INGRID KINCAID
  • RUNES
    • books
    • Rune Readings
    • Rune Resources
    • Podcasts
    • Blog
  • INGRID
    • Bio
    • Testimonials
    • Rune Readings
  • TEACHINGS
    • Spiritual Counseling
    • Rune Readings
    • Self-Directed Home Study
    • Books
    • Live Recordings of Past Events
    • Podcasts
    • Blog
  • STORE

BLOG

Blood Rune?

8/13/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
Original water color by Ingrid
There are rune beings closely woven together with earth, air, water, fire. Who is the rune being most closely connected to the blood of women, menstrual blood? It is through this mystery we all come into life. Has the existence of this rune, its shape and form been forgotten or hidden?
Blood moves through all of us.
We have a certain fascination with the blood of warriors, battle, and death.
We are entertained by tales of hungry vampires drinking blood.
But what about the life blood that flows each month from women’s bodies? It is a connection we all share, yet we hide it, ignore it, or pretend it isn't there.
Surely there is a rune for women's blood, a rune that connects us with this potent, primal being, giantess, goddess, that cannot be ignored and does not go away. She is intimately connected to life and death.
The runes are numberless, not limited to the few popular ones we know. What shape and form does the rune of women's blood take?
0 Comments

Beware The Devouring Mother

8/23/2015

0 Comments

 
To watch the coming of spring after a long, cold winter is to know the magic of Berkana.
To watch a mother dog push a runt from the litter and refuse to feed it is to know the wisdom of Berkana.
So often emphasis is placed only on the nurturing, protective, care-giving aspects of the Berkana rune.  We must never forget that the balance to all of this is the mother’s wisdom which is also expressed in knowing when to kill, destroy, cull or push things away that are defective, weak, sickly, unable to thrive or inappropriate to nurture. 
This does not need to be considered as negative or the reversal or merkstave of Berkana but rather part of the whole.  It’s not negative that some things in life need to be destroyed or allowed to die.
Yes, the mother births, nourishes and protects but considering these things as the only expressions of feminine energy creates a dangerous imbalance.
Don’t be misled and caught up in worrying about whether a rune is upright, reversed or inverted.  The runes are multi-dimensional, part of the great Web which has no top or bottom, and when you stop looking at them as being flat and begin to experience them as crystal-like shapes you will come to understand that when they appear for you in a reading or a casting or even as a shape seen in nature, they carry all of their wisdom, all of the time.  And none of it is good or bad.  It just is.
The law of life is that just as the mother births and nurtures, she also devours and destroys.
She knows she must care for herself first in order to care for others. 
She knows that if she is fed poison she gives back poison in return.
Where in your life do you care for others at your own expense? 
Even the most loving mother will have her milk dry up if she doesn’t take care of her own needs as a priority over those of her nursing baby.
What in your life needs to be discarded, pushed away or left on its own?
Who feeds off you when it's not appropriate?
Where in your life are you still breastfeeding teenagers or suckling adults?
These can be hard questions to think about.
Answering them can help you align with the wisdom of Berkana.

As I’m writing this, the skies over most of Oregon, California and Washington are filled with the thick smoke of forest fires.  It’s the summer of 2015.
I am reminded of the Norwegian Rune Poem for Berkana.
Birch has the greenest leaves of any shrub;
Loki was fortunate in his deceit.
At first it might seem a bit strange that Loki is mentioned in the poem.  Loki is a trickster figure in Norse myth with prolific reproduction being one of his primary characteristics.  He was born from the giantess Laufey after she was struck by the fiery arrows of the giant Farbauti.  Laufey’s name means Tree Island.  The Berkana rune carries a theme of rebirth and return of life to the woodlands and forests after the devastation of fire.  And even though Loki’s actions are dangerous to the gods and to humans as well, they are nonetheless necessary for new growth to occur.  
Thank you Loki for the necessary but difficult devastation of fire.
I am warned
the devouring mother
discards as well as nurtures
she who births
also destroys
when I poison you
Berkana
you feed me
death in return
beware
this is the mystery
life

The Berkana poem is one of the 33 original rune poems created by Ingrid Kincaid, the Rune Woman.  They were first published in her limited edition, completely hand made book (un) familiar.

Picture
Berkana
(un) familiar Rune Card Deck
Picture
Birch trees

What wisdom do the runes hold for you?
Runes connect us to the ancestors.
Runes show us the way back to the wisdom and beauty of the earth.
Runes were part of the religious, cultural and social life of Northern European people prior to and during the overwhelm of Christianity.
Schedule a reading with Ingrid, the Rune Woman.

Rune Reading
0 Comments

The Sun Is Sister To The Earth

1/30/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Perhaps you think of the sun as being male, as the Greeks and Roman did.  For those of us whose ancestors came from the North, the land of the midnight sun, the land of twilight winters, the sun is female, Sunna, the great mother of warmth and light and growth and I suspect that if we go back far enough we will find that she and the earth and the moon are all sisters.
This morning as I was walking in the Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery in Portland, Oregon I was momentarily blinded by the sun as she rose up out of the earth and appeared between the trunks of several winter-bare trees.
I paused in awe, remembering back to a time when my ancestors rose to greet the sun each morning, humble in their relationship, never assuming at night that she would automatically return.  
Here is the poem I wrote for Sunna which can be found in my rune book (un) familiar:


I rise at dawn
to greet you Sunna
singing your song
Sowelo
you grant sight
you blind the arrogant
wolf chased
horse drawn
you disappear
again
I rise at dawn 
to greet you

When was the last time you rose a dawn to greet the sun?

There are only 3 copies left of the original 33 handmade, limited edition rune books which contain my 33 original poems. Are you called to be a guardian of one of them?
I am available for personal readings and spiritual direction either in person or by phone/FaceTime/Skype.  Contact me for more information.
Ingrid, the Rune Woman
Changing Lives With Ancient Wisdom


0 Comments

Audhumbla:  A Creation Story Retold-This Time Honoring The Female

11/21/2014

0 Comments

 
As the ice is melting, more and more wisdom is being revealed, wisdom that has been safely hidden away in the North, held in the crystals of ice.  Like the drips of water from the icicles and the glaciers, this information is on the move.  In my Lost Teachings of the North class we open up to explore and share what is being remembered.
After our last discussion, Lara Vesta, artist, teacher, author, was inspired to write this touching piece about the Audhumbla, the Reindeer cow who licked the ice.

I was there in the beginning.  

I watched her meander through the mist, emerging, her antlers hung with velvet.  I watched her give birth, her calf dropped to the sacred snowy ground, the sack freezing on contact even though the air had begun to warm.  Mist rises, rises from the icefall from the collision seeping beneath the surface of beginning, of begun.
 
She licks the calf, stirring, and slowly he emerges reaching up to her milk warm teats.  Life is birth and nourishment both in that hard land.  She licks and licks again and I am with her somewhere, sometimes hidden, sometimes in her.  Whatever I am emerges too from that land, that catastrophic merging that birthed the death I now am. 
 
She licks and eats the food of her own body, she is self-sustaining but he is not.  He suckles and grows.  Days hum or night too in that place, all whirls from the center that is her.  Her gentle action, taking and giving, the pulse of the mother all life. 
 
Sometimes I am so near I can smell her salt and hair, wholly mammal.  I bury my face in her many layers and sleep a while.  Dream I am at the beginning again and again and again. 
 
Days hum and then night and he dies.  He dies.  This is how:  a bellow, nothing changes, an urging, this is time.  His eyes know:  She is not alone, but she is one and together they must be many.  They mate, he kneels weary, bends his head and with a breath becomes.  From his head, the forests, from his body mountains, from his veins the rivers from his blood the sea.  He dies and completes and she swells with life and births again, and again, and again what will be.
 
I would wake screaming from this story, howling with the pain of creation and death.  My mother came for me then, not as she is now but young and soft and still so full of sure love.  She cradled me, my whole side last, my bare side first. 
 
In memory my bones click together, the hearth fire a little higher, my mother sensitive to warmth.  And my brother licks me and lays his head in my lap.  And my other brother wraps us all, the length and breadth of him bringing us so close.  We hold each other and somewhere we know this is our beginning, and all the holding in the world can’t prevent the end.
0 Comments
    title Photo by Amaury Gutierrez on Unsplash

    Ingrid

    Writers write.  
    Waiters wait.
    I write because I have to.
    I am a writer.


      Start a conversation:

    Submit

    Archives

    January 2022
    June 2021
    December 2020
    October 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    November 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    August 2016
    July 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014

    Categories

    All
    1961
    Ac
    Adoption
    Alfheim
    Algiz
    Alice Herz-Sommer
    Andy Goldsworthy
    Angrboda
    Annie Londonderry Kopchovsky
    Ansuz
    Antlers
    Asgard
    Audhumbla
    Beginnings
    Berkana
    Bicycles
    Blood
    Bluetooth
    Burial
    Calc
    Cemetery
    Cernunnos
    Crazy
    Creation
    Creation Story
    Creavtivity
    Credentitals
    Cweorth
    Dagaz
    Dragons
    Ear
    Ehwaz
    Eihwaz
    Endings
    Fear
    Fire
    Ganesh
    Gebo
    Global Warming
    Hagalaz
    Harleys
    Harvest
    Hyrrokkin
    Imbolc
    Ingwaz
    Ior
    Isa
    Jera
    Jormungund
    Jotun
    Kenaz
    Labyrinth
    Laguz
    Letter Press
    Liminal
    Lost Teachings
    Mannaz
    Masks
    Mead Of Poetry
    Meaning Of Words
    Megaliths
    Melusine
    Midgard
    Nauthiz
    Neolithic Shaminism
    Nidhogg
    Nine Worlds
    Norns
    Northern Traditions
    Obstacles
    Os
    Othila
    Pertho
    Questions
    Raido
    Reindeer
    Rilke
    Rivers And Tides
    Runes
    Sacred Feminine
    Sane
    Shamanism
    Skadi
    Sowelo
    Spider
    Spiritual Tools
    Stan
    Sunna
    Super Moon
    Swartalf
    Tattoos
    Teiwaz
    The Meaning Of Words
    Threshold
    Thurisaz
    Touchstones
    Travel
    Truth Telling
    Tyr
    Uruz
    Vanaheim
    Vanir
    Wasting Time
    Water
    Wildness
    Writing
    Wunjo
    Wyrd
    Yr

    RSS Feed

      Receive my writings in your inbox:

    Subscribe to Newsletter
Ingrid lives in the Pacific Northwest, at the confluence of two rivers, and in sight of two volcanoes.
Photos from kajsahartig, x1klima
  • RUNES
    • books
    • Rune Readings
    • Rune Resources
    • Podcasts
    • Blog
  • INGRID
    • Bio
    • Testimonials
    • Rune Readings
  • TEACHINGS
    • Spiritual Counseling
    • Rune Readings
    • Self-Directed Home Study
    • Books
    • Live Recordings of Past Events
    • Podcasts
    • Blog
  • STORE