Ogham — Runes: Week of Monday, October 19

Idad is almost certainly the yew, and its kennings are about age: oldest of trees, fairest of the ancients. The second phrase uses a word that means old people as readily as old things, so the letter reaches toward ancestry. This week something long-standing sits beside whatever feels pressing: a family pattern, an old arrangement, an institution, a person who was here before the current problem and will be here after it. Let the comparison set the scale. Much of what seems urgent will look small next to it, and that is useful rather than deflating. Idad is also the last of the twenty letters, the fifth notch, the point where a sequence is complete. If something is finishing, treat it as finished rather than failed, and ask someone older what they remember of how it began.