I recently ventured into San Francisco for a routine medical appointment. I was chatting with the lab tech, who noticed the hematite I was wearing. He commented that he preferred lighter stones, such as rose quartz, as they matched his energy better.

We chatted a bit about energy work. I commented that dealing with the energy of a constant flow of people at his workstation must be challenging some days, and he said he didn’t really notice, he just did his job.

I shared that the bus ride to the building had been an exercise in maintaining energy boundaries. One of the men on the bus had been yelling into his cellphone, saying truly awful things about a mutual acquaintance of his and the person he was speaking with.

The lab tech asked how I did that, and I told him about visualizing a mirror to bounce the energies back to the person emitting them.

He replied, “Well, that’s not very nice!”

I stared at him, and said, “Why is it my job to process this person’s energies, just because I’m on the same bus?”

“Because you’re—”. He caught himself, and then made himself very busy putting labels on things.

I rolled my sleeve down, fastened my cufflink, wished him a good day, and left.

No, it is not my job to process some man’s stuff just because I’m a woman. He’s old enough to own an cellphone and ride a bus, he’s old enough to manage his own stuff.

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A friend sent me this from Twitter.

I *had* to share it, of course, so up it went on my Facebook wall.

Some of my friends replied that they felt called out by it—as did I.

I thought about it, then replied, “I am trying to think of it less as being called out for doing badly, and more as being called upon to do better.”

And then it hit me—yes, exactly. Instead of feeling bad that I’m not doing enough, I can view it as an opportunity to do better—and I know I’m capable of doing so, even if sometimes that little voice at the back of my head tries to tell me otherwise.

And then I brushed my teeth and went to bed, and slept seven hours.

If you’re not familiar with academia.edu, I encourage you to click the link and check it out (after you’ve read this post, of course!). It’s a site which aggregates nearly-infinite numbers of research papers on pretty much any topic that might interest you. The papers are posted and managed by their authors, so they don’t have to rely on corporate publishers, and the site is *free* for readers to use. It’s like having an incredibly large library in your home.

Many of the authors posting on the site have fancy credentials, but not all of them do—many of them are amateur historians, folklorists, etc. who pursue knowledge for the love of doing so, rather than as part of their academic career. Thus, you are as likely to find an article from your neighbor who has been studying Norse history for years and years next to an article from Jesse Byock. Perhaps consider posting your own research there!

I’ve been reading papers on there for some years, and it occurred to me just today that perhaps my readers would be interested in hearing about some of the items I’ve been reading.

Today’s selection is “From Hebrew Coph to Ogam Cert to Runic Peorð“, by Alan Griffiths, Ph.D.  Griffiths writes extensively about runes, ogam, and other alphabets of the early middle ages. He’s written previously about Peorð, and the article linked above is his most recent examination of its linguistic history and possible meanings.

As an introduction, you may want to check out his piece, “A Family of Names”, which lays the groundwork of his theory, or else just read this excerpt so the Peorð article makes more sense:
“that ogam-names are based on interpretations of Hebrew, Greek or Latin letter-names given by Jerome, Ambrose and others, and introduced into Ireland by Christian missionaries (fifth to sixth centuries). Subsequently, under the influence of Irish Christian missionaries in northern Britain, names were also created for runes (seventh to eighth centuries). Before then, there had been no comprehensive system of rune-names, but the introduction of names led to the composition of the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem. Although few would dispute that it shows Christian influence, the Anglo-Saxon poem is still thought to be based on a pre-Christian ” common Germanic ” Urgedicht, which is more faithfully represented in the comparable Scandinavian rune-poems. The implication of my thesis is that no rune-poem existed before the Anglo-Saxon poem and that it is this poem, with its Christian allusions, that is likely to have been the original version and to have formed a basis for the Scandinavian poems, in which pagan allusions are examples of scholarly antiquarianism.”

He traces the history of the glosses and kennings for both Peorð (Perthro) and Quert (Cweorth) in the written lore, and speculates as to possible connections between them, going back to the Hebrew letter Qoph. Meanings vary widely—and wildly—from various sources and languages, from “an enclosure” to “a rag or piece of clothing”, to “a pear tree”. To further muddle the matter, in the one source for the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, the stanza on Peorð is incomplete, so linguists and historians have added their own words to replace the missing ones, with, of course, varying meanings as a result.

I won’t spoil his conclusion for you, in case you want to read the paper for yourself. However, if you just can’t wait to find out, it’s posted below the cut.

(read more)