On the Sandstorm
Magic carpet rides, the Mystic’s threshold, and pathfinding in unknown terrain.
Like so many I've talked to lately, I've been wandering around in what I can only call a surprise sandstorm. Mercury retrograde for all of us, and for me specifically, an incoming Saturn retrograde. Saturn on steroids doing battle with Mars sitting on top my ascendant at the anaretic degree — the degree of fate, the karmic degree — while my sun and Mercury are cazimi in the 12th.
I have to collapse all of that into "weather." Otherwise it gets heavy really fast. But it's complicated weather, and it's been having a specific effect. It’s a little like my compass has been stolen out from under me and hidden in the next room. I can feel it. I can hear it. I just can't see it.
So last week, having run out of better options, I reached for my oracle deck.
I pulled my Mystic card, and then three more from my deck to give some context. And somewhere in the process of sitting with those three, Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" started playing in my head like someone had turned on a radio transmission from somewhere … else. Now I want to be absolutely clear about something: I cannot do Steppenwolf. The song is equally obnoxious to me. And yet there it was anyway, arriving because (to the best of my understanding) one of those cards happened to feature a carpet and a lamp, and apparently that was enough of an association.
“Now this half-seen gateway feels, at least on approach, like it could be equally challenging ... because apparently the Mystic is presiding right now, and I do not yet have her language.”
The thing is, once I got past being both amused and annoyed, I actually felt the damned thing land. In the middle of weeks of sand — weeks where nothing has felt solid and everything feels abrasive — this one ridiculous song was broadcasting something real. Certainly not something I’ve been able to name, but because the arrival of something I would never have chosen told me that something real was actually happening, it felt a little like tripping over some unseen thing and stumbling onto a clue. An obnoxious one, yes. But the first solid ground I'd felt in a while.
The Mystic sits on the devotional side of my Inner Council, directly across from the Architect. Where the Architect takes perception and builds it into form, the Mystic does the opposite. She takes direct experience of the divine and moves it upward, into abstraction, into pure seeing. She holds the lens up to the moon and sees the full moon in it regardless of what the sky looks like outside. She is the one who moves between the dance floor and the balcony on the devotional side of the house. The pathfinder without a map, so to speak.
Hers is a threshold I thought I’d already crossed. The FireKeeper crossing — from discernment into devotion — was rewriting on the soul level for me, and the lessons I learned there I think I’ve often mistaken for “Mystic’s lessons.” Now this half-seen gateway feels, at least on approach, like it could be equally challenging. Like standing in my own home territory — oracle cards, symbolic language, the entire inner architecture I've been building for years — but it currently feels like a room that’s blown into a million pieces. Not really because anything is outwardly wrong, but because apparently the Mystic is presiding right now, and I do not yet have her language. I'm still figuring out what the terrain even looks like here.
What I surfaced with from all of that was one usable piece of ground: A reminder that I have been in unmapped territory before. What I've learned is that when the terrain dissolves, without fail (so far) I find a process, a project, some kind of creative pathfinding tool that lets me begin to orient, to mark the ground as I move across it.
So, I'm over here just planting a flag. Something I can find again when the sand blows back over it — and it will blow back over it. Possibly by tomorrow, if things continue unfolding as they have the last couple of weeks. That seems to be the nature of this terrain.
The flag is an Inner Council page, which the Architect just finished scrapping together. The Mystic presides there at the moment, along with whatever process is unfolding under her supervision. Think of that like minutes taken, records kept.
WORTH NOTING: Between the card pull last week and sitting down to write this, the entire idea fell completely off my radar. It only came back when I sat down to write my studio note and looked over my notes. My best guess is that won't be the last time I lose sight of solid ground in this weather.
You can find the flag here.
