Inside some of humanity’s greatest myths, you can find a multitude of accounts showcasing humans desperately seeking a means to immortality or everlasting life. We find it in mythology, ancient legends, explorers’ diaries, and religions. Even much of the biological sciences of the modern age have been dedicated to reversing the aging process, or at least, slowing it down. And while testing the limits of science and biology can be a fascinating and insightful thing, the success inside of extending life has left the world in a state of forgetting that death will be the outcome of all things. We’ve learned to live in fear of the only guarantee given to us at the start of this life. In a way, we have simply lost touch with nature. It’s obvious in the way we treat the earth around us. Our egos have inflated just large enough that we believe ourselves to be gods of our own making, and who knows, perhaps we are. But what is a god but what a human decides for it to be? It is our concept. Death is not. We are deaths concept because like all things, our deaths are what create life and our lives are what create death. It is the most reliable cycle in the known universe. Our resistance is our attachment. It is the undying loyalty we have to our stories and our belief that they are important enough to exist forever. And perhaps they are and they do. Throughout space and time, our individual stories live on, but can the soul be transient? Can it pass through the doorway of death and be recycled into the great beyond and then start a new story free of the past, while still understanding the sensations of past lives, like joy and grief and love? Does the soul evolve too, as we do in our human lives? I suppose that’s up for the individual soul to decide. Whether we approach the doorway with fear in our hearts, or with the knowing that the life we lived was worthy of being inhabited by the soul in the first place.

When I was growing up, I was always that kid that would pick the weirdest movie out at Blockbuster and take it home to watch 10 times over the weekend. It was either some very gory horror film, or some bizarre sci fi flick with horrible writing and even worse graphics. Sometimes I’d have friends over to watch with me, sometimes it was my sister. But often times, I was alone, hyper-examining this b to d-list film that most people would never see or even really hear of. I went to Blockbuster quite a bit in the summers when I would stay with my grandparents because they let me rent as many movies as I wanted, as long as I returned them on time. Every summer quickly became a race to watch as many as I could. The summer of 2007, after my 15th birthday, I had made plans to stay with my grandparents all summer, helping my grandfather with his seminar company. My grandparents lived in coastal South Carolina in a beautiful house near the beach. They had done well for themselves and money was no object. Staying with them during the summers was a deep breath and a relief to be away from home. It was just a better quality of life with a lot less fear and worry. It was the one place I actually felt nurtured, where it was ok for me to just be a kid, and my grandparents wanted that too. They wanted to give me a good life, while still respecting the boundary that they weren’t my parents. It’s where I learned what a filet mignon was, tried a lobster tail, drank an airplane sized bottle of Kettle One and choked, learned how to open a nice bottle of wine, make a cheese board. I would spend my days on the beach and the nights watching movies and eating snacks my grandmother would make. I felt safe there and that was a priceless thing. At the beginning of that summer, my grandmother took me to Blockbuster to rent my first selections. I walked through the aisles, stopping at the multi film HellRaiser series, Final Destinations, The Cell starring JLo, all my favorites. I rarely ever rented from the New Release section because they were usually too mainstream, but there was one film in there that caught my eye and pulled me over. It was called The Fountain, starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. It was a film exploring themes around the Fountain of Youth, past lives, interdimensional travel, life/death/love, fate, time, spirituality. The plot was heavy, but I was intrigued. I walked out of the Blockbuster with only that film, which was unusual for me. I went straight home, had dinner with my grandparents, excused myself with a bag of sour gummy bears and went to my room to put on The Fountain. I slipped it into the DVD player and pressed play and within minutes, I found myself totally hypnotized and confused. It was a mountain of a movie, one I hadn’t completely climbed watching it the first time through. I watched the film three times that night and during every viewing I stopped the film at the same spot. In the film, a character is dying and the husband of the character is feeling the immense weight of the impending death. Through a series of events and past life regressions, he hears a piece of information that shifts his entire perspective. “Death is the road to awe.” He hears it over and over again, bringing him to greater peace inside of the grief over his sick wife, and allowing him to ultimately reach enlightenment. I had no clue why I kept replaying that part. It sent shivers down my spine. Yes, I understood that it was a profound idea, but how could anyone just be ok with death? How could anyone make peace with someone they loved dying? I had experienced my own griefs, certainly, but all I had seen were people around me being swallowed by those same griefs. It was always tragic, never peaceful. That was the only film I watched that summer, and admittedly, I would estimate I watched it nearly 100 times. I even lied to my grandparents that I returned it, when in reality, I packed it in my suitcase to make sure I always had a copy of it with me. I tried for years after that summer to get people to watch it with me, but they always hated it or thought it was too hard to follow or that it was strange or scary. And eventually, I stopped watching it myself. I suppose I started to think it was a bit strange too. Why was I so obsessed with it? No one else thought it was good! I went from falling asleep watching it every night to watching it maybe once every 6 months, to watching it once a year. The ideas started to fade too, not that I even really understood them and slowly the film disappeared out of my memory. Even during my initial grief after my mom’s death, really the first 4 years I’d say, it never came up. Around that 4 year mark, I was living in NYC and I had found myself in a group of truly magical people, one in particular who was an incredibly gifted psychic intuitive. He was brilliant, but his gifts were a bit invasive. I knew right off the bat, every time he’d look at me, and you could almost see stars in his pupils, that he knew what I had been through and he knew about my mom. I didn’t speak of it in true detail very often back then. He would never call me out for it, but I knew he knew. He was well connected in the spiritual healing scene of NYC and was good friends with a couple that ran an events space downtown that hosted healer workshops from all over the world. My friend texted me one morning a link to an event happening that evening, and before I even really looked at it, I declined the offer because I had a bartending shift that night. He immediately responded and insisted that I get the shift covered and book a spot at this event. He said it was extremely important I be there and he wouldn’t say why. Confused, I said ok. I got my shift covered and booked my spot after reading the description. It was an “energy healing” workshop with a man named Abdi, all the way from India. He claimed to be so charged with energy that he could touch you and send you into deep, profound meditations that would connect you to a greater consciousness and link us all together. I was curious. Very curious actually. Because I partially didn’t believe it. It seemed like a hoax. Just spiritual fanatics regarding another everyday man as a god and paying a premium to be in his presence. I believed in magic and psychics and visions and all of that, but I was still a skeptic. Especially when it came to people putting me into different states of consciousness, like hypnosis. I came to the workshop open, but closed. I was ready to see a miracle, but I wasn’t sure I would. The 2 hour workshop started, everyone sitting on meditation mats with  pillows and blankets and a man who I believed to be Abdi sitting in a chair at the front of the room. He was short, middle aged, wearing all white, with medium length black hair. Light music began to play and he stood up and immediately started approaching individuals on the front row. No introduction, explanation, no anything. He would kneel beside them, place a hand on the front and back of their heads and they would pass out and he would gently lay them on the pillow and mat. I watched him do this to around 30 people ahead of me. Each of them passing out in the same lifeless fashion. My skepticism slowly turned into anxiety. What if I was wrong? Was I even ready for 2 hours worth of deep profound visions?? I was getting scared. He arrived to my spot, looked me in the eyes, knelt in front of me, chuckled and placed his hands on my head. 2 hours later, I opened my eyes, noticing that I was now on my stomach with my arms stretched out in front of me and my fingernails digging into the hardwood floor. I was one of the last people to wake up, while everyone else had made their way back to sitting on their mats. I woke up in a rough fashion, having no visions and mostly completely freaked out that I had lost the past 2 hours and had no idea what had happened. Once everyone was awake, Abdi finally spoke. He said, “You may ask me anything you want, as long as it’s not about what just happened.” There was a collective groan as everyone looked around at each other. No one raised their hands until a very small and quiet woman in the back left corner of the room gently raised her hand and said with a shaking voice, “My partner is dying of breast cancer right now and the doctors are certain she won’t make it. What is the best way I can send healing to her in these final hours?” My eyebrows raised. Yes, this was heavy, but as she spoke, I realized that this was part of the plot of The Fountain. A lover dying of cancer and their partner desperately trying to help while ultimately feeling helpless. I was listening. As the weight of that sunk in, she began to cry silently as Abdi formed his response. And after about 60 seconds of silence, he said very softly, “Sometimes…..death…..is the healing.” And that was it. Those words hit me like a ton of bricks because as he said that, I felt as though he was speaking directly to me. I felt as though in that moment, he knew my story, my mom, my grief, and he was also saying, “Death is the road to awe.” And it suddenly made sense. My whole entire life. My experience and my memories. My story. I began to sob, pretty uncontrollably. It was one of those deep release sobs, a purge of sorts. After years of grieving my mother, this was the first thing I had heard that had offered me any relief, insight, or inkling of peace, and the unbelievable part was that I had known it all along. I had already received that message. And perhaps it was that saying in my deep subconscious mind that kept me alive and helped me grow after my moms death. After the workshop, Abdi approached me and asked if I would like to stay for the next workshop after, free of charge, to try it again. I said yes and again, went under for 2 hours with everything I had just learned in mind. I had visions this time. Of past lives, of the astral plane, of being in the sky and watching souls leave bodies and return back into their original forms, of the afterlife, or rather, lack there of. It was all just space and we were drifting through attaching ourselves to the things we magnetically attracted to. Experiences, other souls, blips of timelines, fragments of lifetimes, identities, planets, light and darkness. Sometimes 42 years, sometimes 97, sometimes 1000, sometimes 2 minutes. Constantly moving, ever changing and always, always, always free. That night changed my life forever. It is singlehandedly the moment I began to claim my grief and decided to not be swallowed by it.

What I found was the brutal truth. I found the meaning of life. That there was none unless we decided for there to be. And that was beautiful and sad to me. Empowering and humbling. We are energy. And right now, we are animating a form. I am writing on a laptop and you are reading it and this means something to us because we decided for it to mean something. Our stories mean something to us because we decide for them to. And often times, the stories that mean something are traumatic. They bend and sometimes break us and the only way out is through the doorway of death where you get to take everything but your form. It’s a bit like  Siddhartha choosing to leave everything behind and embrace his destiny as The Buddha. It is merely a transformation. I cannot say if we will meet those that have passed again as we’ve known them. And I also cannot say if that will even matter once we walk through the doorway. But what I do know, that when suffering is too great, when the magnetic attachment of a soul ends, we must leave our biological forms. And to those left behind, the pain can be great, but not necessarily great enough to leave. If you have survived, it is because you are still meant to be here. There is still an opportunity for growth and healing. Never forget, the universe is in perfect working order. Nothing is a mistake. Everything is an opportunity to learn and grow. Even the most tragic moments are not a mistake and we must know that and understand it, despite how gut-wrenchingly painful it is to accept. Our souls understand. Because our souls know what’s next. It is not separation, it is not heaven and hell, up and down, in and out. It is endless expanse, waiting for the next moment of magnetism and perfect collision. It is a giant glittering ocean where we, as individual drops, form the whole. It is oneness and the knowing of all things. Radical empathy and ultimate peace until we decide to venture out on the next journey. Do not fear death, for death is simply an exploration of life. There is life beyond this as there was life before this. But cherish what is now. Make peace with what is now. Enjoy what is now. And grow, as much as you can in the time you have, with the beings you have it with. And know that when something we love leaves its form as we know it, it is being recycled back into all things. It becomes a part of you, the air you breathe, the space you inhabit. And someday you too will leave and become all things again. Right now, our experience is a water droplet from a crashing wave, detached and on its own from the great ocean. We are our own oceans, and at some point, we will return home, remember our origins and become yet again a part of the ever flowing expanse.

The imagery of this card was chosen specifically because there is no creature more selfless and poetic than the luna moth. With an adult lifespan lasting on average for 7 days, it is truly the definition of Just Passing Through. It brings to mind a peace, yet poses the question, do they know their lifespan will only be a week? Do they understand mortality? Do they understand time? The psychology of the luna moth is of course unknown, and while majestic, there is a gentle layer of sadness draped upon it, or perhaps that is our inability to let things come and go freely from our lives. And there lies the true depth within this card. Can we simply observe? Can we look without touching? Can we love without controlling? Inevitably, this card will strike a resistance in our hearts, as we have become creatures of ownership, but yet again, nature teaches us the lessons we need to hold closest to our hearts. Like the leaves of fall and the flowers of spring, may we move through the phases of life with grace and effortlessness.

This tale is more or less a confession, of a number of words I have never spoken aloud. Mostly because they are fairly new and also because this is the first time I am officially writing them down in story form. At this point in my life, I consider myself well seasoned in love, having the opportunity to live a love story many dream about. From afar, it was bliss. And even up close there were many moments of bliss. It’s funny, when you’re in your early 20’s, you have such a plan for your life. You think you know all you’ll ever need to know with the undeniable bravado that accompanies an early 20 year old. But at that age, I wasn’t emotionally intelligent enough to be able to know what I actually needed and I was much more willing to sacrifice my well being for the security of what I thought was “home.” I was looking for attachment. I was looking for something solid to cling to, seeing as how much of my early life was as stable as a brick house built on mud. My time living in NYC brought me some of the most profound personal connections I’ve ever known. From friends, to family, to lovers. All of which I honor to this day. But none of them were as impactful as the time I got to share with M (that’s what we’ll call him.) I met M when I was just 20 years old in the dead cold of NYC December, fake ID in hand, sneaking my way into a Hell’s Kitchen gay bar to support a friend of mine doing a body painting exhibit. M was the model being painted that night and like the wide eyed baby gay that I was, it was love at first sight. I mean, he was wearing very small underwear with an amazing body staring right at me, could you blame me? As I watched with fascination, it was easy for me to visualize what I thought my life would be like with M, despite the fact that he and I had never exchanged a single word. But there was something, I couldn’t tell what, perhaps my own will, that knew that I’d be with him again after that night and that he would see me and I would see him in a way we had never been seen before. We spent that night having one too many drinks, making out against a bathroom door and stumbling outside, where I tried to convince him to come home with me to my New Jersey college apartment, to which he laughed and said “I’m not going to New Jersey, but you can come to my place in the East Village.” I drunkenly said sure and we hopped in a cab heading downtown. There was a moment in the cab that night when he sweetly began asking me questions about my life, where I was from, what I was going to school for, what my family did, all the classic questions one would ask during a first encounter, except for me, those questions always made me anxious because it either meant I had to make up a fancy lie about my life, or dump tragedy on them during our first moments together. That night, my very sad drunken heart chose the tragedy. I placed my head in his lap and started to hysterically cry, telling him that my mom had died just 4 months prior and that my whole life was fucked up and I didn’t know what to do. He sat there, brushing my hair, listening so closely. I don’t think he had ever seen someone in so much emotional pain before. As the cab stopped outside of his apartment, I got out and said “Hey, I know I’m a mess. I think I’m going to head home…” and with a chuckle and a devilish grin, he grabbed me by my hand and said “Shut up. You’re cute,” and lead me upstairs to his tiny 2 bedroom apartment where his bed was quite literally the only thing that fit in his room. Charming is the word that comes to mind. That night, M held me tighter than I had ever been held before. There was no demand for sex, no expectation, just him and I intuitively knowing that for the next little while, we were going to take care of each other. After that night, M remained slightly aloof. I would text him things like, “Hey, just wanted to say that I had a really amazing night with you. Hopefully we can hang out again sometime,” to which he would respond with the incredibly frustrating side eye smirk emoji. That’s it. I was sure I had messed it all up, but for some reason, he began reaching back out. Asking for me to come see him and spend the night with him a few different nights over the next couple of weeks. He would take me to his favorite restaurants in the East Village, we would get wine and margarita drunk and smoke bowls on his fire escape. It felt like some dreamy summer love, except it was below freezing and we had to huddle close to stay warm. It was on December 21st that he asked me officially to be his exclusive boyfriend, under the brightly lit Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. And it was no more than 20 minutes after that, he received the call that he had booked his first national theatre tour and would be leaving at the end of the week for 4 straight months. I was instantly crushed. It felt like some cruel cosmic joke. I had opened myself up, been vulnerable like all the books on love had told me and it got ripped away in a moment. My reaction in that moment was completely selfish. I said “Seriously? You’re going to take it? What about us?” as if we had been together for years. But that’s how I work. When I open myself up, I am OPEN. I dive in head first and I give my all the second the guards are down. But there I was, feeling as foolish as ever. His response was very matter of fact. “Why wouldn’t I take the job?” And just like that, I knew that we were on different pages. His career was still first, and realistically, that made complete sense, but in my soul, he was already first with me. It felt like some strange spell, explained perfectly in the musical The Last Five Years. The way the musical takes place is that a couple tells the tale of their relationship, but one starts at the beginning, and the other starts at the end and they work their way back together overlapping and then passing each other again. That’s where we were. I was at the end in the beginning, ready to get married and settle down, just a month into our relationship, and he was at the beginning, barely knowing me and wanting to move very slowly. We played this tour game for the next year and a half. Him coming back from tour, him leaving for tour, him coming back, him leaving. That was the foundational first chapter of our relationship. And we fought….a lot. Many of the fights were provoked by me. Whether I had convinced myself he had cheated on me or that I was insecure and jealous. You see, I was also in theatre at the time, but my mom’s death had drained me completely dry of any sort of inspiration inside of my actor self and I had nothing to give to the gods of the stage. But M was full of life and energy and he had all the time in the world to audition. But me, I was so full of resentment and fear that I had just spent the last 4 years in college paying for a degree that I was almost certain I would never professionally use. I was sitting on top of a mountain of student loan debt. And he had none. We came from 2 completely different places and that was a fact that I could never make peace with. He lived in a consequence free world, which both annoyed me and inspired me because it created someone fearless and outwardly confident, but also someone demanding and unwilling to compromise. When he came back from the final tour, we sat down and had a long conversation. My intention was not to drop an ultimatum, but I was left with no choice. I placed 2 paths in front of him and said, “Here are our options. You can stop touring and stay here and we can really give this a shot. Or you can go on tour again and we break up and move on with our lives.” Admittedly, the bluntness of this statement to him was probably shocking. But I knew what I needed. I needed to know someone intimately. I needed to live with him, see if I was able to be a good partner and line up my life plan, married by 25. I saw the dream in my head, the roots I wanted to put down, the expectations I had in every category of my life. M decided to stay, we moved in together and that sealed a fate that the next 4 years of my life were going to teach me more about myself and my needs than anything ever could. The problems that M and I had at the beginning of the relationship were the problems we had through the end of our relationship. It was always communication and it was ALWAYS honesty. The white lies would turn into full blown sagas just to avoid the truth. The truth was always so hard to say, I think because he and I were creatures of immense shame. We were filled with it, from different sources, but ultimately around the same topics. Simply put, we had irreconcilable, fundamental differences that no one should ever be asked to change, and yet we demanded each other to change them. He and I bent each other in directions we never should have. From moving in and out of an open relationship, to being exposed to an aggressively perfect family unit multiple times a week, to becoming so suspicious that we’d look through each others phones and computers, then only to manipulate the other into being the bad guy. The game we played would become so vicious. We would actively ruin each others days just to prove a point. It became a vortex and we were fighting about anything and everything. We would get into screaming matches about how I stole the comforter last night, only to somehow land on that relating to my childhood trauma and abandonment issues and his desperate need for control. There was so much we needed to say to each other, and I actually think we always said it. But the other was never listening. We never learned how to not victimize ourselves in those moments and break out of the “my pain is greater than your pain,” battle. Every time a fight would break out, it was instantly about who was going to have the bigger emotional reaction. It was so petty, but the subtext suggested that he and I were no longer compatible. The ecosystem was poisoned. He cheated, I did it back, he 100% wanted kids, I wasn’t sure, he was obsessed with his family, I didn’t fit in with them. I was always sacrificing the better parts of me to fit in to his vision, and I expected the same. But at some point, the mirror shattered. M and I got engaged, we even got married. Only to be divorced 2 months later in a series of events I knew was going to be our reality even though I tried to sidetrack destiny. We’ve all tried to do that. And does it ever work? Never. But we will ignore red flags until we are blue in the face in order to preserve an image and hang on to an idea we think still serves us.

M taught me one of the most beautiful and humbling things I’ve ever learned, something that I genuinely think has changed my life for the better. I learned that we must stop imposing timeline expectations upon the people that enter our lives. I know, I know. It seems IMPOSSIBLE. If you marry someone, you’re going to be together forever. That’s what we’ve been told and sure, for some that may be true. But it wasn’t true for me and some of the most important and impactful people of my life are no longer in my life. Sometimes, people come into our lives because we begged the universe for something and they presented it in human form. I begged the universe for a net to fall into after my mom died. I begged the universe to help me heal. The universe gave me M. He saved my whole entire life. Brought me back to the land of the living and he is literally the reason I am alive today. M wished to be fully seen and loved for exactly who he was. The universe brought him me, and I did love him and see him, with my whole heart and soul. But it was clear, the moment we were back on our feet, it stopped working. Even he knew that, through the utter grief that was our separation. This is not to say that we shouldn’t get attached to things. Attachment is beautiful. But when it develops into codependency, when you can’t exist in the world without that person or at least you’re too scared to, and when you still try and work things out even though you’re fighting multiple times every single day without ever reaching a real resolution, it’s important to see, that is not attachment. It is expectation and control. And love and control cannot co-exist. It is a grand idea to live fully inside of every experience you have. And it’s that grand idea that will help us to find ourselves away from such unnecessary anguish around trying to be lords of time and fate. No one owes us their time and no one knows how much time we have. And it’s better that way, because we get to decide how we fill our lives and how fully we fill them. This is a statement I wished someone had said to me: Just because you’ve been in an unhappy relationship for years doesn’t mean you owe them the rest of your life and the rest of your happiness, even if sometimes it’s good and you still love them. I still love M, I always will. And I anticipate he feels the same, even though we hurt each other so deeply. But our time ended and we gave each other exactly what we needed and now on the other side of that, we are better people for someone new. We may never speak again. We may never know anything about each other ever again. That reality would’ve shocked me just a year ago, but now, I couldn’t imagine it being any other way. Our luna moth cycle ended. We as a unit died and we both chose, out of love, to bow out gracefully and recycle ourselves back to the gods of love. We never fought once during the break up and we always maintained respect, which is ironic because we could never seem to do that when we were together. But it is healthy to examine the subtext of our relationships, those silent cries for release inside of our everyday words. Because only then can we see the natural end of things, when the cycle of a relationship is over even. We need to harness acceptance in these moments, so that we can allow the relationship to fall away as it is supposed to. You didn’t fail, you are not flawed, you are still worthy of love. But maybe everyone isn’t supposed to be everything to us. Maybe they’re just supposed to be who they are, and we are better off accepting that. When we try so desperately to keep a dead relationship afloat, it becomes some form of relationship necromancy, that in order to ensure it’s success, you must trade your own life force. When things naturally find their end, they do not drain us and we should celebrate accordingly. We should also celebrate the bravery it takes to admit that something is over. At some point nature has to admit that the leaves are dead and decide to let them go. It’s a simpler concept, but the trees do grieve, if only momentarily. Until they are once again full, blooming with hope and fragrant blossoms. We will go through many luna moth life cycles in our life and each time we should approach it with the same reality. What did this teach me, how can I honor it, how can I say goodbye and allow myself to observe and not get stuck inside of the grief? When the weight is too much, when you’ve convinced yourself that you’re broken because the perfect love wasn’t so perfect, maybe it’s because you just ended another luna moth cycle. Maybe it’s because you or that person were truly just passing through each others lives and neither of you were meant to stay forever. And sometimes, that means it’s time to have a deep cry, a deeper breath and to remember that it was just one moment and you will have a million more, all of them equally as important, impactful, and immortalized in your memory as the other, like the perfectly preserved body of the luna moth left behind, no longer containing a soul.

This card was born of a quote by early 1900’s philosopher, Walter Benjamin. The full quote is as follows: “Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic.” This idea greatly influenced Austin Osman Spare, eccentric occultist and artist of the early 1900’s (huge magic inspiration of mine) and it is, to my knowledge, one of his root philosophies in founding the theory of chaos magick. 

At this current place in time, words are as powerful as they have always been, if not more considering the speed in which words can be sent across the globe and beyond. If you think about it, it used to take months to send a letter between cities, even longer internationally. And if you wanted to speak with someone directly, that travel could take years. I anticipate the delay made communication much more intentional. People had time to think about what they wanted to say. It eliminated petty behavior and generally brought forth logical and level headed truth, and I can imagine, quite a few people found closure inside of the travel itself, only to turn back to their starting point. The faster the exchange in communication became, the less intentional the language. Words began flowing out of people, unfiltered and unquestioned, and it left our species in a state of suspended animation, having to self-interpret fast words with no intended meaning. If we are to believe in our own ability to create the world around us, as well as our brain’s capacity to imagine and create a landscape of it’s own, then we must believe that the expressions of that landscape, for example, our words, hold as much power as the mechanism itself. If our brain is a laser gun, our words are the laser produced by the gun. They create change, they impact beyond our control, and they act as a satellite signal to all universal forces, drawing in exactly what you call for and ignoring what you don’t. It is wise at this place and time to focus more than we ever have about how we bring forth our thoughts into reality.

The place where I grew up was small. I don’t mean physically small, but in mindset and in culture. The people there wanted small lives and small houses, but loved big families and big cars. They had a big god that swallowed them whole, and big secrets that buried them deep, but few words to explain why they felt the way that they did, if only to say that what they did was because so many people before them had done the same. Thought patterns, beliefs and actions seemed to be almost inherited. Everyone lived the same life and everyone feared the outside. I don’t know what my early life would’ve looked like without relatively easy access to information, be that television, books, film, the internet, music. I only say that because I am aware enough that it genuinely shaped me. Charmed, The Craft, Sabrina, The X-Men, Enya, the Barnes and Noble New Age section, early 2000’s websites dedicated to love spells and hexes. All of those things were windows into an outside world, a world I longed to see and fully be apart of because what I knew at home was not enough. Or maybe not that it wasn’t enough, but that it wasn’t for me. I never belonged. It wasn’t even ever a feeling of not belonging, it was a knowing that this wasn’t where I was going to make a difference in the world, and it wasn’t where I was going to learn the most. For example, the public schools did not allow the Harry Potter series to be in my library and they made the executive decision to tell us about the Christian creation theory as opposed to evolution, because there was NO way God would’ve ever let us be apes. That made no sense, but the entire human race spawning from 2 people absolutely did. Naturally. I spent quite a bit of time with my maternal grandmother growing up, who I lovingly referred to as Grandmama. We lived with her for a number of years and I loved Grandmama, even though she could be cruel to my mom. She was never cruel to me. She inspired me quite a bit and taught me more about magic than I ever thought possible, considering she was a devout Christian. And I mean devout in the sense that she’d protect and defend to the death the one section of the bible the pastor preached the most on Sunday’s, which was usually the story of Jesus. A great story, but not the FULL story. I had a number of magical experiences as a child that widened my oversized eyes and flipped my world upside down and she for some reason talked me through them, saying they were God’s gifts. And she wasn’t wrong. I just think, even then, my intuitive understanding of God was just bigger, more expansive and inclusive than her’s. She encouraged me to spend time in nature, out in the woods, talking to the plants and the animals and learning what was poisonous and what was not. She taught me how to look at the silent cues of nature, the gentle whisper in the wind helping you find your way home. And in a way, she prepared me to enter the wilderness on my own, in both literal and metaphorical ways. One thing I will never forget, and this has worked every single time, is when you see a branch on the ground that has a crossroad or y shape, walk towards the direction of the y and you will find water if you are thirsty. This strange Appalachian/Native American hybrid magic became second nature to me. Her great grandfather was 100% Cherokee Indian and the evolution of this ancestry slowly climbed it’s way into the Red Top mountains, one of the most magical places in the world I’ve been. For no particular reason, other than that what I’ve seen and experienced there in my lifetime is not of this plane. Hands down. I think that general mountain energy, all over the world, tends to make people a bit odd. They just care about different things and they listen VERY closely, and so I followed suit. I started listening too, in different ways, almost like how animals can feel a storm before it hits. It honestly became psychic. There were so many moments of prediction and premonition, especially in my dreams, something to this day I still experience. I would tell Grandmama about these moments every time they happened. I remember one dream I had about this big yellow church hat that was so big, the woman wearing it couldn’t fit through the front door, and sure enough, that next Sunday, someone in the congregation wore an oversized yellow hat and couldn’t get through the front door of our church. There were also a number of experiences where I would get these deep gut feelings as I was awake that something was about to happen and then it would, right then. Cars honking their horns, alarms going off, people walking into a room, people saying specific things on tv. The thing is, I always knew they were about to happen, but I never said anything about it. I never spoke up and I never told anyone about those moments and gut knowings, not even Grandmama. I don’t know why, they just always seemed more like a psychic observation. Like, it’s going to happen anyway and it happens so often that it’s not going to matter if I speak up. One Saturday, I spent the day with Grandmama, just me and her. She drove one of those very excessively large Lincoln town cars that looked like a vampire would drive it, except the color of it was “Champagne.” But for my small 8 year old body, it was awesome. Warming seats, all leather, seats that laid completely flat. The city where Grandmama lived was always so bizarre to me. It would go from complete middle of the woods nowhere, to in the center of a city with businesses and restaurants in the matter of 1/2 a mile. There was this one section that I always closed my eyes through. It was a massive 4 way intersection that cars were always zooming through at high speeds. The massive part was how long it took to get through the intersection. It was so open and it would take cars extra time to get through, which meant getting stuck at a red light was a nightmare. I swear the red light would last for at least 6+ minutes. We passed through this intersection on our way back to her house and there were a few times we got stuck at the red light. One time, we were stopped for what felt like an eternity, but sitting in front of us was a beat up Ford pick up truck, covered from the wheels up with mud and dirt. 2 people sat in the cab, while the bed of the truck was occupied by a beautiful dog, a seemingly Rottweiler/lab mix. The dog was sitting very still staring off to my right, sitting patiently in the back of the truck waiting for traffic to continue moving. In that moment as I watched the dog, my heart began to race and it was as if a movie began to play before me on an invisible screen inside of my third eye. I saw the dog jump out of the truck. Now, this didn’t happen in reality in that moment. There were no indications that the dog would jump out. This was just a glazed over, deep vision moment, and the second I came back from seeing that, I was so overwhelmed with panic that I shouted in the car with Grandmama, “That dog is going to jump out of the truck!!!!!!” And quite literally, the second that I finished saying that, the dog stood on all fours, turned around and jumped out of the truck, walking slightly too far into the other lane of traffic, instantly being run over by, ironically, another beat up Ford pickup truck. The sight was horrific, and without too much detail on the matter because animal violence is gut wrenching to me, the dog was killed in a fashion no animal should ever be killed. After I said it out loud, my hands covered my mouth as if fire had shot out of it. I felt immediately guilty, as if I had made that happen. That I had somehow gotten into the dogs brain and invaded its’ psyche to convince it to jump with my words. I began to cry, which my grandmother assumed was because the dog had been killed. And yes, that did make me cry, but it was also that it was the first time I had ever spoken a prediction out loud. And because I did, something violent happened. I hurt an animal. I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe if I wouldn’t have spoken up, the dog wouldn’t have jumped. I think that was a major moment in the calcification of my throat chakra. Learning to not speak because every time I spoke up, it would be chaos.

It took me nearly 20 years to unpack this memory in full and it was truthfully as I wrote this entry. But re-examining this moment as my current 27 year old self offered a clarity I had not yet attached to this tale. The truth of the matter is that even when we know things, even when we feel things and predict things, when we have something to say and when our mouth wants to move, it isn’t always our job, our purpose, or our duty to speak it aloud. I say that bluntly, fully knowing and experiencing many moments where my speaking up changed the course of action. But I think it’s important for us to consider that perhaps an invisible fire does shoot out of our mouths when we speak. Maybe then we can fully revive intention, so that the fire can turn to wind. That term is thrown around so loosely, but in my opinion, intention is everything. It is motivation, decision, inspiration, energy. It is the foundation of magic and spellwork and it SHOULD be the foundation of language, even thought it so often isn’t. Intentions are equal to the directions we choose to move in as well as the things we allow ourselves to have. But most importantly, it’s the things we attract, both good, bad, and neutral. The most impactful intentions, the most impactful words and spells, are specific and consciously said. They have purpose, form, direction, and meaning. If we allow ourselves to speak to the universe and to speak to others in cryptic fashions, we will never be fully heard or understood the way in which we intend. The primary problem with language is it’s immediacy and if magic is immediate, the the primary problem of language is it’s magic. Your words can be the wind in someone’s sails, but they can also be a boomerang in a room full of mirrors. How different the world would be if everyone collectively took an extra beat before statements and responses. I think we would see more understanding and I think we would see cleaner magic. And like whispers in the night, this card stirs up the sentiment, “Be careful what you wish for.” Or at least, think about what you wish for before you wish for it.

TRIGGER WARNING: sexual abuse, physical violence, drug use 

This card can be read in a couple of ways. Is there someone/something you need to forgive? Do you feel the need to be forgiven for something you’ve done? Or perhaps the person you need to forgive/be forgiven by is unreachable and the forgiveness must be self generated? Whether forgiveness is being sought or granted, it’s often a non-verbal act that doesn’t require anything but acknowledgment, acceptance and release.

My mind drifts back to my last 2 years of high school, which were undoubtedly some of the darkest years of my life thus far. They were also the last years that my mother was alive. She was a breathtakingly beautiful, yet gentle, rather quiet woman with very few opinions, even fewer words and an oversized heart. I physically favored her greatly in my younger years. Big chestnut eyes, dark brunette hair, and an ear to ear smile with missing middle teeth that somehow always remained even though home was never safe. I knew she had been shattered mentally from the inside out, yet her heart survived. A lifetime of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, having children way too young, and then raising those children as a single mother, had created a void and a rift between her heart and her spirit. From my earliest memories, I remember her void being filled with a number of relationships, all with abusive and misogynistic men who only wanted her beauty and never her liberation. They left their mark on her in the form of scars and bruises both emotional and physical, and even some on me and my sister, and as each of them departed, her void grew larger and larger. Every time she blamed herself. She never believed she was enough. The void was also filled with tiny stark white pills that she had been prescribed for the pain management of DDD (Degenerative Disk Disease,) something she had been diagnosed with my freshman year of high school, which would leave her fully unable to walk by the age of 45 at the latest. The solutions were few, being a very complicated spinal surgery or to live out her years constantly taking narcotic pain medication. She chose the medication and as soon as the Workers’ Compensation kicked in, her void reappeared bigger than ever with a desperate hunger for the OxyContin. The disease left her relatively bed bound, but I look back now and wonder if it was the disease or the addiction. The pills inside of her began to take on a personality of their own. It was a very clear shift, her pupils would shrink to the size of a pin prick, and all that remained was a hollow grey. She would lose her memory and forget who I was, asking me nearly every evening, “Who are you and why are you in my house?” to which I had to explain that I was her son and I lived here with her. It was gut wrenching. Every single time. As much as I wanted to help, not that I even could, there was too much fear as I witnessed her do too many absolutely horrific things that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to purge from my memory. The moment I saw her chug an entire bottle of bleach sitting on the kitchen floor, the countless times in the depths of the night where I would wake up to her whipping a wire hanger across my face saying over and over again in a timbre I couldn’t recognize, “I know the truth about you!” or the late nights she would take off all of her clothes and wander through the streets where we lived, completely nude, only to loudly rap on the door around 4:15amto be let back in. It became routine and oddly comical. I learned how to sleep with one eye open and my observation skills became so unbelievably sharp that I to this day swear my senses literally sharpened. Slowly an ache in my gut began to form, an ache that signaled she was not long for this world. I held on because even through the absolute terror, she was still that sweet, 5’ 2” woman who sang me to sleep every night of my childhood with “Open Arms,” by Journey, calling me her little brown bear. I left home at 18 and went to college about 12 hours away in Montclair, NJ, and after my first year, I went away to work for the summer. I barely spoke to my mom throughout the school year and even less in the summer. The times we did talk, it was always later in the evening and her speech was slurred and I often had no idea what she was talking about. I don’t think she could’ve faced me sober. Those talks would result in passionate heated arguments, usually with her trying to convince me she wasn’t high and me screaming at her, saying how disappointed I was, how terrible of a mother she was, and how she desperately needed to get help. The clock was ticking and at the end of that summer, I received the call that I knew was coming but dreaded on a soul level. She was dead. She had taken her own life and was found on the bathroom floor bleeding out after collapsing from swallowing an entire bottle of oxycontin and hitting her head on the edge of the bathtub. What a tragic way to die. No note, no explanation, no ghostly visitation explaining that she loved me. Just silence. Deafening silence that her void now transferred to me, and about $10,000 worth of debt from phone plans, leases, and cable bills that she had signed up for using my social security number in the highest of her highs. I guess I expected a Princess Diaries moment, where she died and I found out I was actually a prince and my massive inheritance was on the way. That’s what I thought I deserved after having to live such a labored and heartbreaking life with her, most of the time being her parent and pushing my own childhood aside. I was angry. Beyond angry really. I was vengeful and I wanted to scream at her all over again from beyond the grave. But I couldn’t. Not only for the dimensional limitations, but also because as angry as I was, I just wanted her back. I still loved her more than words could ever express and it killed me because I couldn’t figure out why. To have one more slurred speech conversation, to be angry in real life at her one more time was all I wanted. The crushing reality was that the anger I felt wanted genuine forgiveness. It wanted a lighter load to carry. It wanted a cosmic explanation of why me? Why did I have to see her like that and why couldn’t I have been spared? I asked myself these questions for a long time after her death, almost daily. I’d wake up filled with despair and with anger, adding new questions on top of my old questions, drowning me a little more each day. 

Time became my best friend and my worst enemy. I knew it was the only way I would heal even though the days spilled into nights and the nights into black holes. I reached my own suicidal thresholds, so filled with complete apathy that I couldn’t muster any reason to live. She was my entire life’s purpose for so long, well, at least keeping her alive was. But how many times do you need to drag your drowning and unconscious mother out of a bathtub to realize that her will to live no longer existed? How do you make peace with that? How do you forgive that? My remedy was time and years and years worth of sleep. Allowing the days and nights to bleed into each other and making sure that I had someone to occasionally check in on me to make sure I was eating, drinking water, and seeing the light of day. Grief and forgiveness are so similar, one ultimately leading to the other. And in my opinion, there are actually 6 stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, and Forgiveness. I went through them all, even though it feels like one big blur blended together. I sobbed through denial, stared into the sun through anger, bargained with Death, slept through depression, sobbed again during acceptance and finally took a deep breath inside of forgiveness. As I suspected, the years passed by and the weight really did get lighter. The questions I started to ask looked more like, “Why her?,” and “Why couldn’t she have been spared?” I grieved for myself and I grieved for her. But in a very real way, those questions and that double grief was forgiveness for me, to see her suffering in a way that she didn’t cause herself. I also think asking questions in that way granted me the forgiveness I wasn’t sure I even deserved. While I may have been a part of her story, she was suffering in a way I’ll never know. She made that so by making the choice to contain all of the pain inside of her, and yes, I occasionally got shocked by the waves of pain. But the moments I yelled and threw verbal daggers back at her, it was all my teenage brain knew. It was fight or flight, a desperate cry screaming, “Why are you not protecting me?” I wanted to hurt her as much as she was hurting me. And that became a toxic cycle I have repeated in many of my adult relationships. There’s no need to justify what I said to her, because in my deepest dreams, we’ve talked and she still smiles every time she sees me. Because leaving the human plane means you enter directly into the expanse where truth is the only currency. There is innate forgiveness inside of acceptance, and to start we must move out of anger. We are all victims, even the most dangerous villains. We’ve all been hurt, defeated, broken, and abused, but now we have a choice. Is it easier to carry the emotional weight forever and wear the mask of the victim, or to drop the baggage, finally unpack it, take off the mask and let yourself breathe fresh air? Neither is wrong or right. But at some point the latter will take over by force and liberation will be demanded. I decided to see my mother as doing the absolute best she could and remember that through the demonic possession that was an oxycontin addiction and a broken heart, she still loved me more than she could ever properly express. I saw her wheels turning my whole life, trying to make the “right” decision not only for her kids, but for herself. I know now that to know forgiveness, I had to stop being angry at her and at what I thought was lost. Nothing was lost except for her life, which I choose to honor now. And that’s the hardest part in my opinion, to change your own narrative. But it is possible, as are all things. And in the deep breath I take inside of this story, I do feel forgiven. And I think she does too.

A portal can appear as many things and opening one looks like even more. It can be a memory, a spell/ritual, a prayer, a wish, a dream, a flashback, a trigger even. Engaging with a portal is the act of allowing the mind to travel without the body in tact, which in most cases can be very dangerous, unless specific parameters are set and guidance is given. Many times, we see this in the form of full ceremonial magic, where energy is summoned and invoked, taken from somewhere other than the plane that we can see. Opening a portal can be an unstable act resulting in access to places and experiences we are not yet equipped to understand or integrate. There is benefit in the opening, but opening and closing are 2 completely different rituals with 2 completely different sets of instructions. Whether the ritual be small or large, conscious or unconscious, it is advised that with portal opening that you also prepare yourself to close it.

My upbringing was intensely rooted in the Southern Baptist and Pentecostal faiths, both mutually terrifying and awe-inspiring. I don’t think my mother really understood religion or even the purpose of it, but my grandmother absolutely did, to the point of being in a relationship with Jesus Christ on Facebook for a number of years. We went to church for her, every Sunday and every Wednesday, just me, my sister, my mom and my grandmother. Afterwards, we’d have a feast, somehow prepared, setup, and ready to eat the second we got home after Sunday School. How on earth my grandmother made that happen, I will never know, but it filled me with wonder and a love for god because he was the one that granted us this meal, always. It sometimes didn’t make sense why we always had to thank him. He didn’t cook anything and he didn’t buy the groceries, but the rhyming scheme of the dinner prayer did excite me. I gave thanks anyway, mostly because my family got a kick out of me beatboxing it at the dinner table each Sunday. “God is great! God is good! Let us thank him for our food! By his hands, we are fed! Give us, Lord, our daily bread!”

One Sunday, I woke up my 7 year old self at the absurd weekend hour of 8am to get ready for church, only to see my mom in the hallway looking a bit anxious. She said, “……So we aren’t going to Sunday School this morning. But there’s a new church I want to try, it’s a little different because the service is at night, but I’ve heard really awesome things from my friend, Celeste. You can go back to sleep if you want! But promise me you won’t tell Grandmama. I told her you had strep throat again.” Of course I agreed because I hadn’t been able to sleep in on a Sunday or watch cartoons or stay in my Tigger pajamas for as long as I could remember. It was an awesome day spent sleeping in, binge eating Lucky Charms (marshmallows only) and playing in our small patch of yard outside in the deep July heat of a Georgia summer. The day passed and around 6pm, my mom asked me and my sister to start getting ready for the 8pm service. We had dinner before we left, which was a garbage salad, a term my mom coined for a pile of nachos with whatever we had in the fridge on top. Sometimes lettuce, sometimes chicken and dumplings, sometimes okra, sometimes tuna salad. It was my all time favorite meal and I realize now, it was also an incredibly crafty way of hiding from us that we were absolutely dirt poor and all of our food came from a food bank. We arrived at the church a few minutes before the service started. The boxy wooden building with only 4 walls and no air conditioning, no bigger than 700 sq ft, was packed to the brim with devout Christians ready to see a miracle. We stood near the very back of the church, me in between my mom and my sister, holding both of their hands. Even from a young age, I had intense social anxiety. Large groups of people made me very uneasy, especially when I was the shortest person in the room and I measured up no higher than anyone’s waist. I did think it was very strange that no one was sitting down, or even that there were no chairs in the room, except for one with arm and ankle straps placed up front in the direct beam of positioned ceiling lights. I felt more like I was in a haunted house than a church. This was not what a church was supposed to feel or look like. A few minutes passed and the room got quiet as a man in a very sweaty white button down shirt began to welcome everyone in the room, stating that he was the pastor of this Pentecostal congregation. He made a short speech filled with a number of quick prayers, thanking us for coming and asking for our undivided attention and worship. Another 2 men came out of the shadows and into the beam of lights holding up a stumbling young girl in a white dress, no older than 10. She looked incredibly familiar and I quickly realized that she went to school with me. I didn’t know her name and we had never spoken, but the sight of her stumbling was unsettling even to my 7 year old self. As I peered through the legs of the others standing in the room, I watched as they sat her down in the chair. The pastor assured us that the straps on the chair would only be used if necessary and I quickly asked my mom, “Is she ok?,” to which she shushed me. The pastor began to speak to the girl with such conviction and I could feel a tangible energetic shift in the room, like lightning inside of the building. He was speaking to her in and out of english and a language I couldn’t understand that sounded as though he was just making noises that seemed to get stuck in his throat and fill his mouth with spit. With one raised hand and a bible in the other, his words began to wake her up. She started sitting upright and her posture changed in a way that looked as though a whole other person had crawled into her skin. The people watching began to get involved, as they wailed and lifted their hands to the sky, sobbing and singing and praying to god to show his power in this space. The girl’s head hung halfway with her eyes lifted, staring directly into the crowd at what I thought was through their legs and right into my soul. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck begin to rise and tears well up in my eyes. What was happening? I squeezed my mom and sisters hands as tight as I could, as we all watched the girl stand up crookedly and slowly be handed a snake from one of the men that carried her in. The snake seemed to wrap around her arms and neck and it looked as though this was her pet. She slowly began to move around the front of the room, loudly speaking to the crowd in the same unknown language the pastor had spoken in. The crowd seemed to all be breathing at the same time, all of their hands lifted to the ceiling in worship, some even kneeling at this child’s feet, begging her to bless them. My mom gripped my hand tightly and quickly turned around and pulled me and my sister through the crowd and out of the church. We got into our car and she drove away as fast as she could. My sister softly began to cry in the back seat, which made me start to cry as well, and my mom looked at her in the rear view mirror and then to me and said “We shouldn’t have gone there. Please try and forget you saw that and PLEASE, do not tell Grandmama.” The next day at school, I looked for that girl in the lunch room, only to find her sitting by herself silently with the same crooked posture she had had holding the snake as she spoke to the crowd.

Years later, I asked my mom about that night, and after much convincing that I was old enough to hear the truth, she told me that the service we had seen was some sort of Pentecostal revival where the pastor promised the congregation that god would facilitate a miracle through him. She told me that she had been questioning her faith lately and needed to see something to make her believe. And that the unknown language was the “biblical gift” of speaking in tongues, a direct channel from heaven. I asked her why we left so quickly that night and she softly replied, “That wasn’t God.” After my own research in my adult years, I began to understand that what occurred was actually an invocation ritual, one that I’m unsure was fully understood by the ones who performed it. They believed that they were bringing Jesus Christ into the girl’s body, but the request for the snake and the sinister behavior of the girl led me to believe the portal opened was of demonic nature, not of heaven. And in that moment of invocation, no boundaries or wards were set to protect the girl. No closings were performed. They just waited for her to collapse under the sheer power of the almighty, only to perform the miracle again next Sunday at 8pm, leaving her portal permanently opened and her body permanently inhabited.

The necessity of closing portals after ritual is without a doubt one of the most important aspects of working with magic, small or large. The void is filled with many energies, mostly curious and harmless ones looking to assist, but if you dig deep enough, you will find creatures in the depths capable of distorting the human reality. Magic should always be thorough and after the duration of every spell and ritual, you should make an active effort and put as much energy into closing it out. This not only solidifies safety for you, the magician, but also that the ritual has been done in full and is complete, closing the portal.