VALHALLA
Find Your Freedom
Chapter I BIRTH
I remember the eyes of youth. Everything a mystery. Brilliance and awe born in the heart of every breath. A world alive on the edge of an ever curling wave. Every sense feeding, and thriving on the infinite wealth of a moment. If you've seen the winter's first great snow through a child's eyes you've known true happiness. I remember a bottomless freedom.
One day I woke up to find those perfect winter mornings had melted and gone. Young joys evaporated, muddied in the heat of stress and obligation. We get lost in the doubt of so many forgotten days. And that great wave breaks apart into dream and memory. What happened to that simple joy. Where do we find the freedom that time stole away?
I had no real plans, and even less money. There was only a direction. The fire I'd lost, I felt the distant heat of it still flickering way out beyond the ragged rim of the normal, of the accepted. And so I went in search of the untamed, the estranged, the wild few tending the flame. I went north, towards a half forgotten dream.
Change was in the north wind. Revealing new color, whispering impossible promises. Great things were happening that I could not miss.
I left my life by the roadside and set off on foot through the woods following the thin thread of some nearly buried track. No direction but north, drifting with the tireless snow. Then for a moment the sun broke through and I found myself in a world bigger and grander than all imagination. Color and life vibrating in everything, falling in the smallest pieces of heaven down to earth. Just what sort of wonder could this new world hold? The storm moved back in, but not before I'd seen the smoke of a distant fire.
Chapter II YOUTH
I'd found a place of mountain myth, they
called it VALHALLA. In Norsk lore, those who fell in battle were lifted
up on angels' wings and brought to a kingdom of delight for all
eternity. The souls here came from the city, the road, from places they'd long forgotten. They were those who'd fallen on the battlefield of the modern way, who'd tried to fit in to the cube but had been swept aside by society. They'd found their way here on wings of cosmic fortune and now indulged in the raw pleasures of the winter afterlife. These were the forgotten few who had fully cast their lot into a simple emotion felt in the simplest of seasons. They'd offered themselves up to the only thing that had never led them astray--the absolute honesty of winter.
The leader of this funky tribe was a man who called himself Rashik. Never had I met such a high caliber outlaw. He was a boy locked in a man's body. Eccentric, playful, invincible. The world said that people like him were crazy, but he didn't much care for the opinion of the world so he wandered off and built his own. He could probably tell it better than me.
"Hello darlings, I've got hiding spots everywhere, in the trees, full of stuffs. Anything
a man could want. I got food for twenty winters, if you like herring... I LOVE herrings.
And I love golf; it's a game for gentlemen; an under appreciated winter pastime. One
thing I don't like is work, but someone has to pay for the herring. And every sunday
I ride to the job and chase the professional life. HAhahaha, maybe being a coach isn't
so bad. In my world we'd just listen to the kids. Kids don't care about taking chances,
about hurting themself, they just go. I see kid courage is just sitting in our bones, waiting
for us to stop worrying and take the jump. So... would you like a lesson?"
The freest spirit in camp lived in a girl named Ayla. She floated on a grace all her own, without any of the world's weight we all accumulate. Her ways were as smooth and sure as gravity, flowing down through the mountains like quicksilver. No one knew where she came from or where she was going, and I doubt she did either. She pulled from the deep well of instinct, moving to the rhythm of a simple song--think, and it will be. She saw all the possibility to make this life her own.
"My father used to teach me to play with strangers. To not be afraid of what I didn't know.
He taught me to howl at the moon. That the only difference between us and those wolves
was a couple of hairs. We all bleed the same blood. Winter has a way of washing away
the layers, bringing us back to what we're all supposed to be--creatures of the earth."
Chapter III ADOLESCENCE
The call of Valhalla was irresistible and soon it became the closest thing I had to a home. With the passing of the days I fell into that snowbound family as if they were my own, moving with the gentle rhythms of the snow and the ecstatic surges of the tribe too weird for the world outside.
Valhalla, a beacon in the night. Its flames slowly spread and take on a life of their own, unique to every eye. The mountains gave each what they needed in a unique way, speaking to them in their native tongue, filling in the gaps in their lives until their lives until their souls were white hot and brimming full. Life there asked you for nothing but to find out who you were and to set that person free.
With every dawn that greeted Valhalla a man named Yama quietly carried that fire from night into day.
"Early in the morning, when nature is fast asleep, the animal in us also sleeps. We are
still in the world of dreams from which reality can grow. Every day is new. It's a new
chance to breathe and feel. With my mind and heart I am alive."
Chapter IV ADULTHOOD
There was more life and character in Valhalla than in the rest of the whole rest of the world I'd known before it. They had all taken such different paths, but each had led here to the same dawning understanding. That morning the mountains told me I'd reached a turn in my own path. I felt the softest tremors of the earth with perfect clarity. Everything was in the right, swaying in an ageless rhythm. In the pure and free forever of one winter morning I at last viewed the world through those lost eyes of my youth.
Change was in the wind. The evening was warm, old bones ached, and those who knew spoke the dread word "rain." The season was coming to an end. Our tribe gathered for one last offering to the winter night.
Rashik: "Hey man, let's go get some love! Welcome to funky town..."
Chapter V LEGACY
I woke up the next morning to a dissolving dream. In the wake of that feverish night the rains had come and washed away the magic of the place leaving behind that old familiar void. Some innocence had been lost in the dark now turned to rot. Nothing would last. That was the harsh reminder of the melt.
So that morning while the camp slept off the night's delirium I packed my bag and left Valhalla, returning to my home, my only home, the road. I went north, always to the wild north. There was an ease and purity of putting my thumb to the road, drifting, smoothly entering the flow of lives on the move, trading our hopes and our memories.
I rode beside men anxious to tell the stories of their own adventures long gone by. The raw lands and untold miles traveled, the friendships and the shameless freedom, the exhaustion and the joy, all now bottled together on a faded past. The lives and those memories and the life I live now separated by so many years were little different, and when those old eyes looked at me I saw the same glow with which I regarded my own youth. They told me of a place to the north, where winter in it's purest form never ended. A land beyond change, frozen in time.
And so when I finally reached the end of the road I bartered the last of what I had for supplies and one last lift north, as far as a man could go.
I climbed mountains and saw things that few would know how to imagine. Surrounded by beauty and grandeur, a lonely existence in the heart of endless winter. Then a storm came and swallowed everything. For days I lived in white, lost in memory, I'd found Valhalla in such a storm. How would I remember that place years later? The collection of souls in that camp, all as wild and rare as each snowflake that beat against my tent.
In that storm I could see the entire diversity of human life dancing in front of my eyes. I was enveloped by, and connected to, each of those crystals and all the miles they'd traveled, the clouds and water they once were, the rivers, the ocean, the lakes we all drank from. Where had the snowflake been? In what form? What memories did it hold? Each was a thread between me and the wildness of this entire earth, it's ancestral memories sewn deep into the feathers of each dendrite. Long ago I'd seen the freedom of countless lifetimes in that simple ever changing star of water and ice. I saw now that this same freedom had never left life, but had only changed form as I'd grown, working itself into the cracks of the road I'd traveled, into the breaths of those who had guided me along it, into the footprints of those who'd paved the way. Every step of life, from beginning to end, was just a new chance to see it again through a changing set of eyes passing from one generation to the next and back again, that beautiful legacy of what it could mean to live free.
As the storm finally broke I saw that change was the beauty in the heart of all things, and that I finally had a home to go back to.
But first, there was three feet of fresh!
Chapter VI REBIRTH
It was a celebration of a long winter lived well. Each of these souls would soon scatter, heading out on their own path for the summer months. But every turn the season brought one of equal wonder, and every ending birthed new opportunity. Each breath was another chance to dance.
The camp was all but gone. Packed up and stowed away until the return of the autumn snows. The mountains whispered a last ode to a long winter, a parting song for a recycling soul. There will always be brilliance, awe, and magic running through life for those who wish to see it. The eyes of youth were never meant for the young alone.
We had no plans, no money, and no direction. We let the mountains guide the way, drifting in their timeless flow.
And I wonder: what will you see?
Thanks for posting this. Love this movie
ReplyDeleteThank you! Such a great movie.
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