The world needs more wyrdos.
You have always been a little wyrd. Now the world is asking you to stop hiding.
You have made yourself legible to a world that thought wyrd was weird. So often that you lost touch with the original.
But your wyrd is the heart of you.
The part that takes rage as fuel to create the new.
The part that partners with what is becoming before others even notice it.
The slightly wild, feral part that remembers we are nature.
The part that longs for myth, ritual, initiation, and wonder.
We are in the in-between, a threshold where the old is passing away and the new has not yet been born. Wyrdos are those who can stay at this threshold, who know the unique threads they weave pull on others they will never see, and spin them anyway.
If you can stay, you are already one. If you can't yet, you only need to reconnect to the wyrd you have hidden away. It is still there, underneath.
Wyrd is a word tangled in myth. It resists definition. The best way to explore it? Go to the roots.
We would rather practise wyrd than try to define it.
Prompt your Wyrd. Take as much as you can hold.
What will you weave?
A micro-dose
Find out which thread is yours.
A little goes a long way. Start small and follow the thread.
A hero dose
Ask your body what it already knows.
Access Altered States, with shamanic practitioner and microbiologist Simon van der Els. No substances, just your body's own intelligence.
Three virtual sessions: preparation, the altered states session, and integration. €500, with 5 spots at a time.
An immersion
Stay at the threshold, with others, long enough to hear it.
A day among the bronze beasts and wild figures of the Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden in Stellenbosch, to stay at the threshold and listen.
Women only, 30 places, 21 March 2027. €450 early bird, rising to €650 from 1 December.
The mythic roots of Wyrd
In Norse myth, at the root of the world-tree lies the well of fate, and three wise women live beside it.
They are the Norns, shapers of fate.
- Urðrwhat has become.
- Verðandiwhat is becoming.
- Skuldwhat should be. What we owe.
Their names hold something we still recognise. We arrive into a world already made by others, carrying what we have inherited and everything we have lived through. Yet we are still becoming. And we owe something forward.
A serpent gnaws at the roots of the tree. Each day, the women draw water from the well and tend the tree so it does not wither.
The gnawing continues. So does the tending.
Urðr shares an ancient root with the Old English wyrd: becoming. Fate and becoming, entangled.
Wyrd moves through other stories too.
Lakota stories speak of an old woman and a black dog. Tricksters, like Loki, unsettle every arrangement the gods make. Aboriginal Australian stories speak of a snake who shakes things up to make room for new life.
The word itself isn't named, but the spirit of wyrd is in them. There was room in these stories for difficult knowing, for mischief, and for being changed by what we meet.
But over centuries wyrd became weird. The word changed. Much of the world that held it became unfamiliar.
Yet the stories remain.
Now Wyrd is returning.
At a time when the weave seems to be fraying, and the gnawing grows louder.
Wyrdos hear it and choose to stay and tend. They make things, sow seeds, find threads that weave beauty, and mend what they can.
We cannot unlive what has been lived. What is ours is how we meet what is becoming.
Every choice pulls on a thread. And the thread runs further than we will ever see.
We owe something forward. We are tending a tree whose shade we will not sit in.
The tree still stands, and the well is still there.
What will you weave from what has become?
Ready to step into Wyrd? Choose your dose.