Hi community, it’s been a minute… I’ve had a very busy summer at the market. As often happens over the years, I’ve heard comments, received a bit of side-eye, and I have thoughts in the aftermath.
What I do isn’t exactly mainstream, I admit. Doing card readings and astrology is the very definition of woo to those who don’t understand what it is. Complicate that with the many practitioners who love to play up the woo and act like they are elevated all-knowing seers who know everything about you, who promise to guide you through the maze of occult visionary knowledge that only they can navigate, and it’s understandable why I am so often side-eyed.
But here’s the thing. When I do a reading it isn’t about me. I am not a psychic. I don’t read people’s minds, auras, pasts or futures. I am barely able to read facial expressions in fact, and it’s taken many years to puzzle those out.
I look at the pictures and symbols, and I find a story that weaves them together and makes sense of them. The pictures on the cards, the symbols on the chart tell a lucid and meaningful story. My skill lies in translating that story into words that make sense to you.
It’s a process similar to the one behind the creation of a song, or a novel, or a theatre piece. I do it because it is fun, I love it. It is incredibly rewarding to witness and experience the connection that the story makes with my audience of one.
I’ve come to believe that the universe and everything in it is composed of intelligence and meaning, just as much as it is matter and energy. I have learned to engage with that intelligence, to tease out meaning and to translate the story. The magic is not in me. It’s in everything. Everything is alive, in us, around us, above and below us. It’s a living, breathing, interactive universe.
I don’t see myself as a fortuneteller. I find the label off-putting. I don’t tell fortunes. I tell stories. I am a storyteller. It’s not my doing that the stories turn out to be true. I can’t take credit for that. I am tapping into a rich vein that has been mined by creatives, mystics and intellectuals since we first began noticing the stars overhead and seeing the living stories that play out among them and noticing the connection to our human relationships and experiences.
My point is, I won’t read your mind. I don’t know anything about how to find a missing person, or how to speak to your spirit guides, though I could probably make something up and who knows, maybe it would turn out to be true.
What I offer is validation. The one thing nearly every one of my clients says, in one form or another, is, “There are no surprises here. I already knew this.” That is the most surprising thing. We do already know what we need to know. But we don’t know that we know it. We have been trained out of trusting our own sense of the world.
But the world is available, right there, in the random fall of the cards, in the vast ponderous movements of the planets, talking to us, validating what we know about ourselves and our choices. It never fails to astonish me. I do what I do because I love the sense of awe, of meaning, of profound connection to something vast, strange and deeply personal, that cares, that speaks intimately to each soul that quests.
It’s something that society tries hard to train us out of. But reality is alive, talking to us all the time, and it won’t go away just because we don’t believe in it. I love reading for skeptics; they are the most fun. They walk away puzzled, unchanged for the most part, saying variations of, “I don’t believe in this stuff, but that was exactly right.” And perhaps some of them are given food for thought, enough to open up a crack to wonder, even awe.
Reality is strange, and extremely responsive to consciousness. I believe that what I do is, yes, weird, because the nature of existence is weird. Or maybe it only seems weird because we are trained to believe in some sort of linear, mechanistic illusion of ‘normal’ that has no connection to reality.
I find this deeply comforting.
That’s what I think. What do you think? Email me at phoenixonhornby@gmail.com
