Rúnminations: I: Control
[concept/disclaimer/etc]
As I've taught the elder for years based on the surviving poems, lived experience comes to factor in. (Is this the difference in Óðinn's runemasters charge between interpret and receive? Who's to say.) So to start, I want to talk about Nauðiz, Perðo, Laguz, and the concept of control.
With Nauðiz, we have no control. We have "scant choice," we experience "state[s] of oppression and toilsome work." Many people see Hagalaz as the rune with the bad wrap, but there is agency in Hagalaz (although that's a different post). With Nauðiz, we are chilled by the frost. We have no choice. There is a lack of control, which is (in this rune's perspective, rightfully) troublesome and hurtful to us. I see Nauðiz also in relationship to Raiðo through its link with 'toil': the message, sometimes you are the horse.
The only other rune that offers no control is Perðo. Perðo, the rune of the unknown and unknowable: the dice cup of chance. As Jeanette Winterson wrote (unrelatedly), "You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play. It's the playing that's irresistible. [...] What you risk reveals what you value." We play because we have no control. If you fixed the game, if you knew for certain the outcome, it would no longer be a game—it would be something else. The joy of the game is the lack of control. In both Nauðiz and Perðo, we're given two looks at how to experience a lack of control in our situations.
I used to talk about the tensions between these two runes all the time, and it wasn't until this month that I experienced Laguz's lessons as it relates to control. Yes, yes, water, of all kinds, water and flow. Water that falls and water that swells, water that eddies, water that dazzles, confuses, terrifies. And how to learn from that. Words that, previously, landed in me like 'surrender,' 'flexibility,' 'adaptation.'
Recently, I've found another way to describe it: it's the choice to give up control. When I see it, now it says to me, You can have control here, in Laguz, if you want it—you can always swim upstream—but the suggestion is, perhaps, that you would flow further if you let go and let the current take you.
