To quote Bladerunner, "How can it not know what it is?"

I had lived a healthy portion of my life before I started to self identify as heathen. In my youth, my friends and I were aware of paganism and actually referred to ourselves as heathen, feeling some affinity to the norse gods. However, as I left my teens behind, I began to consider myself more of a nihilist than anything. Famously engaging in good natured competition with a fellow nihilist as to who believed in less while out one night in Grimsby. I won by virtue of the fact that the guy believed in believing in nothing, while I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Such sophistry appealed to me back then, I guess.

But, in my early thirties, the quest for romance took me to Sweden. I moved in with my then-girlfriend in Boras, Sweden. It was only fated to last a year, but that was a year that taught me a lot about myself. During that time, we made a trip together to some woodland, just outside of Svaneholm. It was there that I had my spiritual awakening. A feeling of awe overcame me and felt in some ways divine. It was the first time I felt divinity to be something outside of (but connected to) myself. It was also connected to the land around me at that time and linked me and the land to my ancestors and, what I later came to refer to as wights.

That didn't exactly set me on a new path, but it caused me to think more deeply about the path I was already on and how it could be considered to be a pagan one - and, more specifically, a norse heathen path.

Now, I find myself still on that path - and travelling as often as I can to Sweden where the landscape is as awe-inspiring as ever. The train from Stockholm to Kiruna, for example, took me and my (English) wife through some amazing countryside. Forests, mountains and lakes all call to mind faerie tales, sagas and myths that have been knocking around in my brain since my childhood.