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.
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 calm down, take a deep breath, and let the world fly by for as long as we’re here.”
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 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.
Raidho is about the ride, yes, but that encapsulates everything that happens on the ride. The break is part of the journey. Stopping has its place. 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. 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 was part of the journey, and it shaped me.
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.