You have felt it — that the floor you stand on and the sky over your head and whatever you call the dark underneath are not three separate things. That they are joined. You just couldn't say how.
The Norse said how. They said there is a tree.
Hall tells it like this. When Odin had brought some order out of the chaos, he planted a tree in the body of the slain giant Ymir. And it grew — up through everything, like the spine of a giant. Its roots ran down below the world of men into a cold dark place they called Hilheim, which is where we get the word hell — though here it meant cold, not fire. Around its middle they set the great disk of the earth. And every living thing lived upon it.
That is the whole trick of Yggdrasil, and Hall is careful to say it. It is not scenery. It is structure. One tree that binds the world above, the world of men, and the world of the dead into a single body. So that to climb it, or to go down into it, is not to travel to another country. It is to move between the floors of one house.
Heaven and earth and hell — you thought they were destinations. The tree says they are heights on one trunk. You are already standing inside all of it.
And notice where the wisdom is kept. Not at the top. Down at the roots lies the pool of Mimir — memory, older than Odin himself. And to win the secret of the runes, Odin does not ascend. He goes down. He plucks out one of his own eyes and casts it in. Only then are the great laws whispered to him.
That is the teaching under the bark. What you most want to know is not up in the light where it is easy. It is down in the cold, in the memory, in the part of yourself you'd rather not look at. And the toll for reaching it is real. Odin pays with an eye. Nobody reads the deep runes for free.
But the tree holds a second thing, and Hall does not soften it. At those same roots, destiny has set a host of worms whose only work is to gnaw the roots through. This is the clock. It has been running the whole time. One day the worms finish, and the tree falls, and its three worlds go down together into the dark.
Here is the part worth carrying home. Hall says the world that falls is not the ground under your feet. It is the world made only of law — the world of the ordering mind, the ego that thinks it runs the place. That is what the worms are eating. Not the earth. The false certainty that the earth is all there is.
So the tree tells you two true things at once, and refuses to let you have one without the other. That everything is joined, top to bottom, and that you can climb it. And that it is coming down, and you were never meant to hold it forever.
Both hands know this already. You reach up because you are made to. You let go because the roots are being eaten, and something older is waiting underneath — the ground the tree was only ever standing on.