Hello, dear ones -

I’ll keep this email as brief/ direct as possible because if you’re anything like me right now, you’re juggling a lot while also wishing you were hiding away in a cozy cottage with a fire where no one knows where you are.

Yesterday was the final full moon of the year. I felt called to spent time with water and hung out in a sauna (with cold plunge tubs) next to the ocean. Just what I needed.

Podcast

I also dropped an incredibly potent and important podcast episode. Tad Hargrave of Marketing for Hippies (originally on in episode 38) is back with his good friend Kâkîsimow Iskwêw of Meeting My Ancestors- a Metis cultural educator and activist. They’ve been teaming up to explore where the roots of an indigenous cultural memory of mother Europe remain stored, coded into traditional stories and fairy tales.

I jumped at the chance to have them both gather with me here to spiral around some of the big, important questions many of us who want to do something about the ugliness in the world today seem to be grappling with and wondering about. Questions like:

• What is culture? And if we’re ‘white’ or of European descent (particularly if we live in so-called ‘North America’), do we have ‘culture’?
• How are we defining indigenous - as an identity or something else?
• What does it mean that stories hold memory?
• How do we navigate the hunger, the thirst, the grief and shame which seem to be in so many of us these days as we reach for something meaningful and nourishing? And if we find some deeper roots, and they feel like their ‘ours’, how do we go about honoring them in a good way?

Since we recorded the conversation, I attended a three-hour online version of their spiral into Briar Rose and the story is still resonating within me and moving me in ways that aren’t ready to be articulated yet; but are inviting me into deeper relationship, into protocol, with the story itself and the living culture it’s carrying.

I’d love to hear how this conversation leaves you and if you’re feeling called, you can check out Tad and Kakisimow Iskwew team-up events here: https://meetingmyancestors.com/briar-rose/.

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Offers:

​Insight 2025 - Tarot for the Year Ahead is back and officially open for purchase.

When we’re burned out, we feel both empty and overfull (usually of demands, expectations, and the needs of others).

When we feel disconnected from our purpose, we feel like we could float away, like we’re spinning around with a blindfold on and no sense of orientation. We start grasping after things to tether us and give us direction.

In both cases, whether consciously or not, we are out of alignment with our personal power, and out of rhythm with aliveness as it wants to move through us.

We become desperate to come home again to ourselves; to see, hear, know ourselves. We long for mirroring.

Yet this is the moment when, if we aren’t careful, the mirroring we’re seeking expresses itself as a desire for answers and we end up getting more personal powerlessness and projection, opinion, control from the person we’ve reached out to.

These tarot readings is developed with the idea of offering mirroring while giving your power back to you.

Together, we’ll use the cards to:

• orient you when you aren’t sure what’s next;
• challenge and affirm your sense of the ebbs and flows of your life;
• support your discernment in where and how you’re directing and using your energy;
• and restore a sense of nourishing wonder, meaning, and magic in your day-to-day.

I offer these readings at this time of year as a way to navigate the pressure/desire to honor the New Years threshold and look ahead to the growth and challenges of a next turn around the sun. Rather than adding more goals and external pressures and motivations, rather than jumping too far to a potential future outcome and trying to work backwards from there; the cards can help you tap into internal desires and prompts, dreaming from the bridge between your body and soul.

Available for purchase until Jan 16, 2025 - there are a few options to choose from. You can find out more here.

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And next week, I’m offering a free online gathering: Winter Solstice in the Roundhouse.

If burnout is, a least in part, the result of being out of rhythm with Aliveness; then looking to how our longer ago ancestors might have honored and aligned themselves with the important turning points of the natural year could offer an antidote… and the deeper nourishment so many of us find ourselves hungry for.

Join us around the virtual fire, in our virtual roundhouse, for an experiential exploration and re-imagining of how our longer ago ancestors would have gathered for ceremony and story; as a way to keep themselves human, whole, connected, and alive at this time of longest night and the return of the sun.

(** please note: this re-imagining will focus on European ancestors, and even more specifically those from what we now call the British or Northern Isles, but any who feel the call to join are welcome)

Find out more and save your spot here.

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Wherever winter finds you, however you're marking this time and season, may you feel the blessing of the elemental, dark grandmother as she wraps you in the warmth of her heart and hearth.

with Love,

Kate