The light of your life was given to you by your parents to keep and share with your children. In Runic Alchemy we learn how to create and grow the seed of Crystal, even if everybody already has it. This is what we already do to live, so we need to learn from ourselves.

Othala Rune

Othala rune name means own land, heritage, inherited estate.

The idea of home was invented by life eons before any sign of humanity on the scene: hole, cave, nest, hive.

However, the principal evolution in the idea of a home made by humans is bringing artificial fire inside, the source of warmth and light.
Another significant step forward was extending the home to a tamed and ordered part of an initially wild environment, having your water source, and growing your food instead of hunting it outside.

To make our artificial, tamed segment of reality work, we have to invent and implement certain rules and keep following them to maintain order within our home space and to keep it alive.

Keeping fire inside, not letting it go out, but not letting the house catch the fire - this is probably the brightest symbol of the idea of home.

At the same time, the light and warmth of the hearth, oil lamp, or candle brings all the family together.

Protecting this light, passing it from ancestors to descendants, preserving and teaching rules in the form of traditions - this is a key part of making a home last for generations and preventing the premature death of its inhabitants.

This is how life itself, preserved and passed from parents to children across the unimaginably long chain of ancestors and hopefully projected far into the future, sits at the very core of the idea of home.

According to Norse creation myth, the light of life was breathed into our first ancestors, trees Ask and Embla, by the same three brother gods who created our world, Midgard. "Allfather" is one of Odin's names. Some scholars dispute whether it is and whether this paternal role extends to absolutely everything in the world, but for humankind, he is explicitly described as a creator.

So with the help of the Othala rune, following back along the chain of our ancestors, passing the light from hands to hands, we can connect to our very divine source, to the light shining for us from the past and lighting the way to the future.

From the Runic Alchemy perspective, the Othala rune spans across four top levels: Water, Air, Emptiness, and Earth.

It shares its diagonal bars with almost all runes we already know, except Isa which has no diagonals, and yet more runes that wait for us ahead. It makes this rune so multifaceted and gives it an integrative role.

When previously we were doing all the runes in a sequence - they were connected and smoothly shifted from one to another, but still they were separate.

When you do the Othala rune it feels like all the puzzle pieces click into their right places to make a big part of the whole picture clear and those runes start to work with each other within the Philosopher's Stone, even if it's not complete yet.

To do Othala I suggest making such a double handful gesture, like warming your palms around the candle or mug of tea.

• Your straight fingers will make ascending and descending bars from the level of Air to Water and back, similar to Tiwaz.
• Your bent lower parts of palms will meet where wrists touch each other, so they repeat the Algiz rune and connect the Air and Emptiness.
• Finally, your forearms, starting from connected wrists, will spread down to elbows - this is our triangular "roof" of the "Earth house" - crystal with a tip touching Emptiness.

This rune has multiple transitions going in parallel, still, we can use breathing to follow along.

• When you breathe in - feel how Air from your chest ascends through and above your head, to the Water and also descends to the solar plexus at the level of Emptiness. It will be similar to what we did for Tiwaz and Algiz.

• By the way, during the same inhalation, we also feel Earth rising from the lower belly upward to the solar plexus. We remember this transition from the Dagaz rune when Earth became harder and denser on the way to its Crystal form.

• On exhale we release Water from the top to flow down to us to guide us as Tiwaz and calm our hearts as Laguz. At the same time, we get the clear Sky of Algiz which is lit with the golden light of the Sowilo thanks to the transparency of our Crystal achieved with the help of Hagalaz, Naudiz, and Dagaz.

You will find peace, light, warmth, and safety of Othala to be very stable between your hands, so you can quickly detach it from breathing and just be there.

Wunjo Rune

Golden sun, when shining through the blue waves, tints green. This is how you may see your heart with inner sight, when looking down to the chest from the height of the Water - golden in the middle but with emerald edges. We already saw a similar green glow in the crown of Berkana.
Now let's focus on this upper emerald part.

Do you see how the descending bar of Laguz touches the top ascending bar of Sowilo? There is a rune for this — Wunjo.

It means joy and bliss, and we can also consider love, desire, and even victory aspects.

Etymologically, the proto-germanic word "wunjô" descends from PIE "wenh" - "to love". Interestingly words "venus", "to venerate", and "to win" also descend from the same PIE root.

Venus - Roman goddess of love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory. The Norse goddess Freyja is associated with the same domains, and interestingly, she is one of the Vanir - "natural" or "shamanic" faction of gods. Some scholars trace the "Vanir" word to the same PIE root "wenh".

So even if it's not attested in the sources explicitly, both from functional and etymological perspectives we can confidently connect Freyja with the Wunjo.

Freyja was known to possess a somehow important necklace "Brísingamen" but details of its significance are lost in time. Though unattested in sources this necklace reminds the Crystal we are making from Earth as part of the Runic Alchemy process.

From the Runic Alchemy perspective, Wunjo is a full-height vertical of simultaneous resonance of all five levels: Water, Air, Emptiness, Earth, and Fire, followed by a descending transition from Water and an ascending transition from Emptiness, both ending at the Air level - our chest.

The Water flow, the river, can be compared to the flow of time, from the future to the past. It always goes in this direction and we can directly perceive only the present, merely guessing the future and recalling the past. But sometimes on the river, when a normal current faces an obstacle, the whirlpool may form, causing Water to loop, so locally, time may turn back for a while letting us hang on and look around.

This is the power of Wunjo - the flow of Laguz, facing the rising vector of the Sowilo sun, causes the time to make a few circles and let us look around. Those bits of joy and happiness in our life usually happen when we hurry not, but are being in the moment and realizing how amazing is all this stuff around.

By integrating the Wunjo rune, we can adopt such a mindset of being happy, and here is how I suggest doing it:

We will use our right hand only with a vertical forearm aligned with our own vertical axis.
Softly bent palm forms a right-directed triangle of the upper part of the Wunjo: fingers represent descending Water, which we touch with our fingertips. And lower part of the palm helps the sun raise from the Horizon of the wrist to the energy center in the middle of the palm.

We don't even need to associate Wunjo with breathing, just feel:

• You are sitting or standing straight and Spirit blows along your spine.
• Fresh, gentle water flows down along your hand.
• Meets the warm and fluffy Sun and spins around.
• You now have some pleasant and delicate volume inside your handful, it's ok if you smile a bit.
• Don't forget about vertical resonance - we do both at the same time.

Doing this you may notice how something is emanating from you in all directions.

Gebo Rune

We found how Freyja is closely connected to the Wunjo rune.

But she has many names and one of them is Gef - "the giver". The etymology of this name can be directly traced down to the proto-germanic name *gebô - 'gift' and here is a rune with the same name, Gebo:

As you see it is the largest rune if seen from Runic Alchemy's perspective. It spans across all the five levels and does it twice in parallel: descending from the Water to the Fire and ascending from the Fire to the Water, meeting in the central point of Emptiness.

Gebo is a connection. The bi-directional connection between the Water and Fire.

Connection is a change.

Through connection you become open to something outside, so it can come and change you and you can come and change it, even if just to get to know. Without a connection to something else, there is no reference point. You need to relate to something to make any sense. Even isolation is impossible without having something to isolate from.

We saw how Kenaz rune starts everything from separation. The Emptiness, the creative force of separation, keeps everything apart, as we saw in Isa rune. A thin and flat layer of Emptiness was locally stretched into the bubble, the cavity of Ingwaz, so it was filled with a small and precisely balanced amount of opposites. And Eihwaz rune sealed this bubble into double static-dynamic equilibrium.

The cell preserves itself thanks to the membrane separating its fine-tuned local contents from the rest of the world.

But it's not alive if there is no exchange with the outer world. Life needs to let external resources in and byproducts out.
Life needs an inflow of energy and information.
Life produces energy and information and it's changing the environment around. It not only protects itself but also projects its internal law outside. The world is dangerous. But closing into full defense is even more dangerous.
If you don't trust the world, not open and connected enough - you'll miss resources, opportunities, and signs of upcoming danger.

Small whirlpools floating down the river, that are born on the water's surface, live for a while and dissolve back into the river - are they connected to the water around? They are made of it.

Tongues of flame in bonfire: some of them stay in the same place for some time, and some appear here and there briefly and fly to the night sky. They are small shapes of fire.

We have a deep connection with the world outside and inside, we are made of wood with senses and thoughts breathed into us.

A long, or short, optic fiber lies on the ground twisted into spirals, stretched over the place or clumped into the pile - the trajectory of life. Things are going one after another, events causing other events - this is a human being if seen from a four-dimensional perspective. It is like a chaotic tunnel or snake drawn by the body, that moves in space and time. A pulse of light runs through this optic fiber like through the tunnel - a spark of consciousness running fast and watching the movie, does it have time to feel itself along all this connection from the beginning to the end? It's rather the opposite - the time is only a narrow slice of "now" with a quickly fading out bit of memory behind and expectations ahead.

Can we change something in our journey or we are only running in this tunnel bouncing from the inner edges, following the previous direction, and reacting to circumstances?

Let's do the Gebo rune and see what will happen.

We will cross our arms in front of the chest, elbows down, and hands up:

• The right hand points to the top left direction with the palm turned up, touching the Water and letting it pool before overflowing down the wrist.
• Rivulets of veins suddenly turn into bluish lightning, because Fire is rising from the bottom-left elbow and it vaporizes the Water into stormy clouds of steam and smoke.
• The Fire itself cools down in contact with the Water, gives its power to the Air, and turns into dark stones of the left forearm.
• Left hand, with palm imperatively turned down, points to the top right direction, showing the Light the path of ascendance from the Fire trapped beneath the dark Earth.
• Wrists are crossing in the center of the Gebo, on the level of Emptiness, where Air and Earth are touching each other along the horizon.
• The tip of Crystal, the higher state of the Earth, who learned transparency from the Water, pierces the Horizon to let the Sun rise to the clear sky.
• The gift of Light propagates upward to the Water from the Sun held below the left palm turned down.
• And the gift of transparency, of the hard order, comes from the Earth Crystal down to the Fire, turning it into red gems.

This is how the Water and Fire, once divided, reunion and give gifts to each other, change each other.

The Gebo is a promise.
You give and you receive in response and you hope the next time it will work again, and it works, until it doesn't. And if it doesn't, maybe it's because you forgot to be open, so you will find the strength to trust and open yourself to the world again.

Gebo rune teaches that in the very center, there is a gap between before and after, between perception and reaction. On the very edge between external and internal there is still a thin layer of Emptiness, and if we focused enough - we can slow the time down and catch this moment between before and after, the moment when nothing is yet and already happening, a slit between time frames.