Practice

Before the holidays were gentle, they had teeth. Thirteen old visitors from European folklore, and the one question each of them still asks. The year I finally knitted the wool socks I had been promising my sister, I finished them on the twenty-third, and I remember thinking, for no reason I could name, that I…

One card, ten minutes, and a reaction you cannot quite explain. A gentle way into work that most guides make sound like a demolition. My first try at shadow work was a printed list of a hundred questions. I answered four, felt worse, and put the list in a drawer for a year. What I…

Five minutes, one card, and a pen. A small way to start the day on purpose instead of in your inbox. For a long stretch, the first thing I touched every morning was my phone. I read three emails before my feet hit the floor, and by the time the kettle boiled, the day already…

Skip the best-deck lists. The deck that stays with you is the one that speaks to what you are already living through. The first oracle deck I ever bought, I chose for its cover. Midnight blue, gold foil, a moon on every card. I was in the middle of a long, tiring winter, and every…

Forty journal questions from The Gold in the Dark, sorted into the four stages the deck moves through. Pick one. Ten honest minutes is enough. The Gold in the Dark began with a compliment I refused. Someone once called me formidable. I laughed it off so quickly that the laugh was what stayed with me…

You have probably heard that a deck has to come to you as a gift. Here is where that idea sits, and why choosing your own is a fine way to begin. The first time I heard the rule, I was in high school and only just discovering oracle decks. I stood in a small…

A working list of Yule correspondences for the winter solstice: the colors, greens, woods, stones, and foods people reach for, what is genuinely old, what is modern, and what to actually do with any of it. My first solstice, I wrote the list on an index card and taped it inside a cupboard door. Red,…

Not every pull needs a ceremony. These are the three small spreads I actually run on an ordinary Tuesday, with the positions written out so you can lay them tonight. Most of my card pulls happen at the kitchen table with the kettle going. No cloth, no candle, a deck and a pen. Over the…

The card is only half the reading. The question is the other half. Here are forty-four I keep in the back of my journal, grouped by the kind of day you are having. For a long time, my only question was “what do I need to know?” It is a fine question. It is also…

Before you ask a new deck about your life, ask it about itself. Five cards, ten minutes, and you will know how the two of you are going to talk. Every time a new deck arrives, I do the same thing first. I make tea, clear a corner of the table, shuffle until the cards…