Norse runes, read through a Japanese lens.
I'll be honest: tarot and I never quite got along. Not because there's anything wrong with it — people I admire love it — but the cards talk first. Before I can get quiet, the pictures are already telling me a story.
I've practiced the Japanese tea ceremony for fifteen years, and I'm a practicing Buddhist. The tea room and Zen share one instinct: pare everything away, and give your whole attention to this single moment. Kanso — simplicity. When I first held a set of runes, something in me recognized them at once. Twenty-four marks. Plain lines. You draw one, and you receive it in silence. That's all.
Some of you may know Vinland Saga — the Viking epic that doesn't stop at the battles, but follows a warrior out the far side of them, through the emptiness of vengeance toward something like peace. It's loved in the West for exactly that turn. What many don't realize is that it's a Japanese creation — written and drawn by a Japanese author.
That turn is a very Eastern one. And it's part of why a Japanese tea practitioner reading Norse runes may be less strange than it first sounds. A Norse form, read with an Eastern heart — for stillness rather than conquest, for meeting yourself rather than foretelling your fate. That, in a small and quiet way, is what I'm doing here.
When Westerners look East for divination, they usually find the I Ching. And it's magnificent. But the I Ching is a system — yin and yang, sixty-four hexagrams, changing lines, a whole cosmology to decode. In that sense it sits on the same shelf as tarot and astrology: powerful tools you read by combination.
The Zen sensibility runs the other way. Strip things away; rest your attention on one. Seen like that, a single drawn rune stands closer to Zen than the I Ching ever does. This isn't Japan versus China — Zen itself came from China. It's system versus simplicity. Runes are simple.
Tea has a phrase: ichigo ichie — "one time, one meeting." This cup, this gathering, will never come again exactly so; and so you honor this once.
Drawing a rune feels the same to me. No birth date, no birth time, no chart. All it asks for is you, now, in this moment — not the data of your past, but this single meeting with the present.
There's another Zen phrase I keep close: nichinichi kore kojitsu — "every day is a good day."
It does not mean "a good day is a sunny one." It means that the rainy days, the hard days, the days that don't go your way — lived fully, they become good days. You make them good. The good is yours to make.
So when you draw a rune in the morning, don't ask it whether today will be lucky. Ask it to help you meet the day — to make today yours. If a heavy rune turns up, that's simply what today invites you to practice. Every rune becomes material for your one day.
You draw your own fortune, and you make your own day. Nichinichi kore kojitsu is just the old name for that.
There are no dramatic prophecies on this site. Only quiet marks, and your own day — a gentle reading, open to anyone, of any background. It's set down here softly. Come whenever you like.