About the Author
My name is Jim Brown
I grew up in the American South, homeschooled inside an ultra-conservative Southern Baptist church community — a narrow-minded world with firm walls built to both demand compliance and encourage the suspicion and condemnation of anything that existed beyond. It was an environment where any question that might be asked had already been answered by a group of men with vested interest in keeping church pews (and offering plates) full. Questions challenging the hatred, bigotry, and supposed truth being preached from behind the pulpit carried the threat of exile, being labeled a heretic, the fear instilled from childhood of being cast out from god’s grace and protection. It was a world curated and controlled by guilt, fear, weaponized cognitive dissonance, and self-hatred.
At sixteen, I walked away from the only community I had known into the unknown world I had been pre-conditioned from childhood to believe would consume me and doom my soul to eternal suffering and torment.
What I found on the other side of those walls wasn’t emptiness or evil. It was a library. I discovered paganism, and through it the pagan traditions of the world. Their ways of meeting the metaphysical, of living well, of treating other people and the living world with intention. I have spent the time since my discovery reading, questioning, practicing, and revising my thoughts, ideas, and understanding.
In time, I settled on Norse tradition. Not because it is “better” or “more correct” than any other pagan path. Unlike the world I left behind, I found that pagan practices are often welcoming of one another and in many instances have overlapping practices, rituals, holidays and other elements. I, in fact, still carry parts of several other traditions in my personal pagan practice. I settled here because it offered the structure, and the interface with the unseen world, that best fit my own experience.
Pagan paths are living traditions that grant practitioners room to question, to test the old words against new understanding, and to let the practice grow as wisdom accumulates. They are paths that grow with you as you learn. They are not ones that root you in place and demand their practitioners to defend old errors, misunderstandings, and damaging philosophies long after critical thought has shown them for what they are.
At the time of this writing I am in my early forties. I hold several college degrees and have spent more than a decade and a half serving in the United States military traveling to many places encountering people, ideas, and traditions across many walks of life. I offer that information as context, not credentials. The most important thing all my years and travels have taught me is this: my understanding only scratches the surface of what is a universe that is massive, beautiful, and complex far beyond what my comprehension and experience can ever fully grasp.
This site is my effort to set that understanding down in words. It is my notes, my experiences, my conclusions; finite and limited as they are. It exists so that you, the reader, can take up the tradition that has carried me through some of life’s brightest peaks and darkest valleys.
Our tradition of never-ending curiosity.
I hope what you find here gives you a foundation to stand on as you keep questioning our place in the universe, and firm footing among our ancestors, the spirits standing just beyond the veil of our senses, and the deities who both hold sway over, and bend to, the powers of the cosmos and the strands of fate spun by every action we take, as we travel The Norse Path.
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