April Fools! Royal fools have wisdom in their trickery. These five (plus a bonus!) blog posts each explore the Fool from a different angle. This handful of essays includes a soup recipe, a love tarot spread, a wordless essay, and…
Find Your Brightest Self with this Alchemical Tarot Spread I proposed the topic of “dawn” for today’s spring equinox blog hop. Today the Sun steps into Aries, marking the start of the zodiac and the dawning of a new cycle.…
2023 Spring Blog Hop: Dawn On New Year’s Eve this past December, I posted an “endings and new beginnings” theme, then the next day I shared a year ahead spread. After that, Kim Kim’s topic for Imbolc, our first hop…
Explore the Symbols of Calcination The first step of alchemy’s seven operations feels hot, cramped, threatening, vulnerable, and trapped. In this level, the alchemist burns away the dross, leaving nothing but bone, a symbol of the incorruptible body. This first…
Introduction to the Rotation of the Elements Everything in the universe comes into being through the interaction of two forces, called the polarities. The four elements arise from the interplay of these forces. According to the philosophies of alchemy and…
Take Five With The Tarot Fours Our topic for the Mid-Winter Tarot Blog Hop is “Beginning Again.” Wrangler Kim of Kimberly Essex Tarot and Meditation skipped through a series of word associations starting with “spring cleaning” to “cleaning the slate”…
Look Back to Look Forward with this Retrograde-Inspired Year-Ahead Tarot Spread Happy New Year! Your social media may be deluging you with not only unsolicited decrees for a proper New Year, but also dire warnings about Mercury Retrograde. So as…
Read MoreThe Silent Sermon, or, Happy New Year!
A simple band of eyelet snowflakes warms up this quick knit project Frigid temps and icy roads were the culmination of several days of snow. The crows held a convocation. Perhaps cawing kept them warm. Here in Seattle, the slick…
How to Do Astral Journeying for Tarot Pathworking For the winter solstice tarot blog hop, wrangler Jay Cassels gave us an interesting prompt of “traditions” combined with an image of an arched wooden door in an oak tree. The attached…
Meditations for Magical Images A mighty king sitting on a sapphire throne. A warrior queen standing in a red chariot. A golden-haired child with arms upraised. These are some of the magical images of the Tree of Life. What do…
A Sample Reading with the Great Granddaddy of Tarot Spreads Years ago I came across Mary K. Greer’s wonderful article, “The Oldest Spread, by le Comte de M***.” She offered a fascinating peek into the first recorded tarot spread. All…
The Tarot Taboos: Reading on Health and Other People Reading on health and other people are two very common questions. And every reader’s Statement of Ethics says they will not read on these topics. But reading for clients includes looking…
Be Sure to Leave Room in Your Luggage for Tarot Decks! “How many decks should I take with me?” A year or two ago, I was reading for a client who was preparing for a retreat that would last several…
Create an Equinox Password and Create Your Bountiful Harvest Our theme for the fall equinox Tarot Blog Hop is Bountiful Harvest. Raine of Tarot of Change suggested it and Jay of Jay’s Mystic Blog is hosting the master list. So,…
“Tarot and Astrology Chat” Links and References I had a great time talking with Chris Brennan of The Astrology Podcast while I was in Denver last month. We explored a wide-ranging variety of topics centering around and launching from a…
Get a Handle on What Makes Life Hard In Heart of the Dark Woods, we use my specialized Empyrean Key method to identify the primary block in your chart. Then we go on to note the helper who can offer…
Transform Third-class Trash Into First-Rate Tarot Art Today’s assignment for the Tarot Blog Hop is to create a tarot card or two or three from your junk mail! As the wrangler, my suggestion was to stick to what comes through…
Mid Summer 2022 Blog Hop: Junk Mail Tarot Back in 2016 for the June Solstice, wrangler Morgan Drake Eckstein of Gleamings from the Golden Dawn proposed one of my all-time favorite blog hop topics: Junk Mail Tarot. I liked it…
I love staring at tarot cards. I can gaze at a card a million times and still find something new in it. Last night, I was looking at cards with friends. As I contemplated the Ten of Wands, I saw…
