Deep intrapersonal alchemy is a subject I do not take lightly. I spent over half my life battling my own trauma past and dysregulated nervous system using the Tarot as my sword and the planets as my compass. The battle ended when the surrender began; it started with offering a seat at the table to the rejected pieces of self that my survival instincts had cast aside in a failed attempt to adapt and endure. This embrace of shadow and embodiment of the full spectrum of self naturally came with an emergent relationship to the cosmos and with a power beyond my knowing, and certainly beyond my control. I have many therapists, kin, friends, elders, ancestors, animals, plants, fungi, and substances to thank for this attunement. 

My Tarot, herbalism, and astrology practices are all grounded in an intimacy with the realities of complex trauma, as well as the harmful paradigms we find ourselves presently surviving: extractive late-stage capitalism, climate grief, the present rise of fascism and exacerbation of white supremacy, the fractures of colonialism and artificial borders, and the gross marginalization of certain gender-based identities. My experience with these subjects is partly academic and partly based on my own enduring. I do not separate the personal from the political, and I do not see any occlusion of social justice frameworks from spiritual work as beneficial, to the self or to the collective. Beginning our internal work requires recognizing ourselves in an ecosystem, and working toward right relationship to all that is both more vast and more microscopic than us. Our very existence is founded on the principle of interconnectedness - a notion which we must continually engage with in order to persist as a species. This is the notion that lays the foundation for my work with the Tarot, with herbal medicine, and with the planets in motion.

It is bold work to dig deep and alchemize the self, and we do it with humility, silliness, complexity, adaptability, resilience, and bravery. We do it even when we don't want to, we do it because it is our birthright. To be human is to brush up against the divine and work to make each encounter more lasting than the next. In the words of my favorite poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, "Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."