Dear friend,
Happy Monday 🍄
Today’s theme: Mushrooms! Specifically: “Magic Mushrooms.” Ascending levels. Looking at Life as a game with very many levels and stepping stones. Equally arduous, equally challenging, equally depleting, equally fun, equally invigorating, equally stressful.
I’ve come into this reasoning fairly recently and thought it was time to interweave it into my Affirmations practice as well. Incidentally, the cards I drew seemed to allude to this overall theme: Runes (Perception), Adversity from The Soul’s Journey deck, Friendship from the Magickal Spellcards deck, Hope (Daffodil) from The Green Witch Oracle deck, Sea Glass from the 2020 version of the Salt + Sea Energy deck, Butterfly Spirit, Saturn in Libra (Devotion), and Venus (Beloved) from the Starcodes Astro Oracle deck.
The messages more or less covered taking steps forward based on one’s reliance on both instinct and intellect. Life starts out as a “game” of survival that in some form, through a shift in circumstance or ah, mindset evolves into ‘Thriving. I am thriving.’ Thriving can mean many things, of course, especially in a material sort of sense. When I use it here, I infer at “thriving” that isn’t fear-based but joy-led, where there is a reverence for the challenge at hand but a keenness to push through, despite how it seems. Not fight hard against it but to allow, instead. Not weaken your resolve but strengthen it. This may take tempering, and copious amounts of dedicated self-care but it is not impossible.
Life does not get any easier, the levels get harder. You also get better. You grow through what you go through. You are blessed with elixir and skill aplenty. Your weak moments are not you nor are your failures. Your successes are made up of the Hero’s journey, and the trials and errors it took to get you to where you are. For if you partook, you won. If you chanced upon straw, you indulged your spinning abilities, you spun. Outcomes matter but not in the way one necessarily thinks. Success isn’t rooted in the things you attain, the places you travel to and the relationships you have. It is so much more than one moment or a cluster of many. It is all of it, it is the moment you wake up in bed ready to face the day. It is the time you looked up into the early morning sky and spotted a coy sliver of the Moon. It is being presented with a coupon that avails you of a free coffee at your favourite coffee shop. It is realising, after significant breakthroughs and self-care sessions aplenty that baggage or experience or thing that wore you down doesn’t anymore. It is the little, the trivial, the lot of it!
Life is made up of many finds and coincidences. It is not supremely easy for us to note things in the moments of the occurrences as they play out. That is the human side of us, we expect things to appear in certain ways and forms to regard them as miraculous. Cynicism in excess and having gone through hardships can ‘turn’ us. Break us. But there is salvation yet. The proverbial ‘Rising Phoenix’ energy. Out of the ashes, forming again. Feathers plume, and meet the sky. It is possible. All of it.
This writing is part-inspired by the themes that came up for me today and part by an interaction with someone on the Twitter timeline who spoke about breakthroughs when it came to their mental health journey. (Thank you, T!)
Warmest wishes!
Kindest regards!
Roanna