Susan Hintz-Epstein is the author of RUNE PLAY: Learning the Runes
Susan of the North
Susan of the North aka Susan Hintz Epstein is the Rune psychic and author of this blog, Urd’s Well. I started this blog as a promise to the Norns that I would gather a women’s community. I had no idea what that meant for me or just how I would honor that promise, and I still don’t, but here we are. I will be exploring this topic in these pages. Women are the backbone of our families and communities, but we often feel underappreciated and fail to acknowledge our own intelligence, grace, and strength. We can do that for each other in community. But these pages are also about so much more. They are perhaps about redefining our humanity and how we see the world.
I hope women can love ourselves as individual beings in the world, but not being used by the world. We give our power away to so much: husband, children, jobs, community service, and yet I believe there is a core in each of us that deserves recognition from our own self. Certainly being of service to those we love and who love us in return is a worthy cause, but without adequate self care, we too can run out of life force energy and burn out. I’ve done that, and my own health demanded that I learn how to set comfortable boundaries and honor them. I learned that loving someone does not always mean I must “do for” them what they can and should learn to do for themselves.
When my son was two, I located my birth mother and learned that I am half Swedish. I came home to myself in a new way, because I had ROOTS now, ties of blood. And yet I am sculpted by the family who raised me and how they thought about things. The Hintz family was Lutheran. An incident happened when I was seven that caused me to question everything that I was taught in that church, when the family cat died, and my parents insisted cats do not go to heaven. During the many years in-between then and now, I have learned that love does not die, but goes on to renew itself in often surprising and unexpected ways.
My entire life has been guided by an inner impulse toward self-discovery, ever since Sociology teacher Harry Whiteside stated to his tenth grade class: “None of you know yourselves.” I realized I could define myself by my roles, but those roles only spoke to what I did, and not the heart of what makes me: Me. The search has taken me through the Gurdjieff work, Reiki training, a BA in Studio Art and Anthropology, motherhood, and diverse career choices that included (my favorites) farming and teaching art. Now I’m writing a book on the topic of how the Goddesses of the Nitty Gritty have taught me to work with the Tree of Life, Yggdrasil, in order to understand Self in relationship to the world.
On Becoming A Rune Psychic and Author
By January of 2013, I was struggling to gain clarity as a psychic reader and I prayed to be hooked up to the Weave. The Elohim of the West Kill, the creek that flows behind our home, hooked me up with the Norns around the same time that the Runes “downloaded” themselves into my head.
I learned that the Norns are the ancient Norse giantesses that oversee the fate and destiny of humanity. Urd oversees the past, Verdandi oversees the present, and Skuld oversees the future. The Norns spent over an hour showing me how to work with the Weave to heal issues that were going on in my life, and their advice worked. Those personal issues related to family and how I could improve my relationships.
Since then, I have created a lifestyle around a shamanic practice that includes daily communication with these Beings. Other deities from the Norse pantheon introduced themselves to me, and have become tutelary spirits for me. Because they brought me home to myself in ways that were straightforward, simple, rough and gentle, tough and loving, I began to call them the Goddesses of the Nitty Gritty. Now they are the GNG for short, and a very funny coincidence is that I will often see those three letters on license plates especially when they want me to be paying attention to something important.
What I am becoming is Author, and I’m sure there is more to the story as these pages unfold.
Urd's Well 