Kenaz Filan recently posted an insightful commentary on Jera on his blog: http://kenazfilan.blogspot.com. This has promoted me to further explore this rune,  because I think it’s quiet nature often gets lost in the wake of more assertive runes like thurisaz or ansuz. There’s also the fact that jera is at once intimately connected to the human cycle and completely detached from it. Jera will govern its cycles and whether humans object or not, those cycles will go on.

In many ways, jera is the glue that holds everything together. Kenaz rightly associates it with cosmic, planetary, and natural cycles (in this, it is also connected very strongly to dagaz). Jera is all about the progressive inevitability of change. It is gentle comparatively, for this is an immensely organic rune. It follows natural patterns, natural cycles and indeed ,flows within them. These are the conduits, the currents it likes to ride and wherein it has the most influence.

Often jera counsels, “persevere. If you persevere, you will make it to the end of this cycle. If you persevere, perhaps you will have something beneficial to harvest. Persevere. Everything flows, everything changes, everything grows even in the midst of its destruction.”

In a reading, jera ties things together. As Filan rightly points out, it is necessary to look to the runes that surround, precede and follow jera. There is no way to avoid the turning of the wheel, the changing of the guard, the moving on of the cycle that jera represents. This ongoing, inevitable change is what it might show up in a reading to represent, as well as the slow turning of one spiritual or wyrd cycle into the next.

These cycles occur whether we will it or no. The sun will rise and set, the seasons change, the carcass will be devoured by the beetle, and the compost will nourish the seed. All of these things will go on regardless of our feelings on the matter. There are spiritual cycles that occur as well with just as much lack of concern for our individual egos. Jera isn’t about us. It’s about those cycles that occur around us, through us, and of which we are a part.

Jera is all about patterns. It can bring one right into the threads of wyrd and working with this rune is a very good way of developing sensitivity to the pattern and flow of wyrd. That is the ultimate cycle, the ultimate pattern and jera contains an immediate and direct connection to and reflection of its enormous warp and weft.

Jera may be a good rune to work with, honor, and meditate upon to help find comfort, consolation, and closure in the wake of the death of a loved one. It shows us the connection inherent in all things, and the cycles of which we are a part, and that nothing truly ends, it only moves, circles, cycles, and transforms. 

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