I am looking forward to our Wild Women and Magic Retreat coming up in September.
It incorporates some of my favorite things: Wildness, Women, and Magic. I am especially pleased and honored to be adding another one of my favorite things, tarot.

Wild: As opposed to civilized. I believe we each come into this life with essence, a part of our soul that is inherently wild by nature. Part of our task in this human journey is to learn how to retain our wild essence while being shaped by our culture’s norms, to be able to live in alignment with our essence while functioning in the society we are born into.

Magic: I’m using the word “magic” to describe the inexplicable ways things or situations can work together that one could never imagine. I think of magic as similar to synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence.

Tarot: Tarot contains elements of magic, synchronicity, and wildness. Countless times, I or my clients are left speechless, or in tears, from the beauty of the story the cards tell and their perfect relevance to the situation. Tarot is a divination device, a way to communicate with the Divine, alive in the wild realms outside of our civilized norms. I use tarot as a mirror that can reflect the energies present in a situation and show us a road map to get us where we want to go. There are no positive or negative cards, only honest reflections that are pertinent for us in the particular time we have consulted them.

I will be using the cards to answer wisdom questions, to help guide our journey for this retreat as well as in the workshops I will be facilitating.

This morning I asked the cards “What do we need to know about the Wild Women and Magic Retreat?”. I chose the beautiful deck by Joanna Powell Colbert, The Gaian Tarot, in part because she created it while living on Lummi Island in the Puget Sound, the same bio-region as the Wild Women and Magic Retreat.

The Guardian of Water, Two of Fire, and Ten of Water showed up as our teachers.

This spread demonstrates Synchronicity and Magic speaking directly to us. Two Water element cards are holding the fire element between them. On the right is the Guardian of Water. She tells us we are safe to open our hearts as “she guards and nurtures the qualities of intense emotion, dreams, and healing. She guides us to cherish our dreams, follow our intuition, and listen to our hearts; she knows that our feelings can be trusted to guide us.* ”On the right is the Ten of Water which uses the metaphor of the life cycle of salmon, who makes a long, arduous journey home to spawn. It is a journey of descent and return. We are like salmon, returning home to drop the form that no longer serves us and leave a gift for those who follow.

This loving container formed of Water holds the juicy fire element depicted in the Two of Fire. We come face to face with ourselves in this retreat and will have the opportunity to choose to live in our passion, or turn our faces away. Either way, we are held in Love.

I look forward to dancing with you!

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*“Journey Through the Gaian Tarot” by Joanna Powell Colbert