No need to rush, says the Water,
No room to hesitate, says the Fire,
You must open the door for yourself:
Pull and push at the same time.

There is a vertical axis of symmetry, a thin border of Emptiness, which separates our left Water half from our right Fire one, so they don't conflict nor get lost in each other.

A thin line of Emptiness at the very center of ourselves - you are probably already aware of its presence from your life story, from those moments of silence when the Great Spirit was looking at you from behind the scenes.

There is a rune for this - Isa.

We are still working on the first phase, which means we see the world left-to-right, not top-to-bottom, but if we rotate our picture, paradoxically, Isa remains vertical:

Do you now see a dashed line in the middle representing Emptiness?
If you succeed with separation and can hold both forces together but apart, you probably noticed how the idea of an axis of Emptiness helped stabilize the entire system. It's because Isa is a force of Emptiness that holds Kenaz preventing it from collapsing back to unity.

The Rune itself appears horizontal now, connecting Water on the left and Fire on the Right. It represents the principle of simultaneity, but its essence is Emptiness.

You can feel Fire and Water directly. But you can't feel Emptiness alone. Because Emptiness is not substantial, it is force, and force reveals itself only when applied.

Take a magnet, and try to feel the magnetic field around it with your fingers - you can't. Take another magnet and move it around holding the opposite pole towards the first magnet. Now you can feel how the magnet in your hand is repelled.
It's just a metaphor, but now we are going to feel emptiness in a very similar way:

• Stand or sit comfortably, and close your eyes.
• Summon Fire into your right hand.
• Invite Water into your left one.
• Slowly, to not lose your Fire and Water, move palms towards each other to make a prayer gesture but keep a bit of distance between palms.
• You are now touching the vertical axis with your palms, a thin layer of emptiness, which divides your Fire and Water halves.
• This axis goes through and beyond yourself, up and down across all five worlds: Water, Air, Emptiness, Earth, and Fire, making them all resonate.
• Feel this stillness, balance, internal silence.
• It's a source of order in the world and the Great Spirit lives in the thin line of emptiness in the very center of the universe, dividing duality like a horizon line and watching us from behind the scenes. You are now touching the Emptiness.

Ice is an order.

Liquid water is chaotic, molecules running here and there, bumping into each other.
Ice is a crystal, every molecule sits in its place, and they are ordered.

Emptiness is space and time, something that gives order, and allows us to distinguish things, to say where and when things start and end.

Isa is the simultaneity of all things — it fixes everything in its proper place, moment by moment. Even if everything changes in the next moment - it becomes a new perfect order.

Emptiness is dissolved around us, it's like invisible glue everywhere which holds our universe, not letting it fall apart or collapse back to the initial uncertain state of unity. Even in a non-empty place - still every thing, every bit of it is submerged into emptiness like a fly into invisible but slightly springy amber.

Order does not exist alone. We can see the order only when it's applied. According to the Norse creation myth, the Water of Niflheim was liquid at source but got frozen down the stream, closer to Emptiness. So it's like a liquid uncertain future materializing into a hard "objective" reality of the present moment. We never see true reality directly, there is always a little gap of around 150 milliseconds before the first fresh memory of the present moment reaches our consciousness. The gap between us and the Ice wall of true reality which holds the ocean of the future behind. We can't go through this wall, we can't even reach it directly, only feel the delayed echo of it.

But there is a Fire on the other side of the Ginnungagap. Instead of looking straight into this wall of ice can we turn the head and look along?

By having Water in the left hand and Fire in the right we look right into the slit of Emptiness in between.

Looking into the Emptiness is like looking into the pupil of the eye - you see nothing, but you feel how it looks back at you.

In Kenaz gesture / drawing we had left palm holding Water and right palm holding Fire like on scales and in the center of Water palm we see eye of eagle while on the center of Fire palm - eye of serpent. That was the purpose of initial division - to let unity look at itself. One cannot look at itself, it's alone, so it divided itself into two so each half could look at another.

In Runic Alchemy, as we will see in the next rune, Air arises from Water when it's evaporated by Fire. That's why we have eagle eye in our left hand - it's a potential of Air waiting in the Water. Eagle is flying above the frozen mountain peaks, at the edge between the sky and the Water above.

And Earth emerges from the Fire when it cools down by Water and solidifies. So we have serpent's eye in a right hand as potential Earth looking to arise from the Fire.

In Isa rune we move Fire and Water closer to each other so two eyes of eagle and serpent become one eye of dragon - mythical creature which combines qualities of both.

This eye represents the entire universe — formed of two opposites, held apart by the creative force at their center. It is looking at us, just as we are looking at it.

In Isa we focus not on divided opposites, as we did in Kenaz, but on the root cause of this division - something in the middle. And we can feel it with our hands and look right into it and maybe, by resonance, recognize the roots of our own nature.