Hearth & Horizon

Happies seem to be a distinctive colloquialism around here, at least to me. Maybe it's just a Southernism. I was raised in NWA (northwest Arkansas) and had never heard of the term until we moved to central Mississippi. They seem to just be small gifts or items given to make someone happy, it's pretty flexible in use. It can be something like giving a gift card or picking up a trinket that reminded you of someone.  While I've heard them used as physical items given as gifts, I'm going to put a twist on it for the sake of this post. I believe the closest term to what I'm thinking of is glimmers, popularized by Deb Dana's work with polyvagal theory and the nervous system. Since I'm not quite sure that my post will completely overlap the definition of glimmers, I've decided that happies will be the term I'm using. (I'm adding polyvagal theory to my never-ending list of rabbit holes to explore.)

I'm writing this to distract myself from the itch to buy "stuff". In my case, I'm fairly sure this is good ole American consumerism mixed in with neurodiversity and maybe some fantastical thinking.  I live in a house full of stuff. Stuff that I needed, stuff that I wanted, stuff that I thought was a good idea to buy for that possible need someday, stuff that I probably have no idea that I own stuffed in a box somewhere. Yet here I sit, staring at a cart page that beckons me to check out with a siren call unlike any other. And recently, I've been finding myself wanting to break free from its grips. Well, let me back up a bit. I say  that I want to be free of it. And rationally, that is the case. I have seen the effects of hoarding in the lives of loved ones and how it affects the people around them. I know that all sort of unmet needs, personality traits, or other issues can be transformed into a "buying this is gonna fix me" complex. I've read a book...

What does that even mean?   I, for one, do not know. It's such a subjective designation. However, if I polled 100 people, I'd bet that there would be some common threads. Perhaps it is someone that reads a lot of books. Okay, but what if they're all middling quality or all in the same genre?  Perhaps it is someone who has read all of the classics. What classics? Contemporary classics, historical classics? Fine, now we have to decide what makes a piece of literature worthy of being deemed a classic. Do we weigh the worth based on how well written it is, on how influential it was on literature or on the world, or something else entirely? While I was pondering what makes a "good" tarot reader and whether I counted as a reader or not, my mind wandered to other things that I'm considered "good" at to compare. Reading easily came to mind. I've been a voracious reader since I was a child; I recall several instances as a child where I had read everything...

As I said in my previous post, I am making the effort to reintegrate tarot as a practice in my daily life. I started today with an open mind, well, I tried to. For one, there's a level of feeling like I'm an imposter here. I don't believe that I actually count as a tarot reader. Whether that's realism or some nagging shadow whispering in my ear, I'm still not sure. I think that I see other practitioners out on the web and they seem like they just know  how things work. But, I have to ask myself. What makes someone who uses tarot a reader? Have they done readings for other people? Have they gathered a certain number of reference books or decks? Do they have a page where people purchase readings from them? There's a post from Substack that I think of right now. The author writes that sometimes we cling to motivational identities to comfort ourselves and forget to actually become what we are idealizing and daydreaming about.  Maybe you could be a great writer, but ...

Well, I might be overstating myself in the title. I have dabbled with tarot as a practice on and off for about a year and a half. And for about the last seven months, my deck has sat untouched. Despite that, I still tend to think of myself as a tarot reader, though "tarot learner" is probably more accurate. While I do tend to have a distracted streak, we have had an eventful year that left us in survival mode for the majority of it. From moving to a new house, bringing home a new puppy, handling family health scares, and just trying to keep an even keel amongst all the changes, we were more focused on getting through it than anything else. Now that things have finally settled down, it feels like we can take a breath and look around at the life that we've built and decide what we want to cultivate in it. Taking this newfound free time, I decided to break out my deck and sling a couple cards. This time, I used the "Back on Track" spread from Rose B Mystics, but ...