A forecast for merrymakers

I made an oracle deck of paint swatches. First though -- being possessed.

Regardless of how good of a day I am having or how enriching the moment-to-moment experiences of my life could be, I sit down to type and the intrusive fears come out.

Notecards of goals? Many! Dry erase board of ideals and encouragements? Filled in color-coded ink to the edges! The voice memo app? Hitting storage capacity with the small songs my heart sings while doing dishes. My neighbors? Surely enjoying the tight-five stand-up sets I riff while walking around my apartment.

And yet, despite the giddyiness and gooeyness of what could be, the fingertips on the keyboard have a different idea.

The creation of words comes from a well of raw matter. On paper, the writing craves to be in service of pleasurable experience. At the keyboard, the process wants to be done already. On the page, words sing out after a process of inspiration and embodyment. I watch the atomic collider of my ideas and universal love through a pane of muddied safety glass that’s only as thick as my fear. As that safety glass thins, it becomes clear I don’t need to be treating my creativity as a dangerous combustible in sterile surroundings. Drop the science and return to the natural innocent act of witnessing without judgement. The difference between lab notes and field notes is your degree of seperation.

Typing though… There is an intrusive voice reading any of these words as the narration intro or outro of a television show where the main character has a blog/column/chat show. Everything is coming from a sense of “This is how I see it and this is what it is.” It’s the voice of an author insisting they have authority. This authoritarian author’s intrusive voice has a gentle lilt and is playfully sardonic. No identifying details are given as this intrusive voice recaps my life in the epsiode outro. (Still, the intrusive audience intuitvely understands who the words allude to through the cross-cutting and internal pace set by a top-notch intrusive video editor.)

My words are between worlds. Natural play and the formal play. Expansion and coldness, my heart is a blossoming ivy reclaiming steel scaffolding. Let passion and puns be thine buds.

So yes, I’m feeling great, it’s just the keyboard that pissese me off. And that’s not fair. The keyboard does not deserve my ire. From an animist perspective, the keyboard I’m typing on has its own dreams and inner weather. It doesn’t need me to pile on with my own issues.

“I may be in your backpack now but please,
Confuse me not for baggage with the keys”

— Shakespeare
Macbethintosh

When I stopped drinking, it wasn’t for fear of my own safety, nor was it me hurting others and myself, nor even still the legal costs accrued alongside a sizable booze budget — I stopped drinking because I spilled gin and mountain dew on my keyboard. Readjusting how I was sitting while playing Overwatch, my mixed drink toppled and poured over the keys. I thought “okay. That’s enough of that.”

And so, I dried out the keyboard to the best of my ability and thought about how happy I am to be done with all this. There was in that moment no question, after over years of false starts and a steady spelunk through false rock bottom.

I thought about when my parents figured out I started smoking, and during an exhausting kitchen table conversation I asked my father how he quit after smoking for 30 or so years. “It was the hardest things I ever did,” he said.” I tried over and over. Then one day and a smoke break at work, I accidentally burned a hole into my new sportcoat. I said ‘Enough of this,’ I then I just quit right then and there. Truly by the grace of someone up there looking up for me. Probably your grandma.”

I’m encouraged by the trickle of “enough” energy I’ve felt to get this far. And I’m encouraged by the continuum of support here. It feels playful, and I don’t know what, or who, is playing with me. How do the relationship we have with ourselves determine how we see ourselves and our world? And if there is help from beyond… a friendly possession? How does exploring my interior self affect how my body shows up? Jungian archetypes meets somatics, as playful or gravely serious as you wish?

Either way, I’ll chose playful.

Happy Fool’s Year

A practical tool I’ve developed for navigating my own inner environments is an oracle deck of paint swatches. 80-or-so colors, intuitively culled down from my original looting from 450 swatches spaced over three Home Depot visits to avoid suspicion.

Introducing — “I n t e r i o r s”

Since its assembly last August, i’ve used it to navigate pathways of joy and authenticity in a self-defined intutively language. In an approach of navigating my inner storms and edens, it reflects a truthful and compassionate language developing outside of pathologically (read: anxiously) needing to know every facet of self before ever permitting the joy of self-discovery.

Basic Guide:

• Card meanings emerge from a consistent practice.

  • They are ever-evolving, and I keep track of how meanings have shifted over the past six months of personal and public readings.

• Qualities that may affect a swatch’s meaning include:

  • the quality of the color.

  • the name of the color.

  • stories I associate with that color.

  • if a swatch evokes are card from Tarot (ie, The Sun in Rider-Waite tarot deck is comparable to Radiant Sun in the i n t e r i o r s Behr collection.)

  • the color story as it emerges in context to surrounding swatches.

  • Sometimes I doodle on the cards (not pictured in this post.)

  

Happy Fool’s Year - A reading

Today is the anniversary of last year’s total eclipse in Aries. During the the full totality, I quietly dubbed this moment the start of an era of delight: a call for clowns and merrymakers to step into their role of public servant. While the tools change from place to place, the clown’s responsibility across cultures revolves around maintaining health and hope within community. That’s why the following reading forecasts the upcoming year, focusing on the inner journey of the merrymaker and the first leg on a journey in finding our joyous “why?”

The reading follows the pagan wheel of the year, starting with Ostara/Easter in the East and continuing clockwise. Don’t get bogged down in specific dates when you can honor the feelin’ of the season. Take heart in the “-ish” of the festival calendar and be less precious with perfectly timing your events: they happen when they need to happen.

C’mon, let’s play with the future.

First Glance Gut Check

• We are starting in calming hues with blues. The quality of rest now nourishes brightness to come. Do not act, but do not wait.

• Resting into the depths of a deep purple near the summer solstice, we emerge into pastels evoking inner light and personal power.

• By Samhain, we return into darkening earth tones, reflecting the shift from summer’s sense of possibility. Shadow Mountain invites us to do life-changing work based on the lessons of the year.

Our current moment — Ostara-ish — Bitter Sage → Lotus Petal → Camelot

Vibes — A subdued watery pallet. Surf. Obscured vision, into stillness, into a comforting depth.

We begin as the Bitter Sage, a friendly reminder that we don’t know anything. Just because you’re frustrated doesn’t mean you’re right. Our sense of superiorty over the situation obscures the truth of the moment. I cannot stress enough how little we know. To know everything is to resent the unknown. Fortunately, a solution appears in Lotus Petal. Stillness brings awareness. Trust the water to keep you afloat. The paradox of stillness is that 15 minutes of actively doing nothing reconnects you to concise conscious action, making a previously maddening task come together with ease. Pockets of stillness and inner peace sustains ourselves in a time of rebellion. It does not need to be selfish — when you enter the world in the radicalness of your full awareness, you inspire others to be their true selves. Your radical act of self-compassion sustains the radicals among you, and OH HOW WE ARE STARVED for emotional adults in our world.

Finally, Camelot. The work you do to know yourself brings specifics to the legendary life you are here to live. Dreams have an intoxicating possibility. Stay grounded, but claim your sword. This is a beginning. Do not get ahead of yourself. It’s a glimmer of what is possible, stay grounded.

If you’re down with astrology, lean into Neptune in Aries.

Beltane — Twinkling Lights

Vibes — Ambient glow. Glimmers. Feeling cosmic, yet can be enjoyed in a low stimuli living room.

I consider the cards between the Solstices and Equinoxes the spaces to celebrate. Solstice and equinoxes are for Getting Shit Done. The following holiday is a potential boon from the toil in the soil. It is a step towards inner knowing. For Twinkling Lights, the seed planted at the vernal equinox begins its eruptment. Witnessing it is its own reward. Enjoy a soft light hinting at what’s to come.

Summer Solstice — Purple Prince

Vibes — Audacity in action. Earned swagger. A rich accent wall.

A “big” move is relative to the size of the regular moves you make throughout your life. I remember one time in the mid 2010s I decided to start tucking in my shirts as a fashion statement. A small act? Sure. A benign act? Internally debatable. An act of self-designation amidst a life that felt hurtling out of control? Absolutely! There’s worse ways to wear a belt, and the simple shift eased me into making other choices of greater positive consequence outside.

You don’t need to settle for an act this small. It feels fitting (har har) that this comes after Camelot. You can read Purple Prince like a Knight card in the tarot. Charming and magnetic, brash yet compassionate, this prince asks you how you honor your strongest convictions. It is a card of embracing challenges and self with equal fervor, especially the challenge of embracing your self.

Lughnasadh — King Salmon

Vibes — Good authority, welcome party, an enlivening yet earthy living room.

As an animal, the king salmon spawns around this holiday each year, in summer and early fall. The return of the king completes its lifecycle and helps propegate the next generation of salmon. When the first salmon appear in the spring, celebrations abound. Native cultures in the Pacific Northwest like the Chinook tribe hold a first salmon festival. The cycle of seasons continues and abundance comes again after a long dark winter.

Embracing princely qualities and knowing your worth deepens your relationship with inner royalty. As a boon holiday, our reward for honoring our power is the support of a wiser force. There’s two ways to read King Salmon, and I’ll leave the choice up to you: celebrate abundance returning or appreciate the ending of a cycle. Either way, bring the life to the party.

Side note: the “king salmon” also goes by the name “chrome hog.” I share this only because I cannot stop thinking about it.

Mabon — Infatuation → Firefly

Vibes: Lighting your own path. Balancing flirting and flying. A baby’s room is partially a solarium.

The autumnal equinox pairs with a swatch denoting light! But before we talk about our insect friend, let’s focus on what we can’t unfocus from. Infatuation denotes daliance, and not neccessarily a reciprocal one. Rose-colored glasses rev the engine, but I wouldn’t recommend them for night driving? As a person who has lost themselves in crushes before, I feel like the wisdom I’m working with is “Walk through the garden. Smell the roses and breathe in the rarity of this moment, but you can’t stay forever.” If you stay and let the sweetness become a snare, you won’t fully witness the culmination of your own delicate unfurling.

To shine as a Firefly is a two-fold gift. First, you get to see where you’re going where you originally would have relied on other’s lamps and light pollution. Second, when a firefly shine, they are seen by the other fireflies. Through an embodied summer, Beltane’s Twinkling Lights become your biolumensence. As Timothy O’Leary said, “find the others.” If you have spent the summer crafting your personal freak flag, this is the time to fly it. To me, Mabon as a harvest time is when a community that’s never met comes together as old friends. It’s the season of the concert that brings the perfect combination of acts and friends. You found your own way to where you belong. Welcome. The experience and lessons yu harvest here will nourish you through winter.

Samhain — Celebration

Vibes — The Great Pumpkin cometh. Retrospective. Gold accent on art deco furniture.

Animist hot take: Halloween is only scary because we do not tend to our ancestors and spirits of the land well. Leaves fall, the wind crisps, and we cope by spending $12.2 billion. I think having a giant skeleton up all-year round is a radical clown logic pro-social act because it forces your neighbors to confront the spectre of death through play (even if seeing reminders of death may reeinforce our habits for better or worse.) I think the magic is made more powerful by enshrining the giant skeleton with new outfits each holiday and asserting that people who talk about the skeleton refer to it by it’s Christian name: (insert your unique skeleton pun here.)

Celebration is a card of rejoicng in the face of life. Dark and scary political climate? Dance anyways. In love? Move about it. Broke your legs? Scoot your booty. Dance for the people who are no longer here because they live in our movements. We hold an heirloom as we saw our parents hold it. We dance with our life experiences reverbing from our muscles’ memories. To memorilize well is to learn how to live another’s delights in their abscence.

In dancing, shake out all the loose stagnant energy we’ve held onto. Let go of what will take up space in the stillness to come. Dancing is excellent for inner inventory management.

Yule — Shadow Mountain → Split Rail

Vibes — Sharing a privacy fence with an intense neighbor. A pile of firewood at night.

In my personal definition, shadow work is a paradoxical community effort. It cannot be done well without a support network, AND it cannot be done for you. It requires a commitment of authenticity and protection to the shadow you banished into the darkness. Everyone who has been there has their own stories about Shadow Mountain, each wildly different. Listen to the stories because they are great stories.

We are seeking what we once loved, but that we exiled from ourselves out of fear that the part was a liability. In this, the quest is remaking friendship with this shadow through gestures of good will. In order to do this safely, we need proper boundaries.

Enter Split Rail. Adjustable. Semi-permeable. A stake in the ground denoting your willingness to defend what is yours without building a wall.

In journeys of delight, we want to crack open, even just a little. Winter is for reflection an sitting with the gooey self. The shell you constructed out of fear has been cracked, and now you witness your innate cocooning drive in awe of your liberated natural world. Elements affect the cocoon. No catepillar spins a steel cocoon.

Imbolc → Roulette Reversed

Color-corrected

Vibe — Motorcycle in winter. Hubris stank. A mancave of ill-repute.

I have never used reversed cards in a paintswatch reading, but this feels right.

By Feburary, stir-crazy from the modern challenge of “being with one’s thoughts,” we have an itch. May I advise patience as a topical cream?

Rightside up, Roulette is a brash yet exciting swatch. The green felted table brings an exhilerating confidence. Three seconds of courage can change your life, if you accept the risk.

Roulette reversed warns “the house always wins.” A thrill ride describes both the modern safety-inspected rollercoaster and the 70’s ramshackle decapathon. Maybe stay in the cocoon a little longer? Congratuations on making it this far in the cocoon — there’s no reason to press your luck. Why you trying to burst out in Feburary??? Head starts avail us nothing. Continue to delight in creature comforts, even if it means sleeping under a heavier weighted blanket.

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That’s your year in fool color. Take what resonates and leave the rest. Thank you for reading!

Donate a beverage here if you want, but it’s more important you answer at least one of these questions five!

1.) How you planning to live your best fool life this year?
2.) What do you see in the color story of the year?
3.) What oracles do you use?
4.) What’s your favorite color, in the reading or not?
5.) How’s your relationship with your keyboard?