Futhark: Rune Magic 101 - Berkana/Björk (B/b)

“Bear hence, my son, what thy mother hath said,
And let it live in thy breast;
Thine ever shall be the best of fortune,
So long as my words shall last.”
—Svipdagsmál

Literal Meaning & History 

The literal meaning of this word is Birch, as in the tree. 

The birch is a genus of trees that grows throughout the temperate belt and even a bit north of it. It’s a hardwood and can be found as tall, statuesque, slender trees with bright white bark, and as low, nearly crawling, shrubs, depending on climate and surrounding conditions. 

This tree doesn’t produce fruit in the traditional sense. 
There aren’t any fleshy fruits. 
There aren’t any nuts. 
There aren’t any acorns. 
Only these long and slender little flower clusters that don’t look like much that grow and mature before the tree has fully grown it’s leaves in spring. 

This tree is considered a pioneering species. What that means is that it will quickly colonize open ground and spread wide. 
In fact, this species can even be considered invasive, a threat to open spaces, and so, if grazing is not enough to keep the saplings and seedlings down, periodic burning has been a common tool to control the trees and slow their progress. 

The combination of these things, that this tree will grow without fruit and that this tree will grow where no other trees grow, seemingly even sprouting again from it’s ashes, contribute to the mythological view of this otherwise extremely useful source of hardwood material. 

Figurative Meaning & Symbolism 

There are so many words one can evoke for this rune but they all connect together under the idea, the concept of “Fertility”, not only literal but figurative.

This rune represents the mother of us all, mother nature, or mother earth.
This is fertile ground and fertile hearts.
This is growing as a person, as a being of nature, as life. 
This is creation and conception, two sides of the same coin.
This is birth and rebirth.
This is a cleansing, a purifying, a clearing.

This is new life, whether a tiny puppy or a pregnancy scare. 

This is creation of something new, whether nurturing your book as you write it, feeding it words as needed, or coaxing the image from the canvas with paints, or struggling through the night, trying to get the song to come together.

This is planting seeds in the moist earth to grow flowers, or food. 

This is the taut skin across the abdomen, heavy with new life. 

This is raising cattle, being there for the birth of every new calf, with care and love, knowing full well that this new life will later sustain your own life. 

But all these things, all this beauty, all this life, is nature. And mother nature has her dark sides, even in this. 

Birth defects. The song that you give up on. The accident. The stillbirth. The loss. The new disease.

You can not be reborn unless you also experience a death, in one way or another. 

Context. 

The little rune poem reads:
Bjarkan is a branch with leaves
and a little tree
and youthful wood. 

Suggested Homework 

Invoke your own creativity, find it. 

And don’t think you lack it, that you don’t have any, everyone has the capacity to create, everyone has creativity. 

The creative processes that go into things like writing code are similar to those that go into creating art. 

Whatever that is your creativity, whether it comes in when you need to solve a problem or when you’re idle, whatever you make, dip into that process, into that mentality. 

Make something. Anything. 
Make dinner. 
Make art.
Make a program.
Make a poem.
Make music.
Sing.
Dance.
Write.

Then write down: 
1. What you made, what is your creativity.
2. What is your process.
3. What does it feel like to be a creator. 
4. What had to die, be destroyed, be changed irrevocably, so that you could create.
  And even if you just wrote three lines of code, something was changed that can not be unchanged, something was lost that can’t be undone, be it the paper you scribble notes on, or time spent, energy burned, looking for answers within your mind