Berkano

The picture

The birch is the first tree back after a fire or a clearing. It is slender, pale, and it does not wait for permission. Where the ground has been scorched or cut, the birch is already up and leafing while the bigger trees are still deciding. In the north it was the tree of spring, of sweeping out the house and starting again.

I like that the rune for new beginnings is a whole tree. A seed is potential. A birch is potential that has already got on with it. The two triangles on the stroke have been read as a mother's body, and that reading fits the meaning well enough. This is the rune of the thing that grows because something is tending it.

In plain Perth life Berkano is the first week in a new house when the boxes are still in the hall. It is the new job before you know where the good coffee is. It is the baby, yes, and also the business, the garden bed, the friendship that is three weeks old and already feels like it matters. Anything young and alive and needing water.

When it comes up

When Berkano comes up I read it as something starting and asking to be looked after. The emphasis is on the looking after. Most of us are good at the exciting first day and less good at the dull sixth week, and the rune lands right about there. Something you began is still small. Keep watering it.

It also asks a question about who is doing the nurturing. Sometimes the answer is you, and the rune is telling you to be gentle with yourself as well as with the new thing. Sometimes the answer is that nobody is, and a good idea is quietly drying out on the windowsill. Have a look at what you planted a month or two ago and see whether it has been fed.

There is a softer reading too. Berkano can come up when you are the one who needs tending. Rest, food, a kind word, a mother's sort of care whether or not your actual mother is the one to give it. I suspect this rune comes up most for people who have been running on empty and calling it discipline. The birch does not grow faster because you shout at it. Standing in this rune means slowing to the pace of something growing.

Reversed

Upside down, the triangles hang off the left of the stroke and I read it as growth that has stalled or been neglected. A beginning that never quite got going, a plan that was all excitement and no routine, or a family matter where the care is going in one direction only. It can also point to smothering, the kind of help that does not let the young thing breathe. Ask whether what you are tending needs more from you, or less. Both are possible, and the rune will not tell you which, so you will have to look.

Across the traditions

In the tarot I put Berkano beside The Empress, the third card of the Major Arcana, seated in a field with the wheat ripening around her. She is growth that has been looked after, which is exactly what this rune is about. That is my own pairing and nothing stronger. The Empress page in The 78 Cards goes further. The birch is also the first letter of the Ogham, the old Irish tree alphabet, where it carries much the same meaning of beginning and cleansing. The Birch page under Celtic Tree Astrology and The Ogham and the Tree Calendar page walk through that side of it, and it is worth reading both alphabets together. Two northern peoples, two alphabets, and both of them started with the same pale tree.

What did you start recently that is still small enough to need you?

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