The Runetastic 120 days! (a call to glory!)

General Discussion
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You will, man. The knowledge wouldn’t come if the greater part of you didn’t want it to; it’s just that sadly, we humans tend not to learn half so effectively as when we are knee-deep in -defeat-! I mean otherwise, there would be no reason in the world to change anything we were doing, right? But when it comes full circle, Odin is the first to make sure you realize that all this power to change is actually inside yourself, and that you bear the responsibility to take control of your own destiny.

Edit - I guess the best way to prepare is to consider what in your life comes to mind when you think the word ‘Attachments’.

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Haha, you were a step ahead of me to already know Raidho had to do with “the Journey we all take on our lives” and “the need to pay attention to the Journey and not focus so hard on the end goal that we don’t enjoy the Journey”. It looks like already being conscious of that freed your time to press further beyond that initial realization, whereas hard-headed old me needed my five whole days to truly take that idea into my life!

From Fehu through this point, I was still home for the holidays on post-deployment leave from Afghanistan. I was conscious of living in utter Western luxury, I didn’t have to worry about anyone trying to kill me, I slept and ate and fucked like a savage god - but at this point in my rune work, I became restless.

I felt really guilty at first because I had so much compared to so many and somehow wasn’t satisfied. It was kind of natural for me to yearn for a break from my family - I’m all for familial duty but it’s just healthy for a son to strike out and make his fortune independently. But even when I stayed with my girl, who was great and very patient with me after coming back from over there, my week with Raidho introduced this powerful familiar primal urge to roam and discover that I actually thought I should quash out of devotion to her.

Thing is, that only contributed to more restlessness and waking up while she was still asleep to plan things for the future that - honestly, even though it’s kind of fucked up - I just couldn’t picture her choosing to keep up with. So how does this tragedy end?

Not that tragically, actually. It seems like the way a lot of the runes worked with me was in steeping my life in a challenging level of their energies, and then leading me to the knowledge that would reconcile what I found myself dealing with. In Raidho’s case, it was just what was mentioned on Orismen’s blog: “the need to pay attention to the Journey and not focus so hard on the end goal that we don’t enjoy the Journey”. In addition for me, a sense of Perspective: how where I was came about because of my Journey so far, and how many limitless possibilities lay in store for me as long as I didn’t rest content but -continued- the Journey I’d started long ago.

I was treating the wanderlust and longing for new horizons as something immature and “bad” that reflected unworthiness of loving the woman I was with, when slowly I was made aware that it was just part (a fucking -important- part that had spurred to development my whole life!) of me, and that propagation of the idea of its “badness” stemmed from -other- cultures, -other- viewpoints, and -other- people and -their- ideals. And that as long as I refused to recognize what in my mental make-up came from myself and what came from “outside”, I would never truly be Free.

So, not nearly as dramatic as my lessons from some of the preceding and succeeding runes - and I do apologize that the context of this realization is kind of personal and maybe any readers can’t relate or just don’t care to hear it - but this was the realization that -I- needed to gain from this rune, and Raidho is one that is still very near to my heart.

Hail, guys, walk in your own light and don’t feel guilty over needing to crest the next horizon,

Claidheam.

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As a relevant aside, last weekend I competed my initial working with the runes, concluding with Othala and have since been taking a bit of a “breather” before really working at perfecting evocation and particularly spirit communication. I have still been spending plenty of time at my altar for Odin, and plan to continue working with him for some time. Last night, whilst lighting the two candles I have on the altar before going into plans for the near future including spending the next three days in a learning connection with a certain demoness from Orismen’s tarot experiment - and one of the candles immediately went out, and then stayed out. So I stood there puzzled and continued trying to relight the candle because two candles on the altar had been established habit, goddammit, and then I got this overwhelming image of a one-eyed old man cackling in hilarity at me.

It clicked. One eye, one candle. I remembered the tale of Odin sacrificing even his own eye in the quest for knowledge and now that I had taken my swift six-month journey through all the runes that legend took on a newer and more personal meaning. So, yeah. One lit candle it is, for now lol.

Er. Sorry about the revenge of the run-on sentences from hell. If it really bothers y’all I will do my best to stop that.

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Personally, they don’t bother me, I come on here to read the kinds of concepts, experiences and ideas that can’t be conveyed in moronic soundbites (soundbite-compliant shite in the news is usually designed to appeal to the emotions, not the intellect or soul anyway) - I mean if anyone can find a way to convey this significant and important stuff via lol-cats or something, go to it, and good luck, but speaking for my own POV, reading’s why I’m here in the first place, and at least you use paragraph breaks and correct punctuation!

Too much “dumbing down” assumes dumbness and also subtly fosters it in the reader, it’s an enabler for mental laziness.

JMO. :o)

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Working with Ansuz I became aware I need to stop using the runes for a while. It seems odd that the runes want me to stop this pathwork, but they are aligned and supporting me to accomplish other things. Apparently, I have other ongoing workings that are more important to my ascent.

Enjoy the ride.

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[quote=“NariusV, post:66, topic:2651”]Working with Ansuz I became aware I need to stop using the runes for a while. It seems odd that the runes want me to stop this pathwork, but they are aligned and supporting me to accomplish other things. Apparently, I have other ongoing workings that are more important to my ascent.

Enjoy the ride.[/quote]

It is always important to listen. Interesting, the runes seemed to sense that they were in a way holding you back. Runes are strange, sometimes it is like they almost have a conscious mind…and other times they act more like the mechanisms of the universe.

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Whatever they tell you I’m positive the message was clear. I’ve always found the Runes to be blunt and to the point.

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That dream of yours is absolutely uncanny, and I’ll try to explain why.

When I started working with Kenaz I was particularly excited: illumination and enlightenment are things I realize I’ve literally spent almost my entire life seeking for, and its fiery connotations had me eager to tap into that more active energy to fuel my advancement and learning.

But what I found was that for me, Kenaz was not a bright bonfire lighting up my whole everyday life around me. Kenaz was a torch with which I descended into the depths. My dreams started to depict the ancient Germanic past, a few of them even seemed to depict past lives that went a long way toward explaining certain longstanding predispositions. Often in my thoughts during the day, but especially at night, the torch-rune Kenaz flared to life and beckoned me further down to the secrets of the past I needed to be mindful of.

It reminded me a lot of the old custom of burial mounds. The kind that were meant to be entered long after the burial, by descendents. There would be history, and your heritage. Their would be weapons, armour, treasures and relics from the past - your past, and your families. For as long as the family remained on the lands that housed their ancestral remains, this could be a very tangible link to the past and their roots. But for people like me who have sprouted from seed flung far afield, there are journeys to the burial mound by the light of Kenaz.

My time with Kenaz coincided with the turn of the new year, and that night I had the most vivid impression that I was re-living the spirit of the ancient tradition of yearly festivals about entering the world of the dead and symbolically dying yourself, to return to the land of the living with knowledge from beyond. In the rune’s lines it seemed clear as day that depicted were the rays of a torch’s light penetrating into the dark regions within the burial mound.

Ultimately Kenaz was an amazing bridging between myself and the past, with a lot learned on my part of the -heritability- of problems and questions and obligations from the past that can fall on the shoulders of the descendents. Cause and effect, people! That’s all “karma” is!

There I am rambling again. I love the runes. As an aside, shortly after finishing up Othala a week or so ago I performed my first rune reading since undertaking this six-month meditation, and holy hell! How powerful and vibrant they are, even compared to what I’d done before! If anything I’m more humble about reading them because now I -know- from experience just how overwhelmingly much can be eloquently spoken by a single simple symbol, but it’s awe-inspiring how powerfully they will -speak- to you when this work is done! So worth it!

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Gebo’s energy reminds me of sex magic and deep ancestral magic. It seems to be a combination of the two, a union that brings forth the new.

Perhaps the greatest gift of Gebo is the internalized recognition that these gods are my literal ancestors, their power runs through my blood and Gebo will show me how to unlock it.

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That is -very- interesting. I have a bit of an early day tomorrow so it’ll probably be later that evening before I find myself at leisure to type, but I will say that while we were definitely working with the same rune, and that rune -meant- the same thing, the -inflections- of it and the way the concepts came across were very different, and it’s pretty interesting to me anyway just what form those differences in approach take - because then, from the rune’s perspective, I get to ask myself ‘Why?’

Yes, that was just a pair of sentences. 0.o

I’ll try not to write a Russian-length novel tomorrow.

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But I like your Russian-length novels.

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Damn it Orismen, you’ve doomed us all!

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So Gebo. Yes, Gifts. To me, the major emphasis was on -Exchange-, and honestly although there were material items among them during this period, I didn’t feel like that was the real emphasis. The items themselves seemed to partake much more strongly of Fehu, and to me Gebo had to do with the interpersonal relations involved in the Exchange, not just of gifts though but of ideas, emotions, a million little exchanges of influence that happen, consciously or not, when two or more people interact.

Carl Jung I believe said that when two personalities meet it’s like a chemical reaction where the personalities of those involved each leave their mark upon the other. It’s this much more intangible sense of exchange - as a by-product of the gifts - that were the focus of this rune in my days with it.

So if anything, my interpersonal relationships hit a major upward spike because of how much more I was able to read into what was actually occuring aside from the obvious, and my appreciation for all social interactions (and I’m -definitely- not a social person for the most part!) increased as well.

Similar ground, true, but also -very- different emphases between our two experiences, but that’s good actually. The time of the working was for what the runes needed to teach us as individuals - now’s the time for broadening the total view.

I guess that one wasn’t very long, after all! Better luck next time I suppose.

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With special thanks to Frater A.

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Awesome to hear you came out on top again, my own experience definitely echoes the ‘joy after hard work’ axiom. A couple of differences in inflection again, but that’s why it’s so worthwhile to compare. I won’t be able to type up a summary of my time with Wunjo tonight; you know why, Orismen. But when I can, I will!

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Have fun finding that nugget of gold Claidheam :slight_smile: