The liminal days between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve cascade like a spider strands in winter light. We inhabit a “thin place” as the wheel of the year revolves.
Aaron Oberon describes a thin place as places in which the boundary between our spirits and our bodies are thinner and easier to navigate, making spirit flight or conjuration easier. This comes from his exceptional book, “Southern Cunning: Folkloric Witchcraft and the American South.” Thin places are found naturally near streams, gardens and groves. We craft thin space when we open ritualistic sacred space, integrate intentional movement practice and cast tarot cards.
Between now and next week we naturally inhabit a dark wood of thin space where power is easily raised, tapped into and molded. In other words, the preferred state of mystics, tarot readers and witches.
What will you craft with your witching fingers?
What doors shall you unlatch in the haunted house of your soul?
More importantly, what doors are you ready to close?
The RWS Fool sets off from an alpine peak. The gesture marks the soul’s adventure, a new cycle, a shiny new year. Beginnings can’t happen without an ending.
Or can they?
One week from today, I’m boarding a jet bound for New Delhi on route to Mysore in the southern state of Karnataka, India. To touch down in the shadow of the Himalayas, within two day’s drive of Mt. Everest fills me with joy beyond words. Where have you felt the most at home in the whole wide world? For me, it was my 7 days in Tibet. My friend, Buddhist scholar Alex Gardner, says it is something about the altitude. Mountaintops are thin places.
I’ll move deep into tropical southern India to write and practice ashtanga yoga for 6 weeks. Hop on your broomstick and travel along with me. I’ll be posting daily photos and snippets of the adventure on Facebook and Instagram.
Feb 24 - 26th, I’m co-teaching “Awaken Inner Magic a Yoga and Tarot Weekend” at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in the frosty Ma.Berkshires with oracle deck creator, Alison DeNicola. It’s an incredible winter reset. You’ll awaken inner magic with a blend of somatic tarot, intention setting and intuitive cartomancy. I’ll be fresh back from India so it will be an especially deep and meaningful program.
“Ghost Stories by the Fire” returns with new dates, new cities and a new set of dedicated socials in 2023. We are pleased to welcome actor/director/icon Catherine Mary Stewart onto the Ghost Stories team as a co-director!
Fancy the idea of practicing witchcraft and conjure on a Mississippi river boat in steamy August? I’ll be teaching Shadow Work & Tarot at Hex Fest in New Orleans this summer. August may feel like a long way off but it’s never too early to plan a little southern cunning. See my website event page for all more information.
Lots of exciting stuuff to be announced in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Lastly, let’s peek at how the year 2023 reduces to a fairy tale’s favorite number, 7. 7 aligns with the 7 dwarfs, 7 visible planets and the Chariot card.
The RWS Chariot is a paradox. Movement is the card’s keyword yet the Chariot is placed in a gray cement block which can’t possibly travel anywhere. The charioteer’s lack of physical movement is precisely the point. The body needn’t physically go anywhere for the soul to take flight. Tarot doesn’t describe an outer journey. It reflects the inner landscape of the soul.
People often get caught up on what things look like on the exterior while failing to see beauty, truth and transcendence emulating through every molecule. Beneath surface level, everything is the same. We tarot readers know this. And the gift of the tarot reader is that we have become adept at seeing the secrets hiding in plain sight.
Even if that secret is us.
Here’s to thin places, secrets, mysteries.
Here’s to things that don’t make sense now but might someday.
Most of all, here’s a toast to magical you.
Love,
Sasha Graham
