Midweek Enchantments #6: Laying Down, Bibliomancy, & Wandering with the Hermit🧙
& Invitation to Today's Grief Studio
Midweek Enchantments is a weekly(ish) series/practice where I’ll share some writing about enchantment and one-several things I’m feeling enchanted by, with invitations for joining me in this practice.
Dear Shapeshifters,
Yesterday, when I heard news of the ceasefire, I forced myself to stop working. I cancelled my plans. I decided I would just lay down on the floor of my room, drink tea, and let myself feel, to buckle with the possibility of a break in the bombs, to collapse into visions of our Palestinian kin, and children in joyous roaring, even if there was no certainty of the permanency of this ceasefire. The news of a ceasefire cracked open some of the ways I’d been guarding myself over the last year and didn’t even know it.
Even though I made my mind up to just lay down and be with this moment, it took me about two hours to get myself to actually do it. I kept finding things to do around the house, people to respond to on my phone, tempted to scroll.
Once I made it to the floor of my room, laying down was both nourishing and incredibly challenging. Staying put and just being with myself was both what I needed and deeply uncomfortable.
It made me consider the Hermit’s invitation to actually be with ourselves and our love and grief for this world - and how counter that is to so much of life within late stage capitalism.
This invitation seems especially important in times when we feel bombarded with distractions, disoriented with mounting grief, overwhelmed at the tasks that lay ahead amidst just trying to function in our day to day. In this orientation, we are pushed to rush through the world, rather than just being here.
Perhaps the Hermit invites us to get present, reminding us that it is in slowing down, feeling, and allowing ourselves to just be, that our senses become more attuned to the aliveness, resource, and magic of the world around us.
Bibliomancy
This morning, instead of diving into admin and responding to emails, I opened a book and read for 30 minutes.
Since my dad’s death, I’ve had trouble reading longer form writing. As someone who grew up devouring books one after the other, losing the ability to get lost in a book has been a big heartbreak. So I treasure the moments when I find myself able to reach for the books on my shelves, to take them down and sit with them.
And when I can’t sit for long, I’ve turned to a different practice of reading that allows me to savor what words I can, and interrupts my longing for the past with enchantment for the present:
Bibliomancy.
I approach the bookshelves, my hands hovering over the spines of books like they are alive with desires and agency of their own. I listen for one that seems to want to jump out, and open them, flipping to a random page. I read the words as if they are full of magic and wisdom for this particular moment, a message. I play with the words, let the words play with me. I let them influence me and become ingredients in whatever it is I do next.
Today, I flipped to a random page in Michael Meade’s Why The World Doesn’t End and found myself in Chapter 7: Open Secrets.
Here are some snippets, as ingredients for our Grief Studio tonight, exploring the Hermit as a guide for disorienting times:
“Whereas the grand myths and epic sagas of civilization tend towards dramatic conclusions and apocalyptic endings, more humble folk myths and folktales tend to escape the grand finales in order to live another day… The folk of folklore tend to have little myths of how the world survives rather than grand dramas of how it all comes to an end…When the great civilizations lose their civility and collapse upon the historical heap, the folk continue along intuitively, instinctively making do with the remnants, loose ends, and leftovers that remain when everything else falls apart…”
“When the storms of life rage all around us, the floods of change threaten to drown us, and even the gods begin to weep, the only safe haven may be the dream that brought us each to life to begin with… it becomes more important to follow a dream than to seek safety in some isolated corner of the earth. It becomes wiser to reconnect to the intuitive and instinctive realm, the way animals sense a storm coming and head for higher ground… Each person comes to this world with a meaningful dream that first formed in the otherworld, and it is that inner dream of life that is intended to become the vessel that allows us to align ourselves and navigate the rough waters… In the end each person must learn the language through which the unseen world speaks to them or else miss their star and become lost in the storms of the world and the flood of life.”
I wonder about the Hermit as the part of us that seeks to connect with “the dream that brought us each to life to begin with”, our capacity to “reconnect to the intuitive and instinctive realm” that allows us to find our way in disorienting and troubled times, “making do with the remnants, loose ends, and leftovers that remain when everything else falls apart” (Meade).
With love,
Mara June
PS If you’d like to join us for an exploration of the Hermit card, our January Grief Studio is today, January 16th, from 6-8pm eastern time. See details below!
If there’s one enchanting thing right now in your day or week, what is it? Tell us in the comments below🦋✨
Today’s Grief Studio
We’ll be exploring the medicine and wisdom of the Hermit card as the collective card for 2025, and how they might be a guide for staying with the trouble in disorienting times, and making art about it. ❤️🔥
The card of the year is calculated by adding up that years’ digits (2+0+2+5=9) and then seeing what card from the Major Arcana that number corresponds with - in our case, 9 is the number of the Hermit card.
The Hermit holds up a lantern before us as they lead us down the starlit path through the deep woods of 2025, and invites us to consider how we move in the dark.
Some of the questions we’ll be sitting with:
What messages might the Hermit card have for the collective in 2025?
How might the energy of the Hermit support us in staying with the trouble (turning towards one another and the world)? How might they be a powerful guide in disorienting times?
What does it feel like to embody the Hermit? How does the Hermit move through the world?
What connections do you see between the Hermit and grief?
What inspiration are you drawing from the Hermit for this year? What are the spiritual/magical practices that ground and sustain you through grief filled times?
These studios are for paid subscribers and are spaces to dialogue with, make, and share your own art and writing alongside other grievers. For $16-20 per month, you both support this publication and your creative practice too! You’ll also access monthly creative prompts and other paid posts!
What to bring:
🕯️🧙♀️Bring the Hermit card from your own tarot deck, or an image or item that reminds you of the Hermit in some way.
🕯️💐Set the space: Please find a comfortable, quiet place for our meeting. Set this space for yourself in any way that feels most supportive for you, whether bringing in pillows, candles, flowers, photos of any of your beloved dead, drawing a tarot card, creating an altar of some kind, bringing in scents and textures you enjoy, or simply making sure you have a spacious and comfortable space.
🍉🫖Bring nourishment: Please bring water, tea, any beverages, fruits, or snacks you'd like to bring for our time together.
🎨📒Bring art supplies, a pen and paper or something to write with, or if there is a more pleasurable or accessible form of reflection you like to do, bring materials for that…Markers, colored pencils, paints, collaging supplies, your phone to record voice memos... There will be time set aside to free-write/create/reflect using whichever mediums work best for you.
🧚♀️🌊Disrupt perfectionism and come as you are. You do not need to be "on" in order to show up to this space. Let however you're arriving be enough.
Structure for Grief Studios*:
Welcome & Grounding
Small group discussion around a particular theme, tarot card, plant, or text related to grief
Intention Setting for your creative practice
Creative Exploration/Studio time: Undirected, parallel play/creative exploration using whatever mediums/materials you feel called to, with the understanding that all of life can be lived as art, and that our artmaking gets to be a practice of attunement to ourselves and the world around us. Studio time can include anything from painting, collaging, dusting off your apothecary shelves, making tea, making music, rearranging your room, casting a spell, cooking a meal, or simply laying down and allowing yourself to rest as a creative practice…
Reflection: Set aside time to free-write/reflect on your creative process, and witness and dialogue with your own art/creative process as if it were animate and speaking to you.
Witnessing one another: Time to share our art and reflections with one another, without the intentions to critique or comment. Here we are simply in the magic of witness - hearing ourselves speak aloud that which arose in witness writing, feeling ourselves be heard and received by one another.
Sessions (not including break out rooms!) will be recorded for those unable to make them live ✨
*This structure is adapted from the lineage of the Jewish Studio Process, whose two year Creative Facilitator Training Fellowship I am currently in and deeply grateful for!