Intro: The Inconvenient Priestess

Every day, more or less (when I can remember to do so and my morning schedule hasn't been reduced to "only five minutes left, what's more important, coffee or shoes?"), I draw a single card from my trusty Thoth deck with the question: "What should I focus on today?" On an average day, this elicits either a "Well, duh, Crowley!" (8 of Wands on a day when I know I won't even have 5 free minutes to eat a Pop Tart) or a "Fuck you, too!" (anything in Swords.)

Lately, though, my deck seems to be evolving, or to have taken the position that I should be.  My card of the day, more often than not, issues a challenge, a call to focus on something that can't possibly be consistent with the day that I have planned. 3 of Disks when all I can think of is lounging about in bed, the Princess of Wands when my to-do list is filled with tedious and mundane things, or the Priestess on Christmas Eve.

What is wrong, you might wonder, with the Priestess on Christmas Eve?  She's a fine lady! She intuits the source. She perceives the underneath. She exists in quiet understanding! How dare you malign the Priestesss?!

(You're quite defensive, gentle reader.)

There is nothing at all wrong with our lovely friend the Priestess.  She is wise and powerful and patient.  She is, in fact, one of my very favorite cards. I am all about the diving down into the depths of deepness. It's kind of my shit, my thing that I do. If I'd planned to spend December 24th in quiet contemplation of, well, anything, the Priestess would have been a perfect card.

Instead, my darlings, I needed to get my ass to the bank. And finish shopping. And wrap gifts. And work my second job. And spend the evening at my parents' house doing last minute decorating and prepping a slow-roasted pastured heritage turkey and I was running on hardly any sleep at all and getting over/getting deeper into a sinus infection/bronchitis of doom.

It was not a Priestess day.

So I sat in the morning with my Priestess and my coffee and my almost four hours of sleep and my Dayquil and I did the unthinkable: I wasted some time. I did some reading and some thinking and some meditation. I revisited Deborah Castellano's call to action, and a conversation I'd had with a dear friend about such.  (In which he said, "This is awesome." And I said, "Yes, awesome and exactly what I need and terrifying and I am not sure I'm up for it.")

And, also, I didn't have a blog. Not one appropriate to the task. I'd thought about starting one, had even been encouraged by that same dear friend to do so, but...*insert excuses.* I am sure you're familiar with the excuses. They are the same ones we all use to avoid the important work of ruthlessly reserving chunks of time for our respective devotional practices. They are the voices that tell us that our spirituality is a luxury, or that our health is second to our obligations, or that we can only care for ourselves once everyone else has been attended to.

(Aw, shit, is this going to be one of those fluffy-smushy self-love blogs? Sometimes, yes.)

But underneath those excuses, beyond the realm of my own "Invisible Inner Terrible Someone," was a quiet, simple voice. The voice of the Priestess. The voice that said, "The time is now. You need to do this. You have spent enough time exploring the excuses that excuse you from your responsibility to yourself. It is time to stop sitting around wondering when, and if, your life might turn into something, or you might turn into someone. It is time to make it happen."

So I am a little late to the New Year, New You thing.  (For what it's worth, I was born late and just never got caught up.)  But here I am, declaring my intention to work this process, to make it happen, to do the doings that need to be done.