Laguz

The picture

Water has no shape of its own. It takes the shape of whatever holds it and it gets into everything eventually. Leave a cup out and it is gone in a week. Leave a roof alone and it is in the ceiling by winter. Water finds the low point and goes there, every time.

The old picture is of the lake, which is the still version of the same thing. A lake looks calm and is deep, and most of what is happening in it is happening where you cannot see. I think that is the best picture anyone has drawn of the mind that works below thinking. You know the feeling. The answer arrives in the shower, or on the drive home, or at the exact moment you stop trying to work it out. That is the lake doing its job.

In ordinary life Laguz is the hunch you did not act on and wished you had. It is the dream you half remember, the mood in a room that nobody has named yet, the tears that come up at a wedding or an advertisement and surprise you. It is also the sea off Perth on a flat morning, which looks like glass and has a current under it that will take you half a kilometre down the beach before you notice.

When it comes up

When Laguz comes up I read it as a moment that asks you to trust what you cannot prove yet. There is information in the room and it has not come through the front door. Your body knows something. Your gut has an opinion. The rune is asking you to listen to it before you overrule it with a spreadsheet.

Now, I teach that the voice in your head is not always the one to trust. Some of it is intuition and some of it is what I call Monkey Mind, the chatter of doubt and fear that dresses up as insight. Laguz leaves the sorting to you. It asks you to pay attention to the sensation that came with the thought, to follow it and to see where it leads, so that over time you learn your own water. That is slow work and there is no shortcut I know of.

The other thread is flow. Laguz says stop pushing. The thing you are forcing will go better if you let it find its own level, and the thing you are resisting is probably going to happen anyway, so you may as well swim with it. Standing in this rune means letting the lake go still long enough to see the bottom.

Reversed

Upside down, the branch points at the ground and I read it as water out of its banks. Emotions running the show, a hunch that is really a fear, confusion where there should be a clear feeling. It can also point to being pulled along by someone else's current, going with a flow that is not yours. The fix is usually to stop, get out of the water for a day, and see what you actually think once you are dry. Then get back in, carefully.

Across the traditions

In the tarot I put Laguz beside The Moon, the eighteenth card of the Major Arcana, with the pool at the bottom of the picture and the creature climbing out of it. The card is about what lives below the surface and comes up at night, which is this rune exactly. That is my own pairing and nothing stronger. The Moon page in The 78 Cards goes further. The whole suit of Cups belongs here too, and the How to Read a Card page will help you hold the suit as a picture. There is no tree in Laguz, so I do not send you to the Ogham for it, though the willow, which drinks from the same bank, is worth a look on The Willow page under Celtic Tree Astrology.

What have you known for a while and not yet let yourself say out loud?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.