My Practice

How did we get here?

A question that haunts and harries us all, or near enough; whether quietly, subtly, sadly, persistently, or otherwise. Admittedly, for some lucky few, it never troubles them, I suppose. I do not envy this. I have always been full of questions. I suppose I have my exalted Mercury to thank for that. A mind that never sleeps. A tongue that never stills. Save for when it does; that’s how you know you’re in trouble, actually.

Welcome, traveller. You look like you might just need a compassionate friend. Take a seat by the fire and tell me what ails you. Let’s re-walk the path that brought you to my door together and set a course to forge ahead.

How did I get here? Well. What brought me here is as cliché as you like and as common as the garden snail: a fork in the road, the end of a relationship, the death of a future.

I have been reading about Brighid as healer, warrior and poet at this, the end of the year. Triads have power. And so I offer three things: cards, stars, and self. You come with questions, so many questions. Yet all roads lead back to ourselves. All roads lead back to our past. But only some roads lead to a future we can stomach.

Two paths diverged in a yellow wood, sighed the pen of Robert Frost, ever to be misquoted and taken out of context.

Frost himself, two years before his death, lamented the way readers and critics had misinterpreted the poem, which he called ‘tricky’. Those two roads diverged, forcing Frost to choose one, but this means that he also necessarily had to choose not to take the other. In opting for one road, he was consciously rejecting the other.

Frost’s poem describes how he came to a fork in the road and wished he could have taken both paths. But that isn’t possible, of course, so with a heavy heart he had to choose between these two roads which diverged in a ‘yellow wood’. He took his time making his decision, because there seemed to be very little way of telling which road might be the better one to plump for. The only thing that seems to have made the chosen road preferable is the fact that it wasn’t as well-trodden as the other: its grass was less worn.

Emphasis mine, article found here.

And though Frost’s choice was, truth be told, entirely arbitrary, there is always a whisper in the mind of someone like me – like you, perhaps – that there is something more behind our choices.

This year I have begun to experience physiological oddities: a ringing in one or both of my ears when I hear or see certain things, goosebumps down the backs of my arms when I say the Orphic hymns on the appropriate days to the corresponding gods. I watch birds. I feel the winds. I notice changing light. I track the clouds and marvel at their texture, at their weight and their weightlessness. I catch scents on the air that have no place being where they are. I am becoming more aware. (And credit where it is rightly due to Hawk Grubb, Asphodelo Stregganio, Katy Swallow, and Amaya Rourke for their deft hands in these developments.)

As I change, as I grow wiser and closer to my stars and the Others that surround me, as I become ever more aware of the web in which I weave and thrash, tarry and toil, lament and luxuriate, the better I am able to serve others. That exalted Mercury again, lord of Fortune and co-present with it in the Sixth House of Service, ruling the bounds of my MC and AC, politely coughs. In truth, my chart all but shouts, in the words of the ineffable Nate Craddock, “LET ME HELP YOU!”

And so – do you trust me? I will be glad if you do.

Let’s begin.