I skipped the 9 a.m. sessions this morning--wasn’t too into any of them and I was off dancing till 1 anyway. Excellent decision since being up till late and then going to 9 a.m. sessions got me quite tired in the past. Sleeping in till around 10 rocks.

I saw a license plate that said “FEY PET” in the parking lot, but that’s about as much as I saw of anyone in my old coven this year, as they never turned up. Very strange that they did not show for the last one, which makes me think that maybe they all moved away for all I know. I have been wanting to get up the nerve to ask my former coven leader why they ditched me if I ran into them at the con (seriously, racked my brains for years and have no idea what I did to get cut off, I’d just like to know), but...nope, never happening, I guess.

I did get up to go to “Uncrossing: The Art Of Unscrewing Your Life” by Katrina and Eric Rasbold. I...did not get what this was about, btw. I thought it was gonna be soul searching stuff and fixing your shit, but it was instead (at least 60% of it) about being cursed/hexed/crossed and then getting yourself out of that.

Like I said before, I don’t really .... Well. It’s hard for me to discount other people’s weird shit because I have certainly had my own weird shit that sounds very crackpot (Smelling ghosts? Really?) to most other people, and hell, if I hadn’t had eyewitnesses at times I’d wonder myself. I give the most credence to things I’ve experienced, some credence to the weird shit my friends have experienced but I haven’t (oddly, the one person I know who claims to have seen Jesus is Jewish), and then well, who knows, it’s kind of a guess or judgment call.

I don’t particularly want to buy into the idea of curses. I don’t really think that is going on in my life. I am fairly sure that if my office enemy had any power to put one on me, she freaking would have.* Or whoever it is who liked to mess with my shit. And yet, I do not think I am cursed. I certainly do not have the whopping mess o’ symptoms/health problems that Katrina listed as possibly being curse symptoms, nor have I had any particularly awful streaks of bad luck.** I am fine. I don’t even think my dad was particularly cursed even though he was generally an unlucky sort who’d hit every red light, marry the wrong woman, have to deal with other humans and he hated that, and die of a shitty degenerative disease at sixty.***

* She’s an ex-Goth, but I continue to be surprised that she apparently never went through a The Craft phase, because she seems exactly the type to go vengeful dark witch.
** Wait, now I’m wondering if my office is cursed.
*** Or Dad, now that I write out that list...

However, since Katrina practices different magical traditions and has studied different shit than I have, especially what with going bruja, I do concur that she lives in a different world than I do and may come across Weirder Shit than I do with her clientele (she mentioned gang members). So I guess in her world, cursing is a frequent thing for which one needs limpias.

So Katrina did the first half of the class, talking about all the physical symptoms of curses/etc, what the difference is and how some stuff like crossing happens inadvertently like when someone cusses you out at a freeway exit, tools you need to get rid of this shit, next steps.

Eric (a professional healer) did the second half of the class, which I related to a lot more because it was more about unfucking your life than dealing with curses. Go Eric.

He essentially had three tips to solving problems: identify, objectify, and banish.

* Identify the thing, journal, get your emotions out, what needs to change.
* Objectify: go deeper, note excuses vs. reasons, truths, don’t do analysis paralysis, don’t use catastrophic language

I asked him about how optimism is so fucking hard for me to maintain and he suggested saying “the thing that is going to happen to me is for the greatest good, there’s always a reason” (for perceived failure). I like that.

* Banish: get it out of your life, get jerks out of your life, get rid of whatever doesn’t serve your goal.

I hung out with Monica in the hospitality suite for lunch again, where I hyped attending the Tarot Reading Circle to everyone in the room and did talk most of them into going. Then Monica and I skipped the 1:30 sessions, as I wasn’t super invested in any of them, to (a) go to the Elderflower Women’s Suite Stitch N’ Witch, and (b) theoretically go to the free tarot readings being done in a suite from 12-5. Annoyingly, when we went to that suite they were having some class and then said “come back at 2:30” and then when I did that, got ‘the class is still going on till 4.” At which point I gave up. I’m disappointed, because Katrina and her friends were supposed to be doing them and THAT would have been SOMETHING. So instead we stitched and bitched and Monica and I pondered going to Elderflower’s retreat in the summer. If I can get out of work...well, who knows there, it’s in August and that’s crazy time for me, we’ll see.

At 3:30, we went to Mary Greer’s Tarot Reading Circle one last time. You can read the instructions as to how it works there, but you draw five cards from very random decks and go around the circle. Your reader draws a card, does whatever question/suggestion Mary says to read it, and then you move on to the next person. After one person gets five readings, you switch and then do readings for five others.

My cards were:
* “Revolution:” card features fire, oil rigs, “No Blood For Oil” banners, a “Defend the Sacred” banner and general war-ish mayhem in the back, and a grandmother and granddaughter trying to grow a garden in the front. Depressing card. Someone later said it was from Next World Tarot.
* “10 of Music” (don’t know what this deck is either), featured a bunch of dancing goddess women floating in air with discs/tambourines and a flying little cupid playing the violin, with a quote about domestic happiness bieng the source of sublime art.
* Knight of Pentacles, traditional deck, simplistic drawing of man on a horse with a pentacle.
* “Reflection,” a picture of a stone angel.
* The Emperor (note: nobody drew this card so it never came up in the readings).

I secretly recorded what everyone said since I was in no position to write anything down and I tend to not remember shit if it’s not written down very soon after hearing it. However, it was a very noisy room and mostly I heard best whoever was on my right than the conversations I was having, sigh.

Monica did the first draw, the 10 of Music, and came to the conclusion that this is a “very artsy way” and that music was going to be a factor here. That sounds legit.

Second person drew “Revolution” (the Devil, she said, by the numbering) and had to describe the scene, which was a pain in the ass. Then she had to describe it from my POV--that I’m defending the sacred.

I was supposed to “ask the question silently” with the third person, which was fine by me since I was rather embarrassed saying mine aloud so much (still am even though I’m fucking journaling it, right?). He drew the Knight of Pentacles and said that the guy on it didin’t look too happy even though the rest of the card was pretty cheerful, but he’s going somewhere. “Your horse is taking you wherever you’re going anyway. Maybe you’re just along for the ride.” True dat. (I liked that guy. Kind of another five second friendship even though I doubt he would have considered us compatible for that outside of those minutes.)

Fourth person had to respond with another question based on the card. She asked me what I’m afraid of. I said it’s incredibly rare for me to have anyone I’m interested in at all, and I don’t want to mess it up because who the hell knows if I’ll ever get another opportunity again? (I forget what card this was exactly, but I remember that Revolution was drawn twice, so I guess it was that one.) It’s something worthwhile to be scared about, she said. This lady was kind of crying (?) during the whole conversation, which was...odd, to say the least.

Fifth person drew the “Reflection” card and was told to speak from the POV of someone on the card. He said to be myself.

As for the readings I gave, there were mixed results:

* One lady asked about the drama going on in her house and she had an 8 of Swords in which a woman was hiding behind some kind of fruit or vegetable (why?!) while standing in front of a scraggly tree. The instructions were to describe what was on the card, so I did and was all, “yep, no advice here, but it certainly looks like there’s trouble at home, all right. Sorry about that.”
* One time I was told to answer either with a yes or no answer (which, I’d like to note, goes against what she said to ask, no yes or no questions). This threw both me and the guy off, so he just went with “do I have what I need?” and I went with “yeah, but you don’t think so” since the card was a fortune teller.
* I was told to read a card WITHOUT SEEING IT AT ALL and then flip it over. The question was about a job offer and I was all “I think there’s two options but both have their plusses and minusses and neither really stand out,” and then the card said “Thin Ice.” So uh.....
* I can’t recall the card or what the question was, but the lady was concerned about whether or not it was a lie to say that her partner’s job was as important as hers when she’d gotten some job offer and she was the clear breadwinner. We ended up concurring that since she made more money, unfortunately, it did mean that her stuff/job took priority.
* The best one was when I was told to describe the card as a fairy tale and I was describing the Knight of Cups. Her question was “how can I support my friend?” and I did this whole thing about tainted water and the KoC rides in with a water cureall in his cup. She related to it because her friend has been having an emotional affair with a married man for years. I suggested they do some kind of water/cup ritual and maybe get one of those “grows when you put it in water” men and throw it in there, and she LOVED that idea.

That’s Tarot Reading Circle for you: sometimes things are eh or fall flat, sometimes you get very unexpected revelations.

Quote from Mary: “Magic is taking the limits off our experience.”

previous entry - next entry
archives - current entry