories are no less valid than those that emerge from our readings of the Eddas and Sagas or other such ancient sources.
Odin used Cloud Atlas imagery to speak to me as that was the most clear and present symbol system rolling through my brain at the time.
For me, it was more than a scene with Tom Hanks and some cute kids among the stars. In my version, the children were me and Tom Hanks was Odin. At the time when I met Odin on that comet I needed to begin the process of re-membering myself. We humans do that through story. In the company of the stars I could see the constellations of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that were a part of me. I could interact with the vast array of experiences that were chapters in my story. With Odin’s help I began a journey through self and through the Worlds. The new narrative of my self is being written everyday in thought, in deed, and in story. I have committed to telling my own story, to weaving my own tale, drawing the lines that give form and function to the constellations in the sky of my experience.
Odin and I still meet on that comet. Each time we do, I sit at the fire there and tell my story. And he tells me how the Worlds began. Together we re-member the past, mark the present, and weave the future.
Wandering Woman Wondering 
One reply on “Greeting Odin Among the Stars”
[…] Having said that though, until recently I never really had a close relationship with a god. There was that sensation of Mary “Mother of Christ” in her all-mother role, very distant and impersonal but nonetheless full of beauty and power. Sometimes, there was a flash, like hands fleetingly meeting in a crowd, with some but that was about it. While the otherworld felt natural to me, I journeyed and talked to spirits of place and my own totems much in the Shamanic tradition the gods were but a distance shadow on the horizon. Someone I knew was out there, someone I might sacrifice to and whose stories I might share, but nobody I had ever really met in person. I did not get to sit at their fires, nor did I get to, as Wandering Woman wrote so beautifully the other day, “greet them among the stars“. […]