For a long while, my focus has been the rune, Fehu.
Often mistranslated as money or personal wealth, Fehu is cattle. Movement. Shared resources. The health and vibrancy of a people. Not what one hoards, but what a community tends together. The past year has been about building, holding, and feeding that kind of living wealth.
Not long ago, I had an opportunity to read aloud, for a dear friend, the draft of an epic poem I have been working on. Doing so brought my thoughts to Ansuz. The Breath of a God.
As a poet, this was crucial to me.
Ansuz is not just speech. It is the intake before the word. The moment before sound. The breath that makes meaning possible. Communication not as noise, but as something earned through stillness, listening, and endurance.
Odin did not gain the runes by mastery or control. He gained them by suspension. Deprivation. Surrender.
No drink.
No breath.
No ground.
Just hanging in the wind until knowledge arrived through suffering.
Breath is not guaranteed. Breath is gift, ordeal, threshold. Air is the most intimate thing we share with the world, and the most fragile.
Ansuz reminds us that spirit enters through breath, and leaves the same way.
There is something fierce happening here:
Odin breathed life into ash and elm, but first he learned what it meant to be without breath.
Creation and deprivation are bound together. Voice is born from silence. Meaning from pain. Presence from absence.
This feels like a season to honor air. Not only to be mindful of what is spoken and what is held, but to hold fast to the knowledge that breath is not infinite, and therefore sacred.
From tending the community’s herd to tending the wind.
-by Father Ridire
The Cyrenaian Hedonic church 
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