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Reading the Runes as the Year Turns

As this year draws to a close, I find myself looking back not with relief exactly, but with a sense of reticent recognition. What has been a year of gradual recovery from a nervous breakdown has also been a slow and often uncertain re-learning of how to live inside my own mind.

A couple of evenings back, wanting to understand where I now stand, and what I might hold in awareness as a new year approaches, I cast a Three Norns spread, asking the weavers of destiny a simple question:

‘Where am I now, and on what should I focus in the coming week?‘

The runes that emerged were Thurisaz for the past, the Wyrd Rune for the present, and Perthro for the future. Together, they felt less like answers and more like a story — one I already knew, but perhaps had not yet fully articulated.

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Thurisaz speaks of pressures that could no longer be contained, of boundaries pierced, of a confrontation that was unavoidable. For a long time I experienced this only as failure or collapse. Yet this rune suggests something harsher, but also truer: that what

Life as it was being lived had become unsustainable, and Thurisaz put an end to the illusion that I could simply endure indefinitely. The break, however painful, stopped something worse from unfolding. In short, the thorn saved my life.

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THE PRESENT was represented by the Wyrd rune — the blank rune, the uncarved moment.

This struck me deeply. It suggests that I am no longer defined by what happened, but neither am I fully shaped by what comes next. I am between stories.

Admittedly, there is uncertainty here, and a lack of clear direction … but also there is freedom. The Wyrd rune reminds me that not everything needs to be decided yet. I am standing in a space where old patterns have loosened, and where the future has not hardened into expectation.

Healing, it seems, does not require answers so much as patience with not knowing.

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THE FUTURE rune, Perthro, feels cautiously hopeful. This Rune is associated with mystery, with the casting of lots, with revelation that arrives unexpectedly rather than through force of will.

Where Thurisaz was rupture, Perthro is understanding — not necessarily intellectual understanding, but recognition. It suggests that meaning will emerge gradually from what has been hidden, and that what I have lived through may yet become something I can shape, share, or express.

There is a sense here that chance, creativity, and storytelling will play a role — that insight may arrive sideways, through reflection rather than effort.

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TAKEN TOGETHER, these runes do not speak of returning to who I was before. That person belonged to a different weave of circumstances.

Instead, they describe an initiatory passage: a breaking, a pause outside of certainty, and then a slow revelation of new meaning.

As I approach the beginning of a new year, the message feels less like instruction and more like permission. Permission not to rush clarity. Permission to live with uncertainty. Permission to trust that the worst disruption is behind me, and that what comes next will unfold in its own time.

For now, that is enough.