So Begins 2017

New Year’s Reading 2017

I rarely lay full spreads anymore, but I do keep up with a New Year’s Day reading and this year’s turned out to be, well… Intense. 

The Two of Arrows up there carried over from last year, when it was manifesting and from the year before when it was the key theme. This card has represented my depression/anxiety struggles and to have it in the “leaving behind” position is encouraging (not that I have any belief my barrow-wights will vanish, but I have reached a new and healthier place in resisting them). 

The Forest Lovers appears as a key opportunity for the year I will be getting married in a Viking style ceremony in the mountains, the first true rite of passage in my life. The Wildwood deck is cheeky as hell and blunt as a sledgehammer sometimes. 

But of everything here it’s The Stag that commands the reading. This card that I have from the beginning associated with Tyr comes as deep wisdom from the gods. In this year when justice on all fronts will come under threat the likes of which many of us have never imagined, we will need His example the most. We will need conviction and compassion and willingness to sacrifice for the good of others. Tyr is chided as being “no peacemaker”. But when there is no justice there can be no peace. 

This is the year of the shieldwall, and we will all need to find the strength to hold our place in it. 

When the Student Is Ready.

Hello friends. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

A good deal has changed since my last post in March. I’ve gotten officially engaged. We have a new home and new jobs and have added a sweet, snuggly hound to our family. I have my workshop back, even if it still is a shambles from the move, and I’ve been taking steps to commit myself to following my bliss.

My bliss is telling stories, and I will be telling my stories my way, in my voice. No comparisons. Comparing myself to the achievements of others and finding myself always wanting has been a plague on my writing this past year. At the impromptu wake held for my uncle last week, my aunt asked me if I was doing any writing. Not really, I told her. Not as much as I would like.

“You’re such a beautiful writer. What’s stopping you?”

At that moment I realized I had no answer to that question. All the possible excuses that flooded through my mind shriveled into inadequacy when faced with that question from a woman in mourning. It ceased to be a question. It became a challenge.

What was stopping me? Me. Only me, just me, nothing but me. I had made a choking ouroboros of myself, driven by a deep terror of judgement, and of being thought arrogant. Arrogance and boastfulness, being “full of oneself” is the bogeyman to the Midwestern child. It is the worst thing a person can be, and any sign of it is to be quashed even at the expense of healthy confidence. I’ve come to realize that this is one of my Shadows, created in me both by birth (anxiety and depression are family ghosts) and by my upbringing. It is the darkest, most manipulative and nasty side of my Inner Critic. It has so many tricks to convince me that my efforts aren’t worth it and that I’ll never be as good as others, because if I haven’t finished a draft by now I probably never will I’m just not smart or creative enough so just don’t bother and hey there’s some dishes that need cleaning, you know you really don’t keep the house well enough….

The Critic sticks her nose into every aspect of my life. I will never get rid of her, but I’m learning ways to sock her in the nose when she’s not wanted. That’s where another of my Shadows steps in, the one I call the Farmwife, to thwack the Critic with a wooden rolling pin and give me a good dose of tough self-love (and possibly inspire cookie baking). The Farmwife Shadow personifies a matter-of-factness and a make-do/can-do attitude that I associate with my maternal ancestry and which I’m proud of; and a bitterness and resentful anger of which I am not.

I expect to be blogging more about my flirtations with Shadow-work, but the true inspiration for this post was the revelation I had while spending some time with my Mary-el deck last week.

It’s been a good while since I’ve had the space and the solitude to do a proper reading. After the move I decided to redesign my creative space to be more conducive to writing and laying cards. I’m quite happy with what I came up with. I have a corner altar for my Patroness, above it a small space for my ancestors and other honored dead, and above that a shrine to the World Tree. In the center of my main workspace is my tarot altar, a simple arrangement of a shell, a candle, and a stone (Earth, Sea, and Sky, a hearkening to my adolescent interest in Irish-Celtic neopaganism). I made myself some tea (I almost always have tea when I sit down at that desk) and decided to try out the Tetractys spread, one of the layouts from the very detailed book that accompanies the deck. As I began to lay the cards, confusion crept in. What the hell was all this Earth and Fire doing here? I’d never seen so much Earth before! I’ve never been an Earth person. Air and Fire, Water and Air…those have been my typical pairings. But my desire as the satyr-bodied King of Disks? The looming Magician sitting there at the heart of it all staring sightless at me and offering up no clues? The Devil AS my Devil and Minotaur Ace of Earth as my Angel? It wasn’t until the last card, the final outcome and peak of the pyramid, that comfortable reality reasserted itself in the 4 of Cups.

There he is…looming.

I have done so many readings about my creative aspirations. It was among the first questions I ever explored with tarot and oracle. It was the dream I brought to my first day retreat with Joanna Powell-Colbert back in 2013. I’ve drawn lessons from each of them. This one, though, left me puzzled. So I sipped my tea and scratched my dog and stared and stared…The King of Disks certainly looked very pleased with himself, lounging against that tree, manhood exposed without a single fuck given. I perused the book. Completion. Confidence. Mastery. Consuming the fruits of one’s self-creation.

The bell went off. I journaled through the cards, quickly, without thinking much about what I wrote. When I looked at the Magician again, looming over the Heart of the Matter, the message could not have been clearer:

“Get out of your head, girl. MAKE IT MANIFEST.” 

I have never felt a connection to The Magician. He seemed an alien presence in nearly every deck, aloof and cloaked in the unfamiliar. I had always thought of him in esoteric terms, preferring to identify myself as a writer with the ecstatic, with archetypes of Divine Inspiration. I had failed to notice that it was not inspiration I needed. It is not inspiration or even creativity that compels me to tell stories.

The Wooden Tarot, Majors Deck

It is the need to make these worlds real. I want to paint them and their people with such color and sensation that they live in the mind of another person. I want to take these places and their histories from the ephemera and give them solidity on the page. I want, I need, to make them manifest.

That is the Magician’s domain, and so Magician I will be.

A New Year, A New Blog

I’ve been on quite the hiatus but it’s time to step back into the practice.  Here’s to finding Balance in 2016, and maybe walking with the Old Man for a spell.

New Years reading.Spread by Joanna Powell Colbert.

Into the Wildwood: The Shaman

His hulking, lopsided figure, cloaked in a heavy bearskin, was silhouetted against the blazing fire. His ochre-reddened face was shadowed by his own frame, masking his features to an indefinable blur with the baleful, asymmetrical eyes of a supernatural daemon.

~Mog-ur, The Clan of the Cave Bear

Position: Heart of the Wood, Spring

Taking the place of the RWS Magician is The Shaman. Presiding over the Spring of the inner self and consciousness that is the Heart of the Wood, he is the bridge. He is the initiator, pulling that which is inner and unknown out in to the light to be Known and Manifest. Spring is the time of renewal and growth, when what has been sleeping and maturing in the darkness and safety of the Earth breaks through. There is a unity to the Shaman; he knows all the elements and their connections and perhaps most importantly, he knows how to draw hidden power and potential out of each person. He knows mysteries, standing on the edge between the limits of our understanding and what is only speculation, and he uses that knowledge to invoke awe. When this hybrid of scientist and priest works his wonders, we are aware of ourselves and we feel the web that ties us to all life, to the universe, and to time.

One of the roles of a shaman or anyone who occupies a liminal or priestly status is the performing of rites of passage. In the West, and particularly in America, we no longer have such rites on a wide scale. These events that mark a shift in a person’s life, identity, and place in society are confined to religious communities and no secular equivalent has come along to replace them. To me, that is a loss. The most prevalent rite of passage worldwide seems to be that of transition from child to adult in the eyes of one’s society, marked by some form of ritual and/or change in dress or appearance. In our society right now, those boundaries have been blurred beyond almost all recognition. We accept child’s tantrums from grown men and subject little girls to the sexual rules that should be reserved for grown women. We mark 18 as the age of adulthood, and then force those same “new adults” into a paradoxical mess of delayed responsibility and blame for not taking up the same. An 18 year-old may fight and die for their country, but not consume alcohol. A child of 10 may be tried as an adult. Even our most important rite, the ritual of voting, has been called into question in recent years. We shift the boundaries and responsibilities of adulthood when it suits our whims or complaints.

Still, we acknowledge shifts within our own identities and to some extent we retain rituals to accompany them. The literal pomp and circumstance of a graduation ceremony comes to mind. Some graduations even precipitate the changing of a person’s name, granting them prestige within their field of study but also in our society as a whole. We celebrate the union of two people, if not with a full wedding ceremony at least with some manner of celebration. Each of these markers adds another layer to identity, growing us like a tree, gaining more rings as we grow taller and older. Whether religious in form or not, I think we need rituals. We need the marking of change.

The Shaman to me is a signifier of this type of transition, that the time to assume a new mantle is upon you. What is within you must now be manifest. This is your initiation into the next ring of yourself.

Into the Wildwood: The Wanderer

Position: Heart of the Wood, Winter

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.

~J.R.R. Tolkien

The Wanderer is one of four cards that make up the inner heart and it stands in the Winter quarter, ready to wake up and begin a new journey. In a traditional RWS deck, this is the Fool card, and it still carries much of that meaning. The idea of being a fool, of looking foolish has become rather vilified in our society, I think. There exists in our American culture (and we do have one, however lacking it may seem) a push for planning and precision, stability and safety above all else. The idea that one might not know the direction they want their life to take right away is a cause for concern for many, and the sign of the downfall of society if the New York Times’ opinion on us dreaded Millenials is to be believed.

But as is often the case, the Professor has some wisdom to offer us here. “Not all those who wander are lost” is a verse written about a wandering king, after all. Just because the path may be long and unsure at first does not mean its end is inevitable failure. As my generation moves into adulthood I see a growing acceptance of the idea of wandering without being lost. For many of us, the straight road we were promised–from school to university to stable job to marriage, family, and owning a home–has turned out to be not so easily navigated after all. We understand that life requires wandering, because so many of us are Wanderers ourselves.

As a card, this is one of my favorites in this deck. I love the colors that seem like both fall and spring, I love the face in the trees, I love the position the figure is in (almost like they’re running or stepping forward into a free-fall) and I love how the figure is essentially genderless. Since gender is something we each discover and create for ourselves, it’s perfect that the Wanderer is a blank slate in this sense. Identity is something that is always changing in one way or another and we are all Wanderers more than once throughout our lives.

There’s a thrill to this image that is just so exciting. Beginnings are like that. Who knows what lies ahead? Both joys and terrors, surely, but this is the moment of knowing that when you take that step towards the adventure it’s what you are meant to do.

Into the Wildwood

When I first started my journey into polytheism and the Pagan world, I never dreamed I would find myself practicing any form of divination, let alone Tarot. I’d had a few readings done for me here and there, by old women at fairs and by my (now erstwhile) Wiccan friend, but it fell into the realm of “silly woo stuff” for me. And then in the winter of 2012 I spotted a few deck images on someone’s witchy Tumblr and a little bell went off. I was struggling with my creative writing at the time and thought, “Hmm…this could be a good way to get my juices flowing”. I started reading up on different decks and I came across The Wildwood Tarot, by Mark Ryan and John Matthews with art by Will Worthington. Despite the warnings that this was not a beginner’s deck, I was fascinated by the imagery and the symbolism and I knew this was my deck.

The Wildwood is a re-imagining of the popular Greenwood Tarot first printed in 1996. It shares many similarities, but as the name implies it is indeed wilder. The premise of the deck is a journey through a beautiful but at times perilous wood, running into its various denizens along the way. It feels very much like you’re the hero of a classic folk tale, and I connect with this deck in a very personal way that I haven’t with any other deck since. It is my personal deck, for looking into myself and connecting with my characters across the veil of the multiverse. It always provides for me, even if its messages are sometimes blunt and even acerbic.

Since we’re moving into Autumn and the dark, fallow half of the year soon I’ve been feeling a pull to make a new study of my old friend, and so I figured a primer post was in order. The Wildwood uses the traditional four suits under its own names: Arrows (Swords), Bows (Wands), Vessels (Cups), and Stones (Pentacles). (The archery focus is something else that drew me to this deck.) It also places each suit and every major into a wheel of the year formation that intersects with different levels of consciousness, with the center being the Heart of the Wood, the middle ring the level of human interaction, and the outer the universal, cosmic level.

The Wheel of the Year

This sets up the relationships between the cards, and one of the aspects I like best about it is that it allows for liminal space where the levels and seasons blend into each other. When I refer later in my journal posts to a card’s position, this is the position I’m referring to. The whole deck laid out in the Wheel formation is gorgeous, if a bit tricky to photograph.

(Don’t mind Biscuit in the upper corner there! I am an adult who still loves her stuffed buddies, and proud of it!)