This Week’s Tarot Reading
MIND: King of Cups
BODY: Queen of Cups
SPIRIT: Justice
Whether you’re married, single, dating, or somewhere in-between, partnership is the name of the game this week. Who’s appeared in your dreams lately? What feelings have been surfacing? Even if it's love you’re still trying to manifest…energy of a divine union surrounds you. They’re an empathetic and intuitive individual, and see the same qualities reflected in you. It might feel like sitting, waiting, and wishing right now…but trust that something is building. Equilibrium will be reached soon.
*Note: Notice anything different? Right along with the time change, I made a last minute decision to change the deck I’m working with for our weekly reading (and photographed it on my bed rather than my desk). Moving forward, I’ll be rotating between several decks by different artists.
If you’d like to book a personalized Tarot reading, you can find my offerings here. 11% of every reading purchased is donated.
This Week’s Astrology
Sunday, March 13th: Sun + Neptune conjunction 22° Pisces
Friday, March 18th: Full Moon 27° Virgo @ 3:18 AM EST
It’s the final week of Pisces season, and the energy is primed for “aha” moments from the collective unconscious. Try to read between the lines this week, and note any synchronicities that make their way to you. Some things are reaching a boiling point, while others are only just ready to blossom. Never doubt that you’re in constant communication with the Universe.
If you’d like to book a personalized Astrology reading, you can find my offerings here. 11% of every reading purchased is donated.
My default setting has never been neutral.
I have more planets than I’d like to admit in the first house of my birth chart. I’m instinctual and intuitive with a general disregard for rules or the opinions of others. I follow my feelings…and that has served me for better or worse over the years.
More often than not, it means that I learn by DOING THINGS (I even gave in recently and bought the hat). And as one of my many impulsive tattoos represents, it’s a lifestyle that has most often felt like baptism by fire.
As of the past year, I stopped drinking alcohol, doing drugs, eating animals, and most recently, drinking coffee. That now makes me a sober, tea-drinking, vegetarian- a fact alone that makes me want to punch myself in the face, but I digress.
It’s Pisces season, and as of the day this lands in your inbox, there’s a Sun + Neptune conjunction. Everyone wants to be carried away right now. We want spirituality, we want imagination, we want FREEDOM. So how’s a freshly sober, tea-drinking, vegetarian supposed to get her kicks?
Well. As of the other day, the answer was apparently chugging a gigantic red bull then taking a “relaxing” shower in an attempt to slow down my palpitating heart…but instead just shaving with more vigor than a competitive swimmer preparing for the olympics.
Unfortunately, I learned there’s no gold medal for this level of neuroses.
What I think might actually be gold medal worthy (or at least gold star) is finally recognizing that while I’ve always been doing things…they haven’t always been things that were useful, and it’s important to be curious about why.
While not too long ago I was drinking red bull vodkas like they were water, I now catch the babiest of buzzes from my morning black tea with oat milk.
When I dared to go back down that red bull fueled path, maybe feeling a bit nostalgic, and definitely wanting to feel something fucked up adjacent, I concluded that I absolutely no longer desired the promised wiiiiiiiings I had previously.
With the Virgo Full Moon coming up this week, we’re all being confronted with the daily routines and habits that shape our reality. But it can be really difficult to recognize unhelpful patterns when you don’t have any perspective.
Right around the time of my red bull misadventure last week, I was (finally) finishing Amanda Montell’s phenomenal second book, “Cultish”.
Rather than talking about the famous cults most of us are familiar with, like Heaven’s Gate and Jonestown, the majority of the book is spent dissecting something much more insidious: our culture.
She talks about SoulCycle. She talks about Amazon. She talks about iNfLuEnCeRs. While putting on Nikes and committing suicide so you can get invited onto an exclusive spaceship seems…far out, buying something because a pretty girl on the Internet told you to feels…like reality.
I’ve been meditating on the book, and taking a microscope to why I do the things I do. As a creative, I love to tell myself that I’m the one dictating my choices (see intro) and roll my eyes at people who can’t seem to think for themselves.
But of course no one is immune to culture. Didn’t Andy Warhol teach us that?
Especially with how influence is baked into our sleek digital age, maybe we’re all compulsively acting a little (or a lot) insane…a little cultish.
But how do we recognize these behaviors, and reconcile them…when they’re so close we can’t even see them? Going down this rabbit hole has felt a lot like being a white person grappling with the reality of systemic racism and unconscious bias.
Maybe we won’t find the answer right away…but it must begin by being curious, and acknowledging that we’re all being influenced by something, even if it’s less obvious than a cult documentary would have us believe.
My conclusion to all of this is that it’s absolutely ok to get lost. Arguably, we can’t be found otherwise. But we can question how we arrived in the strange places we find ourselves, and maybe, instead of waiting for someone to rescue us (or living in an eternal fantasy) figure out how to rescue ourselves.
Going to Starbucks everyday doesn’t mean you're evil, nor does using jargon at your gym that outsiders wouldn’t understand. But asking yourself who is truly benefiting from your participation in these everyday rituals should be common practice.
If it’s truly YOU, and it stops there, it passes the cultish test. But what if it doesn’t?
Here’s to investigating our practices, and determining if they’re being used to fashion us a lighthouse…or just contributing to the fog.
Until next week’s magic,
Erin River Sunday