As stated in a previous post I have been accepted as a teacher at the next Oregon Ghost Conference hosted in the Seaside Conference Center. I’ve been told by others that my understanding of tarot is good enough I could actually teach others. So I decided to give it a shot and start with an introduction to my craft. After all, if you should start anything, even teaching, you start with an introduction. This also means introducing myself to the world as a tarot reader.
I will admit that in my rough drafts of the lecture, I may have gone off on rants about childhoods in Texas and conservative parents. But that is a part of who I am, a girl from a state where if the sun doesn’t kill you its environment will. That is also on the west part of the state which happens to be a desert. Not everyone growing up in Texas has had to deal with that harsh of a climate. Anywho, that pretty much encompassed my rant and I had to rethink my approach to introducing myself.
Thankfully a friend reminded me of the K.I.S.S. method of writing, Keep It Simple Stupid. All I needed to talk about was who I was and how long I’d been tarot reading. So I begin with my name and where I currently live along with where to find my office. Then I get to how long I’ve been tarot reading and how I got started. This sends me off on another rant about Baptist and autistic brains, on how it was easy to get overwhelmed so of course I would leave to get some air. That it wasn’t my fault there was a metaphysical shop two blocks away.
Removing most of that speech from my intro I did leave it at the fact that I found a metaphysical shop I found a block away from a church I was attending in 2015. It’s the truth without being too much truth. I did explain that the tarot cards call out to me because of a psychology class I was also taking at the time. This gives my class at least some academic standing as what I currently do is get paid to test Carl Gustav Jung’s theory about human predictability. If you’d like to see the lecture yourself and you’re in the area follow this link for tickets http://www.oregonghostconference.com/IntroductiontoTarotReading.html.
The lecture is written out and I am excited for what comes next!!!!
As the Year begins we all recover from the previous night’s debauchery that was inspired by the greeting of the New Year. Most of us return to our regular jobs grateful to have survived whatever 2023 was. Some of us reflect on what amazing changes and opportunities we were given in 2023. I happen to be one of those that had experienced epic changes in my life. So much so that looking forward to 2024 seems a tad daunting if I am being completely honest. That being said, I hope that all of my friends and loved ones experience their greatest desire that year.
My 2024 is already promising to be filled with new experiences and even more changes than 2023. Every third Monday will have me in a tap house in Southwest Portland doing tarot readings at a Pagan Market that is using the upper floor of this 100-year-old building off of Barbur. Every third Sunday will be my Intro to Tarot Reading class that I will be hosting via Zoom. It will be the same class I will be giving at the Seaside Ghost Conference in March. It’s officially scheduled for Saturday, March 23rd from 3pm – 5pm. And that is not counting the Fireside Moon Bazaar in February, the Beltane event at Ffynnon, and the two other OWOW events during the year. Not to mention the Eugene Pagan Pride at the end of Summer, along with the Samhaine and Krampus Bazaars that Pagan Fyre will be putting on at the end of the year.
Then I’ve got to take into account all of the personal changes that seem small in comparison. I still have every Thursday for the next year blocked out for a Lunar Year class. Pagan Fyre is looking to move locations and I am honor-bound to do Tarot Tuesdays for the Pagan Fyre TikTok @paganfyre until December 2024. Plus I have to create a TikTok for my Crows of Fate Psychic Services business and do collective Tarot Readings at a scheduled time for that TikTok as well. There are also Facebook and Instagram accounts I have to create for the business if I want to reach both Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
2024 is looking to be very busy for me, documenting everything on this blog might be the only way I can keep it all straight. Granted not everything I post will be available for the public as they will include places or people that ask for anonymity. It will still be nice to share the journey with those that do follow me. I just hope that 2024 is kind as we collectively move forward into this election year.
I have spent exactly one year away from this platform. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I had no idea how I was going to explain anything that was happening at the time. The year started off with an event on the coast and ended at an event center with me giving a workshop on the Basics of Tarot Reading. There were three different camping events at Ffynnon I attended that year. One where I met a Spyder and shared tea with the Elders, a summer camping trip where I got to witness the passing of a torch, and one where I participated in a graduation ceremony for the Witchcraft 101 class I was taking throughout the year. How can one really explain any of that? At least that is what I thought because I was raised by conservative parents. My 2023 has been a very magical year and I want to talk about it.
My first event of the year was in March at the Ghost Conference held in Seaside Oregon every Spring Break. I had borrowed money for the table and a ride from Pagan Fyre Mobile just to get there. A friend of mine put me up so I didn’t have to pay for a hotel room, which was the only thing that made it worth even trying. I had a spot on Psychic’s Row right where everyone was coming in at the end of a long line of established psychics. It was very nerve-wracking as I felt that maybe was too new at this to sit next to other tarot readers and divination specialists. Especially since I could boast no other talent than tarot reading from a deck that was first published in 2017, two years after I started learning the craft. The Crow Tarot created by MJ Cullinane in 2017 is a beautiful deck with wonderfully honest Crows and my favorite to use in my business.
I did well at the conference. I was able to make back the money I borrowed as well as buy birthday gifts for my twins. There were so many people there that I got to meet, and one woman who thought if she thought hard enough I would give her a free reading. She never verbalized wanting a reading so I never verbalized a free reading as an option. Which is fine, I am sure we will do the dance again at the next Ghost Conference. For some people, I ended up trading readings for things like earrings and organic soap. Anyone who got a reading from me generally liked what was said. My favorite part is always when the client points out how I managed to say the right thing connected to their problem. This is only a surprise for them because they don’t verbalize the question until the end of the reading. Using this method I have only had five readings that have left bad impressions.
One was asking a yes or no question about their future, which, no matter how many cards you pull, will always read ‘It depends on the choices you make’. Another didn’t like me telling her the same thing the last few psychics told her. There was one lady who was absolutely certain that she was right and that I was missing something in the answer. The rest were readings for friends in which I did not agree with my Crows but that is a topic for another day. At least this event left me with enough money to buy a victory book and pay for the next event.
I did not do so well at the MeWeFair I attended in April. I did make some connections that helped Pagan Fyre in its own event planning later on in 2023. I did get to attend Beltane at Ffynnon as a solo camping trip. I did not get to participate in the early rites as I did not get a ride until Friday, so I only got half of that experience.
I will change that for 2024. An easy feat as my current Witchcraft teacher led the rites to Ffynnon’s Beltane 2023. It was during this camping trip that was privileged enough to share tea and spirits with the Elders of Ffynnon. I say spirits, in reality, it is homemade meade that is absolutely wonderful. The people I met around that fire have shaped a lot of how I handled the curve balls 2023 threw at me. The first of which was the closing of Pagan Fyre.
For the entire month of June Pagan Fyre had closed its doors. There was Sunfest XXXIII to worry about so I tried not to be too disappointed in the store’s closure. I will admit that it did affect me negatively and may have affected my attitude at the Sunfest event. I would also hazard a guess that the creepy dude who smelt like the bad drugs was the one having that effect on me. Especially as he found a reason to move his tent ever so closer to mine.
The Ffynnon Elders took care of the problem and I lost my place in OWOW that was hosting the event on Ffynnon property. I did get to see the passing of a torch that summer. An event I will detail in another blog that will be released in January as I have to get clearance from the main players of that story. I did make some friends and am part of the Mushroom Meadow Ffynnon crowd.
At least July saw the reopening of Pagan Fyre, mostly as a mobile operation, but it opened. We also had customers coming in asking to buy what we had in stock. Not all of our customers stayed but I can see who the loyal ones are. Which made it worth the reopening process. Not to mention the events that Pagan Fyre was able to pull together for the end of the year.
Pagan Fyre ended the year with Crows of Fate Psychic Services (my business) and Slayter Curiosities (our sponsor) hosting two events at the Wingspan Event Center in Hillsboro Oregon. The Harvest Moon Bazaar in September and the Winter Moon Bazaar in December. One was bigger than the other but both did fairly well as far as patronage went. Every vendor is wondering when our next event is so we’re already getting the Fireside Moon Bazaar off the ground so that it can happen February 24 next year. My only job is to fill the Workshops, which I have done already for the Fireside bazaar. A thing I was only able to accomplish because I spent 2023 learning how I could be the best witch that I could possibly be. I can promise 2024 will see more of me and My Crows advising people of their Fates and general witchy behavior. Especially since the Basics in Tarot Reading workshop I did for the Winter Moon Bazaar will be expanded into an Intro to Tarot Reading class I will be posting about soon.
This year has been interesting for me. I’ve made new friends and had a couple new experiences. So much has happened I haven’t been able to write about it at all. Mostly I wasn’t sure how to process all of the changes that I was going through. Now the year is ending and all I can think about is how different my life was in January.
When this year started I was going through a break up, renting a room in a family home, and working a mundane job. Everyday was the same, waiting to see if my ex wanted to keep his promise and stay friends. I would try to socialize with the christian family I was staying with as I passed through the house to smoke outside. Most days I worked the graveyard shift as a security guard, driving a car that was leaking everywhere I went. My days off were spent doing laundry and sleeping because I had no energy for anything else. That’s not really existence I would call living. Luckily for me, everything changed with one stroke of really rotten luck.
April came around and I was trying to start a wiccan practice by doing rituals and meditation. This required burning herbs and lighting candles. This didn’t sit well with the lady I was renting a room from. Even with explaining what I was doing and her nodding as if she understood, she soon found her own reason for me being gone. I lost my place of living because of my religious practices and was blamed on my choice of medication. I am medically prescribed cannabis for the CPTSD I am currently in therapy for. She accused me of smoking inside and didn’t want me lighting candles even if I was doing so for prayer.
Around the same time my security job started drug testing when a janitor left drug paraphernalia behind during my shift. Because the company I worked for is a national company, having cannabis in your system is still a fireable offense. Granted, the fact that it is prescribed should give me some leeway in that area. I just ran into some bad luck with getting the right paperwork to the right people because of the logistical nightmare that is HR. So I lost both my job and my place to live.
I had no friends I could turn to as everyone I knew was my ex’s friends. My family back south would’ve taken me back in but that puts me back where I started three years ago when I was looking down the barrel of a gun, almost quite literally. An ex-girlfriend did gift me with a barely running RV so I wouldn’t be entirely homeless, for that I will always be grateful. I still didn’t know where I was going to go or what I was going to do with my life. So I went to the closest pagan store and asked for advice.
The Shopkeeper was nice enough to point out where I could park the RV and we made a deal that I would pay him rent each month for me to be able to use his tarot reading space. It would definitely be a new chapter for me as I never really did readings for other people before. As it turns out I shouldn’t have been so nervous about it. I’ve been able to do enough readings to pay for the space and put a little food on my table, but not much else.
The job is located at Pagan Fyre in Cornelius has also connected me with others in the Pagan community and I have an actual teacher now. I experienced a large ritual during the Litha celebration held at Ffynnon. I’ve participated in three Pagan events this year as a vendor, each time doing a little better marketing myself as a tarot reader. I’ve even gotten Pagan Fyre on social media enough that people are talking about it and coming into the shop. There is a lot I’ve accomplished in seven months since I lost everything I knew. I am proud of myself and I can’t wait to see what I accomplish in 2023.
I agreed to write a memoir on why I decided to give my only twins up for adoption in 2010. I struggled with starting this for years because all of my decisions were made through the lens of untreated CPTSD. What I did was an act of saving my daughters, at least in my mind, giving me the title ‘Setting Them Free’. The outline afterward came easily with the three main ideas being, My Thoughts on Motherhood – exploring my own relationship with my mother, Falling In Love and Lust – how meeting their father and our relationship went for two years, and Living With Family – the toxic traits I had to fight against while living with my brothers and father. Looking at the list I realized they could be broken down even more into easily dealt with chapters but this required me to understand more of the Trauma that seems to run in my family. I struggled for a few months not wanting to face the truth of my own trauma caused by my parents. A visit to the library gave me a book titled The Trauma Spectrum by Robert Scaer. On page twelve as he is setting the reader up to understand trauma on a clinical level he says something that changed my whole perspective on my relationship with my Mom.
” The nature versus nurture, genes versusexperience dilemma is especially important in the field of development of the brain and behavior. Many mental illnesses and behavioral and personality traits are considered to be primarily genetic in nature. In fact, genes are routinely activated or “switched on” by experience, often only during a window of opportunity in early infancy.”
I will admit that my therapist has been spending months trying to get me to understand that my parents were only human and acted the only way they knew how. I couldn’t seem to believe her because some part of my brain kept insisting that my parents knew what they were doing, especially my own Mother. However, the above text tells me that traumatic behavior and actions can be triggered early in life and many may not know or understand that it has even happened. Thus, they end up repeating cycles that happened to them as if they are normal or right. Now I’ve got to take another look at my idea of Motherhood. Did I start to get the idea because I wanted a list of ways to better person than my Mom? Or did I create my list for a perfect Mother because they were the traits my own lacked that I found in others? I can certainly see that my own trauma responses to life were triggered early by the same things that triggered my Mom and her Mom before her making it true that trauma can be generational.
Trying to prevent my own daughters from having CPTSD is the main reason I gave them up for adoption. Finding the right parents just took a stubborn will to only accept the parents who had the ability to love my twins as much as I do. Now I am trying to find a way to explain what I did without making my family look like the villains in the story. Robert Scaer’s words remind me that just because they are the villains in my story doesn’t mean they always are, or that they weren’t designed to be that way by generational trauma and societal pressure. So I feel like I can move forward with less guilt, especially if I view it as generational healing instead of mud-slinging like I am afraid the memoir Setting Them Free will be viewed by my surviving family members.
A bright light lanced through the blurry haze of this tiny world. For a brief moment, the thought passed through, “Where am I?” It passed because the sloshing felt so good in this tiny world.
“Don’t worry Clarence,” the little girl told the goldfish in her bag. She carefully carried the fish before her tiptoeing through the garden to the little spring that ran along the outer edge. “You’ll soon be free.”
“Am I Clarence,” the fish wondered. There was a brief image of bright pebbles and a pirate ship. It was quickly washed away by the soothing sloshing of his tiny world. The rhythmic side to side and occasional front to back lulling every thought to sleep. Then suddenly the world was open and Clarence was moving very quickly. Until he found himself landing in water that seemed colder.
The water of the creek splashed up and startled a newt sunning itself on a leaf at the edge of the water. They looked down to see the strange addition into his world as the little girl happily skipped away. “What are you?” They asked the bright orange fish that disturbed their nap.
“Clarence” The goldfish responded quickly.
“What is a Clarence?” The Newt wanted to know. Was it a species that was edible?
“Who’s Clarence?” The Goldfish replied before swimming upstream. His world was new again and it was time to explore. The Newt stared after this new addition wondering if it was poisonous. No time like the present to find out. Somewhere in the distance, a woman shrieked as she found an empty Goldfish bowl in her living room.
I’ve spent the entire month of January trying to set up my life so that I can finally jump on the ‘New Year, New Me’ bandwagon everyone pulls out every year. I made a list of accomplishments that I was going to try to stick to. I shared it with my Therapist and she praised me on how my list was realistically manageable. Bolstered by this praise I figured, ‘hey, at least I can start getting healthier this year’, completely forgetting the fact that once you start on a road to Healing your Demons start to surface.
So, I got a yoga mat and started at least attempting to stretch for 5 to 10 minutes a day. This has proven to be depressing because the stretching exercises I do know don’t coincide with my fluffy frame. So I now must look into yoga for plus-sized people. Guess, I should still be proud of myself for the effort even though I’m disappointed in my lack of ability to execute my desires because I let myself reach such an unhealthy level. I’ve been told to remind myself that a setback is not a failure but what does my Therapist know, right?
The next goal on my list was to write daily, no more than 500 words. It could be an insight, a journal entry, complete and utter nonsense. I just vowed that I was going to start putting words on paper for the sake of putting words on paper. This worked all the way up until a friend of mine sent me a pair of drawings that got turned into a piece of flash fiction. (I will post this story later, I promise). They loved what came out a demanded more wanting to see adventures of the two unlikely friends that formed by one chaotic act. This desire inspired a poem, ( I will also post this later) but after that, I couldn’t continue anymore. I got out maybe a few journal entries about what I observed or some of the changes in my life but the want to create died. I got stuck in this weird loop of ‘What’s the point if no one is going to read it?’
I had forgotten that I used to write for myself first. That I wrote my first story in the second grade because I ran out of books to read. There was a time when my classmates were trying to fill their lives with Nickelodean magazines and guide books for video games. I was subscribing to Writer’s Magazines and going to whatever free writer’s workshops were available close to me. In Middle School I had two poems published and even won an award for one of them. But none of that mattered because my parents never read a word I wrote and were the ones who implemented the nasty word loop I can’t seem to shake when my writing becomes interesting to me.
Is this really a New Year New Me life when I’m in the same old patterns as before? The answer is honestly, yes. I’ve made some adjustments to how I am going to execute my plan but it is still happening. I had to recognize the triggers that stopped me in the past and instead of letting it be a road-block I let it be a small setback while I changed my tactics. My Therapist is ultimately right, a setback is not a failure. I have to change how I approach the problem instead of whining about the fact that there is one. So yes, I do have to look into Plus Sized exercise techniques to get into better shape. I also have to remind myself that my words are first and foremost for me. Anyone else who gets to read them should feel honored to have done so. (This is a mantra I believe every writer should follow). 2022 will be the year of the New Me, because I am really tired of being the old me.
“ You cannot be forgotten if you are thinking of yourself.”
Ursula LeGuin
I had a moment of fear where I felt that I was going to end up forgotten and alone. My Therapist gave me the quote from Ursula to ponder. It only emphasized that I didn’t even remember who I was or what I wanted out of life. Then I remember a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, “If you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing, ….then you’re a writer.” Suddenly, I remembered all the stories I used to come with when I had no books to read. The random things that would pop into my head and demand to be put down on paper. I had moved to Portland, Oregon to find my voice so that I could share my stories with the world. It shames me to realize I forgot that. That doesn’t matter anymore, because I can remember that I am a writer. Whether my stories reach many or a few, I will always remember that I am a writer.
From left to right Larry, Wilbur, and Earle Provines
My Grandfather was a lively person when I knew him. He always had the best stories to tell whenever we were gathered around the table. I always looked forward to hearing them, no matter how many times I’ve had him repeat them. Every story painted a different picture of the life he lived in rural America during the depression, being deployed to the Philippines during WWII and watching it morph into the Korean War, collecting model cars and winning competitions, racing in a national circuit before NASCAR was founded. He had such a colorful life for a man who lived quietly running his own windshield replacement business when I knew him.
He retired and sold his business in 2001 just two years after the death of his wife Mary Ellen Baker Provines. That didn’t stop him from telling stories. When he met Phyliss in 2001 at one of his usual haunts they discovered they went to rival high schools just a year apart and I discovered all new stories of what high school really was like in the 40’s and 50’s. My Grandfather seemed to live such a vibrant life I wanted to live up to that. His stories shaped the way I viewed the world and I hope one day that my stories will do the same.
Random Ideas of a Chaotic Mind 