Create a journey card reading now

Think of a situation that is confounding you; whose possible paths of choice and action are tangled and difficult to see. Perhaps it is occurring to you as you read this. Here is the card you have drawn for your journey to the Oracle about this situation. The card’s orientation has come up the way it needs to. See first the card phrase—then look deeply into the card image. This image shows you how to understand this phrase. Describe what you see in the card image using simple language. Describe images, colors, shapes, and also what you feel and associate with them. Now see your situation in this description, and apply the phrase to the story you are telling yourself about your situation. How is this image, and phrase, an answer to your question?

Deepen your understanding of your revelation by noticing the color of the card’s rim. This shows the card is part of the Wiccan wheel of the year suit in the Journey Oracle divination deck, so one or more of the following themes are a major influence in your situation: hope, light, perspective, time. This card represents the seasonal energy of Samhain, or Hallowe'en, on October 31. What feelings or associations do you have with this time of the year? How do these additional layers extend the meaning of the insight you have received about your situation?

Find life purpose

Recently a friend said decisions were flowing well for her; a new career possibility was in view, and lots of good energy was surrounding it. I wondered if these subtle energy cues are the way we find life purpose. I asked the Oracle about how to best find life purpose and this card of the Moon from the Journey Oracle deck came forward. This is one of the divination cards for self-knowledge in the Journey suit, named for our life's journey to access our own deep wisdom.

I see plant forms flowing upward from purple depths towards soft yellow. I am aware that these two hues are color opposites: the two primaries of red and blue that mix to make purple do not use the third primary of yellow. Therefore when our eye sees one of the set, it yearns for the color not used. Our eye wants this color complement to be present; it wants what is whole to be visible. We yearn for our life purpose to be visible, in order to feel whole.

Intense blue flowers grow from twiggy stems, or perhaps these are already gone from the life force; their papery edges seem without vitality. The upward rushing color is hatched on either side with ragged black, as if a web has given way in the force of this movement.

Finding life purpose is a balancing of opposites. Even though the Journey Oracle art images are complex and many-layered, it seems that the insights from reading oracle cards are often quick and simple. When I look carefully at the card image, and read again what I have chosen to describe, these questions come into the hollow space made by my seeking. Am I making space for what is whole? Is there something in my present life purpose,that once had vitality, now feeling lifeless? Has a new energy force broken through, reaching now for a new light?

A Journey in Strange Territory #2

This continues the story of the second blue marble and of my journey into the strange territory of the Mayan calendar. It took me four months to go receive what I knew to be a second Sastun. Fear of future grief mixing with present elation created a swirl of shifting feelings. “What color? What size? What do I do? What do I know?” When finally I held the gossamer pouch within which the Sastun nested in copal, I saw with amazement that although it was countries and years away from the first one, this marble was the same size and color, with little twinkles of turquoise light moving on its surface.

During the time of the first blue marble, I began receiving songs in sounds that had no apparent connection to human language, yet had their own internal logic and order. This receiving happened very slowly, and I treated their remembering more like a game than a lesson. A psychic mentioned a most important object I had; something with a blue cover. This was the little notebook where I wrote down this vocabulary, and so I gave this study priority.

I struggled to accept the Sastun teaching me, and to stop believing I was in charge. I spent six years of thinking I had been shown a clue, following its scent with hopeful action, only to find the surface of the marble growing dim and vacant before my efforts. Something liquid, a candle nearby, songs of greeting, the strange language, different systems for ‘reading’ the lights: all shifted and transformed, became deleted and reconnected. A few clients would indicate an interest in a session, and I would enthusiastically gallop in my most current direction, believing their request was confirmation of right action, only to discover patterns of light that didn’t fit my system, and messages I couldn’t translate.

The juxtaposition of a children’s book and writings about time in Mayan reality created a breakthrough. In The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman, Lyra understood images on the compass rim by seeing a three dimensional ladder of possibilities from which she was able to intuitively select the correct meanings. At the same time I was studying the Mayan deities of the days, months, years, and other time measurements, because of this Sastun’s origin in Guatemala. I came to understand that every moment is a manifestation of forces, however favorable or adverse, that are always divine. Are the lights the arrivals and departures of divine forces within the many kinds of time that govern all existence? Is the Sastun a three-dimensional world of Time? Is recognizing the gods of day and night in a situation a way of describing the forces moving within that situation?

Another doorway opened when I discovered a Mayan poem in Shaking the Pumpkin, edited by Jerome Rothenberg, in which a man describes going to a wizard who reads a Saastun before giving advice. Now I understand that the liquid is liquor given with the candle as payment; the strange language is my gift of effort to the gods who move in five kinds of time, and that the lights are, at least, the faces and locations of these gods, and certainly much more. As I continue to investigate I am beginning to ask, “Why is this coming to me?” Probably not to satisfy my ego that likes to imagine lines of clients holding pints of whisky and candles. Maybe so I can share that the simplest of things—a blue marble—is awake. And perhaps it is we who are not.

A Journey in Strange Territory #1

Sometimes when we think we are going to visit one thing, something entirely other appears. Ten years ago I received a call from a friend with a strange story. She had gone to Mexico to witness a ceremony, and had taken one of my rattles to carry in her pocket for well-being. Many dramatic things happened, and on the morning of her last day in the mountains she was walking along a stream when she heard in her head, “take that to Kristen.” She saw a piece of cotton thread twined into the brush, and in a little natural cup of muddy water—a small blue marble. “How odd,” she thought, but dutifully put the two in her pocket. What became of the string is another story; this is the story of the blue marble.

I received these gifts with a great sense of portent. This friend is deeply psychic and when her guidance says something, I listen carefully. She mentioned the water, and suggested perhaps the marble wanted to live in something made of clay, perhaps in water. I filled a small earthenware jar with rainwater and plunked in the marble.

A short time later, at a drum-making workshop, a participant brought me the gift of a book titled Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer by Rosita Arvigo. I was distracted by the work at hand, and put the book down on a table, from which it fell, opening to a photograph of two beautifully ancient hands: one holding a small clay jar and the other holding a marble. Every part of this world became quiet as if holding its breath to honor my revelation. I understood my friend had brought me a Sastun.

I read this book many, many times. On Friday nights I would swirl the marble in its jar, while singing and saying my prayer to Mother Mary nine times. I would then look at its surface where indeed I would see turquoise lights—sometimes moving boldly and sometimes flickering. But what did they mean? Never did I miss a Friday, even though I did not know for whom I was showing up.

I took the marble in its jar, tucked inside a sage filled pack, with me everywhere. While driving in the States one morning I saw a dog try and jump from the back of a truck, and then a hawk flew dramatically at the windscreen of my pickup. I turned back to watch the bird and saw that the lid had flown from the storage box. Upon stopping my worst dream came true: the pack containing the Sastun was missing; it was the only thing missing. Of course the hours spent looking turned up the shattered lid but not the little stone jar with a blue marble inside. I have never grieved a loss so deeply. I cried for what seemed like forever. I tormented myself with blame that if only I had been more careful, more disciplined, or more something—it would not have gone. Four years later I came to some peace by understanding that I did not make the Sastun come, so why did I think that I had made it go? And then I received an email from my friend who was traveling in Guatemala. “In Tikal…another marble.” was all it said.

Making a bead

April marks the time when my heart turns to the desert, and I remember the four years I spent as a student of Martin Prechtel in New Mexico at his school of never-before-seen things. My experiences were intense and life-changing, and one of my deepest learnings was about making a bead. In this story of the Elder tree month card from the Journey Oracle deck, the butterflies are all of nature; the Holy who yearn for us to feed them the beauty made by our hands and voices.

There was a child who so loved butterflies that she wanted to make them a gift. She felt communication without words when she was near one, like a coming into power. Her mother suggested she make a bead to give and that in doing so she would discover the secret of something, a knowledge that cannot be out there, and this knowing would be the gift that the butterflies would most like to have from her.

“But what material shall I use? I don’t want to be a death bringer to wood or bone,” the girl said. “I’ll use an empty shell,” she thought. “This will be no harsh look at reality because the creature will have already left.” And so the girl found a shell and chipped and sanded it with a rock until a circular shape appeared. “But now the fairy tale’s over,” she realized, “now I must be doing the work to make the hole.”

The girl looked for shards amid a scattered focus of rock rubble, like seeing horns of stone that would be able to pierce without breaking the shell. She began twirling a sharp piece into the center of the shell circle, and felt her inner tension clearing, like she was going to a new place in how she used her hands. This twirling took a long time; the layers of shell were like hard news that does not want to be forgotten. Yet finally the girl felt a little tickle against her finger, the way butterfly feet tickle when one was walking on her hand. A hole appeared!

“This is the secret my Mother told me about,” she exclaimed. “A bead is not something that surrounds a hole; a bead is the hole with something surrounding it so it can still be seen. I am giving the butterflies something invisible.” Then the girl looked at her sore fingers, dented from all the twirling. “Maybe this is the knowledge from making a bead that cannot be out there—that the butterflies want the gift of my effort, more than the thing my effort makes.”