Today’s deck is The Adventure Tarot.
This one is really good. It’s one of those scant but valuable ones where they’re commited to the aesthetic but don’t try to be too unique and make it unreadable.
Today’s reading talks about how being emotionally staggered due to responsability can get you stuck. Makes me think of all the times I keep things from my family just to not worry them too much.
Someone came to check the smoke alarms, so the doorbell woke me up. There’s days where I wonder if I can mute the damn thing, a thought that crosses my mind mainly after I wake up really annoyed.
Already up, I decided to pay the bill I couldn’t pay yesterday and thankfully I made it in time today.
I also got called by Paypay to ask for… shockingly scant info that gives me hope I’m actually getting at least one of the cards I set out to get. Especially because Rakuten sent me their Dear John email. Then again, I’m officially in the “90 days until expiration, renew your visa bozo” window of time.
So in short I got a visa rejected because of a visa.
Paypay did stop working on paypal today when I tried to renew some other fanbox subscriptions, but it works with the card number directly, so it’s probably a thing on paypal’s side.
I went out to get my prescription and while I’m doing all of this, I was finishing a short book about Shamanism, The Way of the Shaman by Michael Harner. I started it because I’m always curious about other belief systems and whatnot, there’s a different life where I would’ve…
…I was gonna say “where I would’ve studied anthropology instead of Graphic Design”, but I was barely able to even get into Graphic Design to begin with.
ANYWAY, this has to be one of the few times where something belief-related gave me the same deep “HUH…” feeling as learning about ADHD.
A couple of examples include the idea/phenomenon of a shared unseen world, a focus on singing tunes that come from inside of you and must remain private, asking for permission whenever you grab something from a tree like a leaf or a fruit…
Respective in that order, I’ve talked plenty before about my weird dream visits or how there’s places in my dreams that feel like recurrent locales, when I’m alone I tend to sing to myself non-specific tunes and I also then go quiet if I think someone heard me… hell, sometimes I wake up humming that sort of tune that isn’t really from any song I know.
The last one about asking for permission is extra insteresting to me because that was something that my grandpa, someone that wasn’t really a mystic by any stretch of the imagination, always insisted about doing that when he was around in the garden.
I’ve always loved plants, in fact when I was 10 I was convinced I wanted to be a botanist, so I usually grabbed leaves from the backyard, smelled them, when I was old enough to be allowed near the stove I boiled them a couple of times, and to this my grandpa would insist I ask the plants permission if I’m gonna pluck leaves, which didn’t make sense to me at the time, but oddly enough stuck with me ever since.
I’m not bold enough to say I have “high shamanic potential” or anything like that, the feeling is more an eerie (given the topic) sense of “oh, so this is more common than I thought”.
While the book does actually reference one of the aboriginal tribes of the country (the Waraos), learning about the topic made me realize just how… shamanic the place I grew up in was, and the country itself by extension honestly.
It also makes me think about how alien the idea of “magic realism” feels to me in the sense that it doesn’t really feel like anything special. I come from the sort of place where everyone comes from a town with a witch, where town squares are cursed to become labyrinths after midnight and where it’s a common turn of phrase to tell someone in a particularly long streak of bad luck to get some ramazos. Ramazos being the name of a ritual where a healer in town purifies you of whatever bad spirit is haunting you by hitting you lightly with branches with their foliage still on while chanting some prayers.
In that sort of environment, ideas like… Youkai for example feels less out there and less worthy of pointing attention to as a genre.
There’s one last bit related to this.
Behold this stick.
Really cool stick, I saw it when I was going to get groceries late at night and I was like “I need that scepter… if it’s still there when I get back I’ll grab it”.
And it was, and I did and I had the dumbest smile on my face on the way back. It looked like a wizard scepter, had great weight and balance, so I left it near my doorway and went to cook some food.
Then the book got to the part where it talked about the tools shamans use, objects that look ordinary in the real world but have other forms in the spiritual world, and how many of these are items that are either loaded with memories or call out to you.
Call out to you.
Like say… a stick that called out to you and gave you joy when you picked it up.
I literally turned off the stove went to stare at the cool stick now inside my house going “what the fuck” repeatedly inside my head for like 5 minutes.