‘That which circles moves from its centre’
1Perhaps you too have something like this: a conundrum from which you can never turn away, which you do not feel as a curse, but a generative, endlessly revealing, probably insoluble, puzzle. In Ancient Greece and Norse myth it is part of your Fate. In Old English, it’s part of your Wyrd. It’s a now-smooth pebble you can endlessly turn over in your hand, replete with crooked hole through which you can peer, to see the horizon transformed through the-nothing-that-is.
In writing this piece, I wanted to name it, this perennial circling of the heart-mind, as I know it’s not just me who experiences it. I went downstairs and I knocked at my partner’s door, requesting a moment of his insight into the language he has been enjoying in Old English Word Hord and Beowulf.2 I said that I was searching for a traditional two-word phrase to name the centripetal dance around my life’s great koan, (like the famous ‘whale-road’ for the sea). ‘Ah, you mean a kenning,’ he said. We talked of wyrd and fate, questions and purpose, interior places to which, no matter where you wander, you always end up returning: is it like a tor? A well? A magnet?
No, it’s the hearth, we realised. That bright place to which we will always be drawn.3
So, I will from now on call it my hearth-riddle (heorþ-rǣdels)4
Tangled life
No matter where I turn and how far I wander, the challenge and practice of yielding are always present. This is my hearth-riddle: how not to resist life, yet keep my centreline. How to balance softness and firmness, adaptability without flimsiness, stay in touch with things, yet not become enmeshed. In short, how do I stand my ground using softness, when all around the laws of iron5 and silicon6 are followed ten thousand times more widely than the rules of any wise well-tried path or the natural process itself?
It can seem that we are in a particularly terrible time right now with domination being a popular policy instead of dialogue, in so many contexts, whether at home or abroad. The great paradox of yielding in relation to this is how do we resist ‘evil’ (such as rule by force) without getting tangled up in it, or perpetuating it ourselves? If we constantly dwell on everything awful, do we not internalise it? If we ignore it and seek a safe hermitage somewhere, metaphorically or physically, aren’t we just abandoning our fellows to its ill effects?
This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, illustrations and links on 3rd March 2025.
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