Nauthiz looks something like a cross with the horizontal line slanting downward.  It signifies necessity and hard times ahead.  Whatever happens next needs to happen, and can be survived, but may not be pleasant.  Personal security may be temporarily shattered.  Self-confidence may be at an all-time low.  Projects and relationships may fail.  It might be a time when help is needed from friends and family to get by.   We all go through periods like this.  It will pass.  A major turning point may be right around the bend.

When it comes to the healing interpretation of the runes, Nauthiz stands for shame.  Shame from the past needs to be recognized before it can be healed.  It brings chaos and uncertainly inside.  There are things we have done that cause us shame, and then things that are out of our control.  We need to understand the difference.  Life tends to humble us.  You may need to ask for a hand.  If there is a secret you are keeping, you can lighten the load by sharing it with someone when the time is right.

The pandemic had humiliated me to the core and saw me camping in my mother’s yard for a year and a half.  Even before then, however, I knew that my nomadic way of living was reaching a state of crisis.  I was getting too old to keep finding the contracts I needed to keep me afloat, and at the same time none of my creative attempts had gotten over in any way. 

I’d hoped to at least have a support group by now, if not a home, but in my mid-fifties there I was, without a home, without a family, without a career, without any money, without even a hope.  If I could’ve died of shame, I would’ve.  Instead, I’d toughed it out, and then began to realize that a lot of people were having problems during the pandemic.  I wasn’t the only one that had been affected.  Once I realized that, I began to handle it better, and now here I was, just as vulnerable, but still alive and moving forward.

Barrio de Xanenetla was once a dangerous neighborhood, but they gave it over to street art and the seeds of its rehabilitation were sown.  Walking through the narrow streets where such imagination has been allowed to run riot, took me out of myself, away from the anxious thoughts of returning to Los Angeles and starting from scratch once again. 

There was so much to process, two coyotes howling into Infiniti, a technicolor snake the length of a city block, a woman adrift on a lake, two sandaled feet, a portrait of a woman and two geese, a low-flying owl, a vaquero in a sombrero, riding a black horse, a man and a golden eagle, a laughing Mayan with a bowl of flame on his head, an exploding human heart, a rapper made of sparrows, a woman with arms like branches, pink and blue cotton candy, a masked wrestler, a mother and child, two outstretched hands, a beetle attacking the full moon, a young girl tending to a bull.  It was all there to walk through like a small city of dreams.

By the time I got back to the hotel area it was nearly dark.  I walked down to the Zocalo and stood beside a fountain, flashing purple lights beneath a purple sky.  I went into the Puebla Cathedral and stood beneath a statue of a saint, Francisco de Borja, in a black frock, holding a skull in his hand.  Two statues to the right and left of him were reaching up out of the flames of purgatory.  Jesus was on the altar, revealing his sacred heart.  I walked beneath a ceiling of concentric circles.  Outside the fountain was flashing, now purple, now blue, now green.