February 3, 2025

I have finished reading The Witching Year, where the author committed to practicing witchcraft for a year and day. I enjoyed the journal approach she took. While it included some details about various practices she explored over the year, it was more about her experience with the craft, her doubts and questions, where she felt she came up short and what she felt a connection with.

I realize that perhaps I should take a similar approach. I love sharing things I make or read, but I think this is a wonderful site for just sharing thoughts. And while reading, crafting, and doing is certainly important in this journey, I think sometimes just sitting with our thoughts and processing how we are feeling is important in our journey as well. So I think I will put into words regularly what I am thinking about and processing. I have found that talking about and writing about what I am thinking is a wonderful way to organize and weight my thoughts, as they are not just in my head but on screen or paper. I can take a step back and read with a little bit of detachment. So I think this will be a large part of what I do here. I hope others may benefit from my sharing my experiences.

I recently saw a post come across my feed, and it said “There are two rules on the spiritual path. Begin and continue.” And it is so true!

While I dabbled a little in this spiritual practice decades ago, I made a decision to not pursue it and thought I had moved on from it. But several years ago, I found myself overwhelmed by a desire to reexamine this practice and what it could mean to me.

I have always loved studying theology, and spent decades studying not only Christian theology but other religions as well. But aside from the short-lived dabbling mentioned above, I have not done much studying into paganism or witchcraft.

When I made the decision to start this spiritual practice, I wanted to put in the same energy I have put into my other theological studies. But having left a faith tradition, I have firmly parked myself in the Agnostic demographic. And so I am exploring a lot of areas that have a lot of symbolism and archetypal energy and can be approached by people who want to believe in all these things taken at face value, or want to embrace things with the understanding that so much is just metaphor or archetype.

One of the things I really enjoy doing is tarot. I’ve wanted a tarot deck for years, and several years ago I happened upon a deck on Kickstarter, and decided to back the project. This is the Telluric Tarot deck I often use in my four card spreads. In my early tarot studies, I realized that while some people certainly believe in a spiritual aspect to the divination system, there were plenty of people like me who wanted to use the cards to help probe my subconscious.

Secular tarot is absolutely a thing – and it has been a wonderful tool to dig deeper into my own self. When I pull cards, whether I am doing a tarot spread or a daily oracle card, I take the meaning of the card as given in the guidebook (for tarot, I usually read the book that comes with the particular deck but I also look into a general guide to get a deeper understanding of the card’s meaning). As I am reading the cards, I am searching my mind and memories and thoughts  I have tucked away – often the card will cause something to click in my mind, like oh yeah I think this particular issue or situation or memory is just what this card is describing. Especially when I am doing spreads with several cards, each card causes me to pull something out or make connections that I may not have considered, and so the cards are like a therapist or journal prompts, suggesting ways to make connections or go deeper in my memory.

Maybe this is why tarot has become so popular in more recent years – seen as either side show trickery or spiritually-charged woo-woo stuff, more people have decided to push the stereotypes aside and check it out for themselves and are finding out that while it can certainly have spiritual aspects, the bigger truth about tarot is that it allows us to explore ourselves to a much deeper level.

I for one am glad tarot has gained in popularity. It seems a week doesn’t go by when I see yet another tarot deck that has been put out. It is incredible to see the artwork and meaning that these creators have put out into the universe.

Today I only pulled a single oracle card – and it happened to be a card that the meaning was very much contextual. I had to dig a little before I realized what it was shining a light on, but as is often the case, I am better for knowing something about myself at a deeper level.