When I first started learning about the runes—and perhaps everyone does this—I identified a few personal favorites immediately. Obviously I was drawn to Thurisaz, the giant; Jera, the torch of creativity spoke to me; I had a lot of affection for Perthro, the vulva; and Raidho stood out as an interesting, useful, exciting rune. I was pleased to spend some time with it when its turn came up.
And then I spent two weeks with it, because I didn't have time, and I didn't make time, to write out the blog post and my interpretation of the rune last week. Note the dates: it's been two weeks with Raidho, and what a journey it's been.
The Sake of Locomotion
The ride, the journey. Such an archetypical, primal concept. Getting out of my chair to retrieve a can of mineral water in the living room is a journey. Putting Ansuz away and searching for Raidho in my pouch was a journey. Zipping around on my Vespa to class, driving with my wife to the grocery store, flying across the country to a conference, these are as much journeys as tempering my character through military service, going a little nuts with the new concepts presented as I dive deep into Scandinavian mythology, or spending my life making amends for the imbalanced train-wreck I was in college.
Raidho distinctly spoke to me because my life has been defined by trajectories. I have always been on a quest for self-improvement; unfortunately, I've harbored some immature ideas of what improvement looked like and entailed. That set off further journeys as I built working premise after working premise, rewrote my morality and developed my ethics, never able to correct the past but endeavoring to not repeat my mistakes. The difference between what I've been doing and the core concept of Raidho is that I've been aiming for destinations. If I can hit a certain weight, I'll be good. All I have to do is give up carbs for 30 days, and I'll be good. All I need to do is get to bed by 11 p.m. every night and get the fuck out of bed at 8 a.m. every morning, for one week, and I'll be good. All I have to do is draw up a short list of friends I want to see, bug them all month long until we hang out, and I'll be good. I'm always about goals and destinations—I'm completely unmindful of the process, completely out of tune with what's happening around me, and to me, between points A and B.
That's what Raidho is. Raidho says, "Shut the fuck up and look out the car window. We don't have those plants back home, aren't they interesting? Check out that new smokehouse BBQ place, we'll have to come back to that. Just … fucking … calm down, take a deep breath, and let the world fly by for as long as we're here, okay?"
And Raidho is also about appreciating, trusting, and respecting the forces that are moving us along that path. The rune-poem for Raidho talks about how nice it is to sit in a saddle and have a horse do all the labor of transportation for you. Something is moving us along: a horse, a car, fate, the gods, the natural order of the universe. Your journey goes easier when you trust in that and when you appreciate it. You can still nudge the horse this way or that, but abuse it or neglect it, and it will take you down a very different path than you were anticipating. The Old Norse gods strove to impose order upon what they perceived as chaos: the natural order of the cosmos. They fought giants, they raised magic women from the dead to peek into the future, they broke all the rules, and for what? The cosmos ended exactly as it was going to, and they changed nothing, just increased their labor and suffering. What would their lives have been like if they'd tried enjoying the time they had, rather than bending the universe to their will?
The Break Is Part of the Journey
Like I said, I spent two weeks holding Raidho, and like I said, I structure my life in destinations, not thinking about the interim travel.
An unfortunate effect of this philosophy is that when I miss my goals, when I fuck up my timelines and don't hit my destinations, I beat myself up very badly. I think the worst things about myself, I cycle into bleak, dark patterns of behavior. I begin to despair of ever changing myself, and I even question the worthiness of my goals, question my priorities or the point of anything at all. It gets epic, and epically messy.
Raidho is about the ride, yes, but that encapsulates everything that happens on the ride. The break is part of the journey: there are times you have to pull off the path and let your horse get a drink. There are times when you have to pitch a tent and camp for the night. There are even times when you stop riding to read the sign posts and consult a map, or just sit on a promontory and appreciate the landscape in an area you've never visited before. Stopping has its place in the journey. Falling off your horse and banging your head is also part of the journey. The most important thing about the journey is what it does to you, how it shapes you, what you become when you're moving from location to location. And how it shapes you is due to what you see, what you experience, things that happen to you. One journey can comprise a hundred little journeys, working together or independently from each other, like the currents in a river.
It wasn't a failure, that I didn't bend the universe to write my blog last week: it just didn't work out, and I chose not to. That's part of the journey, and it shaped me. Had I put in more effort and written these pages last week, I'd be a different person today than I am now, as I write them. Not much, but slightly different, on a slightly different path to a slightly different destination. I can choose to hate myself for not meeting my goal and prolonging the process of learning the Elder Futhark runes by one week, or I can accept that this was also part of the process. Sometimes the blog post will be late. Sometimes the rune doesn't speak to me. Sometimes life happens in complete defiance of what I had planned. Instead of fixating on how things didn't go as planned, it's better to reconcile with the fact that all of this is part of my journey.