Natalia Lee

A nest of sorts

Designed with WordPress

Category: Telling Fortunes

A 12 month spread…

by

Telling Fortunes

In the beginning of the month I mentioned that I would be adding a reading option to my offerings, today is the day I do so. What I want to do here is share a little bit on how the reading will work.

The template of the reading spread will be the astrological map of the whole sign house system, but in the reading I will not be overtly considering the planets nor zodiac signs, I will instead be using the narrative of the houses vis a vis the cards situated there as they play out for the year. A basic outline of the spread and how I will be reading the cards is pictured below. I will begin the reading with the general tone for the year ahead, underscored by the cards that land in the angular spots, positions 1,4,7 and 10. This will sketch out how you will enter and move about the year in general, the lay of the land so to speak. Then I will go into the inner and outer aspects of your year, underscored by positions 1-6 (inner), and 7-12 (outer). By inner and outer you can read personal /private versus public.

Once this general foundation is set, I will look at relationships, starting from cards opposite each other, and how this will color your year. Getting into the specifics of the reading and how they pertain to your year, I look at positional relationships, triangulations, making special note of particular considerations as they arise, bringing focus to areas as the cards indicate. Lastly, I will write up a month to month snappy view of the landscape.

I will say that even though for this reading no questions are necessary, I do always encourage a question or focus area, this provides context and that is always welcome. If you have a particular topic or goals you want to see play out next year, this spread can aid in highlighting them, helping you gauge potential and possibilities.

~~~
The Oracular Incantation

by

Animating the Tarot Pips

We begin in a hall like a cathedral full of echoes, enclosed by high stone walls. There is a cup, a breath disturbs the waters of this upraised cup, prayers are intoned. Within all is holy. Beyond, a sword stabs the earth, sinking deep and disturbing the soil, echoing the words, “the earth gives and the earth takes away.”

Next, the breathe speaks with utterances of love and desire, and a tipped cup spills into another, coaxing a third to birth. While the hand that gripped the handle pulls the sunken sword, standing in a clearing with a sigh of relief as the frenzied moment passes. “Now let’s make our way through this forest.”

Seeing eye to eye is a matter of negotiation, discerning through exchange, a temporal dance. A construction, a reconstruction, a formulation and an articulation of definitions and significations. A play of words and body, re-created and re-arranged. The art of form expressing itself through temporal movement entwined with the voice. Walls and fortifications built around need and mediation, the tension.

Suddenly a hush descends, the silence of recognition for the word symmetrically expressed. The word and the image dance. The sound of equilibrium. The flesh moves within this frame, inhales, exhales.

Then the great doors groan open, outward flows the nave, an axis mundi in motion. With this opened course, the heart and the body moves, the mind following. Where places unknown, a labyrinth yet to be voiced, lie unseen.

Diamonds, cups, grail, scepters, swords, sticks, coins, daggers, branches, leaves and hearts. Things, all things we use, tools for the hand and the flesh to encounter. Except the heart, the heart which we always carry inside, yet on occasions, we find it spilling outward in bursts or trickles. When the axis mundi tilts, these Things slip from our fingers to fall in a clatter at the threshold, a cacophonous array at our feet, complex-ifying the exit, entangling the flow. With this a brigade of thoughts invade the mind, what to take and what to leave behind. Locating desire the fulcrum of the quest. Enough!

The stairs appear, that were always there, winding endlessly up and down, down and up, above, below. Ways, roads, paths and courses, winding outward beyond the reach of our sight.

Between the tower and the star, the fool stumbles onward, a pack full of fallen tools gathered along the way, resting on his shoulders. From a little to a lot, and often gathering in between stops, the inhale and the exhale continues. From one, the many stumbles out in brazen nakedness, a coagulating web of movements, forms, and omens. Signs of things that are, are not, will be, or evanesce into the mass of all else. The expressive self, em–placed, mirrors the sign, mirrors the body, mirrors the sign, in circles we go. To end and begin anew. The snake swallows its tail.

Jean Noblet Tarot de Marseille, reproduced by Jean-Claude Flornoy, editions letarot.com, 2014.

~~~

-For the beginning, go here: Animating the Tarot Pips.

Animating The Tarot Pips by Natalia L Forty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at mistandether.wordpress.com
“When outside forces impose”

by

The Pips

I’m quoting myself in the title, it’s from my lyrical exploration of the tarot trumps, or majors. June and July have flown by, maybe it’s more like a rumble, they’ve rumbled by. Now we’re in August and I’m thinking about the world, the card in the tarot pack The World or Lemonde as it’s called in some older packs.

The Spanish Tarot published by Heraclio Fournier, Spain; Tarot de Marseille Jean Dodal reproduced by Jean-Claude Flornoy, France 2009.

In a wreath like a cocoon, holding a wooden stick, looking back and appraising what’s been left behind, if you take the left as being in the past, or she could just be trying to look behind her. The naked self in confined contemplation, thinking back on what has passed while keeping to the present. We’ve all been in this contemplation of place, our movements restricted, feeling the vulnerability of isolation from what was, within this new unfolding world. We’ve all been placed in a position of evaluating where we stand.

While I could say that this person, the one in the card that ends the trumps series in the tarot pack, rises above the crowd crowned by all the four corners, robed and scepter bearing, they are also in a place of alienation, of being separate from. Depending on how I look at it, I’m either in the crowd of onlookers or the person in the center, apart. This is a good card to take forward as the second half of the year continues rumbling onward. It gives me the vigor to bring forward.

Let’s consider this, how are your fours corners? What is the condition of each? Solid, wobbly, vulnerable? Did you find and don your cape? Yes, cape. What you will carry with you to whatever comes next, when the cocoon opens and the seed sprouts. This cape will be a protection, a security, a covering, and also the cloth that connects you to the air, the rain, the earth, as it and the elements encounter each other it becomes a thing of relation, of connection. How are you shoring up your self when outside forces impose? How are you putting the stick that is a wand to use? Are you directing the way forward for you and your home in flow with the movement of your cape?

One day the germinating seed will spring up out of the cocoon and the road will open in different directions, as it always does, and we should be constant in our readiness to expand and keep walking.

Lemonde closes the tarot trump journey, if you see the cycle as a thing that is linear, but the journey is a web of directions and temporal overlaps. Time is a breathing rhizome. Lemonde knows this secret, and shows us how they are both within and without, above and below, enclosed and open. Lemonde is the seed that opens like a plate in the ace of coins. Perhaps going even sharper, Lemonde is the rider on the wheel of Fortuna.

Tarot de Marseille Jean Dodal reproduced by Jean-Claude Flornoy, France 2009.

With this I open the month of August, contemplating The World card. I’m also going to mention that I have a newsletter, it’s in its nascent stages but I have a lot of dreams to grow it into something beautiful, like a crimson hibiscus. In the newsletter you can find oracular omens, stories from and maybe about me, updates, and things that are wafting through my mind. You can click on the link above, or on the image below to hop onboard and stay in the loop.

I have a couple reviews for this month, one of them being on the recent book I devoured, The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn. And you will also be seeing my oracular incantation on Animating the Tarot Pips.

~~~
Telling Fortunes in Times of…

by

Telling Fortunes

In an interview with Sam Block from The Digital Ambler in the Glitch Bottle podcast, he said something about divination that has stayed with me for some time, and it is that divination is for seeing the bumps, or obstacles, ahead as we navigate down the river of life. This has been rephrased in my words as I don’t recall the exact wording of his statement but the sense is there. We ride down this River with a changing the topography and divination helps us see into what possible obstacles loom ahead. I find his assertion to be true. To divine is to peek through the patterns being woven around us, both by ourselves and others. It is to open a thin connecting line between diviner and the divine, so as to see more than. More than our daily sight-lines, more than our quotidian habits, our comings and goings.

When I look at it from the angle of fortune, as in telling fortunes, I see how each of us carries our fortune, that which is possible, whether through choice or circumstance. What is plausible within what is possible. Therefore to tell fortunes is to glean the probable but not yet formed. It is to gain sight so as to draw details of the terrain ahead in our map. In times of trouble and turmoil telling fortunes, divining, reading the cards, provides “space” for strategiz-ing around agency, creation,and imagination. If we can see facets of the terrain ahead, we can imagine and create ways around or through to move forward.

Omen logic, or the logic of omens, and reading the cards from this position while also within the context of navigating the River, points toward learning how to see and read the meanings of the unfolding terrain. It is a surfacing of a language that is in direct converse with the landscape (terrain) interconnected with our moving, experiencing, sensing, bodies rowing along the River. It is a surfacing from the world of spirit, which you can also name imaginal. This surfacing can be read as an omen that we interact with and ascribe meaning to in relation with the ways in which our current place reveals what lies ahead down the River.

I should probably define, from my perspective, River. By river I mean life, living, the things we need to do, want to do, our accomplishments, responsibilities, and relationships. All facets of living are subsumed in the River. We are the ones rowing down this river, encountering boulders, waterfalls, setbacks, curves, diverting tributaries, etc.

When traveling along this River, omen logic can be seen as the universe noticing us noticing the universe noticing us. I say this and am reminded of Derrida’s signifier. Always pointing toward the signified but never managing to penetrate the boundaries. In a way it is a tension of unmet desires. Reaching yet never grasping. This tension also fits in this rhizom-atic omen logic. Sitting with both premises, there is no inherent meaning in whatever revelations divination affords since we all formulate it with words that are equally incapable of grasping what is signified, and also we are all inundated in a landscape of meanings within a web of connections and interconnections, that is the River, the rowing along, the water below, the edges around the water, the trees, the boulders, waterfalls, tributaries, and curves. We move onward and describe through our own experience of doing and seeing. And so we come back to reading the cards in times of… trouble , turmoil, upheaval, pain, suffering, unrest, pain, loss. In all our living, telling fortunes is useful because it opens up ways of seeing, ways of moving, possibilities for revealing angles/corners around looming obstacles/difficulties ahead, while also allowing us to create new routes.

With all this said, I do hope you are keeping safe, fighting the good fight. For me to say Black Lives Matter is an understatement, as a person of color from the Caribbean, I know Black Lives Matter. As a way of contributing, from afar, to the flourishing of local communities within this upheaval, I’ve offered readings for donations for the next week or so. No money passes through me, just donate $9 minimum to a local organization. send me a snapshot of the donation with a question to my email mistandaether(at)gmail(dot)com and I will respond with the reading. With this offer on the table, I’m going to go ahead and share a frequently updated document that has links to incredible organizations that are working to be present and provide aid at the local level within affected communities: Reclaim the Block.

In other updates, I’m currently refining the website as well as my content. I’ve decided to move my auguries unto social media, IG and twitter to be exact, and post them weekly, looking at the week ahead. My website will continue to offer the same content, occasional deck reviews, talking tarot, books, with the addition to more Saints, while also opening up a bit more about what I do and what I think around these topics of what I do, the witch, the spiritism, the animism as an embodied web of interconnected living/being, and everything else in between. I hope you continue to read and enjoy what I write, also sharing your thoughts and ideas, whether on here through comments or by sending me an email. I’m also available for a diversity of readings through my consultation page. Keep going.

~~~