It's not from my Viking ancestors, who tended to write very short thoughts on rocks using runes, like "Gorm carved these runes after his father".
Which one might think kinda translates to "Hey, watch me, I can write with a hammer and a chisel."
Or I could decide that's what Gorm did.
I could also decide that Gorm perhaps, one frosty morning, put on an extra pair of woolen pants and a fur coat. He was thinking about his father and he walked out to that place, where the two used to sit. His father used to tell him stories about Freya and Heimdall and Valhalla and how the World was created by Fire and Ice, all the while teaching Gorm how to make little ducks out of reed.
Gorm is thoughtful this morning. He kisses his wife and kids and tells them he'll be gone for the day.
He gets his stone hammer and makes sure the head is tied on properly, then goes out the heavy wooden door and closes it carefully to keep the heat inside.
The sun is just rising. The cobwebs have caught the dew and Gorm's legs get a bit wet, as he carefully, with long steps, lifting his skin boots high, walks through the purple headed thistles to his fathers final resting place.
Next to a standing stone, he puts birch bark fibers and bark down, lights it carefully with steel and flint and adds pieces of 5 sacred woods to the fire. The sweet smoke rises, meets a temperature shift a couple of meters up and fans out, drifting slowly East towards the rising sun. Soon a good fire is going. Gorm can feel his dad's presence and there is a little tear blurring his vision.
His breath hangs in the air as little clouds of frozen steam. Gorm remembers he is alive.
That air has the breath of his father in it too, but it is no longer warm.
Gorm opens his bag and takes out some good, salted sausage and some mead. He carves a slice of sausage with his knife and puts it at the base of the stone. Then he pours a bit of mead next to it. He pats the ground, which still has that little hollow where his dad used to sit.
"Dad", he says aloud, keeping a little pause as his breath recovers after stumbling in its pace. "We're going to do something today, which I always will remember." I will write on this stone what we did today, Gorm thought. "Today" he said. It seemed that everything listened. He knew that his dad could hear him too. Then he started to write the memory of the moment, the precious now, the prayer of the present moment, nothing else:
"Gorm carved these runes after his father".
These words describing precisely what happened that day still wind along the edge of the stone, while not much but a few bones are left of Gorm or his wife or his children or even their children's children. Gorm was remembered as husband, father, then grandfather, then next great grandfather then great great grandfather ... but as time went, only the name remained and the memory of his habits, his essence and his kind heart dispersed like the morning dew on the thistles.
This present and precious Today, thirty five generations later, the latest of Gorm's lineage of firstborns is riding a Skytrain, not knowing how special he would be to Gorm. His name is Andrew. Andrew is a bit hung over from trying to entertain himself during the weekend and swearing about his iPhone spell checker. He's a bit depressed because he has nothing meaningful to do, you know, anything meaningful is expensive and he's short of cash, LOL.
Once he wrote something on his messenger about his dad, but he dropped the phone down a fish-tank in a drunken stupor at a friends place. It was time to get a new iPhone anyway and they were free because he was about to get his contract renewed anyway. With a data plan. Nothing less than 1GByte is meaningful, you know, LOL, Facebook eats so much bandwidth.
While this young man was already forgotten and his dad even more so, ... out in some foreign field, among purple thistles, forty bytes continued to witness that once, on a frosty morning, two hearts connected across the realms of existence.
Andrew does not know this.
This is why he is not happy with his spell checker.
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