The landscape of the Ozark Mountains has been a vital force in forming regional traditions of folk magic and healing. This work was already in progress, however, when hillfolk came to the Ozarks from another mountain home—Appalachia. To go even farther back, these mountain folk can trace their ancestry to highland areas of Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, and Scandinavia. As one of my favorite informants once told me, "Mountain people stick to their mountains." It's fascinating to see how cultures from a variety of mountainous areas around the world share in many of their folk traditions. It's almost as if the mountains themselves help to shape the culture of those living on ...
The tarot invites us to free our minds to the imprint of their meaning upon our lives at any point in time. There are a plethora of traditional, time-honored interpretations we can bring to our tarot practices. However, making tarot personal and intimate goes beyond standard interpretations. In order to take flight into the poetry of the tarot, we must entertain the myriad ways in which each card can be interpreted in collaboration with the other cards. It is essential to include our intuitive impulses, plus our own mental connecting prowess, not just book meanings. Surrendering ourselves into the vastness of the tarot requires building a relationship with it that is separate from ...
Eclipses have always been a favorite topic I cover when I'm analyzing a client's astrological chart. A minimum of four eclipses occur each year, two solar eclipses (New Moon) and two lunar eclipses (Full Moon). Sometimes as many as six eclipses take place. Their presence creates intense periods that often start to manifest a few months before the eclipses actually occur. Eclipses unfold in cycles involving all twelve signs of the zodiac and usually manifest in pairs about two weeks apart. In 2024, the first eclipse pair is a lunar eclipse in Libra on March 25 at 5°07' at 3:00 a.m. EDT, and in the opposite sign Aries on April 8, a solar eclipse at 19°24' at 2:21 p.m. EDT. The ...
In the world of dreams, anything can happen and probably will. They take us to landscapes in which we are powerfully creative, and there are seemingly no limits to our capacity to generate extraordinary realities within the dream state. They say that life is but a dream, and in some ways, we can approach our waking life as the dreamer of the dream, able to create as if out of magic. In fact, there are techniques available to people out there designed to teach individuals how to manifest the life that they desire. The notion is that you can have absolutely anything you want in life; you simply have to learn a technique or two, and the life of your dreams is there for the asking. But is ...