For years I’ve carried the symbol in my brain. I’ve kept it on my computer and in my phone. I’ve printed it via technology and traced it with my finger in misted mirrors, with a pen on paper.
I’ve dallied with finding the words to put to what it means to me, but now I’m determined to explain it — though it feels akin to removing a bone from my body and trying to explain its significance with mere words, trying to make you understand how that bone is a metaphor for everything that exists now or ever has or ever will.
But first I have to tell you this: when I got myself and my cumbersome belongings settled into my chair on the first day of training to be a Reiki healer and looked across the room, I saw it there, tattooed on the forearm of a woman who looked remarkably like my favorite musician and who would be one of my teachers.
I breathed deeply, into my gut, and steadied myself — knew I was where I should be at last. I had followed the signs and they’d led me to this moment in the wyrd web.
Walking in the Web of Wyrd
Nine lines. 3 of them vertical and 6 diagonal, converging and crossing on the center line, rather like a Maypole.
The underlying concept of reality is the web which holds everything together in all dimensions including time. It is in essence very simple and can be depicted as nine lines locked together in such a way as to form the building blocks of the universe. (Butcher 1995: 7)
It signifies the Web of Wyrd: The Norse “matrix of fate.”
Original image by the author
The Web of Wyrd symbol is considered a metaphor for destiny that’s likened to how weaving works. As the fibers turn around the spindle, they become the thread of our lives.
This thread is regarded as the connection between our past, present, and future, and how they are impossible to separate.
When did I first see the symbol?
It must have been within the last 5 years. Or at least that would be the first time I remember seeing it. Maybe I saw it when I was young. Maybe I saw it in another life.
Messages Woven into the Carpet
Why am I so captivated by this symbol?
I suspect that the answer (along with everything else) lies in one thing that is, actually, everything: energy.
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. To understand the true nature of the universe, one must think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” ~ Nikola Tesla
Life is a magic carpet of energy.
Each and every thread in the carpet is a strand of energy. It has no beginning and no end, and it intersects with all the other energy threads to make up — well, everything.
Every strand (not unlike a DNA strand) is so fine and yet so limited on its own. But when woven together with trillions of other similar yet different strands in just such a way, the splendiferous, magical design of life emerges from the warp and the weft, the interweaving of the horizontal and vertical threads on the loom of fate.
And here’s where it gets even more magical: just like any other woven fabric, if you pull at a thread in one corner of the carpet, eventually the opposite corner will begin to fray. Every single microscopic thread has its unique role to play in the design that somehow interacts with all the others. And if you only saw one millimeter of this literally life-sized carpet, you’d still be awed by its intricacy.
I know all this to be true because of a moment of grace. I was given a glimpse of it for an instant; the veil was briefly pulled aside for me just as I was planning to end my life, and that’s what I saw. Life is a magic carpet of interwoven, swirling energies.
And I no longer wanted to die.
That was in 2020.
Bodies Aren’t Cages After All
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”~ Albert Einstein
In retrospect, I think matter itself was the matter for me. I didn’t particularly care for having been incarnated, and I felt as if I’d been bamboozled by fate into a human body. Again.
Prior to 2020, my relationship with my body was civil at best. I likened my body to a prison in which I was biding time — time that I spent loudly complaining about how I’d been wrongfully convicted.
If I knew about the Web of Wyrd then, I don’t remember. I know I felt more like a fly caught in a web than one of the web’s own fibers.
Had I not been shown a glimpse of the wyrd web that binds us all, I don’t think I’d be here today.
Well, I’d be here, but not in my current form.
I’m grateful.
Following the Thread
This writing has been my first attempt (of what I suspect will be many) to explain the significance of the wyrd web in my life.
I know that at best my efforts are just shadows on the cave wall, nearly futile gestures toward the truth that I know more and better than anything else.
But I do know that finding my own strand in the web and following it relentlessly has brought me to Reiki. And to joy. And I will continue to follow it, through this life and beyond.
Getting Better All the Time
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Quantum physics has shown that everything in existence is connected through a great field, or web (or carpet) of energy…and energy never dies. By shaking up our assumptions about ourselves and the world, by putting ourselves in the context of the ‘magic carpet’ of reality, we can begin to rewire our brains to be more conducive to real joy…and magic.
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