The Lovers.

Alternate Title: Follow Your Ib

Three days ago, I had yet another in a long line of strange dreams. It’s practically par for the course. I think about 75% of my week is filled with strange dreams that don’t seem to fit with the standard dream lexicon I’ve built for myself. Deciphering these little shits has become almost a major focus in my life. It’s like, I feel as if I could succeed mightily if I could just figure out what one of the damn dreams meant or is supposed to mean. Ha.

For the most part, I try to parse out whatever meaning I possibly can during my ride into work. My mind is still fresh enough but not hyper focused enough on something else to present me with about 40 minutes of almost down time. So, I try to figure out anything I can and that’s where most of my “ah-ha” moments occur… though I will be honest that I have had a surprising limited number of “ah-ha” moments in recent months. In either case, the drive to work is both a relaxing pastime and a spurt of frustration, but no matter how much I assure myself that I will not think about what I dreamed about the night before, I invariably end up thinking about it.

While thinking about the self-cannibalism dream and trying like hell to remember what the fuck the ouroboros is supposed to stand for (still haven’t remembered and I can’t be bothered to look to be honest), I had a vision of an anatomical heart. Damn. I don’t even want to say “vision.” It wasn’t really a vision. It felt like more than that. There was a black space, which I’ve been in or seen before, and then in the center was a giant-as-fuck anatomical heart. It was just spinning slowly, like it was a coin that was slowing down after being spun really fast. It just kept rotating around and around until I finally heard a whisper, “Follow the heart.”

Well that made so much more sense!

In rapid succession, my thoughts went something like this:

My heart?

Their heart?

The SO’s heart?

The child’s heart?

A stranger’s heart?

The heart I ate?

The fractured heart that I have been working on?

The ring on my finger that is an anatomical heart?

If you’ve been paying any attention to my religious life lately, then you know that hearts are pretty important. Most of my relationship with Sekhmet can best be summed up with a picture of an ib. It seems to be a very big part of what’s been going on between us, never mind all of the recent shenanigans. But just because it’s a large part of my practice that doesn’t necessarily mean I fully understand the point behind seeing one in a dark head space and hearing the phrase, “follow the heart.”

I was quite confused.

I forgot about it because as much as I would like some damn answers, things have happened that required my attention. I went to work. I had things to do there. And then I came home and seethed inwardly for a while. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

The Lovers card from the Mary-El Tarot deck.

This morning, I pulled my daily card because, eh why not. I honestly don’t know why I bother anymore because nine times out of ten, it just causes more arm flailing and makes it that much harder to figure out what the fuck is happening. I was totally unprepared for what I pulled because mostly I have been getting cards like Strength and Death. This morning, I got the Lovers.

I’m not a huge fan of this card, mostly because it’s telling me that a choice that I need to make and I need to make that choice based on my heart. I liked the card even less this morning since it only made me recall that moment in the car, when I could see darkness all around and there was a giant swirling fucking anatomical heart and the whispered words, “Follow the heart.”

Maybe not quite a “clue-by-four” but kind of appropriate all things considered.

The problem is that I don’t know what I’m supposed to be listening to or even what specifically in regards to.

The Tower from the Radiant Rider-Waite deck

There is just so much going on in my life recently. I have honestly felt beset on every side. I think I spend hours upon hours at a time, wishing and hoping that I could just run away. I feel less like I’m stuck between Scylla and Charybdis and more like I’ve been crushed flat by a thousand tons of rocks, wondering if someone will come over with a fireplace bellows and push me back into shape.

I think I’m more at the Tower than at the point where I need to follow my heart.

I know that there are a ton of things that I’ve been sitting on that I should do in order to benefit both myself and my family. However, I’m actually at a moment of complete stasis. I can’t move in one direction or another. I keep weighing the consequences of each. I know what my heart is telling me – I’ve always at least been able to hear it – but the idea of actually following through frightens me more than anything else.

What I see in my heart frightens the shit out of me because there are so many unknown possibilities and I just… I feel as though I cannot take that chance.

I understand, to a degree, why the need to follow one’s heart is important. I also understand, to a degree, why some people have made the best choices in this way. But I’m too on the hedge. I need to ensure that I truly am seeing all of the options from every angle. This has been a huge problem for me for a very long time, but after 32 years, I honestly don’t know if I could possibly quit now.

But perhaps that is the point in all of this: kick my ass into gear and get me paying attention to the deep part of myself that is talking, the part that needs to be heard and listened to. And if that is the case, then maybe more than “follow the heart” would be useful here. Perhaps something that tells me how to get over the heart-crushing, body-paralyzing anxiety would be a good idea.

The World from the Wild Unknown deck

I think what worries me the most about all of this is the same old shtick: I know the end result or at least what the end result is supposed to be. The thing is that I just don’t know how in the fuck I’m supposed to go about it because it’s not just walking through the jungle without a map, but also how to break through my own personal failings or, maybe not failings, but like the programming I’ve been built with.

If I fail at this, it’s not just me that pays the price. I’ve always gone into things under the impression that others would pay for my mistakes. But now, it’s actually true. I have a family to consider. I have to take care of them and their needs throughout all of this. In some instances, I know full well what my heart, my ib, is telling me but I just don’t see how I can take that chance with two people who trust me the way that they do in the mix.

“But Sat, just trust in the gods! Have faith!”

The problem there is that I’ve done that. I have absolutely been there and done that; I got shot with the T-shirt cannon for fuck’s sake. And I’m sorry, but I can’t just blindly follow. I need more than just, “do the thing,” to get my ass in gear. I need a huge neon sign with flashing lights and hymns praising my beauty. I need to my smashed in the face with a piece of luggage falling from the sky before I can even consider the idea of trusting them to that level again.

I think I get the point but I just can’t get with the program on a faint glimmer of possibilities.

Oracular Session – April 2014.

I remember the day I thought about oracular sessions for the first time. I was driving on my way to work, still trying to parse out how to go about and offer services in Sekhmet’s name. I can remember that drive because, one moment, I was in the state of Massachusetts and then the next minute, I was about five minutes away from work. I got very heavily in an internal debate with myself, the first moment I started thinking about it. I knew that this was something beyond my skill set, beyond anything I could possibly offer. But the worst part about it was the approval I felt coming from Sekhmet the moment I had the thought. It made sense, in a way, to offer the service. I had been seeing, for some time, many people doing the oracular session thing for their gods, but I had hardly ever seen the case with ancient Egyptian deities and their recon/revival/whatever devotees. So, in that way, it made sense to me: I was offering a niche and I like to shove myself into tight, claustrophobic niches that leave me panicking.

Evidently.

Accurate representation of me about 95% of the time.

But the main reason why I wasn’t really interested in doing so was because I didn’t know what the fuck that shit was about. All of those people offering those services – how do? It was like some mystical puzzle that had no pieces and there was no picture reference, anyway, to build that puzzle. I definitely had no idea how in the world they had done those things. I didn’t understand how they offered this thing, this mystical and weird and foreign thing, and then made words make sense to the people they were talking to. None of this made any sense to me, whatsoever. But it was the one thing that Sekhmet seemed very keen on. I could have decided, then and there, that my confusion outweighed her approval in the matter. But there’s something that most people may not realize about me or maybe they do and it’s just shocking to me: I always want approval. I especially want the approval of my deities.

I spent a lot of my rides into work worrying about how to do this. I decided that, no matter what, I was going to use cartomancy. But I have to admit that Sekhmet was giving me yet more odd emotive reactions regarding this. I couldn’t tell if that’s what she had in mind. I had, accidently and on purpose channeled deities before. I didn’t like it. I found the whole experience very painful and very confusing and very, very horrific each time. I found that the whole thing left me shaky, tired, aggravated, nauseated, and without any fucking spoons whatsoever. But Sekhmet has this thing where she likes to just have me do something. This should be quite clear, considering the fact that she never once explained to me the whole initiation process or what it was even for, but left me guessing. She doesn’t even to “go into the details,” I guess, and that drives me fucking insane. So, while I was willing to do the thing for people who may be interested, I was terrified about how I was going to actually do it.

I didn’t really do anything at all to prepare myself for what was going to happen. I didn’t know how to prepare myself. I could have napped all day. I could have lazed around. But I honestly don’t think anything I could have done in order to prep would have really helped. As I have made quite clear, I didn’t know what to expect since Sekhmet isn’t fond of details and I didn’t know what I would need to do in order to prepare myself. Did I meditate? Did I get really drunk? Did I get high as a kite (not that I’m into that sort of thing)? Did I try to reach a higher level of consciousness? Did I twiddle my thumbs? Did I read a book and hope that everything just suddenly fit into place? Like, what do people do to prepare themselves to do readings on behalf of people who want to reach out to a specific deity? I don’t know if what I did, at all, was really preparation but I had a pretty good day.

When it finally came time to do it, I realized that I was really fucking tired. I tend to think that I do my best card readings when my eyes are bleary and everything starts to blur at the edges because all I want to do is close my eyes. I’m not sure if I’m weird here, but I assume I am. Maybe it’s just because being tired allows me to relax the rigid, asshole-like control I have over everything and gives me a better ability to interpret what the cards are seeing. Or, maybe it’s just, simply, that I am able to zone out really well when I’m tired and I’m not so good at relinquishing control when I’m not tired. Whatever the case may be, I felt like shuffling cards and zoning out long enough to pull cards while mulling over whatever the request was about and then writing down whatever impressions I got from what I was seeing.

Sometimes, I got like little emotional impressions. Without getting into specifics: my first reading asked a personal query, specifically in relation to Sekhmet. I felt very much as though she were sighing and rolling her eyes. I got exasperation, aggravation, irritation, and put upon when I asked her the question. The amount of emotional overload I went through when I was asking for advice on behalf of another Sekhmet kid was made ten times worse because whatever shields I may have normally were completely gone. As I said, probably because of how tired I was, I was better able to give up my rigid, asshole-like control and get into the swing of things easier. Unfortunately, this meant that I was also able to get impressions that were in conjunction with my own impressions or complete opposite of my own impressions. Things that I knew I was feeling in relation to some of the requests were magnified beyond what they would normally be if I had been as tired as I was.

I’ve thought about this, trying to discern what the fuck was going on here.

I found that I was reacting in an overly emotional way to some of these queries. It’s possible that these emotional outbursts – at one point, I ended up crying for no reason other than that I pulled a fucking card – were due to any number of things. I’m trying to be rational here and not jump on the “I totes was hand-in-hand with my goddess” bandwagon here. But the emotional outbursts that I felt are difficult to parse out and decide what could be from other and what could be from me. I don’t really have any reason to be over emotional about anything that I was asking, though. The answers don’t fucking matter to me; they don’t impact me at all. So, why was I crying because of the Sekhmet kid who got a slot this month? I’ve decided that there are a couple of legitimate reasons as to my reactions: I was over emotional due to ovulation (TMI, right?); I was over emotional due to lack of sleep; I was over emotional due to the stress levels of this past week; I was over emotional because Sekhmet just makes me emotional sometimes. I was over emotional because I was really connected to the god.

I honestly don’t know what the answer here is. Anything could be possible.

I found that, in some cases, I was staring eye-to-eye with the statue of Sekhmet on my altar to give a better indication of what was going on or what I needed to know to relate back to the people asking. This, actually, left me very disconcerted. I don’t normally make eye contact with the statue. Hell, when I dream and/or astral in regards to Sekhmet, I very rarely look her in the eye. I honestly don’t know if it’s because I still feel so much less than in comparison to her or if it’s just a habit that I can’t break. Whatever the case may be, I found that whenever I would look her, eye-to-eye as one would when having a conversation with someone, I found myself uncomfortable with the direct focus. I found it really fucking difficult to maintain that eye contact, but also, I found it difficult to break that eye contact. Talk about a really weird and confusing mess, right? Whatever the case may be, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes, staring into her eyes, so to speak, helped to aid me and whenever I did, I found that I was very stressful to maintain that eye contact.

I did, also, find that the little square bauble that TH’s aunt made for me after Christmas calmed me after those moments. I tend to think of this bauble as the “Ma’at Bauble.” It is gold and glitzy and has glittery ostrich feathers inside. It’s actually really beautiful and the moment I saw it, I knew that this was going on Sekhmet’s altar. It’s a sort of sign post or reminder to maintain ma’at, to maintain balance, but also that one of Sekhmet’s main functions is to protect and maintain ma’at as well. Whatever it is to me doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that when I felt disconcerted or overly emotional about things, I found that just looking at it was very calming. I could go back to doing what it was I needed to complete before going to bed. I found that it was easier to look at that glittery, ritzy, over-the-top-yet-gorgeous bauble and keep on, keepin’ on.

I did also note that my body had strange reactions to some of the requests, as well. When I stopped and tried to ask questions for myself, I ended up getting deep blooms of pain at my third eye and at both temples. However, as I continued to ask questions for other people, the response was dizziness and vertigo. I also received strange muscle spasms the more I asked questions. I’ve decided that this is probably due to the fact that I was sitting, mostly, in a hard backed chair all day and I was using another hard-backed chair to sit in while doing the thing. But the headache and the physical reactions were definitely not caused by how I was sitting or anything. I had felt perfectly fine, though tired, prior to sitting down. I’m not sure if it was just that I was asking my body to do more than I usually do, in a religious or spiritual sense, and that was my body’s reaction or if I can just expect that to happen all the time.

Only time will tell, I suppose.

The emotional fall out is still ongoing, I have noted. I am not a very emotional person, demonstrative or otherwise. I am very rigid and very controlling regarding my emotions. I don’t think that people need to see them, at all, and I try very hard to maintain this sort of tin-women façade. Sometimes, I fail and other times, I don’t. However, I found that as I was sending out the interpretations to everyone this morning, I found that I continued to have an emotional reaction regarding some of the readings I had done. I did find that the more emotional a reaction I was having was directly related to how close to the person who was asking. As I thought back, I think that was the case with some of the emotional reactions I was having the previous evening, though not all of them. But that makes sense! I’m going to, you know, have some feels regarding people if I care about them especially if I’m telling them things of a personal nature. I mean, that’s how friendships work or something, I think. But I’ve also found that the emotional reactions are still happening, which is not something I was expecting at all.

I have to admit that I spent a lot of my time, leading up to this month’s session, freaking the fuck out. Now that I have at least one experience under my belt, I’m not as freaked out. It kind of helps that the people who have received their readings have mostly all commented and many of them have been positive responses. So, I think that is a major weight that has been lifted. I also discovered that actually interpreting what I was seeing was easier than I thought it would be. For some stupid reason, I didn’t see the whole “story writing” that I ended up doing as a possibility even though that’s what I do when it comes to other forms of cartomancy. So, it’s kind of a relief to discover that one type of cartomancy, even if being interpreted from an intuitive and historical standpoint versus what a book tells me it should mean, is kind of the same as other types of cartomancy.

I did discover a good deal of other things, but the most important discovery was that, well, I can do this.

A Glimpse.

I like the feel of holding a deck of Tarot cards in my hands. There’s something incredibly fulfilling and empowering about being able to pick up those cards and catch a shadowy glimpse of what may be coming, what may have happened, and what I need to do next. One of the things that I tend to forget when I’m going through a hard time is just how empowering and fulfilling those moments can be. I forget that I am good at this. I forget that I have an innate ability to catch those glimpses. And I forget that it’s calming to shuffle those cards over and over again. I spend so much time hiding from my cards when I’m depressed that I forget all of these things. I just need to remember that when shit is thick and I’m feeling like a caged animal.

I was talking to someone a while back and I mentioned that I had a thing for Tarot for as long as I’ve known about it and as long as I’ve practiced it. I mentioned to that person that when I shuffle those cards, I can enter a sort of meditative state that brings me down from whatever level of fucktopia I may be in, if only for a few minutes. The meditation of that moment when I’m shuffling those cards, before I pull them out and attempt to put meaning to the puzzle in front of me, I feel good for just a second. I feel like I can reach up to the stars if I wanted to or that I could travel wherever I want to go. I’m not kidding when I said that I feel very empowered when I’m touching a deck. But it’s more than that, too. It’s more than the empowerment and the meditation and everything in between. It’s something fulfilling, I guess, though even that word feels like it cannot begin to describe what it’s like.

It’s a part of me, I guess.

Sometimes, though, when things are particularly difficult for me, it’s not just the fact that I have the power to see a little bit in the future and possibly undermine whatever is going to happen, but a simple fact that I don’t particularly want to know what’s coming or what’s happening. I have a habit of burying my head in the sand when shit is rough and that translates over to my Tarot. That’s the dangers, I guess, for anyone who has some of those out-of-the-ordinary abilities. While mine can and mostly manifest in whatever I can gather from a card pull, it’s not necessarily the entirety of what I see. Occasionally, while I’m staring at a spread before me, I can catch bits and pieces of things that have caused whatever it is I am asking about or what I can do in an effort to push back the flood around me. And sometimes, the entirety of the situation is so shocking or so startling or so fucking huge that I just don’t want to know what the fuck is coming at me.

They say that ignorance is bliss and in some cases, I have to agree.

But in forgetting that I can do a little bit here and there to mitigate what the hell is coming at me, I’m doing myself a severe disservice. By hiding in fear at whatever I may see playing out in front of me when I pull those cards, I am allowing myself to have shit flying at me from every possible nook and cranny. I’m allowing this shit to happen by not using what I have available to me at least try to fucking alleviate it. This is something that I have to keep reminding myself as the shit mire I’m living in keeps getting worse. I watch as the leaves fall around me and I’m still supposed to stand strong, like the trees losing their leaves, while everything around my falls away. I’m not a tree, though. I have feelings about everything going on, many of those feelings are not quite appropriate for voicing or print, but I still have to stand strong like that damn tree.

So, I turn to the Tarot cards and hope to catch a glimpse.

Lately, things have been so difficult that I feel like I’m walking around in a world of gray. Even though the sun shines and the leaves are brightly colored to red, gold, and deep browns, it still feels like I’m walking in the middle of a rain cloud. I know it’s really just depression that’s coloring everything around me. I can see things in a logical manner, of course, but that doesn’t negate a damn thing when it comes to my feelings. As far as I am concerned (and I know that some people I am friendly with do not agree), emotions are not logical. So, even though I can dissect how I’m feeling and know that the world around me is very much not surrounded in shades of gray, I still feel that way. Everything is barely being kept together, no matter how hard I try. As I sit in this gray fog, screaming for help that isn’t going to arrive any time soon, I’m also trying really hard to not completely and utterly fucking lose it.

But I’m pretty damn close to losing it.

As someone who has been barely keeping her shit together for years, this is completely and utterly not fucking tolerable. I cannot lose it. I absolutely fucking can’t just let everything fucking go. I absolutely just fucking can’t stop. As much as I want to sit and lay and be depressed and read books and escape and not be a parent and not be in a relationship (because that would take away from the former bits about depressed and reading and not doing things), I have to keep going. Like I said, I have to be like a fucking tree and just withstand the shit storm heading my way. In the rallying cry of every fucking adult everywhere: I don’t fucking want to. But, as much as I don’t want to and as much as I want to fucking lose my shit and as much as I want to do something stupid and impulsive, I just keep going through the motions because I am an adult and have a responsibility to my family.

I’ve begun thinking about how to get past all of this. I legitimately don’t know. Whenever I get to a point where the world feels gray to me, I really start trying to think more rationally and more logically. I know how impulsive I can be when things suck. I mean, like seriously, on a scale of one to ten, my impulsive level shoots up to like 99 when shit sucks. So, in an effort to not do something too stupid, I’ve been thinking about things rationally. I’ve been telling myself that things have to plateau at some point and then move up from there. (Where did that phrase come from, anyway? A plateau means you go up and then you even keel and then you shoot the fuck down to the bottom again. That’s a horrible fucking phrase.)

And then last night, I was reminded that when I try to be logical and rational about things, I end up fucking things up worse. It doesn’t always seem that way when I make whatever logical decision I’m making, but it sure as shit ends up that way. I never listen to my intuition. I never go with something that feels right. I always make a rational decision because that’s what responsible adults are supposed to do. It could also be because I have a family that I need to support and, like, we can’t live off of good vibes and rainbow farts. But, I keep coming back to the feeling that whenever the hell I try to make a really good decision that’s supposed to take care of my family, I end up getting screwed over in the long run, so maybe I need to really stop doing that.

Thus, like the rambling circle that this entry apparently is, I come back to the point: Tarot.

So, when the world is gray and I start thinking that shit is just going to pile up and bury me alive until I can’t breathe anymore, I suddenly remember that, you know, I have a way to see things and to figure shit out. I have a way to get to the bottom of all of this. I have that innate ability to pull shit out of my butt in the form of pictures on cardboard and figure out the meaning behind all of that. And sometimes, if I’m really trying hard, I can see a lot more than just the pictures of those cards and see the shit that’s behind all of this.

It sure as shit sucks when I discover I’m really not so far off the mark with random comments I make off the cuff without thinking about it.

What sucks even worse is that I really am fucking excellent at squashing my intuition to the point where it’s a tiny mouse’s squeak that’s been squeaking at me this entire time.

And what makes shit even fucking worse is the fact that I could have fucking figured this shit out months ago but was too scared to look.

Consider this a warning to other people who do silly shit like hide from their own abilities: yeah, don’t fucking do that. You may get pissed when you finally take a listen and realize what that part of you has been saying this whole time because you could have already started working on the bullshit months ago.

…

Whoops.

What Is the Wealth of my Akhu?

Recently, I started receiving the othala rune on my daily pull. I have an app on my phone that I use for a daily Tarot and a daily rune. I find it interesting how the two separate types of divination can correlate with one another. Of course, I could also just be putting too much thought into this every morning. But, lately, no matter what Tarot card I receive (and they are all different), I just keep pulling the othala rune. Normally, I can zoom in on the meaning behind it easily with a quick run down of my internal components. Almost always, it tends to remind me that I need to pay closer attention to hearth and home. While I am trying, desperately, to get better at that whole thing, I still fail. So, it usually comes up periodically to remind me that I have a hearth, I have a home, I have a family, and I should probably pay more attention to them.

Thing is, this time around, I’m not feeling that.

Since I am a diviner via Tarot and oracle decks, I will admit to knowing next to nothing about runes. I added the app to my Tablet, on a whim, because I was interested in branching out my divination techniques. In all this time, I haven’t really learned much from them. However, if I get stumped on what the rune is trying to signify, I go to a host of websites to get others’ interpretations of the rune in question. I will do Google search after Google search, troll the appropriate tag on Tumblr, and integrate what I read with what I’m seeing on my app. In every instance regarding the othala rune, I’ve found a key term that keeps popping up and resonating within my subconscious/soul/something-or-other: the wealth of the ancestors, ancestral connections. In other words, it seems to be signifying something to do with my akhu, but what specific is it trying to tell me?

What’s bothering me even more is that I’m noticing a serious coincidence regarding the pulling of this rune. Whenever it shows up, I almost always have dreamt about Sweet Pea, which means that it has been coming up a lot for me recently. After my 70 days of mourning with the loss of my Sweet Pea, I began to dream heavily about her. Sometimes, I knew that I was actually going to the astral to see her, as well. But on a regular basis, I keep going either to dreams to see her and spend time with her, or I end up going to the astral and traveling with her as my stalwart companion. This is, partially, why I’m pretty sure the rune pull has to do with akhu, as Sweet Pea is a part of my akhu. However, I honestly can’t figure out what one has to do with the other. What does Sweet Pea being a part of my akhu and the dreams/shenans I have of her have to do with this rune? What particular ancestral wealth am I supposed to look to?

Without pulling my Sweet Pea into this, I’ve attempted to look for what type of wealth I could expect from my [genetic] ancestors. I’ve combed back through my memory to attempt to figure out what aspects of them that I have within myself. And I have to admit that I have a lot of aspects from my maternal akhu that have made up who I am today. I have Leo’s legs; I have a passion for history; I am named for a branch of the family; I misquote French sayings; I have the same nose that’s gone back generations. I have a lot of bits and pieces of myself that are aspects taken from the genetic inheritance of my akhu. But honestly, as much as I can see all the items I say, do, and have that bring honor to my akhu, I don’t think this is quite what the rune or my shenanigans with Sweet Pea are about.

So what is it?

What key piece to this damned puzzle am I missing?

And where the hell is my manual when I fucking need it?

The Hermit.

Source.

Recently, my Radiant Rider-Waite deck and I have been in a hate-hate relationship. It started requiring a lot more energy than usual in order to use them. I’m pretty sure it’s my fault that this ended up happening, but it happened. So, I put them up and away for a while, telling them that they needed to behave themselves when I use them. And everything was fine until a friend of mine requested a reading. This friend has asked me a couple of times since I put the deck up and away for a reading and yesterday, I decided to pull them out. I tend to bring my deck with me to TH’s family get-togethers as a way to obviously ignore people. (Since apparently my reading means that everyone has to come over and see what I’m reading and ask questions, but not with Tarot cards – I don’t fucking get it.) And I figured if I was in public, the deck would behave itself properly. And it did. On a whim, I began shuffling and “lololol” asked it about my religious life. The first two cards of the reading were unimportant as I’m passed that, but my current phase? It’s the Hermit.

At first, I thought that this was entirely based on my community mongering. I’ve been so intent with community building and the project therein that I’ve written about needing one no less than once a month in the last year (or more). And in all that time, I’ve been so focused on the community that I’m having issues in my personal practice. The thing is that we are working with a religious framework that, while it is community based, is also outside of our normal framework. Many of us solitary Kemetics are coming into this religion from a monotheistic background, which may or may not have a communal backbone as Kemeticism does. (I know my childhood monotheistic practices were not community based, though there was a community within it.) And to compound the appearance of getting nowhere fast with the community posts that we’ve had going around, I’m rather tired of people as a whole and Kemetics, in minor. I go through phases where I am an extreme introvert, which is usually categorized as my “I hate everyone” or “let’s nuke the planet and start over” phases.

I said it was excessive, didn’t I?

The thing is that this is only part of the whole Hermit-ting the card is getting at. I can look at it in one aspect and see, “ah yes. I’m using too many spoons on that when I need to be conserving them for this.” However, I tend to view my divination practices as more than just simply two-dimensional readings. The card wasn’t just simple about having to pull back my spoons and pulling away from my community for a while. It was more about worrying about me, about my practice, and what that actually happens to be. I’ve become so complacent with my practice that I’m beginning to worry about everyone else and what they are doing and what sort of drama-mongering Tumblr is up to that I’m forgetting I have gods who need/want me, I have lwa that require me, and I have a life to lead.

On a whole, I think this is something that all people, of polytheistic, Kemetic, and-or pagan stock, need to pay attention to. If you send things out on the Internet all the time, what does your practice look like? How often are you online, worrying about what others think about you? How often are you online, calling someone else out on what you perceive to be a slight or injustice? Is your relationship with your gods suffering because you’re so focused on things that have no impact on you? Is your practice suffering because you’re so focused on “teaching a thing” to people who have absolutely no part in your life aside from having seen them in passing online?

I was so focused on what other people were thinking about me and worrying about not saying things that I felt because of how other people would react that I was forgetting the most important thing in my entire practice. I was at the point where I was so focused on coming home from work to see the latest drama on Tumblr or to see who was pissed off at whom on Facebook that I was forgetting about the most important facet in my entire practice. And that most important thing is me. There is no one else here who can pick up my mantle should I fall. There is no one else around who will be able to write the guide I’m planning for Sekhmet. There is no one else here who can do the work Papa Legba has asked of me should I get caught up in outsiders’ drama.

And frankly, what is the point in all the things that I’m doing with my practice if I’m focused on other people?

My practice, as I’ve been harping on lately, is orthopraxic. I don’t have to sit around and debate theology with anyone about anything (although I will, occasionally). My religion has nothing to do with what I’m thinking or what Joe Blow Tumblr is thinking. This practice is about what I’m doing. And if I’m focusing on other people and other things, then all of the shadow work, SVP entries, grave-tending, and devotional acts go down the drain. They all end up failing the ultimate test, which is to create a functional, cohesive practice on a solitary level so that, maybe one day, we can create a functional, cohesive practice on a community level.

As Sekhmet said to my earlier,

Being a hermit isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it can be a good thing. It’s not an act of selfishness to lock yourself away from other people. It is an act, as you are already aware, of unconditional love. And sometimes, those acts of love require you to step away from the whole and work on the one. I haven’t been working so hard on you for all these years for you to be of no use to me now.

“You Tie Your Arm and Ask Me If I Want to Drive.”

I draw lines in the sand all the time when I’m on this path and every time I try to stick to that line, I’m forced to revise whatever line I’m drawing. This is vastly irritating to me because I like my lines in the sand and I like sticking to them. However, there are extreme moments where those lines get blurred, erased, or I’m forced to step over them. And I will absolutely fucking admit that I hate having to do that. It’s not just that I like sticking to whatever the line I’m drawing is supposed to be about, but that I like being able to say, I will believe X, Y, and Z but I won’t go any further with this. I’m already pretty insane with all of this shit and something new may put me over the edge. So, no further. However, as time has gone by, I’ve realized that whatever line in the sand that I’m drawing is beginning to become a sort of personal affront to my OTHERS™ and they’ll fuck that shit up to prove a point.

Yesterday, they fucked my shit up again.

I know quite a few Tumblr users who work with the whole music oracle. I’ve always been interested in such a thing, but I’ve never figured any of my OTHERS™ would use this music oracle thing. I’ve had it happen where songs that I’m supposed to use during my Magical Cure Search entries have come on, songs that I had been trying to remember but failed because my memory is filled with nonsense things like ring-tailed lemurs from Madagascar. (A family trait is being able to distinguish places from photographs, or in my mother’s case, animals and where they are in the world from photographs or TV programs.) But, on three separate occasions now, OTHERS™ have pulled out a song that was particularly appropriate for them in varying ways.

In the first instance, we had Hekate using the hit song, Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye, to hit me up. She was trying to hint at me that she and I had been working together before. It took me a while – with some help from a friend – to figure out what the message meant. But as time went by, it really helped to solidify our working relationship together. If I hadn’t heard that song, I often wonder if I would have been so dedicated to Magical Cure Search and the shadow work with the ex-husband. I don’t think I would have been, honestly. But she showed up and she pulled a song into my consciousness to (A) identify past lives together and (B) to help me move forward with the work I needed doing for my ex-husband.

The second instance, I haven’t discussed openly. I haven’t wanted to admit it, but it appears that Gran Bwa has been using Radioactive by Imagine Dragons to get my attention. This song first came on the radio the night after I began dreaming about him. I like the song – it’s a good one. It has a very nice rhythm and I enjoy the message. And I didn’t necessarily realize, at fist, who the hell was talking through this song. However, the alternative message, the one from Gran Bwa, was a warning. I haven’t heard it since I realized that I was being warned about what Papa Legba wanted of me. He was telling me to “wake up.” And of course, I didn’t so I was kind of blind-sided with Papa Legba explained what the hell he wanted from me.

Just because you hear the message doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand the message.

Yesterday, I was driving home from work and studiously not seeing the spirit world or the astral world. I’ve been very conscientiously ignoring anything “out of the ordinary” on my way home since I watched a bush stand up, stretch, spin around a bit, and then lay back down. It was all very normal, almost like I was watching a dog find a more comfortable place to lay down. However, I was seeing a bush and told myself, “NOPE.” Since then, I’ve been less than interested in anything astral related. I have not wanted to do a fucking thing I’ve been asked to do. And by golly, I’ve been studiously ignoring everything spirit related around me: the land spirit; the girl in white who took up residence on the staircase in my apartment complex, the deer spirit eyeballing me from work who wants more apples to feed it; everything. I don’t really give a shit what the hell happens or what’s going on around me. I am a big bucket of nope.

So, to get my attention, my OTHERS™ played around with my CD player. I had been listening to Ten Years Gone, the Best of Everclear 1994-2004 since Saturday. I turned the CD player on, ready to hear their rendition of I Will Buy You a New Life when Strawberry came on instead. I was a little taken aback because, you know, I was two songs away from that one. But, maybe I screwed up and forgot where I had actually left off. No. No. Of course not. Sekhmet was fucking around with shit and wanted me to listen to the song. It’s a very nice message, oh yes.

“Don’t fall down now. You will never get up.”

This message, luckily, is far more easy to decipher than Gran Bwa’s message.

I’m at the point where I just want to say, “fuck it all,” and leave this life. I don’t want to be Papa Legba’s mouth piece. I don’t want to watch as he maneuvers the pieces again and again and again to get what he wants out of my life. I don’t want to be Sekhmet’s mouth piece. I don’t want to watch as she molds me into something that is more amenable and easier for her to use. I know the reasons for the two of them fucking my day up and prancing around like loons, laughing uproariously as I slap them with “human concerns” as to why I can’t do whatever they are asking. I get it. I understand. It doesn’t mean that I particularly like being manipulated by gods, lwa, or anything else on this fucking planet.

And it really doesn’t help when they say, “These are silly, human things.”

But that’s the point in why I bring them up in the first place. I’m human. Things are supposed to be fair. Things are supposed to be easy. Things are supposed to be smooth. I’m supposed to hate my job and hate my life, retire at 65 and fucking hate the rest of my life some more. I’m supposed to get bitter and angry and foul the older I get and you know what? I can’t fucking do any of that shit because I’m so busy with my religion that I know being bitter probably goes against the living in ma’at thing and FUCKING HELL, GODSDAMNIT IT ALL.

We all go through hours, days, weeks, and months where we just can’t handle all of the “woo” going on in our lives.

I can’t handle the “woo” going on in my life, but if I stop even for a second now, I’ll lose it.

So, what’s more important here?

The path?

Me?

Their wants and desires?

My wants and desires?

As I’ve been known to say, our wants and desires don’t figure into this.

And now is no exception.

Adventures in Bibliomancy.

As a teenager, I was really big into the whole Tarot thing. I’ve mentioned before how this was, like, the one connection I had with my mother that wasn’t tainted by our constantly haranguing each other by existing. It was like, a kind of test of sorts to see if connecting with my ancestors would be a way to go. Even though the ancestor in question is still very much alive and is only just one generation ago, I still see it as my first general foray into the idea of “ancestor veneration.” While I never went further than picking up a habit my mother used to have when she had been my age, it still feels like a proper beginning of sorts for all of that. This was part of the reason why I’ve eschewed all other forms of divination: it kind of felt like cheating.

I could get away with oracle decks because, in effect, it’s similar if not the same damn thing as utilizing Tarot for divination purposes. On the other hand, I also actually prefer the oracle decks because the meanings aren’t necessarily as static as they can be with certain Tarot decks. And yet, I’ve always just gone right back to Tarot simply because of my mom. It’s that connection there. And while she doesn’t do this stuff anymore (thus asking me for all of her readings), it’s still a bond we can discuss without having to puzzle out whatever the fuck the other one is saying. (And as a morbidly depressed teenager, that was like a fucking gods send right there.)

Color me surprised when I got the feels to actually, you know, try a new divination method.

My friend, Dodger has been doing bibliomancy readings for a while. I’ve gotten a few from her and let me tell you, it’s always been pretty fucking accurate. There was a single time when I had to ask for clarification and, you know, the riddle within the paradox within the enigma there was because certain gods were mucking about, making things a good deal more complicated than they need to be. So, I started thinking, “Hey, I could do this with the Book of Going Forth By Day.” And wouldn’t you know it? I happen to have a decent copy on hand and I thought, well, why not? Obviously, I could inject a little caveat that said something like, “Accuracy not guaranteed as this is my first attempt,” etc. And I ultimately did do that. So, just before I started taking asks on Tumblr for my first ever attempt on bibliomancy, she posts a handy-dandy guide to getting started.

It was like, you know, fate or something.

I’m going to pause while you click that link to the Bibliomancy Guide and give it a read. It’s really helpful knowledge, she wrote it and that’s an automatic “awesome” in my book, and it will also let you know what the fuck I’m talking about. …All right? Are you done? Excellent. Let’s move on and discuss my adventure!

To start with, I decided to experiment on myself on Thursday. I knew I would do a slew of bibliomancy requests on Friday, but I had to iron out exactly what to do. (Dodger hadn’t posted her guide when I began experimenting.) I spoke with another friend of mine who had done the same experimentation only a few days before. She also agreed to be my guinea pig for that night along with myself. (By the way, thanks, Dusken, for being my guinea pig and talking me through it.) Now, the book I had chosen, Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead from R.O. Faulkner, as put out in a super gigantic hard cover edition by Barnes and Noble, was not particularly fond of cooperating. I tried going through and just letting the book fall open on its own: nope. It was too heavy to fall open to a page I hadn’t bookmarked in some way myself. I tried just randomly letting my finger decide what page to open it up to: the pages stuck together. I tried using a random number generator and I would get zero feels about this.

Since my first experimentation was on myself and I had a specific thing in mind when I was doing it, I have a couple of ideas as to why the book didn’t work. Even though it’s usually a habit to choose sacred books to do these things – and we can argue that, as a Kemetic, this particular book is pretty fucking sacred – I was trying to communicate with Hetheru. Since the book was more about death and dying and spells, it probably would have been better suited for a conversation with any of the deities more intrinsically tied to death and dying: Wesir, Aset, Anup, Ma’at… Anyone who may have some role in the whole process, from protection to actually overseeing your heart being weighed, would have been better suited to this book.

So, I’m in a quandary. The book isn’t cooperating with me, which felt like it probably wouldn’t work with Dusken’s trial and error session.

What to do?

I have a lot of books and I spent a good while perusing my bookshelves. Even though the stuff that I’ve read from Dodger and from other websites talked about using a sacred book, I wasn’t willing to try any of my other magical texts or historical books. This wasn’t supposed to be anything more than fun, right? I was supposed to be happy about working with a new divination system, right? So, I went to my fiction books and my hand snagged on Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. This book is pretty much sacred to me, which I felt made it damn appropriate. This book has walked me through some of the most severe depression bouts imaginable in my teenager years and I re-read the entire series every summer. (It reminds me of summers in Misquamicut, actually, since I usually took the book with me when we went on vacation.)

Now, as to the process of actually going through with this, I thought about trying to let the book fall open on its own. I’ve recently had to purchase a new copy, however, so I don’t think it would have fallen open as easily as, say, the original copy my mother still owns [from when it was first published]. Also, I only imagined a hundred, thousand paper cuts forming at the thought of slipping my fingers across the slick pages. So, I ended up going with the random number generator version. Instead of just letting it random generate a single number for this task, I had it generate three random numbers (starting from the beginning of the book at page 1 and ending at the final page of the novel). I then added those together, averaged them out, and I had the page I should be searching on.

I then ran my finger across the page until my hand/finger/arm/shoulder started zinging with shocks. That’s when I knew I had found the proper annotation for the person in question.

Over all, my experimentation with random people seems to have gone well. The first night with Dusken was hilarious. (She knows what I’m on about.) The next night was serious business. It was very tiring and very draining. I couldn’t keep chocolate and caffeine in my system long enough to answer the volley of requests. This reminds me very much of the days that I decided I would just open myself up to Tarot readings, for free, from any number of individuals and ended up killing myself in the process. I learned, back then, from my Tarot free-for-all that I could max out on five readings a day. I don’t remember how many bibliomancy requests I had but I do know that I had many more than five.

This leaves me with the realization that I have to limit myself.

This leaves me with the realization that I need to be more fully rested.

This also leaves me with the realization that this whole thing is fun.

And I should do it again.

Addiction to Prescience.

I’ve been re-reading the Dune series again. These books are one of the most prolific books of my childhood. I remember when my mother first suggested that I give them a read when I was in high school. I believe my exact reaction was a stereotypical “ew” face. I was always a fanatical lover of horror novels while my mother has always been a lover of science fiction novels. While I was busy reading Stephen King, she was all about C.J. Cherryh. By that time, however, I had already discovered the 1980s version of the movie associated with that and fallen in love with it. (I’m probably one of like ten people in the world that loves that movie more than the recent remake.) So, I took the first book and was instantly entranced. I’ve re-read the series at least once a year since. And I am still fully in the series’ thrall.

The reason I mention this is due to the series’ obsession with the question of prescience and the preoccupation therein. Always both Paul and Alia, and then later on with Leto II, seem overly preoccupied with the constancy or, more like, the constant variables of their prescient visions. They move so carefully forward, stepping lightly and with only occasional surety, while their visions unfold around them. Well. They unfold only so much, depending on variables that I have not mentioned (and won’t because I’m not a huge spoiler bastard). But the point here isn’t the paths, the what ifs, or the variables of each vision, but the heavy emphasis on ever following the foretold paths.

One can’t help but begin to associate these characters’ reliance with certain pagans, diviners, and polytheists. And I will admit to having an issue with this, myself.

The thing is that it becomes like a drug addiction; the desire to know ALL THE THINGS and the “special” ability to do so. It gets, sometimes, quite difficult to put down the crackTarot decks or runes. And not just to put them down, but to do so long enough to realize that you are hopelessly addicted and that you are doing yourself, as well as your future, a severe disservice with this. There’s just something exceedingly exciting, however, at the thought/belief/idea/whatever of being able to tread past all the shit stuff and live a “golden lifestyle.”

The thing is that this is a falsehood we tell ourselves.

Besides, how far does this go before prescience becomes a flaw?

As has been shown oft in the series I mentioned, each decision is made to deflect or side-step a specific path that Paul initially sees. (This prescient vision is never fully spelled out until book three, so I won’t really comment fully on it since, as I said, I’m not one of those spoiling assholes.) Yet, each decision to deflect the path only ends up leading to worse horrors. Those terrors may not unfold immediately, but they will or do happen. Is this a pattern we can find in today’s form of prescience, with our divination via Tarot, oracle, and runes? Or am I just deluding myself in thinking that there is a correlation to be met here.

Let’s talk about me for a minute here. (It’s all about ME.)

I’ve mentioned in various outlets that my primarily utilized Tarot deck, the Radiant Rider-Waite, is an excessive troll whenever I ordain to ask it personal questions. Every horrific computation of the queried situation comes up. And I am deeply reminded here of the Dune characters’ terrible situations and their continuous trials to prevent them. Call me crazy here, but while I’m being troll by my cards, it appears that the characters are being trolled by the visions they’re receiving. In effect, the book mirrors my cards’ constant need to be a troll to me.

And this makes me wonder… if we’re so obsessed with knowing the future, is that why some of us suffer from “trolling prescience”? Is this a mess of our own making? Is the issue here that being addicted, so to speak, to knowing the future causes the visions, oracles, or service utilized to tell us the Worst Case Scenario possible? And if that’s the case, is it because we keep looking, hoping for a better answer or is it because in each asking or viewing, it only serves to make matters worse?

Fet Guede Tarot Reading.

What have we here?

A quick note about the Tarot of the Dead. They use different words for the usual Tarot suits everyone is using to seeing. I figured I should probably explain what each of them are as I didn’t change the names of the suits to make sense to outsiders. The reels are pentacles; coffins are cups; pens are wands; and pistols are swords.

So, on Friday, I ended up doing a kind of generalized Tarot reading when I was at the cemetery. I wanted to do a very generalized kind of thing, asking what I could expect in the upcoming months. I don’t think I was so specific as to how many months or within a year’s time or anything else. I think my intention was a focus on my religious work in regards to going back to work for the temp agency and all of that kind of thing. (I can’t tell you how worried I am that this job will be like my last job and kill my religious working. That worry, however, is probably a good thing because it means I’m less likely to fall into that trap… right?) Since I don’t really recall what the fuck I was thinking when I was doing the shuffling, I’m going to have to piecemeal what the hell this reading says.

To begin, before I got into this reading specifically, the Moon card jumped out at me. While usually most Tarot readers will assume that a card jumping out has some inner meaning that needs immediate attention, I normally don’t. This is because, usually, when this happens it is because I miss-shuffle or I end up fucking up in mid-shuffle. This time, however, I was in the zone that I get into when I shuffle through my deck when the card jumped out at me. So, I studied the card thoughtfully. Of course, I know the generalized meaning behind the Moon card: intuition. Obviously, there’s more than just paying attention to my intuition here. In Tarot: Plain and Simple by Anthony Louis, he has almost an entire page attributed to the Moon card in its positive aspect. The second paragraph, I feel, is particularly warranted in my current life.

The Moon card suggests you are entering a period of fluctuating moods and uncertainty during which you must confront unconscious forces in order to proceed. That which has been invisible or secret is coming to the surface. You can make good use of your creative talents in writing, art, drama, acting, psychology, and psychotherapy. Travel, especially over water, is possible. You notice how ingrained patterns from the past are affecting your current behavior. Expect the uncanny.

Part of this descriptor has already begun to make itself manifest. I have been consciously aware of past patterns affecting me in negative ways to this day. (As evidenced by how much the ex-husband and his shit has been coming out in the last two months, eh?) However, it’s not just a set of following old patterns and trying to break them, however that is part of it. It’s also seeing how many of my past decisions can be mirrored in daily events, monthly events, and so on. Another aspect here is the “invisible or secret is coming to the surface.” I feel like that, in particular, has to do with my recent astral shenans that I haven’t really been discussing in detail. (Not that I don’t want to but as far as remembering goes, my memory is at its infancy.) In going to the astral, a lot of past life stuff is coming out to be worked through and dealt with in some form or another. Talk about secrets coming to the surface…

Now, as to the reading itself…

I chose to use the spread that came with the deck. I honestly don’t know what it’s supposed to signify, or didn’t at the time I was doing the spread. It seemed like a good idea to just stick to the deck and its suggestions while freezing my ass off. A three card spread, I felt, wouldn’t give me as much information as I looking for. It’s entitled The Pyramid Spread and the cards’ placement meanings are: 1. you; 2. actions and events; 3. unconscious forces and emotions; 4. outside forces; 5. knowledge and beliefs; 6. possible course of action; 7. possible course of action; and 8. outcome.

The card that signified me was the Knight of Reels reversed. The generalized meaning behind this card, in a nutshell, is financial instability. And that really does describe myself and my family at the moment. With me just getting back to work (and for a really low rate) as well as with TH out of work again, things are shaky at best. I have been feeling like the foundations are rather shaky when it comes to our finances and I keep putting off necessary purchases (like food) until I absolutely have to. (Currently, out financials are more shaky because of silliness from the department of transitional assistance, but that will be sorted out soon enough.) When we get into more depth with this card, we see that it talks about feeling uninspired and reaching a sort of impasse. More specifics contain apathy, listlessness, depression, dull, and lifelessness. All of these aspects currently describe myself, my emotions, and what it seems like everything will always be to perfection.

The next card for “actions and events” was Page of Pens, also reversed. A very generalized overview of the card is about bad news, frazzled, dismissals, and exasperation. When we get into more depth here, we have to see that it’s not just communication and blackmail going on here (which I have been experiencing lately), but it also talks about a general downturn in events. Nothing is working out, everything looks bleak, and everything results in leaving me feeling drained and apathetic. This is true in so many current environments in my life that I don’t even know how to begin to convey how frightening it is.

The third card was Six of Coffins reversed. A generalized interpretation of this card in the reverse is that there will be rough waters ahead. While normally, we would just assume that this part and parcel to the two cards already displayed, we have to also keep in mind that this has to do with the unconscious forces and emotions as opposed to physical happenings. The descriptor in the book I mentioned above talks very seriously about taking the easy way out of a situation, not being able to put troubles behind you, and feeling stuck in an unchanging and difficult predicament. In the realm of emotions, I have to assume this is in more relation along with the emotional aspect of past mistakes and decisions that I’ve been noticing recurring are still affecting me. This goes hand-in-hand with the last card along the lines of feeling like I’m “stuck in a rut.” It’s not just the decisions and the blah of my reality, but also the emotional upheaval and re-living of those past instances that keep deterring me.

Next, I receive the Justice card in the “outside forces” area. This is a fairly obvious card in its general interpretation: fair outcomes and being judged. While this card could have to do with legal proceedings, which would make sense in its spot in the reading, I think it has more to do with having to look more equally at all possible decisive outcomes. I don’t tend to do this. I’m very much a “this is the way it is” kind of person and I stick through it. If I weigh my options too much, then I end up dithering until I can’t make a decision. If I don’t weigh my options enough, then I end up being miserable and unhappy. (FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS.) I think that a lot of rapid fire decisions (about career, mostly) will be coming up in the next few months and I have to weigh those options neatly and concisely instead of letting fate or the gods or whomever or whatever take control.

The fifth card of my spread was the Seven of Coffins reversed. (I was in a big reversed place, I guess.) This area is about knowledge and beliefs. The general for this one is persistence is rewarded as well as the fog lifts. Considering the place of this card and it’s more localized reading, I have to take this as a direct commentary on my religious practice. I’ve spoken in my Fet Gede post about being scared out of my wits about going back to work and its relation to what my religion will look like. I’ve talked repeatedly in this blog about how much my religion suffered while I was working at the hellhole that fired me for bullshit. This card, to me, is about deciding how much religion plays a part in my life and where this will take me. It also talks about needing to be decisive about it. And while I’m pretty sure I know what the decision regarding my beliefs are, I’ll not get into it right now. (That will come up in a work-related post all on its own this Friday for the PBP.) Suffice it to say, I need to be decisive and firm in regards to both my income, my future, and where my religion plays a part.

So, the next spot is one possible course of action and that card was the Five of Pistols. So one particular outcome, this one, is pretty negative. This talks about being so concerned with winning (or as I could place it in my life, money) that I end up ignoring everything and anything to make that money. In effect, the card, to me, reminds me very much of the materialistic jerk I was when I worked for that ex-company. While I do miss not being able to buy books whenever I feel like it or not needing to rely on family members to help buy food or clothes, I have something to admit. All the books I bought, I never read as I didn’t have time. All of the clothes I bought myself, I never wore because I was always in work uniform or pajamas. I never got to see the clothes I bought for my son because I never saw my son. And while I am currently subsisting on PB+J, I’m probably losing weight whereas I could eat quite a bit when I was making the money. What it comes down to is how important is having the money if you never get to use it to buy things that benefit you?

The seventh card is another possibility. This card was the Knight of Coffins. This one talks more along the lines of an actual person, but the person it talks about is a sort of dreamer. I tend to associate this card with creativity and spirituality. It’s not a matter of dreaming, per se, but a matter of being able to live in all the worlds a human feels comfortable in (creative world, mundane world, religion world, spiritual world, astral world, and so on) and being able to mold that into a cohesive unit. (As if the astral world would ever easily mold into what we desire!) However, whenever I look at this knight and his horse of sea foam, I have to sit there and think about the possibilities. To me, this card talks about following my hopes and dreams. This card talks about getting into gear and doing the things I’ve always said I would: visit Salem for the first time, write a novel and publish it, work on an intro to Kemetism book, etc. While I may not discuss them frequently, I do have a lot of dreams for myself and my future.

The final card is supposedly the outcome and this one was Star reversed. (I told you, I had a lot of reverses in this reading.) This card is pretty much a happy card in either position, however in the reversed position, it just means that the hope and that is discussed in its upright position are a little delayed… but they will happen. In this case, I tend to view it as a very generalized outcome because I get the feeling that it is possible I go with possible action from number six as opposed to possible action of number seven. It’s all a matter of weighing out all of the possibility, as Justice warns me to do, and figuring out where to go from there.

Universe is Trollin’ (PBP).

I keep getting trolled by the universe and it’s all the same trolling.

This is the universe.

And this is my face.

What do I mean when I keep telling everyone that the universe is trolling me? Well, you know how you get all of those Internet trolls who are just trying to push your buttons and start things just for the sake of having something to do? You know exactly what I mean if you have been on the Internet for longer than five minutes. Internet Trolls are the bane of the Internet, but sometimes, you get the same kind of thing when it comes to the universe. Sometimes, the universe sits up, notices what you’re doing, and decides to just piss you the fuck off with what you think are extraneous and unrelated topics. In fact, this is far from the truth because the universe is bigger, badder, and older than you are. The topics in question may be pushing your buttons, but they are ultimately related. It’s just a matter of deciding how you handle it.

You can just ignore it.

You can just go with the flow.

Or, you could just do this.

I’m currently at the last option.

After last week’s PBP post, I was kind of not really sure what to do with the information that reading had provided me. I was under a certain impression that X was the cause of the “nefarious deeds” mentioned therein. The problem, however, is that I’ve had a shit-ton of past lives with this guy and in any one of those lives, I could have done something that would come back and bite me in the ass. I decided not to think about it, but you know, this is a post about the universe trolling me. So, you know, as much as I decided that I could get a working done for the here and now, the universe had other plans. First, a quick conversation with a friend of mine who said that “nefarious deeds,” to her, sounded more like stealing a child, murder, and all that fun stuff. A’right. That’s probably more of a past life thing so again, I decided to mull it over in my own time.

UNIVERSE TROLL IS NOT HAPPY. MUST MAKE HER THINK ABOUT THIS NOW.

I sat down with Hekate and was randomly shuffling the cards to figure out what the hell was going on.

The cards are Earth, The Sun, and Astral Body. Oh-ho-ho. Isn’t it just so interesting that I get a card about the astral when I’m busy studiously not thinking about how I should try to travel into the astral and figure out what the hell I did back then to fuck shit up so hardcore now? Yeah, it was really interesting. The reading was, in effect, this is what you do to achieve some goals, doing all of this well help with getting to the next step in your life, and you have to go to the astral to do it. I decided that this wasn’t really what I had to do. This had to do with the here and now, for fuck’s sake. This didn’t have to do with the astral or severing ties: this had to do with what I did to the ex-husband five fucking years ago and not what could have happened between us in any number of past lives we lived together (and possibly died because of each other in).

So, then I did another random shuffle and this is what happened next. I received As Above, So Below, Tree of Fall, and the Three Great Realms cards. In effect, this reading was telling me that what has come before is coming back now. It’s all mirrors, everything is mirrors. I interpreted that to mean that I’ve managed to get away before, but it’s always come back to bite me in the ass although in different ways. I have to shed this stuff because it no longer works. It’s just dead weight and like a tree in the fall, it’s time to get rid of those leaves. And the final card is, in effect, telling me that all dimensions are concerned here. It’s not just what I see and want to be reality here, but that all decisions from my past and in the astral are impacting me right now.

So much for completely ignoring something and coming to conclusions in my own right.

And then my lovely friend who talked to me about “nefarious deeds” decided to do a card reading for me because she is lovely and awesome and have I mentioned lovely? And guess what?

The universe smacked me around with some more stuff. BECAUSE IT IS A TROLL.

I present to you, the universe… again.

This has left me in a very interesting place. The last few nights, I’ve been going to the astral. I don’t know how or anything except that I am going. I have the clear-cut signs of someone completely hungover from a night spent in the astral realm. I don’t remember anything. Last night, however, I went to the room that I associate with my way-station before I head into the astral. Whenever I purposely go there, Mut (who I am thinking is a guide of sorts here) would never show up. I would end up spending hours exploring the room and trying to get a clear picture of the gods on the table in the center of the room or wandering the balcony and wondering when I would get to leave that room.

I was able to leave that room last night.

I was sucked into a mirror. And the last thing I remember is…

Sans unicorn, perfectly accurate representation.

So, as much as there are times when we don’t want to look at the signs and figure out what the hell is going on, no matter how much you shove your head in the sand, it doesn’t matter. The universe is going to troll the fuck out of you until you pull on your big girl (or boy) panties, pack a lunch, and get the fuck out there to figure it out. It’s so much fun when you try to take your normal route – such as hiding your head in the sand as I am wont to do – and the universe drops a whole bunch of truth down your throat and in your face.

Truth bomb, in yo’ face.