Laguz looks like a backwards 7 with the top line tilting down.  It represents water in all its manifold forms, seas, lakes, rivers, streams, rain, and is a good sign.  For a seafaring people like the Scandinavians, it signified a return to home and a reunion with family.  In terms of situations and relations, it means a safe haven, away from the storms of life.  It can also mean prosperity and success, but patience is required.  Just as the sea ebbs and flows, things will go back and forth before they settle.  In the meantime, one needs to remain calm, like the surface of a lake at sunrise.  Nothing needs to happens.  Things will change around you.

When it comes to healing, Laguz relates to humor.  Humor is the best way to turn a bad situation into a tolerable one.  Laughter is the balm that restores hope to the soul.  The most desperate situations often make for the funniest stories over time.  If you can go with the flow and maintain a good sense of humor you can navigate almost any crisis.

It was Bruce Lee who advised his martial arts students, and anyone else who was listening, to be like water, that is to adjust to situations accordingly.  Water can fill an ocean and it can fit in a rain drop.  It can pound down city walls, and also sprinkle lightly over flowers.  If I’d learned anything from all my travels, it had been to remain flexible about everything.  Often, you can’t even begin to make plans until you get to where you are going next.  In ways, this had allowed me to do things I’d never anticipated.  At the same time, lack of financial stability had often made for a nerve-shattering ride.

When we grew up, my father was frequently in between jobs, and as a family we moved a lot.  Humor became the thing my siblings and I developed to defend ourselves.  We laughed at embarrassing situations, mimicked friends, and antagonists alike, endowed normal civilians with comic superpowers to make them great figures of fun.  If I couldn’t laugh at my situation, then I was screwed.  There were so many times in life that it had been my only reprieve, and it continued to work.  Laughter is still the best, and often the only, medicine.

It seemed like I hadn’t been at the Palenque ruins for long before I ran out of things to look at.  The back trail to it was closed, so I left through the entrance.  As I was leaving, I heard a woman warn her friend about some boys at the entrance who’d tried to sell her mushrooms.  I looked all over but couldn’t find them.  That left me dispirited as it certainly would’ve put a spin on my jungle adventure.

It was a long way back to town, but I decided to walk, seeing that I still had most of the day ahead of me.  My feet were hurting in my shoes, but not like they had for the first week of the trip.  Something about being on an airplane seemed to make them swell up, but I wasn’t sure what the connection was.  I walked down towards town, the jungle dense on both sides of the road, the sun sometimes breaking through the clouds to light the path.  At the gate where I’d bought my ticket to get in, I did another search for the mushroom dealing boys.  Apparently, it was not in the cards that day. 

A van pulled up and I changed my mind and hopped aboard.  There was a rich kid from Peru I’d ridden up with.  He was traveling all over the world for a year and had just come from seeing the Rolling Stones in Dallas.  I wished I had that kind of money.  The first time I’d had any kind of money was after cashing out a pension in my forties and that had only lasted a year.  The next few times I’d had money were after teaching contracts in the Middle East. 

For most of my life I’d been broke or close to it.  The unemployment money I’d recently gotten due to the pandemic had just been a gift.  It would be gone soon enough.  I didn’t need the rune stones to tell me what would happen next.  It wasn’t going to be pretty.  It never is.