In the life of the person who follows the old ways of the Teutonic people, there should be nothing unholy, no time at which you shut yourself off from an awareness of the workings of your soul simply because the thing you are doing is not openly magical or religious in its goal.
Rather, you should be aware of the presence of the gods in everything. When you weed your garden or plant a window box, think of the body of Nerthus, Mother Earth, in which you dig; when you eat a hamburger, give thanks to Freyr and Freyja for their bounty which fattened the cattle and ripened the grain for the bun!
The more fully you can know how the gifts the gods have aided you in every aspect of your life, the closer you will be to them as you use these gifts.
The same holds true for meditating on the runes: as you think on the workings of their various powers in every aspect of your life, you will become more and more adept-not only at reading the staves, but at using them in ways which work more directly upon the part of the world you can see.
Closely related to the duality of holy/unholy is the question of good and evil.
The West has inherited a great deal of its own viewpoint on this matter from the Middle East, in which it is a frequent practice to separate being into absolute Good and absolute Evil.
The problem with this, of course, is that when absolute concepts are applied to the relative world, they are generally applied according to local prejudices.
The effect of this can be seen in, among other things, the incredible psychological devastation wreaked on the Western world by the declaration: “Sexuality is evil; absence of sexuality is good.”
The first, and most important, re-turning of thought back to the ancient ways comes in dealing with the duality of sacred and profane as seen by the modern world.
The terms themselves come from Latin roots; rooted in Anglo-Saxon, the words become “holy” and “unholy,” having very different meanings and connotations.
Holy comes from a root meaning “healthy, whole,” showing that in the Germanic mind something holy is not cut off from the physical world, but rather is strong in both the earth and the worlds of the soul which are woven into it.
Something unholy is not simply mundane or “non-spiritual” in the way that a profane thing is; it is something sick or flawed.
To hallow a place or item is not to set it apart from the world- it is not taboo or untouchable in the sense of the Judeo-kristjan (Norse spelling of Christian) “sacred”-rather, it is filled with such a power of holiness as to ward it from any unholy-warped or woe-working-wights.
