Follow the Torch
Wherein I condense all my work down to one sentence
Inside: what to do if you’re feeling lost or uncertain. Plus, info on Hekate Phosphorus — read on to find out who she is!
Many of you know that I’ve been going through a dark night of the soul recently. Now that I see the soft light humming along the horizon, I want to share what brought the dawn for me.
My dark night came because I’d felt my old ways of making work were no longer resonant for me.
Between the Worlds, my podcast, has been going for almost six years now, and we’re almost done with all the cards in the tarot deck. It’s time for a change.
Instagram, which I’d worked hard for years to build a follower base of over 50k+ had been feeling like a drag for a while, but then after October 7th and the genocide in Palestine it just felt wrong to post in the same way I had been.
I still love to see my 1-1 clients, but even in that arena, I’d been feeling for a long while that I wanted to change the way my sessions went down. I just don’t believe in the oracular as an answer anymore.
The oracular is not an answer. It’s not even a question. The oracular is a creative act.
I needed to shift the way I talked about my work so that clients wouldn’t come in expecting me to give them the answer to their problems.
Instead, they needed to know that our time together was was a whisper into the well of the future, together we would conjure the future they wanted to co-create.
Anyway, for a long time I’d been longing for change. But since I wasn’t quite sure how to make that change happen in my own life, I just had to sit in the discomfort of uncertainty.
Eventually, my discomfort, my itchyness propelled me into the doctoral program at UCLA you’ve all been hearing me talk about for the past year or so.
But if you’ve reading me over the past year, you’ll know that my PhD program is a tremendous amount of labor, not particularly fun, or comfortable, and so you’ve been hearing me wonder…
“…what the fuck am I doing here???”
Well, witches, I figured it out. And, as always, the answer is Hekate. More precisely, the answer is Hekate’s torch.
Hekate Dadouchos (torch-bearer)
Hekate Kleidouchos (she who opens the doorways)
Hekate Phosphorus (she who brings the light)
If you put all my work, my podcast, my book, my public rituals, in a cauldron and boil it down until all that’s left is the Witch’s Stone, what you get is this…
…when you are lost, look for the light of inspiration.
It’s not enough to wish for inspiration to fall in your lap. You have to look for it.
I have proof this works. For example…
….imagine you’re feeling lost because you believe the world is on fire and cruel, evil people are in charge of everything.
And then, as you’re doom scrolling on Instagram you see the youngest member of congress in Aotearoa (New Zealand), a Māori woman, doing a Haka dance in their equivalent of the capital building, and all the other Māori people in the chambers join in. And that inspires you.
Go in that direction.
I don’t mean culturally appropriate Māori traditional dances.
I mean, that kind of defiance, rooted in care for community, rooted indigenous traditions of resistance, rooted in dance, in the body, and in the land, inspires you. Move towards it.
Your inspiration is calling you. Move towards its light. Hekate’s torch knows your name.
We can look around in our lives and notice all the ways things are going wrong. That’s a necessary step. And helpful, to the degree that it eventually prompts us to start looking for inspiration.
YOUR inspiration is already with you. It has been with you in the underworld. It is with you now. It glimmers and shines.
If you look for your inspiration it will warm you and bring you back to life. It will show you the way forward.
BTW, this month’s Sagittarius Season Witch Guide is all about this inspiration-seeking practice. More info below.
Enjoy!
Love,
Amanda
P.S. Subscribers at the yearly or founders level are going to get a Cards of the Year / Hermit Year / Book of Shadows workshop in January! Can’t wait to share more soon!
Inside this month’s Sagittarius Season Witch Guide you get:
A five-minute somatic / yoga exercise to practice daily to call in your inspiration (intro video above, full video link below)
A downloadable PDF to help you call in joy and inspiration
Journal prompts to help you work with the energy of Sagittarius and process the transition from Pluto in Capricorn to Pluto in Aquarius
A Sag Season tarot spread
A candle spell to help you share your light with the world
Suggestions for your Book of Shadows
Correspondences to use on your altar, in your bath, in your daily life
Creative and ecological prompts
and more in the subscribers section below!