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Let's start with an acknowledgment that I simply don't have the ability to keep up with this daily journal the same way I used to any more. We've taken the opportunity to switch from wi-fi to ethernet along with our move, and so my laptop is now an $800 piece of junk (doesn't have an ethernet portal - crapification ahoy!). I'm writing on a very old laptop computer my brother put together from pieces as a hobby. It works fine, but it doesn't sit on a lap too well. And... I now stare at 2 screens for 8 hours a day again. I'd like to replace my evening internet screen time with paper, frankly.

So I will be switching the daily div to a paper journal, and probably will find that a great boon to my health and happiness :)

I won't abandon the blog all together though - I have a lot of Druid stuff to complete and I would like this to continue to be my permanent record of each completion. (Finally started a book on local flowers, yay!) But I will limit posting to weekends from here on out.

Having said that, I haven't yet gotten to Goodwill to pick up a notebook... so let's report, one last time, on the last few days of divination here.

Wednesday--

Me: I ended up with a sudden rush of energy (probably from the catharsis) and tried a lot of different things - simplifying the SOP down into a simple prayer, and trying to take my kid to the park after daycare, so that he could get some nature time. First one worked, second one didn't. My husband decided that he would keep taking walks around the daycare neighborhood with him instead.

Situation: I decided that if there was time this weekend or next, I would take my son with me and visit our old home one last time to say a proper goodbye to the trees and the garden, during the period when my father is at work. It would be easier not to take him - and easier still not to go - but I think we both need something to mark a proper ending of a period of our life. Fingers crossed we can get that done soon.

Outcome: I realized the situation I wrote about at the top of the page. Discussions... debates... halted! I'm sad about losing some of the community aspect of this place, but accept that it's for the best. All social-media-like things need to begone! from my life, and be replaced with as many human connections as I can scrounge up. I'm looking forward to the quiet... the blissful, healing quiet.

Thursday--

Me: King of Hearts - Let's just say that I had a day, er, oriented to my husband.

Situation: 9 of Hearts REVERSED - I did exactly the right amount of work on this day (as compared to the previous day).

Outcome: The Tower REVERSED - I'd been planning to take my husband to a local theme park for his birthday, but the tickets for the weekend sold out within 24 hours :( We were both sad, as we'd really been looking forward to it, but we figured that we could go to a nice local restaurant (Mcmenamins complex, so that the kid could run around and have fun too) instead.

Friday--

Me: Jack of Hearts - boy howdy did hidden feelings ever come to the surface :/ I had a pretty serious talk with my husband about how much mental energy he was spending on his art hobby, which... there's a lot there. He sees it as his identity, and fears that if he doesn't continually practice it he will "lose what he has", which leads to stress, which leads to anxiety, and so forth. He's been banging on about seeing a counselor about it, which I think is a good idea, but trying to get our address changed and signing up for benefits has just been one more damn thing on top of the pile of things for me lately. I asked him, for my part, though I would get the benefits in order ASAP (for a lot of reasons) I'd really like it if he could please take more charge of this personally and show less of it to me. I told him my feelings that we have a lot fewer safety nets that we used to, I'm 2 months pregnant and (hopefully) not going to get any less pregnant, I'm working full time now to pay for rent and benefits, and if I have so much as a pregnancy complication we are going to be in some trouble. We had a nice long conversation about a lot thin we've both been going through recently that ended well, with him agreeing to step up and help me with finances, which was something I'd been doing all by myself (just one more damned thing). In turn, I promised that his art stuff wouldn't become an issue again, so long as I didn't continue to feel like the one worried about all the "adult" issues while he worried about "child's play" (not really the situation, but it had sometimes occurred to me). He does a ton of work for our family too, of course, but the art issue has come up enough times that it had to be settled. 

Situation: 5 of Hearts - learning from mistakes, I believe this card is. I'm slowly coming to terms with my mistake about the best role of family in my life. It'll take some time, but it came up in our talk too. I'm moving forward.

Outcome: 3 of Clubs - I believe I had a relatively successful week at work that I can build on. Also, the conversation with my husband went well, and I believe that we'll be build the next phase of our marriage upon it as well.

Saturday--

Me: Queen of Clubs - me, being creative, with my little one :)

Situation: The Empress - pregnancy, fertility, food/nature

Outcome: 10 of Diamonds - family, security over risk

The rest of today looks like a home-and-family-focused day - I'm planning to get pots for my balcony plants and buy and cook a lot of food for a friend coming over later. What a lovely divination :)

This isn't the end of divination - just a transition. But, this practice has helped me get through some pretty difficult times in my life just since starting it last spring. I'm really grateful for what I've been given. And I'll post again about Druidry stuff next weekend! :)

 Might be a bit of a journal post today, we'll see...

Me: I did have freedom today - the freedom to go and get exactly what I wanted to eat, as I worked hard to keep staving off this whatever-it-is. I also freely allowed myself to take a nap in the middle of the day, about 2 hours. It seems to have worked, at least for now... but I also am recognizing this funk is about more than germs in my lymph nodes. 

Situation: Good things happened today... but in kind of crappy ways? We replaced all our tires on the car and found out the rear brake pads needed attention as well - that means our car is much safer to drive, but it did double our expected costs. (We can afford it easily, it was just a bit of an ugh.) I smacked (not literally!) my husband out of what he recognized retroactively was a panic attack, over art of all things. He was in a spiral where he was trying not to burn out on it, but all the worrying about burning out was... burning him out. I put my foot down and told him that there would be NO discussion about art, none PERIOD, for at least two weeks, and that I would enforce that! I think this will be really good for both him and me, and so does he (if we never ever talk again about art it will be too soon, there's some steaming honesty with how I feel about this stupid topic) but it had to hit a pitch of unpleasantness first. Most likely the true root of this is stress overflow from the intra-family battle royale that had been going on, breaking through now that peace has been successfully brokered. He'd been considering joining a climbing gym - I told him to DO IT NOW, because more exercise can only help an anxious mood! So he'll be going tonight, hooray :) Also, the few friends I keep up with on a Discord server were complaining about the suburbs in exactly the way I taught them all to (fuck the suburbs!). At long last, I've convinced them all! This stuff was my passion, no exaggeration, from roughly 2015-2020. Man... I wish it still mattered. 

Outcome: I think reading JMG's post earlier today about the possibility of ADE breaking out this fall/winter among the vaccinated is, unfortunately, what this card represents for me today. As he also stated clearly, it is just a hypothesis; my feeling is that even if it does kick off, it wouldn't be as bad as the worst-case scenario... but boy, I wish I had more than "a feeling" to back that up. I think the real realization for me wasn't so much that this is possible - it's that if the elites think it might be possible, suddenly a whole bunch of recent weirdness makes far, far too much sense. 

On that note... I'll allow myself to wallow for a moment in the sad end of the pool. I, my mother, and my dad's renter are the only people in my entire social circle over the age of 12 who have any chance of not being vaccinated as of this moment (everyone else has trumpeted their vaccinated status loud and clear). Even if we surmise a very conservative death rate from ADE over the next few years of 5%, that means 5 to 10 funerals of people I know or once knew well. Any higher of a rate than 5%? I'll be conducting at least one of them, probably under great duress :( And that isn't even going into the social, political or supply chain consequences...

Not a single one of the motherfuckers in charge of the country has ever read Nassim Taleb, I can see that much! The fat tail on this one should have been too horrible to risk, but the bastards went ahead and did it anyway, didn't they?!

And my mind, ever helpful, has of course reminded me that it is also possible that the non-sterilizing vaccine will simultaneously lead to the evolution of increasingly virulent variants of COVID, which would hit the unvaccinated harder than the rest. So... there could be piles of both vaccinated and unvaccinated corpses in our future, from slightly different yet not exclusionary causes. It's not like there's a choice on offer that guarantees one's personal safety from all this. Not to mention, either scenario carries with it a good possibility of turning our entire modern health infrastructure into a smoking crater. The folly of our leadership runs so deep and dark... it literally boggles my soul. The more power mankind wields... the greater the fallout from their mistakes becomes in turn. 

And yet... and yet. Deep breaths. There is also a decent chance, out of all this, that COVID simply fades quietly away, and that all we're left with are the political consequences and the vaccine side effects. Not that those are any slouch - but, they are at least more comprehensible. 

I watched a video, first time in a long time (I used to watch him every day in May 2020) by Chris Martenson last night, after my divination. He went into great detail on vaccine side effect reporting from the EU, and highlighted something fascinating that I'd had no idea about. Of course heart issues of all types were widely reported, but the highest single effect reported in the data was neurological and anxiety disorders. This seems to include everything from seizures to onset of severe anxiety. Anxiety, eh? I think back on some of the interactions I've been at the receiving end of over the last month and I have to wonder...

But to get back on topic, the card is... as should not surprise me anymore... excruciatingly correct. It feels like a truth may have been revealed... but has it? Fundamentally, I still don't know. The larger context in my supplementary tarot warns that the reversed High Priestess can represent secrets that seem to have been revealed, but may actually stay a mystery. "Someone is obsessing about finding out all the facts when that is in fact impossible." Guilty, ugh...

And thus, I have decided to avoid checking JMG's site for the next two days, to give my soul a little bit of a break, and some time to recover. If I find that this doesn't help, I may actually stop checking all the news sites - I only go to alternative ones, but even so, COVID is the topic du jour all over every corner of the Internet right now. 

Because... frankly... if these scenarios are going to play out, one or the other, there's no longer anything that can be done to stop them. The vaccinations have been given. The variants are mutating. The economy won't survive another lock-down. I guess I could wear a mask? Ehhh... it would be far more practical to buy myself (and potentially the family) some elderberry syrup. And ivermectin. Time to dig up that site that routes generic meds through Vanuatu! Wheeee! 

Gonna put my kid to bed soon... then, let's divinate for tomorrow. May it be an easier day. I'm thinking that ALL reversed cards, even if ostensibly good readings, can create a bumpy ride...

Me: 6 of Clubs (The Tower) REVERSED - problems, but I can handle them

Situation: 8 of Spades (Justice) - Reason, Fairness "getting what you deserve, for good or ill"

Outcome: 5 of Spades REVERSED - not able to win, hollow victory

Well! This feels like a terrible divination. 

Interestingly, I usually get a "tell" very quickly with these cards, but for the first time I had to sort twice and reshuffle extensively before getting any extrasensory response at all, and it was very slight. I wonder if they didn't want to tell me? Or if I am just burned out... perhaps the spiritual exhaustion continues. 

In any case, I will stick to my guns, and see if it doesn't bring about some healing tomorrow. It's possible that if I treat these cards as a warning, the outcome may not be as terrible. We'll see. 

 Me card: I decided to take this card as a suggestion, and so threw myself into taking care of the last round of paperwork for the job next week, not least setting up the payroll software and direct deposit and so forth. Well... I started going through their task list from the top of the page... and read through about 10,000 words of legalese only for the website to crash on me the moment I was about to sign the bottom of the page. GREAT. I also spent incredible effort in the afternoon getting a pair of shoes, during which I had a truly depressing conversation with the proprietor (I go to small local shops for these things as a rule) about how she and her husband and dog almost died during the latest heat wave, as they can't afford air conditioning. I am pretty sure that shop will not be there by the time the pair I just bought wears out. Material focus sucks! :( 

Situation: I felt a tension going about today, both as my dad's friends came tromping through the house and as I drove around on roads that felt very dangerous to deliver my last bag of plums to the outskirts of the city. 

Outcome: I'll fully admit, the Empress card baffles me. The closest I can guess is that the lady who filled up my gas tank at the end of the day was much, much kinder than she needed to be, for working a minimum wage job and standing out in the broiling heat with a mask on.

So today's divination does not seem to be all that accurate - which is interesting! That hasn't happened in a while. 

And that's where I stopped writing yesterday, because I realized that between my recent epic battle against my own family on the astral plane, all the general hectic-ness of recent life and a wart treatment I did on Monday, I am completely exhausted. I've been getting messages - from my own body, from people I've talked with, and from the cards themselves (as I look at them after a great night's sleep!) that I need to slow down and refocus. So I did that in the most basic way, by dropping divination cold and sleeping deeply without Nyquil for the first time in over a week. And for the rest of the day today, whatever the cards may bring... I'm going to stick close to home, putter about doing simple chores, and refocus on my spiritual path. 

Okay, and with that, let's divinate for today. 

Me: 3 of Spades - "disappointment, a loss, separation" or perhaps my period will finally come??

Situation: 6 of Clubs (The Tower) REVERSED - Some problem will come up that you can manage

Outcome: 8 of Diamonds - Comfort achieved through hard work

This divination feels better... the Me card feels like an acknowledgement of where I am right now, with my shaky health and depleted energy. I appreciate that whatever comes up today (there's always something) will be manageable. And I couldn't have ordered up a more preferable Outcome card. So... let's take it easy today, and work towards healing! :)

 I was slumping along today until I made an impromptu decision to eat half a block of cheese (a European-sized block, to be clear!). Now I feel almost normal! Yay for cheese! :)

(But the cheese rescue didn't come early enough to finish this post... catching up now!)

Yesterday's divination was interestingly diverse... I wondered how the heck the celebration card and the Queen of Spades were going to get along... and the answer was, "awkwardly". I think I was celebrating - all of my references got back to me, and I've got almost all of the onboarding paperwork done - just gotta piss in a cup in some dingy office, and we're golden. I don't even do drugs (even alcohol is difficult to binge on for me) so it seems like I'm about to embark on the next phase of my life! :) I don't currently feel deep existential dread, either... and now that I write those words... perhaps I am celebrating THAT more than anything else. 

And... as usual...the Queen of Spades promised pain, and delivered. While filling out reference information today, even though I had the required minimum, the software wanted me to provide several more to "complete" the task, including one more manager. Trying to think back to the last actually good manager I had prior to the one who'd already promised to review me, I couldn't think of how to contact him outside of Facebook. So I signed back in to that dreadful software. 

I decided to quickly scan the feed to see how some of the contacts I only know through there are doing - bad idea! Bad idea!! - and I found out: someone found a lost cat; someone went on a nicely challenging mountain hike; someone's front porch was ransacked, probably by her political enemies; and the spouse of a dear friend of mine cross-posted an article titled "Why We Should Just Force Everyone To Get Vaccinated Already." 

I clicked out of Facebook like it was on fire, and wrote to the HR person to request that they just go ahead with the references I already had. This was accepted. 

The pointy end pierced me straight through as I sat there afterwards and realized that, most likely, I will never see that poster in person ever again... and due to the close connection... my dear friend, either. As in most Fourth Turnings, the times are determined to viciously divide us, in ways none of us could ever have predicted even two short years ago.

Who would have thought that I, for my part, would have ever questioned taking a vaccine? I got myself injected with Gardasil, the most recent new vaccine I can remember, as fast as I could get access to it. I was thrilled to have a lower chance of cervical cancer (I got it while too old for it to be perfectly protecting). I usually get a flu shot - I've only skipped them due to scheduling inconvenience, and always regretted it. I couldn't have imagined that this miracle of modern medicine might ever need to be resisted. 

And who would have thought that this Facebook user - a hyper-rationalist, trans, union leader who I always deeply admired for her solid grasp on finances - would have ever cross-posted on a public forum something advocating for an insufficiently tested medical treatment to be forced upon everyone in the country, using every method short of a gun to the head? 

As I told my husband when I could finally speak about it (it took a few hours)... I forgive her. She is trans, and that comes with many, many medical complications. Obesity out of the suffering of her childhood; the transition hormones, which seem to not be interacting very well with her system; other issues that keep popping up, then side effects from the medications she is taking to treat said other issues, and so on, and so on... I think at one point she had lockjaw and had to eat through a straw for a while. She's been a shut-in since long before COVID kicked off - staying upstairs during my family's visits, most of the time, due to not feeling well. Per my friend, she was upset enough about her father's passing (a year before COVID) that I was able to read between the lines and suss out that she isn't emotionally prepared to face the ending of her life just yet, either. No different from most people, of course! 

The point I'm trying to make here, is that should anything change about the society we currently live in - and I mean ANYTHING - she may very well actually die. If any circulated diseases are incompletely vaccinated against or become even more so; if the medical infrastructure shudders and she is unable to access emergency treatment from some medication reaction in time;  if there is a disruption in the medical supply chains, which cut off any of her medications or the transition hormones, and she is then unable to access medical care for withdrawal symptoms; and of course if there is a huge backlash in this country against rank Democrat mismanagement and the Republicans take control--trans people have been portrayed as the ultimate child-devouring bogeyman among that crowd for years now, and now that we no longer "do" medical privacy, will likely be served up on a silver platter to appease the mob...

Can I really blame her, for advocating for a policy that she believes would protect what she has, or even save her life? No, and who could?! Even if I were to tell her all the reasons why it won't work... how could she possibly hear anything other than "You're going to die, and you have to deal with it"??

She's one of the people I have feared for the most throughout all this mess. But... I can no longer protect her. That moment--in which I realize that there are people I care about who I can neither help nor save--has arrived. I would have hidden her in my home. I still will, if she asks. 

My outcome card was "choosing security over risk" and as this was the day that my last real concern about not getting this job somehow dissolved, I feel that I have chosen the security of a well-paying job over the risk of crouching in my home until the unemployment finishes paying out. Then again, looking at the world we live in today... what is safety? What is risk? I've chosen the path that society thinks is the ideal one, for sure, and that has its own rewards. It will be good to be paid, to have healthcare and dental. But there's no such thing as a perfectly safe choice. Not in these times, and not in any times.  

On that lovely note, let's get today's divination done, and go on a walk. 

Me: Queen of Clubs - creative, optimistic, holding a little one

Situation: 6 of Clubs (The Tower) REVERSED - thank god no earth-shattering realizations to come today, "more of a manageable or expected change, the questioner able to handle it graciously"

Outcome: 2 of Clubs REVERSED - no discussion or debate, "will lead to an adventurous, exciting conclusion - the questioner needs to jump in with both feet!"

The cards are lightening up, hooray! A straight clubs flush - does that mean I'll be particularly creative or daring today? And on that note... I'd better go schedule peeing in a cup. Back tonight!

Things have been going so well here that I'd almost forgotten that there could be a miss - but today, I can only conclude there was one.

I was the reversed 4 of Hearts, so should have lacked hesitation and fear of former mistakes... and I did send out the invite for the Ecosophia meet-up, and boldly rejoin Meetup.com (a profoundly depressing experience, to see everyone still mostly Zooming or insisting on vaccinated people only, sigh...), but I also had scheduled myself to call up the local food bank, which I donate to, and offer my services as a volunteer. And I have to admit - it was the exact opposite from the card. Despite being ready on a practical and logical level to do this, I have been so burned by volunteer experiences in the past, I wandered about doing literally anything else for 30 minutes (!!) before I finally forced myself to dial their number. And after all that... they didn't pick up, and their inbox was full! LOL! I will try again next Monday, and hopefully not waste 30 minutes of my day beforehand. But the point remains, that the card doesn't seem to have been accurate.

I did manage to write 90% of the candidacy statement - I should have just enough time to finish it tomorrow in order to submit it on the solstice itself.  I suppose the situation/outcome cards were somewhat accurate on that account. I wonder if the distraction from yesterday also affected the divination? I was trying not to be annoyed by a lot of ambient noise while I performed it...

Our old cat spent today working hard on passing from this world, and that definitely affected my day quite a bit. I have a lot of thoughts on that but am too exhausted to put them down properly. Tomorrow, I will eulogize her properly. She is still - just barely - with us right now. 

Let's do tomorrow's divination, for the holiday. 

Me: 6 of Clubs (The Tower) REVERSED - No earth-shattering change of perspective is on order

Situation: 6 of Diamonds - Charity, Harmony, Cooperation

Outcome: 4 of Clubs - Solid Foundations, Stability, Celebration

Oh, I'm so relieved at this reading I almost cried... I am unlikely to suddenly realize I made a mistake in choosing Druidry as my path. Not that I thought I would - I've been planning this for 3 months - but still. The solstice ceremony should be harmonious and hopefully they will be charitably to me, a noob. And this should form a solid foundation going forward, as well as be a celebration. And - hopefully my husband will be OK with the vaccine. I will pray for him... and for our cat. 

A quick review!

I feel like getting the Hierophant was, in the end, a warning - a warning not to go back on what I declared before the gods. I deleted my brief summary of the issue I'd promised I would not talk about again, and continue to let it be water off my back :) Had a pretty nice day overall as a result!

I'm a bit confused about the Tower card, but perhaps the fact that I had a genuine and happy turning towards being social (sent off a message to a group that wants to meet up! <3) whereas I had been feeling "I have no choice but to stay alone, for my own safety..." was a small example of type. Also, I felt a bit cheerful about potentially continuing with an interview process, instead of sullen dread. Another nice change of pace!

The Sun - for the first time, I put in print that I am "moving towards being a stay-at-home mom for a while." That's definitely a new life for me. I have thought for a decade that it would be a terrible choice. But right now... it seems most days like the best possible path. We will see! Also if that interview goes much further, it could mark the beginning of that.

Daily div!

Me: Ace of Spades - Focus, Clarity

Situation: King of Hearts - Sensitivity and Creativity channeled into Professional Success

Outcome: 7 of Hearts - Secrets, Imagination, New Feelings

First thought: Hooray! I'm going to actually get stuff done tomorrow! :) I don't know what the King of Hearts event will be - perhaps it will come out of all my job hunt stuff. Perhaps it will be as simple as completing my job hunt stuff, lol. And the new feelings... will my libido finally come back?? LOL! Hoping to leave the drama behind (finally, there are no Major Arcana... WHEW) and have a nice, productive day tomorrow :)