Rerolling

Okay, so I'm a huge nerd and that should be no surprise to anyone who reads this! I have played RPGs from MUDs to MMOs. But this time, instead of talking about a roleplay character I'm rerolling, I'm talking about myself.

Every now and then you get the urge to, I don't know, level up, polish who you are and create something that is hewn more closely to the real, idealized you that exists within your brain. A chrysalis forms, often against your will. You realize that you are pupating. You realize you are changing. But you don't yet know what you're changing into, it's all part of the process. There is really no time for fear. The only thing there is time for... is time.

Are we aware of ourselves when we turn to goo and are reformed by the hand of nature to have an entirely different shape? What does it feel like? Does it hurt? Do we retain memories of these difficult transitional periods?

I don't know about other folks but my experience with the most recent changes in my life have been harsh, terrifying, exhilarating, very much like my bipolar experience. I have been sloughing off what no longer serves me at Aphrodite's direction; She is, as ever, my guide during this process. You may have seen some of this in my new "branding" - for the extent that I have such a thing, a shift from roses and marble to images of sea and star. In fact, I have even changed the name of my tarot business from "Divinely Poetic Tarot" to "Sea + Star Tarot" to better reflect these changes.

It comes from two places. First, the sea, Aphrodite's birthplace. Some follow the legend that Aphrodite is Dione's child by Zeus, but I follow a different origin story. Love is too ancient and knowing to be the child of a God - She must be a God on a different conceptual level. So I believe that Cronos the Titan, seeing his mother Gaia the Earth being forced to have child after child after the sexual assault by Uranus the sky, rose up with His great scythe and severed Uranus' genitals, letting them fall far below into what would come to be called the Aegean Sea. They roiled there, kicking up massive amounts of sea foam. And so it was that Aphrodite was born. The writer Hesiod derived Her name from ἀφρός, meaning "risen from the foam."

In the name I wanted to pay homage to Her birth, and so I chose the Sea. Aphrodite is the Patroness of sailors, especially in the Mediterranean area. It's as much Her home as it is Poseidon's, if you want to know my feelings on it! Star, too, could be attributed to Uranus the sky god, but that's not where it comes from. That comes from my favorite tarot card, Major Arcana 17, The Star.

For it ever and always gives me hope, and right now, I need a lot of that. I need tremendous amounts of hope, and so I wove it into the name of my tarot enterprise to get Sea + Star Tarot, with all the beautiful imagery that conjures up to soothe and sustain me.

And I really only bring all of this up to say that I have revamped my website! Divinely Poetic is no more. All hail theoraclej.com! I am pleased to give you this new version of my site and myself, and I'm really excited about what the future could potentially bring. I was able to input all of my tarot readings using their shop software, and though they don't yet support Zoom integration for live readings, that is absolutely not a problem - I can manually schedule them.

I'd be so pleased if you visited and checked it out! I think it took me about two hyperfocused days to finish getting everything set up over there. But let me tell you why I went with Beacons. I was concerned about the use of AI, because fuck AI as it stands now, but as it happens you don't have to use any of those features if you don't want to. It offers a prompt for you to use the AI to write descriptions of your products and services, but please, I'm a writer, and it's a pleasure to write about what I offer. I did everything by hand.

Ages ago I signed up with Beacons to use their Link in Bio software, which at the time was pretty much all they did. They have since developed outward with shop support, newsletter support (although that won't change, let me assure you), calendar syncing, website building and support, and unusually quick response times for technical issues. I had a few while I was creating my site, but they were rapidly fixed. The primary reason, though, is because I registered the desired domain with them for my LIB and saw no way to get it unassociated with Beacons.

I have many tarot offerings on the site, perhaps you will find yourself interested in one! I would love to do a reading for any one of you, live, recorded, or PDF! Explore and see if anything catches your eye.

I asked Aphrodite about change, about metamorphosis. How large is the relief of the snake when she has shed her previous skin?

This is the message that comes through from Highest Beauty: even when we change, even when we grow, even when we are smashed down to yellow mush, we retain some small part of the self that was before, some small part, a fragment, a sliver, something that has carried through since birth, an infinitesimal reflection of our parents and the parents that came before them.

It is good to keep these small bits woven into our fiber, it makes us stronger, it opens our minds, makes them supple, willing to bend and flex and grow grow grow to our fullest potential. These specks of who we were sustain us when we are in the liminal phase, metamorphosis, changing, transforming. They are beautiful, they are the thin gold edging in majestic stained glass windows, they are flecks in a hand-knitted tweed yarn blanket, they are the edible glitter in your flashy cocktail.

It's a good time to feel protective of the self, too, after all, we're vulnerable, we're in a cocoon and we're vulnerable. So yes, we will wrap those arms around ourselves and we will be our own support if necessary, because right now it's hard to see anything else, we're pupating and concentrating on saving the little bright spots of who we used to be.

Watch our backs, watch our fronts, watch our things. We're occupied and the wrong sort of person, a villainous type, will just take them. Of course, they're just things, but in this world we have to be cautious of our treasures. Some of them are life-and-death level things! Can't work if we don't have a phone or a computer, can't pay bills if we can't work. Can't live if we can't take our medicine and if we can't work, we can't afford it. And so on, and so forth.Be protective of our things. Treat them with the respect they are due.

Be grateful for the things that got us here. Embrace them as if we love them, for it is on their backs that we arrived to begin metamorphosis at all. Make them last in direct contravention of this disposable world of trash we now live in. Be conscious, always conscious, of what goes into what we use, knowing that nothing is pure, nothing can be pure in late stage capitalism. Turn it around by doing pure things ourselves.

We are called to protect and defend and keep the scraplings of our previous selves and all of these are good things. We will find success if we cling to these values throughout our metamorphoses. We will transform into a great glorious iteration of ourselves when we're careful, sure, and protective. And love will fill us to bursting as our souls find parity with our physical forms and burst out of the cocoon that has kept us hidden for so long.

In Aphrodite's Name,

J