Peace, Love, and Happiness

No matter what holiday you are celebrating this month or, if you celebrate no holiday, I still wish you peace, love, and happiness for the coming year.  Occasionally, I give Runes to people.  By that I mean, I share a Rune with them that best represents a message I want to give them or a meaning I wish for them.  Therefore, today, rather than draw three Runes, I decided to select three Runes to represent this wish  of peace, love, and happiness for you.

To wish you peace, I chose Sowilo, the Rune of the sun and good fortune.  I hope that the great light of the sun warms and lifts your spirit.  Being in good spirits is a key component to finding peace.  May you also find good fortune in the coming year. 

For love, I decided to give you Gebo, the Rune of gifts.  We give gifts to honor or show respect, but also out of admiration and affection.  While giving a gift is more akin to generosity, giving without expectation of receiving anything in return comes closer to love.  When I give a gift simply because I choose to, I feel good inside.  When that gift is appreciated, I feel even better.  When we feel good and make others feel that way too, we build bonds that approach love.  Remember though, a gift is not necessarily a physical thing; it can be spending quality time with someone, paying them a compliment or doing something special for them.

Wunjo is the easiest and most obvious of the three Runes I chose.  It is, after all, the Rune of joy.  What better Rune for wishing you happiness?  Of course, a major component of this requires you to be grateful for all of the things you do have in your life.  Essentially, happiness begins with gratitude.  Moreover, the greatest happiness is found in simple ways, simple pleasures and comforts, not in excessiveness.  That is why I wish you simple happiness.

There it is, the Runes I chose to wish you peace, love, and happiness.  I hope you will carry these good wishes with you this week and I hope your week is wonderful.

Compliment or Criticism: Choose Your Focus

For some reason, it seems humans are more inclined to focus on the negative, rather than the positive.  While we appreciate compliments, a single criticism, no matter how small, not only tends to erase the good feeling brought on by the compliment, but makes us angry, frustrated or sad.  I had this experience this morning.  I ran into a friend of mine, who told me that she started reading my novel last night and couldn't put it down.  "Really engaging," she said.  Of course, that made me feel great!  Less than thirty minutes later, I ran into someone else, who criticized something I did yesterday, behavior that he clearly misunderstood, but his comments were enough to piss me off.  At home, I came into my office and sat, staring at my computer screen for 10-15 minutes, so angry that every time I started typing something, I deleted it.  Nothing seemed right.  Then, I realized what had happened.  I decided to ask the Runes how to allow the positive into my life, while letting the negative roll away.

Othala, the last Rune in the Futhark, offers a very interesting overview, focused on the positive.  While Othala is the Rune of inheritance and the homestead, we must look beyond this face value to find its underlying meaning.  It is about the foundation for the way we live our lives.  It is not an entitlement, rather reminds us to appreciate the gifts we receive that allow us to create the life we want.  Although the meaning tends to be geared toward the gifts we've received from ancestors in the form of traditions, property, and inherited characteristics, when we are building our homestead (the life we want), we also receive gifts in the present from friends and family.  This is where our focus should be, but how do we do it?

Well, Raido reminds us that life is a journey.  The Rune of riding or a carriage, travels on the path we take to establish our homestead on a foundation of the gifts we receive.  We must move forward; that is how we progress.  However, what we must be aware of is that the path our journey takes us on is not going to be straight and smooth.  It will contain bumps, curves, dips, hills, bridges, a whole variety of things that make our journey interesting.  Unfortunately, we will hit potholes and other disruptive features in our road, but our challenge is that we must manage and get past those annoyances, so that we can enjoy the rest of the ride and the amazing scenery that surrounds us.  Again, we ask how to do it?

 Can you guess the answer?  It is, of course, Jera, the Rune of the harvest.  As we have seen many times before, a bountiful harvest represents the fruits of a long process.  This means that there is no easy answer to our question, that removing and not allowing negative energy to chip away at our homestead's foundation will take time.  What we can do is make a commitment to the process.  Realize that the power is within us to dwell on the things we choose.  Therefore, as I starting point, I choose to dwell on my friend's positive words about my novel and build on that.

Before I end this post though, I'd like to offer something positive to you.  Simply by reading my blog, you have done two positive things.  First, you made me feel good by reading my writing.  Second, and more importantly, you have given yourself a tool to help you shed negative energy.  So, when someone says something negative to you, stop and think about all the positive things people have said to you and feed on that instead.

Have a positively beautiful week.

The Road Less Traveled

While there is nothing wrong with the road that most people travel in their careers, it is not a road that suits me.  I'm not sure it ever has.  Now that I am attempting to exit permanently the well-traveled road, I find myself confronted with a variety of challenges.  Many of my friends and family struggle with understanding my need to "derail my career" to accommodate my hobbies.  While I argue that what I am doing is correcting the situation and pursuing what should be my career while letting go of stop-gap jobs, I wanted to double-check with the Runes and make sure I am supposed to get on the road less traveled.  The Runes had some very interesting guidance for me.

Gebo, the Rune of gifts and appreciation, also conjures up the term 'partnership' in new age interpretations.  Traditionally, the gift relates to the idea of giving without expecting anything in return, generosity being its own reward.  In this regard, Gebo gives a good overview of the situation, because it reminds me that it is important to be generous.  If new age meanings affixed to this Rune are true, I must examine what 'partnership' means, for I do not believe it has a traditional meaning in this instance - one with another person.  For me, the partnership is with my craft - writing.  When you have the correct partner, everything flows as it should and happiness grows; that is the gift you receive, but it enables you to give your gift freely too.  I offer my writing for others to enjoy in many ways and, by writing, I feel happy and complete.

Therefore, I can understand why Wunjo, the Rune of Joy, is the challenge in this situation.  Doing what makes you happy and brings you joy, is challenging enough without being surrounded by "nay-sayers".  In fact, I wouldn't necessarily call them "nay-sayers", rather simply people who don't view the world from a perspective similar to mine, people who follow the straight and narrow.  When people don't understand what you want to do or when they can't see how you intend to get from point A to point B, they become critical.  That is why Wunjo is the challenge, because being happy in this circumstance is really not very easy.  What is easy is to feel defeated, to make any barriers bigger than they need to be, to make barriers at all.  The challenge is to be happy and know that, if the path works for you, you can't worry about what others think.  Have faith that you know which path is best for you in the long run.

I simply love Berkana, the Rune of beauty, birth and beginnings.  What more do I need to say?  The meanings say it all.  What is more beautiful than being able to follow your chosen path successfully?  What feels better than the first step on that path, than initiating/beginning your chosen future?  The action required here is to realize that the road less traveled or, more specifically, crossing over to it, offers just what I believe it will.  It puts me on the path to the future I want, the future that I see as providing happiness, security and feeds the things I have always wanted to pursue.  I have to be confident in my choice to step fully, squarely onto the less-traveled road and walk proudly and happily forward.