A little bit witchy, a little bit wary

what does it mean to give in to woo?

I consider myself a somewhat skeptical person but in the last few years I’ve found myself becoming “more woo”. I can’t tell if this is a product of living in Portland, Oregon for almost a decade or simply being in my mid-30s. Do all women turn into witches when they’ve been alive long enough?

This time last year, I had no tarot decks. Now I have three. I don’t know if they have mystical powers but I think there’s something worthwhile in the practice of clearing the clutter in my brain to focus on a singular question that’s troubling me. It’s also fun to bring out a deck at the end of a gathering with friends, like a nightcap for your brain.

I can’t tell if consulting tarot decks means something has fundamentally changed about me. Maybe it’s just that I’m looking for guidance: a few decades into adulthood, I want to know if I’m on the right path. A few times in a row now I’ve asked the deck a question and gotten an answer that was so spot on it was almost like the deck was mocking me. “Should I keep going with this book?” I ask and the deck spits out a card about the value of perseverance.

Frankly, it’s a daily practice to talk myself out of my anxiety that I’ll never find another agent; that I’ll never sell another book; that I’m fundamentally too weird.

I tell myself that hard work—and good work—will eventually pay off but I don’t know if it’s true. I want to believe it anyway. The thing is, if I asked the cards and they told me to give up on writing altogether, I’d ignore them. I find that I only trust the cards when they tell me something that lines up with what I already want to believe. Otherwise it’s just a bad draw.

The Tarot Reader (Bridget Tichenor and Jean Patchett), New York. by Irving Penn.

There’s also the fact that every time I do a tarot reading or have a friend read for me, my brain fills with fuzz and tingles in a way that’s deeply pleasant. It’s like a head massage for my brain. Something in my body clearly enjoys tarot even if my mind is conflicted about it. I worry if I accept that there are a few things in the world beyond my understanding, it will mean I no longer understand anything.

But not all forms of woo are for me. I like crystals for their aesthetics and am amazed by the stones Earth has created but I don’t want to put one in my water bottle or carry one in my bra. I’m similarly unsure about horoscopes or whether the placement of the stars can actually predict a life. I’ve wondered lately whether the commonalities between people with a certain zodiac could be explained by the fact that they were raised by people who happened to conceive about 10 months before. Are Virgos uptight and organized because they were raised by parents who only took a break to conceive them once the holidays rolled around? (I say this as a Virgo.) These are things I think about even without being stoned.

Years ago I interned with a New Age publisher in Berkeley, CA and got my first job editing one of their books. It was, essentially, about communicating with the dead. I believed the author was telling the truth when he told stories about people connecting with souls in the afterlife. I also didn’t and don’t believe ghosts are hanging out waiting for us to talk to them. I had to let those two thoughts exist side by side as contradictory truths. It’s enough to break a person.

And what if opening myself up to the world’s mysteries led me down a path I don’t want to go on? A girl I knew in school got really interested in aliens, and then joined a water cult/MLM, and is now a born again Christian conservative who is staunchly anti-choice. Plenty of other “open minded” people have opened themselves up to not wanting anyone to be vaccinated or thinking 9/11 didn’t really happen or believing in Bigfoot—the latter being pretty benign in the scheme of things you can believe in 2025.

So I dabble. I dip a toe into the waters of woo while letting the rest of myself stay comfortably dry and skeptical. I’ve find reasonable explanations for everything: Tarot is just like therapy in that it invites you to reconsider your life through a specific lens; “Setting an intention” is just deciding how to focus your limited time.

Despite this careful distance, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed other things that make me question if the world is as orderly as I thought. At the restaurant there are nights when suddenly all customers seem uniformly strange, something is off about all of them. Whenever I go outside after that shift is done, I notice a full moon. It does something to us all.

My energy has certainly been affected by the length of the days this time of year. By energy I’m talking about the literal kind: I want to do more, stay up later, and haven’t been sleeping as much. Whether that’s a shift in some kind of metaphysical energy too, I can’t say.

But if the Earth itself is shaped by celestial forces, things like the tides, the weather, it would be foolish to think this didn’t also apply to my human self. I don’t believe we’re fundamentally special by virtue of being human.

Sometimes the unknown is just something we don’t know yet. I’m happy to sit with the fact that animal species with their different abilities to hear and see and sense experience a world that’s totally different from mine. Yet I find it troubling when it happens to members of my own species. How could one person see ghosts if I’ve never so much felt a shimmer of a haunting?

The truth is, we aren’t all the same and even other humans are unknowable. I often find myself pointing out flowers when my boyfriend and I are on a hike or a long drive. I’m stunned when he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, they’re so bright and obvious against the landscape. But he’s color blind. What I see screaming out of the background fades away in his vision. Maybe the unknown is a bit like that—it’s just harder for some of us to see.

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Notes:

I wrote a piece for The Washington Post about the Trump administration’s plan to gut the Ecological Services Administration: a program that does a lot of vital work on a relatively tiny budget. One of the things under its purview is the Bird Banding Lab, a 100-year old program that licenses scientists and other researchers to handle, band, and monitor birds. The opinion piece is a first for me in that photos and video I took of owls in my former backyard are in a major publication! I took these years ago just for the joy of documenting something. It just goes to show that you never know where your choices will take you.

My streak of not-so-wonderful books is over and I read a couple great ones in a row! I’ve been a fan of former Oregon poet laureate Anis Mogjani’s work ever since I encountered his occasional event here in Portland where he reads poems at sunset out of a window. (It still happens on occasion and if you’re in town I highly recommend trying to catch one of these!) I read his poetry collection The Tigers, They Let Me which might not be love poems but are so full of love.

After an extremely long wait, I finally read North Woods by Daniel Mason. It catalogues the events that happen in a house over centuries, not exactly a page-turning conceit, and yet I had trouble putting it down.

I’ve been writing this newsletter over a year. In that time I’ve apparently linked to and/or suggested 73 books to you all! Click here for the full list of them. It’s a wonderfully eclectic group.

In case you’re wondering, here is one of the decks I have—actually an oracle deck—and I love it. The others are from Etsy.

Until next week,

How woo are you?

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