​I just returned from a lengthy road trip with my daughter and 7-year old grandson. We made a circuit from Portland, Oregon to Glacier National Park in Montana, to the Northern Cascades, to the Olympic Rain Forest in Washington, to the mouth of the Columbia River where it empties into the Pacific Ocean and back home again.
The amazing beauty and diversity of terrain exists because in times past the earth experienced rapid global warming, almost instantaneous freezing, massive earthquakes, erupting volcanos and enormous flooding. All these catastrophes brought destruction and extinction while at the same time creating awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping grandeur.
**Does it not seem likely that what we are currently witnessing has happened before?**
**Woolly mammoths once grazed in green, flower-filled meadows in what is now frozen tundra.**
**Can we be afraid of the future as well as in awe?**
**Can we accept the fact that we may very well not survive what is happening but that the earth will?**
We have reached a tipping point and the earth herself has stepped in and taken over and we are now witnessing things over which we truly have no control. 
She does and will take care of herself in ways we do not and cannot understand.
​I explore this in greater depth in my book Lost Teachings Of The Runes.
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In reading Gylfaginning I’m intrigued by the combining of the words yeasty and venom.  So I scry the internet and learn that the word yeast is Germanic in origin and of course it is the word for the thing that is used in brewing beer and making bread dough rise and it also means spume, foam, ferment, agitation, to be covered with froth.  Gylfaginning tells us that there are eleven streams that collectively make up Elivagar (Ice Waves) that finds it source in the wellspring Hvergelmir which is one of the three wells hidden in the roots of the world tree.
It also says that yeasty venom hardened upon these streams and became ice that played a part in the origin of the giant Ymir and the filling of the great Void, Ginnungagap.
Continuing to follow the trail, I discovered that the word venom has its roots in the word venerate, which finds it way back to Venus, which is more than a planet and a goddess.  Venus originally meant physical desire and sexual appetite.
Venom is also a word with connection to the Latin venenum and it doesn’t just mean a poison.  It can also be a magical herb or potion. 
In another place Gylfaginning says, “So many serpents are in Hvergelmir with Nidhogg that no tongue can tell them.”  Is it possible that these serpents are the source of the venom spoken of as being yeasty?  They all dwell in the roots of Yggdrasil, down there where the wells are.
So why do we automatically think that the yeasty venom is poison?  Could it be instead a foaming, frothing, agitated, fermenting magical potion that played a part in what emerged from the coming together of the fires of Muspelheim and the ice of Niflheim?
Fire and ice are joining hands again at this rhythmic time of global warming.  What magical event will occur this time when the yeasty venom is activated? 

Life is the ebb and flow, the in and out of the tide.  It’s the Os rune.  It's the Isa rune. It’s freeze and melt, destroy and create.  Instead of placing our fear-based focus on the changes taking place, perhaps ask instead, what’s being created?  What will emerge this time as the fire melts the ice?  It’s happened before.  It is happening now.  It will happen again.  Life emerged from the chaos of Muspelheim and Niflheim coming together.  Land is created when the volcano erupts, destroying everything.  Ice melted in the past.  It filled the great aquifers.  That’s why we call it glacial water.
As the ice is melting, more and more runes are being revealed.