"A world-tree of balanced stones"

The world-tree is of course the Norse Yggdrasill Tree

Today it is just about words, how they flow when we come across them.  Why Heaney's Belderg? it just happens to pop up quite a lot in my visitor's counter.  It is almost as if Heaney is dreaming of that world beneath the turf, I see history as a book lying on the landscape, you can turn the pages, going deeper into the soil and find a 'happening'.  Sometimes people say that there is not an inch of land that has not been walked on in the past.  The 'peacefulness' of the present moment is not really a truth, if time was many times running parallel, you would feel the busyness of the world's continuous existence around you.
The first set of words below I found somewhere, no author to ascribe them to sadly.  We are always trying to find the second world, never quite getting there, there are some who say they have achieved it, maybe they have.  It has a certain Celtic ring to it, we are unhappy with our first world and so create a second world to dream in, but is it deeper?

"The idea that there are two worlds, or two rivers is found in many spiritual traditions. The first, is the world of our day-to-day functioning with all its dogs of commentaries, opinions, ideas as well as the emotions that move through us like the weather. The second world is completely different. It’s related to silence and seems composed of an entirely different order. This second world is always beckoning to us, but it is hidden behind the veil of the first world."

Rain falling on a temple - Korea

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Belderg by Seamus Heaney

'They just keep turning up

And were thought of as foreign'-

One-eyed and benign,

They lie about his house,

Quernstones out of a bog.

To lift the lid of the peat

And find this pupil dreaming

Of neolithic wheat!

When he stripped off blanket bog

The soft-piled centuries

Fell open like a glib;

There were the first plough-marks,

The stone-age fields, the tomb

Corbelled, turfed and chambered,

Floored with dry turf-coomb.

A landscape fossilized,

Its stone wall patternings

Repeated before our eyes

In the stone walls of Mayo.

Before I turned to go

He talked about persistence,

A congruence of lives,

How stubbed and cleared of stones,

His home accrued growth rings

Of iron, flint and bronze.

So I talked of Mossbawn,

A bogland name 'but Moss'?,

He crossed my old home's music

With older strains of Norse.

I'd told how its foundation

Was mutable as sound

And how I could derive

A forked root from that ground,

Make bawn an English fort,

A planter's walled-in mound.

Or else find sanctuary

And think of it as Irish,

Persistent if outworn.

'But the Norse ring on your tree?'

I passed through the eye of the quern,

Grist to an ancient mill,

And in my mind's eye saw,

A world-tree of balanced stones,

Querns piles like vertebrae,

The marrow crushed to grounds.

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Roy's Chief sitting below the Tor at Stowe Pound