ᚷ gumena byþ gleng and herenys.
wraþu ⁊ wyrþscype ⁊ wræcna gehwam
ar and ætwist ðe byþ oþra leas ᛬᛫
For the people it is ornament and praise
Support and honor, and for those wretched in exile
Mercy and sustenance. You have nothing else.
Gift giving was a big deal to the people of the Rune Poem. It was everything. They gave everything. It could be food or goods, but they loved ornament and anything old especially: gilded, edged with silver, blinding shiny, these were the best gifts, but it wasn’t about the bling so much as the message. What you give is what you’re worth and what you will be remembered for. Everybody wants to be worth something and everybody wants to be remembered, it’s the only permanent thing in a world where every single thing is temporary. We are each other’s immortality on earth through the memories we lay down in other people, it’s the only way to live, so by God you will remember me.
With the gift comes gleng, which means both ornament and honor, and as is typical in such cases, it’s the intangible half of this pair that’s worth more. It … More
The Rune Poem is sung in a tempo that changes from time to time. You can find the beats and the rests between them in the stresses of the words in each stanza. Some move quickly like the adjacent Hail and Need stanzas. Stand in the hail and you’ll see why it needs a quick stanza. Stand in need and you’ll feel the staccato tempo of a life crashing down. The Home stanza is the last in a string of four stanzas bound together by a change of tempo: Human, The Sea, Ing, and Home. Together they tell a story about Ing who was a goddamned legend. He appears in the adjacent pair to Gift and Home, so we’ll visit Ing soon. For now know that home is where you start from and the end of the story as well. You have nothing else.
In the world of the Rune … More
You can cut just about anybody out of your life. You already have, cut them dead. You’ve filled graveyards of disconnections. Good.
Regrettably you have always felt you cannot jettison a family member just like that. That you are in fact stuck with your people forever. Not so! It is indeed possible to rid yourself of any inconvenient relative however close, doesn’t matter who, and as soon as you like too, you need not wait for the right moment or a catalyst. Do it now! Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today, as the esteemed alphabet reformer Benjamin Franklin has it, and though he failed to exile the letters C, J, Q, W, X, or Y from the family, he was successfully estranged from several of his own close relations, so he ought to know and would be delighted to tell you, were he still speaking to you, that procrastination is the … More
You live in the house of two mothers immersed:
One births the other and the other births the first.
You possess me always but may touch me not,
I can not explain why I’m now set adrift.
Was I such a pain? Was it part of a grift?
Whatever their reasons they’re not telling me:
I have no idea why I’m all at sea.
Why could they not love me and nurture my gift?
(My wide open mouth makes too big of a rift)
I always knew that they’d get rid of me
Because X is not Y and neither is Z.
Imagine yourself. Now imagine yourself 1500 years ago. Can you think like that? Think in Old English. There you go. Now you belong to a people who knew the Rune Poem backward and forward and folded in half. Fold it in half and look at the Gift and Home stanzas, they pair up for a reason. You know the reason and you would fear it, if it weren’t unthinkable. It won’t happen, but it does happen. Exile. You get your ass out of here right now. Just like that. Go. You are no longer welcome. This is no longer your home. We are not your people. We don’t know you. We won’t know you. We never knew you.
It’s shocking when it happens, wilderness. You had a place in this world. Gone. This is my family. These are my people. Nope. It’s expected for people to have people. With them comes respect, dignity, worth, support. … More
I sing this wretched song, my full sorrow
Of my departure by myself, that I might speak
That I dwelt in destitution, since I grew up,
Newly until of old, no more than now,
Forever I suffered my compensation, a journey of exile.
First my husband departed away from our people,
Over the tumult of the waves; I have sorrow at dawn
Of where on this land the leader of our people might have been.
Then I departed on a journey, seeking to follow
A friendless exile, because of my woeful need.
I began so that after, my kinsmen consider the servant
Through secret council, that they separate the two of us,
That we two, in the widest wealth of the world
Lived we most horribly, and grieved for me.
I commanded myself, my man, to take a dwelling in the sacred grove,
I had few loved ones in this place
Of loyal friends, because … More
It’s blinding when it happens. You didn’t see it coming. You did and you didn’t. The writing was on the wall, it was right there in your face and you were reading it all this time. And now you need to spell the words out? You want to study what happened? Go ahead, you’ll do it anyway, sound it out. Reduce to elementals who said what when to whom and at what volume. Unwind the choreography too: hands flying, hands shielding, arms folded up, faces folded up. Pick apart the blocking: sudden entrances and exists from rooms or phones, backs turned, unturned, turned. Reduce everything to parts seen and unseen, divide it into infinite smallness and you’ll see nothing’s there. Nothing. A tearing asunder holds no specifics you can explain to the curious.
What really caused your banishment? What do you want me to say. Maybe you didn’t belong together in the first place.… More
Good luck summoning an Angel because you will need it. You’ll need good timing as well because the two of you, or however many, speak entirely different languages from each other. You speak duration and they speak phenomenal flux, making them directionless, which is your next problem.
Angels have all the foresight of a toddler who has just learned to walk. The newly mobile have no planning skills. They don’t care what’s in their futures, this is not their concern. They just want to put something new into their mouths. Angels are like that too. I don’t know if they put things into their mouths or even have mouths, but what they do have is no future and no past, and though they lack these essentials and ought be pitied for it, they do have everything else which must be some consolation.
To overcome an angel’s lack of temporal trajectory, you must shift your concept … More
Has there been an injustice? A lie? Did some ugly thing happen and now everything’s a mess? Go home. Go home right now. Find your happy place. Are you there? Good. Now you can relax and get with your people. Gather them up. Talk it out, ask them what they think is right and what isn’t. You’ll be inspired.
Shoved out of the nest. Exiled in wretchedness. You have nothing else. You are not alone though, you’ll survive. Just. You have help coming to sustain you, a mercy, a gift. Help is the gift, and what a gift. Nothing more precious than generosity. Accept it now, you’ll use it later.
O ᛟ, you shapeshifter. Once you signified all O sounds, until you slipped sideways and joined up with E. Twins you were, they spelled you two ways Œþel and Eþel, depending on what you sounded like where they wrote your name, and when. (O Œþel, you were first in your birth order, if conjoined twins have a birth order.) O ᛟ, ᚩ took your O sound away. What can you do with a wordy god? Without O you get confused with ᛖ a lot. Eh, what do you care? You grew up to be a pictograph in your own right. A whole word world you are, doing the job of several letters in just one shape.
Carve the ᚷ rune. Now put a roof on it. What a gift to have a home.
O ᚷ, you shapeshifter. You have a completely different character depending on whom you are with. Well we all know somebody like that. Chum up to the back vowels (back of tongue and soft palate, O, U) and guess what, you become great and good like a god. Put you with the front vowels (closer to your teeth, I, E) and you soften up, gentle like a Y or a J. O ᚷ, your name gifu means gift, but doesn’t sound like it. It sounds more like what Y is doing in year. Yifu.
Carve a diagonal line and cross it. Lines in two directions.
