Personal musings

For me, working with plants, and increasingly all living beings, is not only about immortalizing them in art. It is about offering a shift of perspective. Working with them on a symbolic or spiritual level, even if you do not call it magic, is about finding a way to create your own symbolic system or a language. It is about discovering a personal method for building meaning in your life and within the world around you.

When you take a deck into your hands you have to assume everything that happens after that is out of your control. And don't get me wrong, that is exactly how you want things to be. You want to loose control, to become a passenger, just tagging along for the ride.

Divination of any kind, using cards, pendulum, tea leaves, or the leg bones of a camel, is an act of doing magic. Our mind, plagued with logic, discipline and the mundane world, is not capable of performing magic. What you want, when trying to read the cards, is the cards to be your bridge to your subconscious and to make relevant bits and pieces come floating out and up into your mind.

In order to be able to give relevant readings, whether you interpret the cards traditionally or in a different way, the key is to know yourself and to be able to distinguish what you would like to see / hate to see happen to your querent (again, another reason I don't read for myself) from what the cards / your intuition / your guide is actually saying.

There's different kinds of energies around us, some can be like static electricity, body heat or just the wind. Some can be residual - thoughts that leave a negative or positive traces of energy in the environment, emotions, wishes and prayers. Other energies, like ghosts, demons or god forms, can be intelligent and can actively influence our readings as well as our physical bodies and states of mind. And all of these an influence the probability and the amount of times cert

What I want to talk about is the way I personally do it. Not that I believe there is anything special about my way of reading - some might even call me intuitive. Except that I'm not, not really. I abandoned the traditional style of doing readings almost ten years ago.

At its core, divination is a method of communication. If something is communication, it implies a dialogue. And dialogue implies language.

I do not believe divination exists solely as a tool for self development. It can be used that way, but reducing it to that is like using a plumbed kitchen sink to store water you carry in from outside. At its best, divination is communication with forces, entities, intelligences, or spirits that are not you or the very least are your higher, divine self.