You don’t need to purchase anything strange or expensive to benefit from rune magick. Though you might like to own a nice bit of jewellery or something with your rune on it, you can get the benefits of rune craft from simply doodling the rune on scratch paper or scratching it in the bare earth beneath your feet.

Can you only focus on one rune at a time? Yes. While working with runes you can only focus on one at a time in a magickal way, but, you don’t necessarily lose the benefit of previous rune work. You may work with one rune then move on to another, but will continue to show the benefits of the previous rune. The only exception to this, really, is when your work creates an unbalanced set of influences, and what will balance or fail to balance is different for each individual.

What tends to happen is people practising rune craft or rune magick follow cycles. Just because you left off with a rune doesn’t mean you cannot return to it later, and they did traditionally as well. Some runes are more troublesome than others, so these troubling runes are worked with for shorter periods of time than the more comfortable ones.

I like this way of focusing on one aspect at a time like different stages of your life. Indeed.

Ah, about berkana and about all of the runes really… Berkana is symbolically the world tree as well, and each rune is really its own world tree. What a world tree does is support multiple “worlds” or frames of mind, frames of reference. Though you may be working with berkana and feel like you are being pretty focused, you will find that the rune touches on and changes your other frames of mind as well. No part of your mind will really remain unchanged, no part of your life, skills or growth. Berkana would make you more “homely” (home oriented), and you will see the world from a domestic point of view which is really the foundation of society anyway. It’s why they say that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.

Also of note, cradles were traditionally also made of birch wood for its protective and nurturing qualities to benefit the baby.

So it all connects. Yes.

Any preferences for our next rune? Name an aspect of life and there is a rune for it. Sort of life as a smart phone, whatever you want to do there, there’s a rune for that.

I am interested in art, science, combat. Ah, then the rune for oak next time. Oak is linked to Thor, and combat. Berkana and birch are linked to Freya.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~