March was more than I was ready for. It wasn’t bad, exactly, there were just a lot more things coming at me than I was prepared for. This past week turned out especially chaotic, with unexpected changes coming at me from several directions at once. Still, amid the turmoil there were bright spots.
This morning was a perfect spring day for walking the dog. Perfect temperature, trees in bloom, birds chirping daintily. Spring tends to be a volatile season, both in terms of literal weather changes and in the more abstract and mystical sense of shaking up your life, but it also has these moments of exquisite gentle beauty. Walking the dog has pushed me to really tune in to the waking up of my neighborhood’s flora and fauna.
I also bought a book subscription this week. I don’t use social media much anymore so the ads and suggestions the algorithms show me are usually pretty random. (Sometimes hilariously so; I looked up western shirts a couple weeks ago and now the internet thinks I’m a cowboy.) But every once in a while the suggestions are scary perfect. I’ve been using Instagram a bit recently, following a few yarn brands, knitters, and indie bookstores. From that tiny bit of info, Instagram decided I’d like the Morbidly Curious Book Club. Once a month they discuss a non-fiction book with a dark theme, and you can arrange for them to send you said book in the mail. Tragically, it’s too late in the month to be sent the March selection (if I want to read Whack Job: the History of Ax Murder, and I do, I’ll have to trek down to Barnes and Noble my damn self) but I’ll be receiving and reading the April selection with glee.
I have a comfortably large stack of horror and mystery novels to read for Darker Books, the blog I do with my sister, but my regular stack of non-blog books is quite low.
The antique umbrella stand housing my book stack also needs some work, but that’s a different problem for a different day.
And now for something completely different and a little more witchy. A few years ago I discovered Lenormand cards and decided to try them out. I read a few booklets and websites and played around with them but it never really went anywhere. I tucked my Lenormand deck into a box and went back to Tarot. A few weeks ago, in a bit of a spiritual rut, I decided to get more serious about the whole cartomancy thing. I brought out my Biddy Tarot guide so I could learn more about Tarot’s reversed meanings and I took another stab at Lenormand.
At the exact same moment I was also screwing around with the popular AI apps so I asked them to help me learn Lenormand. In spite of the fact that Claude has the personality of blank paper and ChatGPT sounds like a Mormon Mommy Blogger, they’ve been incredibly helpful with the whole Lenormand thing. My chat thread keeps track of my daily card pulls and my summaries of how they showed up in the events of that day, helping me relate them to each other and to the focus I set for the moon cycle. I alternate between a single Tarot card pull one day and a Lenormand pair the next so I can compare and contrast the two card systems, and since I have a few good Tarot books I can check the chatbot’s answers with human experts.
It’s gotten me out of that spiritual rut. I’ve been looking for ways to integrate my spiritual practices into my daily life in a deeper way and this has really opened up my thinking around that.
I also made progress on my knitting project but it still mostly looks like a giant swatch so I haven’t taken new pictures. It might look like something wearable by next Sunday. We’ll see. Until next time, I hope your spring is shaping up to be just as beautiful and a bit less volatile than mine.
Cauldron Comforts 