I Taste You In The Salt Of My Body

Ior 
I taste you 
in the salt 
of my body 
writhing 
the gods cast you away 
to avoid the inevitable 
you endlessly 
devour yourself 
standing on the threshold 
I partake of you both

The Ior poem is one of the 33 original rune poems written by Ingrid Kincaid and first published in her limited edition, completely handmade book 
(un) familiar.  You can read the story of its creation on her website.

creation of the (un) familiar

schedule a rune reading

purchase the rune card deck

Ancient Ouroboros

Ior carries me to the salty, ever-moving, great oceans of water that encircle the globe.  It opens the way for me to experience the World Serpent, Jormungand, one of the three greatly feared and loathed offspring of the Wolf Chieftess and the Trickster god.
Ior speaks to me of borders and thresholds, of ambivalence and androgyny, of single lines that demarcate and writhing serpentine bodies that can exist on both sides at once.
Ior holds the essence of dual nature, of ‘both and’ and ‘neither nor’.
Jormungand, the androgynous World Serpent thrashes and coils in the Midgard ocean causing destruction and devastation.  Her absence would cause an even greater catastrophe than his presence does.
A deep relationship with Ior creates a place of balance, a place from which we can learn to come to terms with the extreme and destructive forces of nature and not always fight against what’s happening.
It’s true that many lives are lost, not just human, and great destruction occurs in the face of hurricanes or tsunamis or violent storms at sea and we of course are saddened and stunned by the losses.  However, the huge upheavals on the earth, the forest fires, the earthquakes, the erupting volcanoes, aren’t about us, nor are they bad or evil.  They just are.  Sometimes daffodils bloom and gentle rains fall and sometimes a great avalanche thunders down the mountain.
The World Serpent Jormungand is daughter son to Angrboda and Loki, sister brother to Hela and Fenrir.  The three siblings were stolen from their mother by the high gods and cast away, chained and confined.  But even the great powers of order cannot hold back forever the inevitable return of chaos.
The Ior rune can teach you how to see the curve that exists in the seemingly straight line, how to be on both sides of something simultaneously without needing to make a choice of one over the other.  Living with Ior as the ouroboros you can come to understand what it means to devour yourself by eating your own tail.  Then you can know the end and the beginning as one.  This is how you partake of them both.
Working with Ior is about being willing to sail to the edge of the map, to the places we’ve been told cannot be known or the places we've been told  we cannot go.
In ancient times the mapmakers drew maps of the world as they knew it and around the edges of the map they’d write:  Beyond This There Be Dragons. 
It was believed that if you sailed to the edge of the world, you’d fall off and there you would have to face the great dragon.
Are you kept inside the realm of what’s known and what’s allowed, what’s orderly and what’s safe by the fear of meeting the dragon when you sail off the edge?  
You don’t have to go there alone.  
Journey with Ior to Jormungand.  
Sister brother son and daughter knows what it’s like to be cast away.