I WANT -
let go of that. Just for a bit. it’s fine.
BUT I NEED TO -
no, you don’t.
YES I DO!! HOW DO I MAKE IT HAPPEN -
do nothing. just breathe.

me and the cards have this one-sided screaming match since years.
When I’m under the most pressure and a throbbing deadline.
Often - when I needed really concrete things that don’t just come along - like a place to sleep in three days, or money to buy food in five. it’s non-negotiable, it’s root stuff, and it needs to happen now.

at that point i’m usually elbow-deep in four plans of action with two backups just in case, like a cook in the zone at rush hour where it’s all bang clang and sizzle and deep focus so nothing burns or overcooks and i’ll sideways pick cards with one hand asking without breaking stride, Okay Which Plan do I follow.

and they say None of them. Wait.
They say a variation of today’s High Priestess :
Rest in the abundance of the world.
Emanate from your priestess self, your mystical essence that knows no disconnection, no hurry, no limits.
That is the job. Be.

Be?
Yes I know. I know crisis is when I most need to gently vibrate my divine self.
Hearing it still makes me want to defenestrate while gouging my own eyes out.

This morning it happened again.
I wanted no room for doubt. I pulled three cards then five then nine.
Give it to me straight, no detours no doubts and please gods don’t say “no comment at this time”.
I turned them over and they said
Stop trying so damn hard.

Your sword is stuck in the mud and that’s not where a sword belongs. You’re scrutinizing one inch of dirt and you can’t see a thing.

The other cards indulged me in patient repetition.
Your top action men are frothing at the mouth to wrench back control, and none of them are the solution. Not your teacher warrior priest magician, none of your so-capable so-competent facets will save the day just because all they need is one damn inch to stick their foot in the door and kick it open and -

They’re all in your way.
They’re all the problem.

Lean back. Take off your conqueror boots and your itching fistful of magic beans, and be a child instead.
Potter in the garden. Self-pleasure. Go for a swim.
What would you do if there was only now?

Cause that’s the only thing that will grow.
The. Only. Thing.

You wanted clear, right?

l< n<l! ?!lk< j!ijepitjpiejswjshtmust!!!!!!!!!!

It’s only been a month since we last had this chat, when I caught my finger in the blender.

I was on a roll. Spring was catching me in the feels, and I’d finally bought a train ticket to relocate to the South of France. I was packing up, job-hunting, flat-scouring, brimming with excitement and the winds of change in my hair.

A day after buying the ticket, I listened to an Embodied Astrology forecast. That woman Renée keeps enuciating every month exactly what’s going on in my life.
As she spoke I actually had to sit down.
“You’ve been trying to settle down for seven years, and failing. No matter how hard you’ve tried, it just never worked out.
Well Uranus finally, finally moved - and that part of your life is over.”
My head was spinning.

Could it be?

I wanted to kiss the ground and weep and fling honey offerings into the nearest bushes, but a sterner voice also strangled the excitement with a ruthless hand and said -
don’t believe it till you have proof.
your hopes have gone up and down and up and down and it tears chunks of you out every time.
wait to see if this is real.

But I had a ticket in my pocket.
A sliver of hope glimmered in my heart in a place long turned dull.

I was so ready. Only grievous bodily harm could have slowed me down.
Well.

The very next day, after an eventful trip to the emergency room I finally flopped into bed, with a shredded fingertip in a bandage and an operation date to patch it up two days later.
I wondered whether to push through and relocate anyway.
They have nurses in Montpellier too. A hand clinic. I’d be there. One step closer to the dream.

I WANT the life waiting for me there.
i want trips to the beach. I want to slip on microshorts and walk to the nearest terrace for iced coffees with new friends. I want my writing breaks to have flamingoes and otters and bougainvillea, i want to turn nut-brown and freckle-splattered and smell jasmine on my night walks.

I’ve yearned and yearned and yearned for this.

I can just go, right?

The cards said Wait to heal and I rolled my eyes in moping defeat and slid under the covers.
Final check-up with the surgeon would be twenty days later. If all went well.
Eternity.

But this is what happened next.

I was ready for the move to be difficult.
Soon after the operation, I couldn’t help myself - I nipped down to Montpellier for a quick three-day stint.
I had three flat visits scheduled. I’d found a host in the minuscule Couchsurfing community for my stay.

All I needed was a bit of luck.
An outrageous bit of luck. Same as always.

Three days passed on an extremely dirty couch. None of the flats fit though I did twist and turn to try and will myself to say Yes anyway. Just give me a foothold. One.
My heart was heavy on the train back north.
It will take weeks to find a home. Probably months.
Hopping from one stranger’s couch to the next, trailing a big suitcase while also looking for a job...
Exactly the precarious living I’d fled one country ago.

I landed back north and stopped pushing southwards. I closed the tabs in my browser for flats and jobs.
I waited.
I finished a mosaic table. I sowed more in two weeks than in my whole life before that.
Time went by slowly while my finger healed frighteningly fast.

I passed my last check-in with the surgeon with flying colors and called Kate, a friend also in the midst of moving to Montpellier. She was heading there to flat-hunt ten days later - a little later than my own vague plans.
Maybe we could go together? She said Yes please.

I waited just a little longer.

And then everything started to shift.

I hopped on a train and we landed in her family’s flat, our very own private base of operations for the next ten days. It was such a luxury. The shaded balcony gives out on cypress, olive- and fig trees. Frogsong rocked me to sleep every night and I met all of Kate’s family. I drank like mother’s milk the companionship, the swelling feeling of summer, of arriving at last, of possibility.

The first night we arrived there was my birthday. Kate flew off the couch to grab a felt bag with a cat painted on it - her creation kit. She perched back on the opposite side of the couch and proceeded to lay out minute plastic boxes holding polished chips of lapis and tiger’s eye and moonstone, fermoirs in silver and gold, colored beads.

Back in her Paris flat, I’d admired the bracelets and earings that hung next to the bathroom mirror. Kate makes fairy-like jewellery - delicate, exquisite, and utterly unlike anything I’d ever choose for myself. If I were to choose.

Her eyes raked me up my neck, earlobes, fingers and wrists. “What am I making you? necklace?... earrings?” her voice trails off as she sees.
I shrug “I never wear jewellery.”
She blinks. “Never?!”
I shake my head, fingers skimming through the pretty things glinting in front of me. She steeples her fingers and squints at me, assessing the challenge.
“What else could I make you.... “
As instructed, I make a little pile of the things that catch my eye. A fat gold disc. Asian-looking motifs like square triskels. a box of beads the color of wet moss.
“What if I make you a key ring.”
My head snaps up. “Gods.”
She grins “Perfect?”
“Perfect.” I stare at her. “You have no idea how perfect.”
My current keyring was a leftover tassel I’d made during lockdown knitting sprees. I’d been based in New Zealand. Every three months the government contemplated whether to renew our tourist visas, or suddenly kick us all out to fend for ourselves.
We’d be told we could stay a week before our visa expired. Every time.

Things on the home front - had barely changed since then.

And now I had a local person who came from from this soil, offering to make a charm for me.
An object to anchor my belonging here. As a birthday gift. With full intention and love.

Could things really change?

Our flat-hunting routes would sometimes join. She’d point out the sights, her old high school, I’d push the pram with her sleeping nephew while she strode up staircases to shoddy buildings and came out shaking her head. We debriefed and cooked at night, sharing the day’s discoveries of happy dogs and gardens and horrific moldy bathrooms.

I found no less than three places that would do for now, my shoulders dropping a little more every day as reality whispered “Not this time. It won’t be a struggle.”

Before our 10 days were over - Kate and I both signed contracts to our new homes.
And we were moving ten minutes’ walk from each other.
After three nights of obsessive, alchemical night toil with her pincers, Kate handed me a glorious key-ring “unlike anything I’ve ever made before. No idea how that happened”.
It looks like a netted Sun.

We celebrated our dashing success. We toasted to the sweetness of life together and adventures to come, and just as planned she returned to Paris and I moved in.

I bought bits of furniture for the first time in my whole life - not just candle-holders but a carpet, two lamps, a bedside table and giant plants. It felt absurdly decadent and like I really shouldn’t cause how was I going to transport THAT later when... when?....
I shushed myself and started a ritual of morning coffee under our trees, watering a young jasmine plant I’d just put in the ground and repeating to myself in wonder
This is my home.

A month later, I’d just stepped outside phone in hand, checking the roadmap to go dancing when Kate calls me. Her video shows her face and then turns towards some buildings : “Yo, you busy? Guess where I am?”
She’s on my street. We make a dramatic victory dance at each other on the sidewalk, hugged hard and fell in step towards the nearest park.
“You been to the waterfalls yet?”
She glances at me “The -? Ooooh” a wide grin lights up her face “I see how it’s gonna be. You’re gonna show me all these places I’ve never seen, in my own home town.”
I bob my head “It’s what new kids always do.”
We trade news while the sky turns a rich purple, and she takes my arm in hers and says:
“You know this is my absolute fantasy come true, what we just did? I swan over to your place just in case you happen to be available, and so we hang, no plans... Just flow. Just so easy.
It feels like things might just be easy.”
I squeezed her arm.

All that happened while doing what I was told - sitting back.
Waiting for the easy path to beckon.

So when I pulled cards today, to see my collection of kick-ass men all turned upside down - I know what they’re saying.

Little one.
Stop trying to control the tide.

Wait.
Potter in the garden.
Self-pleasure.
Go for a swim.

(This Tarot Thread is an experiment - I started writing a book of introduction to Tarot, so I’m sticking extracts here as I let thoughts bubble.)

keeper of the keys - hints - clarity
wisdom from personal experience
service
shaman- coyote - guide - journey between the worlds

Rumi - Chaplin - Martin Shaw - Sophie Strand - Saint Thomas of Aquinas

“(His is) The dance between the profane and the sacred.”
Melissa Cynova

“The initiatory ingredients of the rational and the ecstatic” - Martin Shaw

“Person who brings congregants into the presence of that which is deemed holy. Interpreter of sacred mysteries and arcane principles” (Wikipedia)
Notice their keys are at the groin, the root.

Political leader of a faith, this is the teacher who teaches you how to be your own teacher.

Their scarred skin has weathered the burns of paradox and hard choices. Their shadow ripples with secrets gathered in hell-pits, sleeping spring buds, howling factories and radio waves. They stand waist-high in the pungent swamp of experience, both a guardian of the crossroads and a pillar of the community.

The hierophant happily converses with spirits, children, slaves, rocks and kings. They’ve been around. They know their people, and they know the price of things.

A foot in discipline and in wonder.

They might sing like a fallen angel, or move an audience to courage with a spicy sense of humour. I often imagine the Hierophant often at the tavern, having a drink with everyone to share inter-dimensional gossip. They are sailors constantly between sea and harbour, whispers on the wind and the avid attention of crowds and leaders waiting for the wisdom in their saddlebags.

Polarity of learning - teaching.
Surrendering to a higher power - Standing as beacon of reference and authority - Bowing in humility to learn

earned trust, counsel, tending balance, elders.

• Who are your teachers right now (human and beyond, allies and adversaries)? Your disciples?

• What are you called to teach? To learn? To learn by teaching?

• How efficient are the mediums you’re using - voice, heart, physical and mental bodies, the physical place of gathering, the community drawn around it, the rites?

• Where are your blindspots and who can mirror them back to you?

• When in doubt - what would love do? Which face would it turn towards the situation?

Who do you know who holds that archetype gracefully?

I’d never spent an hour twenty metres under the surface.
That level of closeness was new…

It was surreal as going to the Moon.

Like turning my head in a crowded room and falling in love with a complete stranger.

Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I thought -
What does diving teach me about the realm of the Cups : emotions, dreams, connection?

what am I learning from full-body immersion in one of the elements?

Under pressure

The technical side of going underwater keeps lending me brutally clear material for metaphors.
Deep emotions is a big magic, high stakes game.

Going down is sinking into a world of wonders - ruby corals and swerving fish with tremulous fins, majestic octopus and the frolicking light dancing on the sand. It’s utterly out of this world.

But it’s not done lightly.

Unlike the casual flirt of snorkelling, where you can dip in and out, diving requires protocols, a lot of pristine gear, and training.

You don’t do it alone. You learn, with a master.
You go down only with someone you can trust.

Because if trouble hits, you may have one breath only. One breath of air to deal with an emergency, then you’re out of oxygen.
At the bottom of the ocean.
You panic, you die. It’s that simple.

Every metre you go down underwater, you are subject to more pressure. You go slowly into this transition, tracking and releasing any pain in the sinuses as your brain, your lungs - your capacity to absorb - adapt. You have less and less access to light (clarity).

Required equipment includes equanimity and stable breath.

Everything underwater is about your breath. It steers you around the space the way your legs steer you on solid ground.

Inhale, your lungs fill with air, you bob upwards. Exhale, the air empties, you sink downwards.
If your breathing is ragged, you’ll spike up and down, frenzied, damaging the environment and wasting your most precious resource : the finite supply of air in your bottle.

Instead, what you want is to glide. You get that through a slow, uninterrupted stream of breath, constantly circulating through your lungs. Calm. Steady. Continuous. Equanimity naturally results in that kind of breathing.

On the symbolic level, you can often tell if someone can move fluidly through water - through the emotional body - by these signs :

They can flow with difference without feeling threatened.
They’re willing to engage in pressure and discomfort, and have learned to glide through instead of spiking up into trigger, activation, or sinking down into resentment and collapse.

I kept thinking how faulty gear gets you killed underwater, but it also spreads dead-ness when on the surface.

Think about it : if someone can’t deal with emotions at all, there’s often clogged communication around them. Avoidance. Lack of vulnerability. Connection and trust are brittle, so the resources we find in each other, the access to help and inspiration are anemic. The soil is poor, growth stunted and timid.

Become another animal

I kept thinking about gliding through water as opposed to walking through air : water Is thicker. Veil-like. Like the way emotions radically color reality. “Objects in the Mirror May Appear Closer” kind of distortion.

To go into another element to the one we live in is a lesson in limitations. We need to adapt to new rules, becoming awkward guests clutching temporary access cards.

In the kingdom of air, I enjoy a peripheral vision from the top of a high spine, mobile legs and a supple neck. I’m a sleek, nimble predator.
To be underwater, I need to follow the path of Inanna to the underworld.
I gain access by leaving behind my totems of power : my far sight, suppleness.

The diving mask works like horse blinkers, chopping off my peripheral vision until I see only what’s right in front of me.
The bottle of air on my back becomes a shell, limiting neck movements to a minimum, stiffening the spine to support its bulk and weight.
If I want to check my surroundings, I need to twist my whole body around.
I basically become a half-blind turtle.

Water as intimacy

Above ground, I know to avoid touching stinging nettles. I know to run up a tree if I cross a feisty boar.

Underwater I’m an ignorant foreigner. I wasn’t familiar with what itches, burns, bites.

I learn that things are not what they seem.
Familiar characters reveal habits I’d never heard of.

In my frequent childhood trips to the Mediterranean, I’d often been warned about the moray. Hides in its cave, slithers out and bites passing prey. Scary face. My Dad crooked his fingers to show us the angle of its teeth, Like this, Once that’s in your foot there’s no way to get it out, you have to cut its head off. Brrr.

Suddenly the dive master tells me a completely different story. Shrugging and waving his hands - Morays are like, like silly puppies. Soon as they trust you they’ll rub themselves all over you, cuddle cuddle cuddle. Stink really bad though, you have to scrub the scent off your skin once you surface with soap.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows invented the term adronitis - the frustration with how long it takes to actually know someone.

Diving was experiencing the sea as a whole new world. From zero. All previous experiences, the years of snorkelling and living on the beach, of drawing the sea life and strolling aquariums, watching documentaries all paled to nothing in the face of being deeply inside.

I felt connected to the coral reefs, the fish, the destructions of the ocean in a way I never have before. Because my body was there. It wasn’t theory and long-distance relationship anymore.

Every time I saw a manta ray, I literally couldn’t breathe anymore.
My heart skipped a beat.
Revelation.

The sea became so damn personal.

Conclusion

This is how the suit of cups open us to the world : it grabs us in the heart and it all gets terribly personal.

I have a teacher who always says Don’t trust anyone who’s not lived at least three terrible, apocalyptic heartbreaks. They don’t know what life is yet.

As I flip through the cards, I look at each cup and wonder how deep we’ve had to go to fill each of them.
To dive into grief and ecstasy, to sink into worlds of unimaginable wonders - and come back from another world.

With a tiny cup of holy water.

I look at the court cards, and think of the care it takes to not spill that kind of treasure once we’re back on the surface. To allow others to drink from it - and to keep our own cups full.

To remember to breathe through whatever brew we got served today.

“There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.
In one well
You have just a few precious cups of water,
That 'love' is literally something of yourself,
It can grow as slow as a diamond
If it is lost.
Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a
Stranger,
Only to someone
Who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you”

Hafiz (from The Divan)

video shot by Titto, master diver at Orka Diving - Candidasa

Forgive my lack of photo attribution - the pictures are just dirty screenshots from websites I didn’t track as I researched.

Morgan-Greer Tarot :

Golden Art Nouveau Tarot : (It’s full of actual gold. My inner magpie is rock hard.)

Omni Tarot :

Mystic Mondays :

I wouldn’t use the next two because they make my head spin, but I think they’re fabulous.

Tarot del Fuego :

Vilifer Tarot :

Grande finale! Join my haunted longing club for The Wild Green Chagallian Tarot.
This deck that has colored my dreams since years. Alas, it’s Major Arcana only and I’m seeking a full deck. Feast your eyes.

More recommendations, anyone?

What if you never had to ask yourself - What is my purpose in this life?
Because some people have never had to wonder.
I’ve often been mortally jealous of them.

Sobonfu Some shares how it goes in her native Dagara tribe:

“Now, how is one’s purpose learned? When a woman is pregnant, there is a ritual performed called the hearing ritual. In this ritual, elders will ask the unborn child, "Who are you? Why are you coming here? Why do you bother, this world is too messed up. What can we do to ease your journey?"

The baby takes over the mothers voice and speaks back, "This is who I am. I am coming to help uphold the knowledge of the ancestors," or, "I am coming to do this and this." And based on that information, the elders will prepare an appropriate ritual space in which to receive the child, and make sure that everything is ready here before the child is born.

After the birth, the elders make sure they surround the child with things that will help them remember and accomplish the purpose they have described. And when they reach adolescence and go through initiation, they have to go back to the time before they were born to remember what they said.”*

I always feel jealous when I read this book. I grew up in a village with the elderly, but without elders.

Without a web tuned to how the invisible shapes the visible.

And that’s what the cards feel like : 24h access to our council of ancestors.
To the ones who know when to remind us of who we are.

Here in the West our group rituals have faded.

The support we would draw from coming together regularly to honour our place in the heart of the land, in lineages of love and courage and wisdom… All this has fragmented. Replaced by a hundred disparate personal practices like a scattering of broken glass.

The power that has leaked from those foundations is not lost.

Its essence remains where we’ve always found it.
Through coming together with intention.
Through rituals that anchor our belonging and slit open the seams of our vision.
Through the objects of power that have been passed down to us : the printing press. Grandma’s chipped teapot. The equations of the Law of Gravity.

And oracle’s magic trick : to read like newspapers the fractals of reality.

I’m a great one for trying to reinvent the wheel and Tarot assures me that I don’t need to. I can ask the rivers of the World for the answers my mind cannot glimpse.

I can let the village of ancestors show me which way my star rises, my energy naturally flows.
Today we call this : tapping into flow state.

It sounds like a solitary venture but I believe at the end of the day, not much ever is.

It takes a village.

Tarot is a village we can keep returning to.
A lineage unbroken that keeps whispering, like the river always does, where it is we’ve come from.

*The Spirit of Intimacy, Sobonfu Some

Resonate? Check out my Tarot Readings.

(This Tarot Thread is an experiment - I started writing a book of introduction to Tarot, so I’m sticking extracts here as I let thoughts bubble.)

I want to start with the High Priestess because my experience of this archetype clashes with her traditional representations.

The foundation of my tarot book rests on how I believe our direct experience, as readers and voices to the cards, are more important than the voices others have given them before us.

I know this will be a controversial position, and I’m not talking about throwing out the baby with the bathwater here.
Of course context matters. Of course do your research.

But this is not The Coran, faithfully repeated word for word since centuries.
This is symbol. Its meaning changes with each new conquest and its subsequent rebranding of history. It depends on what side of a border you stand on, and moves with each turn of the century.

And I also trust the chaotic lineages our lifepaths have bestowed to each of us.

Supposedly, Tarot’s High Priestess is set in a vaguely Christian background. So that would leave her as … a head nun? This is the assumption on which many Tarot books base this card.

I have never met a nun, but I’ve been blessed to work with many High Priestesses in the flesh. They stare back from my heart as I look at the cards.
Especially the ritualists, shamans, tantrikas.
The facilitators of spaces for union with the divine, with community, with sexuality.

Jodorowski talks of the coldness and remoteness of the priestess (because he places her in a Christian convent context).

These priestesses I know are living monuments of devotion to love both incarnate and transcendent. They bridge the sensual to the divine, like panthers at ease in daylight and darkness.

So my reading of the High Priestess is soaked through with the tantric quality of embracing opposites, as she literally stands between two opposite columns, one black, one white. Of allowing nuance and the unknown to seep into our understanding of what is before us. Of the many gates of prayer available to touch oneness.

Enlightenment is not possible for a woman

A great High Priestess of our times, Ma Ananda Sarita, moved me deeply in what she said about enlightenment - and I’ll have to botch through a paraphrase as I can’t find the podcast again. She shared that as a younger student of esoteric teachings, she was shocked that such beings as Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed would all agree in saying that enlightenment was impossible when you were in the body of a woman.

She couldn’t reconcile the greatness of these teachers with that statement. So she spent many years researching why they said that.

She finally concluded they referred to the Masculine Path to Enlightenment. Which is a path of diminishing input to arrive to a goal - discipline, reclusion, fasting, meditation, silence. It is a straight-line path.

And her conclusion is that as with all things, there is an opposite : what Tantra would call the Feminine Path to Enlightenment. An outwards spiral path that follows the effervescent creative pattern of Nature. As an artist, this sounded very familiar : how some of us thrive and blossom with color, laughter, madness, conflict and growth through resolution, with feasting and celebrations and art. Flowers in our hair, songs on our lips, lovers in our hips. It is a dancing meeting with all forms of life instead of a retreating within to find its kernel in the centre of nothing.

Same destination, different path.
(Note that here Masculine and Feminine do NOT refer to Male and Female but to polarities and qualities, like the Yin and Yang also followed in the Chinese medicine model - they refer to the path intrinsic to the nature of the straight line, and the nature of the spiral.)

Also in this particular card The High Priestess wears the hat of the trickster Exú, which reminds me vividly of a tale that goes like this :

Exú walks down between two neighbours, each one tilling his field.
He wears a hat that is painted a different color on each side : one green, one red.
Each man looks at him as he walks back, and goes back to his work.
Later they share : “Did you see the man in the green hat?”
”Green? Your eyes are getting old brother. It was a red hat.”
”How stupid can you be? Of course it was green!”
And the men come to blows and are close to killing each other.
Until Exú suddenly appears before them, and shows his two-colored hat to reveal the ruse.

Then I can’t remember, he either laughs at them or laughs at them and also they have a feast to make up.

The High Priestess from the Everyday Tarot Deck
© 2024 Biddy Tarot (biddytarot.com) Designed By Brigit Esselmont - Illustrations by Eleanor Grosch

II - The high Priestess

Priestess, messenger, Mother Spider
Standing in front of the veil between the worlds, reader of Akashic records
keeper of the well

Tantrika between the poles - pole dancer - woman with dementia
Deep waters, under the surface - stillness

Inside the egg

Calling for purity in intention, rituals to mirror cosmic harmony and feed inner alignment

She speaks from the shadows inside the temple. standing between the pillars of perceived opposites. Sometimes the Truth sounds like gibberish until it unfolds.

Umbilical cord to the world navel - Mother Teresa - Hildegard von Bingen - Maria Betania - She wears Exú’s many-coloured hat

There’s a paradox to the priestess - she needs a foot outside of the world to serve it.

Balance the to-dos of daily life while drawing from the deep well of personal practice. This could be stillness, ecstatic dancing, Sufi poetry or cleaning garbage from your local beach.
Tend to your personal connection to Home, the Spirit that moves through creation.
Honor it through the land, the inner realms, through art or community.

Make the offerings. Ask for help. Hear the message. Share the prophecies.

A high priestess’ vision is honed through discipline, through ecstasy, through rope ladders of lineage passed down the generations. She sits between the roaring tides of the seen and unseen, the hidden potential and the roads mapped by the stars.

As Maria Betania sings : Do not mess with me. For I do not walk alone.
How great your service when you are plugged into the dreaming of all of life - spirits and children and ancestors. fungi and forests and gods.

Tools :

Ritual - Devotion - Working with the Unknown - Ecstatic Practice -
Oracle - Truth

Questions :

- What burning question do I already know the answer to?
- Where does my devotion naturally flow now?
- How do I navigate the unknown?
- How do I cultivate my intuition?
- Am I speaking the Truth? Am I letting it in from others?
- How do I tend to my gates of prayer? (Body - Mind - Spirit - Heart - Sex) (Meditation, Service, Sexuality, Power)

How does this land with your own experience of the High Priestess?
Who do you know who holds that archetype gracefully?
Let me know in the comments.

If you resonate with this, you can also book a tarot reading.

This might be a weird place to start.
But everything I know about Tarot is built on this foundation, so here it goes.

My path into it will be different to yours

No one holds universal truth on anything, much less on versatile, shady bewitching beings such as Tarot. And my path into it will be different than yours.

I was a painter when the cards came to me. So I first learned by painting them.

It happened kind of accidentally - I just couldn’t really relate to this bunch of medieval Christian white people, sitting around in their stiff costumes. I sifted the internet for stories and interpretations, keeping what rang true. I could hear them better once I’d shaped them in a way that made them feel more familiar - more naked, colourful, and more outdoors, conversing with storms and trees.

That was my way in. Creative contemplation. For me staying only on the mental plane feels dry and limited - I want the moist delight of color, curves, movement, myths and stories I hear from a friend over coffee and cake. I’m a non-linear, artistic-body-chaos type. I study the ecosystem rather than the straight line.

Just do whatever makes you feel excited to meet the cards and start building a relationship.

Tarot is a relationship. Everything is.

I stuck this picture there because my path, unlike yours, included walking behind my mother. Since birth and more recently wading down flooded alleyways.

My readings are heavily colored by traveling the world for 10 years, speaking 4 languages like a native, by the understanding of power and energy I gained through martial arts. By how Peter Grey said the purest language of magic is poetry, and I didn’t understand why until I randomly started writing some. It’s saturated with my obsession with Sufi verses and bits of lore gleaned between South America, my Celtic heritage and the Pacific.

So sure I read a few tarot grimoires on the way - but honestly, these are my real maps. They’re lived, not read about. You will bring your own maps to the table.
Astrology, motherhood, humour, innocence. Plant knowledge, chronic disease, scholarly backgrounds, dancing. All perfect paths of wisdom.

When I was a tantrika, I worked side by side with my best mate Mandy. We noticed that though our bodywork sessions were built in a similar format, our clients tended to have different profiles.

During my sessions, my clients would suddenly meet God. They met Grace. If I look at the cards, it would be the World, or Judgement.

During her sessions, her clients melted into pleasure and deep relaxation. The teachers tend to be Softness, Vulnerability. Their cards would the Star, or Strength.

We readers are not just gates for messages - each of us radiates a certain something that attracts specific people to us.

No one can read like you. Because no one else is you.

No one has your genius and your hard-earned bag of tricks.

One of my tricks is that when a reading gives really hard news, I’ll often direct people to watch the Handless Maiden film. It’s a folktale about going through terrible trials - the narrative is poignant and relentless. A maiden gets accidentally sold to the devil. She gets her hands chopped off. She wanders starving through the woods for seven years. After many twists and turns, we finally reach, panting and ragged, a magnificent happy end.

The visuals of the movie are breathtaking, and beauty is another medicine I take very seriously.

I picked up the tale in my own times lost in the woods, starved and handless. I needed something that had brewed long and dark in the belly of hardship, and showed me how to come back out. Folktales walk like glorious old ladies, scarred with experience, with crooked panache and head held high. They teach me how to do the same when I feel like my legs are broken.

The cards hold that power too because they’re also steeped in centuries of use, in all the energy we’ve given them and they’ve given us.

Give them the fuel of your devotion, your stories, and they’ll reciprocate generously.

Questions :

- What are your maps? Your qualities, qualifications, life experiences, the windows through which you naturally gaze into the world?
- How do they shape your perception of reality daily?

Take these to your journal or share in the comments :)

If you enjoyed this, you might love my readings. They’re known for their depth, warmth, humour and clarity.

Browse Tarot Readings

You can also support my work here —every penny becomes more art :)

Buy me a coffee