Many of the SRPGs I’ve reviewed over the past few weeks use Tarot cards as a random oracle, so I have perforce found myself handling the ol’ pasteboards again. Doing so has unlocked, or at least stirred, some very pleasant and poignant memories. Perhaps the approaching Hallows put me in a receptive frame of mind.
It only took a few moments of reflection to realize that, in focusing on my career and Shadow Work since 2014-15, I have unintentionally drifted away from contact and involvement with the Otherworlds and their denizens.
A so-called career path is a nearly universal distraction from the internal life, and more than enough has been said about that by others. Nonetheless, I found a great deal of satisfaction and validation in finally getting a “big boy” coding job, so it was “positive distraction”, perhaps?
For its part, Shadow Work is a wonderful modality, and I am eternally grateful for what I have learned from and through it. But in the end, it is based in archetypal psychology, and thus is not inherently mystical or spiritual, although the experience of Shadow Work can be both. I believe the majority of Shadow Worker would rejoice if it were suddenly to be declared “hard science”.
Zen also eschews the “woo-woo”, in favor of concentrating on taming the mind, and I’ve been easing deeper into Zen in the last 2 or 3 years.
All unknowing, in pursuit of one set of paths, I came to neglect another, which is at least as rich and valuable.
I’ve kept up my reading on the Norse, but again it’s been tending toward the academic and historical. I wave at the mythologies as they float past in context.
Perhaps, after a number of years immersed in the more phenomenological frameworks, I shifted base paradigms for a time, and just drifted.
But I’m back now, bitches. So hitch up yer drawers and hang onto yer broomsticks…