If - caution, conditions, possibility: the celestial reality of one thing leads to another

Two runes for solstice

Jun 21, 2025

Ritual is a powerful container for chaotic times. My advice: make your rituals, keep your head. Especially when it would be better for the powerful and political if you lose it.

How I cast runes is intuitive and varied. Here, in the NW Highlands just north of Ullapool on solstice eve, I used a method of emptying my bag of stones over and over, each time eliminating all that came out face down until I had two persistent stones that refused to go back in the bag. Twice I put them back in with the aim of having just one remain, and twice they fell out in this order. It is not often I arrive at a word, despite the runic alphabet being built for, well, words.

If. A conjunction. The introduction of conditions. A subordinate clause. The runes of ISA and FEHU (another sort of conjunction). Ice and Fire. Stasis and Wealth. Alone, either of these runes would have had a message very different from the other, but together they offer the medicine of possibility and of one things that leads to another.

ISA - the I-rune - is the rune of pause, of being at the still point. The solstice is always the time for a pause. For breath held as the long light bends.

FEHU - the f-rune - the rune of initiation into a new journey. Equivalent perhaps to the Fool in tarot. The beginning of something. Of mobile power. Of understanding you have the wealth you need to begin.

Pause, and then move. The way of all things emergent. An archetypal positioning. If is a bridge between all that is stored as potential, and all that is possible through action.

We could say that this is enough. Let us take a pause before we follow the energy inherent in the mobile power of the sun as it continues its monumental passage.

But there is another message too, I think, when we listen into the quietly spoken word, which is barely an utterance in the broad, bright sky of midsummer. If. A tiny word of caution, or conditionality, or just unhurried possibility. Of things, tentative, before they are cascading. What ordering must we be mindful of? What must we be careful not to foreclose in our life at the moment? What must we be aware of when it comes to ‘one thing leads to another’? If has an ambivalence in the semantics that is inherent in the rune pairing too. These are different and contrasting elementals.

Isa is ice and speaks of what is in a sort of stasis, and Fehu is a fire rune symbolising mobility – so how are we to understand this word If, which places a condition on matters at hand. There can be no arrival without a departure. We're invited to remember that there can be a sequencing necessary, but also that in a cycle of light and dark we can get turned around in understanding where we are, and forget that all points on the circle are necessary and point towards home.

When we hold, or sequence, ‘opposites’ together, we create a collision of new magical possibilities that come to pass in their own time, and without forcing. We see that nothing is really opposite. Reticence must be given space and patience, so that it can transmute to boldness. Cautiously then, What if? If I breathe in, if I breathe out. If, is a ribcage that provides the holding framework for one thing to pass to another. The alchemy of this then this.

If you can keep your head while all others lose theirs….If you can trust yourself when all doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too…

This paraphrasing of Rudyard Kipling’s words from his famous poem ‘If’, gives instruction for being an individual in this maddening world. But also (by my interpretation) in terms of how we may deal with our conflicting inner parts. If you can trust some inner core of yourself while other parts of you are in doubt or fear, what new initiation becomes possible?

(Rudyard Kipling, considered today through a modern lens, is a politically toxic figure making his own work conditional; an ‘if’. If we can find anything redemptive in the work of a greater monstrosity?…)

Solstice is rarely a time for certainty, and balance is not always passive. The tension in meeting between archetypal Ice and Fire in our bodies, between stillness and mobility, is dynamic and must, at times, be consciously worked for. Likewise, it is the work of wisdom to put hope into action as Fehu might encourage us, while carrying the peace (or even the grief) of stasis that Isa represents. We can swirl around these different positions at the solstice, because what better time to consider how one thing puts a condition on the other? How light and dark wrestle for their own order and mattering, revealing the vitality and necessity of each other.

Here I stand, breathing in the sea air this solstice. I take in a deep breath of salty infusion. I feel still, peaceful, reflective, and yet my senses are tingling and coming to life. The breath within me is travelling fast and bringing to attention all that has gone limp over night, and in the first half of the year. I wait, expectant. This is how If lives in my body today, a solstice embodiment.

Perhaps you can also find a way to connect with If today as we become aware again (if even just on the periphery) that the dark is returning even as the peak of summer still lies ahead? If I breathe. If I hold this. If I allow myself. If I move. If I stay open to the tilting and bending of the second half of the year, to the light that fades and retreats again, but is never entirely gone. If I can bear with what is unresolved in the world and in me. If I can allow myself the grace to blow hot and cold; to be a working, lively, current.

In fact, Kipling was entirely wrong by the end of his poem. Nothing on the earth is ours. The earth will never become ours because it was never ours to possess. If will not bring us dominion and control, and should never. What we have instead is union. The parity of two entities meeting, over and over, with some sense of equality and equanimity. This is solstice work. This is the work of if. If we can tolerate our anxieties, then peace will come. If we can be still now, then mobility will follow. If we can let ourselves be initiated into this bright, hurting, joyous world over and over - to do the work that initiation demands at every new beginning - then we will all, eventually, know freedom.