When I redesigned my digital ecosystem, I seeded Ansuz throughout the imagery. It’s not a huge surprise that there would be a rune in my aesthetic. But Ansuz, specifically.

Apart from the fact that Ansuz is the breath of the divine moving through a vessel into some conjoined new form, this rune carries the awareness that what we express is. What we say becomes. What we create into the world outlives us, takes on their own agency, and carries their own life force. They are inspiration made manifest.

Ansuz holds something I need to remember about everything I make and send into the world. This rune reminds me that our stories don’t belong entirely to us. We can tend them. We can tell them with intention. We can decide what we are willing to make public and what remains ours alone. (Raidho) But once a story leaves us, they acquire a life of their own.

They move through other people. They become a facet of history. Histories. They enter conversations we will never hear. They may be misunderstood, carried somewhere unexpected, remembered years later, or become the thing someone needed on an ordinary Tuesday when we weren’t thinking about that story at all.

We put life force into the world with everything we do. Having Ansuz hold an important place in my digital space reminds me to be more conscientious about what I send. My online domain isn’t a static container for my work. They are a being with their own body, voice, pathways, and history. They go out into the world without me. They encounter people I will never meet and forge relationships I will never know.

Perhaps macabre, yet also ever on-topic for me: I think more about what I’m leaving behind in every aspect of my life. Every book I’ve written was first a wee essay. Every book after my first was born through blog posts on this site. That life force is part of what people experience when they come here, and that essence will remain here, moving through search engines and strangers, long after me.

And so I speak with even more awareness of intention. Own my truth. Weave carefully. Release the spell. Let them go have their own relationships.

That’s the awareness I want behind everything I do now. Even here.

ANSUZ
+
RAIDHO
=
KENAZ

inspiration + storytelling = meaning