January 14th, 2016

I've been doing some tarot work the last few days. After seeing some ideas floating around on the web, I decided to do a spread to look at each month of 2016. It was... a bit of a trip, I'll just say that. There's a video up on my YouTube page talking about my results a bit more if anyone's interested, but in the meantime, I'll just put down a few suggestions in case anyone else would like to give it a go.

For starters, I recommend you have a journal. If you already have a tarot journal, or a grimoire/BoS you write in regularly, that would work. Otherwise, I suggest either getting one, or if nothing else, writing down your results somewhere you won't lose them so you can refer back later. I plan to reference mine throughout this year.

Feel free to set up your reading however you would normally. I personally like to put out a reading cloth and a crystal, and then cast a Circle, but that's just me. You could burn incense, play some music, meditate first, or whatever else speaks to you.

I went with a pretty simple spread. I just asked, "What do I need to keep in mind for the month of ___ in 2016?", shuffled, and drew a card. I repeated this for each month, reshuffling every time, but you could also just shuffle once and put down 12 cards simultaneously.

From there, it's a pretty simple matter to interpret each card for every month, and figure out how your year is shaping up.

As an addendum, I will say that my reading threw out a lot of reversed cards. I know not everyone reads reversed meanings, but I do, and that to me was suggesting that there's still a lot of blocked energy in my field to deal with, so I did another reading today to figure out the causes.

Essentially, I drew one card to look at the overall problem, and then I drew one card for each reversed card I had in my original 2016 reading, to determine what was blocking my energy in those months.

Also, while I did this with tarot, this kind of a reading may actually be better suited to oracle cards, if those are something you use.

January 8th, 2016

Hello, friends, and happy New Year! Or, in Japanese, あけましておめでとうございます! I can't believe it's already 2016! I know for a lot of people, 2015 was a struggle, but we made it through, and here we are.

I certainly spent the year keeping busy. I read loads of new books, many of which I reviewed on this blog, performed in a play last spring, spent Litha in the Boundary Waters, had a grand time at Fairy Fest, and began working in earnest with a few patron deities. I also acquired many new crystals, and joined SIPA, the Pagan organization in my university's locale. I've started making some new friends, which was a pleasant surprise.

Here's to 2016 being an even better year! I've ordered a bunch of new books which hopefully I should have by the end of the month (topics include dragons, moon magick, and solar goddesses), and now that we're past Yule, the days will start getting lighter, which always improves my mood. I am looking forward to sharing another cycle with my readers, and hope that all of you experience love and light.