Entangled Bands of Love

This was my final attempt at finding the rings. I had already made at least three tries, each time climbing the ladder beside the front door; bending through the broken upstairs window, which hung diagonally from it's frame; dropping down onto the bidet; crunching past the steam shower; turning beside the newly velvety-blackened bathtub; and carefully creeping across the bedroom, as far as I could.

At first, I had thought it would be easy, that the rings would stand out: two crisp gold and silver bands, one with a glinting diamond...that they would manifest, distinct from the nebulous, nondescript tundra, fashioned from a gamut of grey. But I just couldn't get across the room to the other side.

Dad had been fixated on the rings for the past few weeks, with a single mindedness I had rarely seen. This was in stark contrast to my last visit, three months before, when he couldn't focus enough to make microwaved oatmeal for breakfast. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's almost two years later.

Now 85, he was a shell of his former self, his deep set blue eyes echoed a hollowness that screamed into the uncharacteristic silence that blanketed the chasm between us.

That afternoon, serenaded by a murder of crows in the cedars above, and immersed in the acrid pall of charred plastics, which stung my eyes and choked my breath, I felt a cocktail of trepidation, heart break and privilege, to be inching across the flotsam cluttered, exposed expanse that was once my parents' bedroom.

Fading into the distance, I could hear the backhoe operator's truck, accelerating up the road, as he piloted home. His last task for the day had been to carefully remove the entire, collapsing roof, disturbing the detritus beneath as little as possible, so that I might travel unobstructed over to the far edge of the building, three stories up from the steep slope below, which dropped precipitously to the Puget Sound.

My parents' neighbors were holding vigil from their perch up the hill, their deck overlooking the destruction. Their son, Nick, had seen the firelight dancing on the trees, as he was crawling into bed, just before 1am, several weeks before. He was the first to call 911, summoning over 14 emergency units from 3 different districts. Nick saved our Father's life that night.

They all knew what I was up to, and offered me the trust, space and support to follow my process on this critical mission. Had any 'officials' been present, this might not have been 'allowed'. But it was a soothing Saturday afternoon in May, a balmy breeze shimmered sunshine sparkles across the water, and I was alone, excepting the crows. I dearly wanted to be able to give my father something real to hold onto again.

Dad was obliviously ensconced at our transition home, a condo, rented in town, which provided us time to stabilize and find some bearings. I felt honored to care for him in this way, to be able to digest this tragedy by attending to the myriad details precipitated by such a catastrophe. It was complex, living with my Father again after 30 years of following a very different path, which it seemed he might never understand.

My focus was to reach the domain of my Mother's bedside table, which housed her private treasures, sacred books, and particularly, the darling dish, where she placed her wedding and engagement rings each night as she laid to rest.

The house had been declared a total loss, and was due to be razed to the ground. What could have been salvaged had already been removed, though little had survived on the top floor. In fact, even the floor was missing in patches, serving up glimpses of the ashen kitchen below.

I crawled, bracing, on my hands and knees for the last several feet, trying to spread my weight as broadly as possible by enlisting the aid of broken boards, drywall pieces, whatever I could conjure from the rubble. It was impossible to discern any particular shapes in the textured grey of ash upon carnage. Everything was a sort of formless blur. I tried to fall into the back of my skull and embrace the sort of diffuse focus that might allow any clear shape in my field of view to present itself, and slowly looked around the area where I remembered my Mother's bedside table once stood.

It felt like one of those garbled 'pictures' where you just have to find the right way to relax, and surrender into the looking, and all of a sudden an object floats out from the image. I kept trying to discover the proper way to compose my parts and gaze without effort. Suddenly I saw six thin black lines, forming a sort of angular Jesus~Fish graphic, pressed onto a small grey manmade clay tablet, which I recognized to be a rune. It blended perfectly with it's surroundings, except for those six darkened lines.

In my excitement I lurched forward, my perch pitched, disturbing the rune which tumbled from view. My heart pounding in my ears, I regained some poise, carefully readjusted my shaky foundation, and inched a little closer, so that I could peer into the void to find it again. Now tuned to that man-made tablet shape, I noticed a second rune, which appeared blank, sitting nearby. Retrieving both, I slipped them into my pocket, bolstered to resume my search for the rings.

When I was about 10, Mum had a mystical phase, and dove into reading all about dolphin communication, divination, and the power of pyramids to sharpen razor blades. She actually had the gardener help her to build a pyramid, from dowels and pieces of garden hose, large enough to meditate in, though I never saw her use it. Dad loudly disparaged all Spirituality as 'Foxes Talk', so she rapidly relegated these things to her tightly sealed private life, in a move of self preservation. Now, 38 years later, I was grateful for the assurance that I'd reached the region of her bedside table.

Ultimately, the two runes were the only treasures salvaged that May Day.

Afterwards, I discovered that they occupy the final two spots in the runic alphabet, although there are differing assertions as to which one comes last.

The first, the predecessor of the Jesus~Fish, is Othala, the rune of inheritance and liberation. It is symbolic of family breakups, problems with parents or with any inheritance. One writeup actually said that the Othala Rune marks "the burning love of home!"

Othala induces us to take responsibility for our own destinies, it offers that the future is a continual movement towards paradise, and reminds us to constantly align our inner compass towards heaven on earth.

The second rune, which had first seemed blank, was actually Dagaz. The fire had blanched all color from the lines, although the infinity shape remained pressed into the clay. The blank rune is associated with spiritual progress, total trust, and the void of infinite possibility.

Dagaz, a primitive infinity symbol, stands for the first and last light of day, specifically dawn and dusk, and is linked to new beginnings, breakthroughs, the integration of opposites, incommunicable paradox, and cataclysmic change.

If Dagaz appears in a spread alongside the blank rune, this new beginning could even involve a literal death



The rings were never found.