“Wyrd is a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny. The word is ancestral to Modern English weird, which retains its original meaning only dialectically.The cognate term in Old Norse is urðr, with a similar meaning, but also personified as one of the Norns, Urðr (anglicized as Urd) and appearing in the name of the holy well Urðarbrunnr in Norse mythology The Old English term wyrd derives from a Common Germanic term *wurđíz.[1] Wyrd has cognates in Old Saxon wurd,[2] Old High German wurt,[3] Old Norse urðr, Dutch worden (to become), and German werden.
The Proto-Indo-European root is *wert- "to turn, rotate", in Common Germanic *wirþ- with a meaning "to come to pass, to become, to be due" (also in weorþ, the notion of "origin" or "worth" both in the sense of "connotation, price, value" and "affiliation, identity, esteem, honour and dignity).” — Wikipedia
The curation of Drafts Of Ecology: URD wish to examine the theme - Trend - initiated by APXIV, by exploring the etymological history and its relation to the ecological concept of a loop. The term trend, derives from the Old English trendan - to ‘revolve” or to ‘rotate’.
The concept of the loop in ecological terms refers not only to the circular aspect of nature and biology, but likewise to the notion of the weird, or Urd.
Ecology - a term coined by German zoologist (among other), Ernst Haeckel - is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment.
The eco in ecology derives from the Greek oikos, a ”house, dwelling place or habitation”. I intend to deploy the dark ecologist thinking (or thinking of a logic of coexistence - Timothy Morton) in order to comprehend the surrounding environment, not only as biological matter, but likewise as alloy, concrete and minerals...
The Weird is always becoming something, decaying from its origin or depicts a tension of opposites which initially generates its continuous motion. The Weird will never be static and will most likely never rest its legs on the kitchen counter. The Weird is never plus or minus, never he or she. The Weird is always revolving. As the leaf from the oak tree, who falls from its branch onto the forest floor and then, devoured by the fungi mycelium only for it to be rearranged back again into the loop, the Weird.
Ecology is Weird.
Trend Piece
It takes me about two or three seconds to take a breath. Everything before belongs to memory; everything after anticipation. It’s strange, the fact that our lives are lived through this small moving window in time. In the modern trend of mindfulness, practitioners often strive to rest their consciousness within this moment of time. The rest of us, we might find conscious rest while hanging of a climbing wall or making love. Studies show that people’s minds were wandering when practicing meditation, often remembering the past or contemplating the future. This period was, on average, less comfortable than the ones spent being in the present moment. Thoughts of the future is often linked with anxiety and thoughts of the past colored by regret.
I use the analogy of meditation to contour the concept of trend. Trend moves between stages in time, past and future - thereby delivering something current, something present, something ‘trending’. Thoughts of past, present, and future is deeply imbedded in us and serves as a way of carving out a space-time continuum. We generalize the French revolution, the Avant-garde or woke movements as having dramatically distinct entelechies. I’ve heard academic scholars discussing whether the French revolution broke with the past or simply developed trends of old regimes. The generalization that invites a clean cut with tradition can seem attractive but fails to consider real continuities and most importantly the origin and concept of trend.
One of the paradoxes of trend is that the return to the origin is never an end, but a new beginning. As such, it is a boundless sequence, where there are still many points in the deep past with the potential to surface. The world today seems increasingly unstable. From new patterns of work and life to economic insecurity and the difficulty of forming deep meaningful relationships, we are desperately in need of a trend that isn’t destabilizing, but restorative.
Restorative trends are about returning to the core qualities of societies archetypes and recombining them to create something that’s both obvious in its provenance and strange in its appearance. A trend that is restorative takes socio-political roles and critically reframe them. It explores how social identities are manufactured, while allowing them to create their own image. Trend is the moment you realize that the only way forward is to hit the reset button and start again from the beginning. The question for meditating: Is “trend” here to save us, or destroy us?
— Fafaya Mogensen
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