Deer Sweet One.
How are your feels? Is sleep bringing you much needed respite Are these big changes moving things about inside of you, too? I don’t know what last week was about, but it was hard. & I totally meant to have this out sooner, but I ended up working extra hours, had to figure out how to extra navigate getting Panda Pie to & from school, had a breakdown/break through in therapy, was thoroughly exhausted by feeling all the feelings, on a whim packed up Panda & myself & visited the river & had burgers, ran into a friend while waiting for the el, & made the call to do things on the equinox rather than write about things. I went on my second house call here in Philly, got to visit a new part of the city, & sat down to read & channel some tarot. It was lovely, I gotta tell you. There was laughter & tears & stories galore! & then I came home & dressed some candles & ate a delicious dinner my roommate cooked. It was a full day, & I was exhausted in that surrender kinda way. & then Panda Pie got sick & I went grocery shopping yesterday & spent the rest of my daylight hours applying for a fellowship. OMG. The Feels. I’ve been thinking on that application for almost a month, & the whole time it was a battle of wills! “You can’t do this! You’re work isn’t worthy of such funding!” vs. “You are valuable! You get to ask for support! Even if we don’t get it, good things can happen!” With one minute to spare, the latter won out. Once I hit send, I was overcome with a feeling akin to grief, which is not what I was expecting. My roommate said I looked like I had just witnessed a car crash, which, yeah, I kinda did. All those nay saying voices in my head just shut the fuck up. Even if my application betrayed my newness to such things, or maybe it just wasn’t up to standard, I did it. & I will do it again. Friends, I have entered a new era or being alive & calling good shit into my life. I hope this explanation, these words, make sense in some kinda way.
I woke up this morning, after another night of really intense dreams, & felt like all the pieces I had been waiting for finally settled, put Portishead on repeat, & set to writing. The spread brought to you today is a little different, but just a little. We have Three of Bottles in the position of What to Shed, Seven of Bottles in the position of What to Sit With, & Three of Feathers in the Position of What to Grow. & then we have Orange Calcite, on top, giving their love to everything everywhere!
I hope, too, that these words bring you healing & clarity. Thank you to everyone who writes me to share how this work is being woven into their lives, it means so much to me. As do your donations. Please consider offering a few dollars my way, or even scheduling a reading, because my day job is off this week for spring break, & that’s a whole quarter of my income right before rent is due. For more info on my rates & specials for this week, you can find them here. Sending all my heart woo! xo Lettie
I’d really love to receive $100 for my creative efforts & healing channeling today in the form of this post. These babies take over 10 hours, so really that's $10/hr, & I bet 10 of you lovelies can muster $10. Please support femme labor, your energy exchange of $1-$50 makes all the difference! My Paypal is [email protected]. Your donations do things like help me buy food & pay for transportation, so thank you so much!
What to Shed: The Not Eough
Scarcity makes you believe that it will never be that good again, or that sweet thing that happened can never be replicated, or things are good enough so why want for more. Three comes right before four, four is representative of stability, & although three can be enough, it is not the resting place for you.
Three of Bottles is about the joy of chosen family, the ones who celebrate with you & the ones who hold you when you need some grounding. I don’t think this card is saying to let go of your beloveds, per se, but more of a prompting to add more to the mix! This past week I got to meet my Trauma Brain face to face, & although it was difficult, it was enlightening. I was not aware of how much my trauma informs my expectations for my life, & that I am overworking myself to predict what harm might be coming down the line. Trauma Brain can also work against me, convincing me to squash new begnnings before any kind of seed has had a chance to sprout. Like, my Trauma Brain is like, “Oh, you planted a new seed? Lemme see…yup, just what I thought. It’s not working, it’s not gonna grow. Take it out. We gotta conserve our energies for shit that’s gonna grow.” & like, yeah, my Trauma Brain has kept me alive, & for that I am so grateful, but we have worked SO HARD to make & remake a new life, & I gotta trust that I can do things differently now. All this is to say, you can continue to grow your love, your chosen family, your friends, your community, your support. There’s a lot of excited YES’s happening right now. What to Sit With: The Unknown
Seven of Bottles shows you that there is something you are not aware of, & that you carry the key piece to understanding a situation within you. Whether that means that your intuition is key, that that seemingly random piece of info you have is key, or something rising up in you is the key.
One thing that comes strongly to mind is diving deep into yourself, destination your shame. It’s not as hurty as when you quarantined that area off from the rest of you, the healing you’ve been doing in other parts of your life have also made it’s way here. The way you understood your experience before needs to be revisited because you have changed, & you can explore this place with a new heart. Maybe even a stronger one. Maybe, compassion is the missing piece for your puzzle. Trauma Brain can distort shit, & perhaps the way you understood things before was because Trauma Brain was translating. I don’t think this is like you were lyng to yourself, but important nuances were lost in the scuffle of it all. & that’s what shame does, it takes whole gulps of we are with no reverence of what we were willing to part with, whole gulps of body & heart & reason. If you can, if it feels like the thing to do, dive back into those caverns you were too afraid to explore before & take back your body, your heart, your peace of mind. My bed is that the shame is like the monster under the bed, disappearing once the lights come on, once the sun comes out. You get to heal this place, too. What to Grow: The Heart What the Heart Wants
There’s a Mary Oliver verse that I come back to again & again because it reminds me that I am ok, “You do not have to be god. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body loves what it loves.” That is what I feel like Three of Feathers is wanting you to know today.
Sometimes I feel unsure that this writing is doing anyone any good, or I begin to doubt that I’m getting these messages correctly because I’m always kinda harping on the same subjects: healing, wanting, gentleness, hunger, fulfillment. But then I remember how often this world tells us that we are wrong, that what we want is unattainable & we should probably just settle & get life over with, & that maybe my messages of follow your heart & “let the soft animal of your body loves what it loves” need to be said weekly, in as many ways as humanly possible. I want you to come again to the things that light you up, to the gifts that open you up, & to the love that fills you up. One of the goals of this card is to be able to directly channel your own heart, though not necessarily onto a page, but certainly into the book of your life. This is a skill that is hard earned because your mind, especially the Trauma Brain, is going to want to make sense of what it is your heart is communicating, & you’re gonna have to figure out how to calm your mind, & the Trauma Brain, while channeling. Maybe even some day we can retire Trauma Brain to a nice cabin in the woods where they can commune with nature & Spirit & rivers all day. Or maybe your Trauma Brain has always wanted to go to space, & out there they can have the deepest convo ever with Pluto. Or maybe they will retire in something similar to what I call The House of Lettie’s. The House of Lettie’s is a magical place where only I reside. It is a house filled with all the selves of me—baby Lettie, child Lettie, tween Lettie with the too sad mom, I wanna die every day teenage Lettie, drunk & hurting Lettie, bewildered new mom Lettie—the list is long & beautiful. Anyways, whenever I uncover a new part of me that hurts a lot & feels like this world isn’t safe enough, I close my eyes & envision this house, knock on the door, & usher them inside. Ooops, I forgot to tell you about one other Lettie that’s important to differentiate from the others, my grandma Lettie is also there. She has a room with a rocking chair & when we go into that room, I am able to crawl onto her lap while she rocks me & sings & mostly I cry. There are other rooms, too. I have one where I can break anything, a room that has the brightest Milky Way (god, I love the Milky Way, especially when witnessed from the middle of deserts or mountains or plains.) & a stream to sit by, a room where cooking is always happening, a room for sleeping in the biggest, softest, most supportive bed, & this list, too, does go one. How did I get here on this topic? Where was I going with this…oh yeah! Do what you gotta do to “let the soft animal of your body loves what it loves,” & keep at it until you are able to gift yourself the compassion you were in need of. Hold on, we’ve got one more card to get to. Orange Calcite. Spring Theme: Orange Calcite
The theme for this Spring is Orange Calcite. Being the Equinox & such, I decided to draw a card from the Visions: crystal oracle deck (I love it, a lot.), & Orange Calcite showed up! Even though I am just now bringing it up, I have been consulting with it the whole time. I’m just gonna relay the info from the very informative booklet that comes with it because Jessika Fancy did such a beautiful job with this deck:
“Associated with the energies of the sun, it is here to bring you self-esteem, confidence and bursts of creative and exciting energies. If you have been feeling down in the dumps lately, focus on orange calcite to help you tap into your energy centers that fill you with pure joy and desire. Do activities that fulfill and nourish you, buy yourself some flowers, start that project you’ve been putting off or tell that person you’ve been crushing on that you like them. Take a positive risk; your insecurities and anxiety do not get to define you.”
Spring is here, babes! We officially made it through Winter, & whether or not you live somewhere where it snows, all of our days got shorter & nature led us (gently & not so gently at times) into the places within us that needed our attention. You did so good (though you certainly don't have to be) & I trust that you will continue to do your work to the best of your ability. Spring, sprang, sprung.
I'm so happy & excited that so many of you are sharing & reading the work I am creating! I'd also really like to receive some $$ if you got it! Know that $5 goes real far in my life.
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