Welcome to the Threshold.

This is a space for the moments when something is ending, something else is beginning, and you are standing in the middle trying to figure out what the fuck is happening.

These readings are not here to hand you easy answers, flatter you, or tell you that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes things happen because people make harmful choices, systems fail, or life is chaotic and unfair. The cards and runes do not remove our responsibility to think clearly, make decisions, set boundaries, and do our own shadow work. What they can do is help us see the pattern.

Each Threshold Reading begins with a cast of runes, tarot, oracle cards, or whatever wants to make itself known that day. I pay attention not only to the individual symbols but also to how they arrive, where they land, what they conceal, what they repeat, and how they speak to one another. I am not interested in forcing a neat message onto a messy spread. If the reading is complicated, contradictory, uncomfortable, or unfinished, then that is where we begin.

Take what resonates, question what does not, and do not surrender your judgment to me or anyone else holding a deck of cards. This is not prophecy carved in stone; do not treat it as such. This is about the work each of us needs to do.

It is an invitation to pause at the threshold, look directly at what is present, and decide how you intend to cross.

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Every rune landed carving-side down. I could see the shape of the spread and how the pieces had arranged themselves but couldn’t actually see what they were yet. That feels familiar to me, because a lot of the time I know something is happening before I can explain it. The body picks it up first. Something feels wrong, or off, or unsafe, and the brain is still scrambling around trying to build a neat little story after the fact.

When I turned the runes over, there was Algiz reversed and Perthro and Thurisaz on their sides.

Algiz reversed points to vulnerability, exposure, and feeling like whatever was supposed to protect us isn’t doing a great job at it. Perthro on its side tells me there’s still something hidden here. The pattern hasn’t fully revealed itself. Something is moving under the surface, but we don’t have the whole story yet. Then Thurisaz, on its side, brings in conflict, self-defense, boundaries, and the instinct to stand our ground, except that energy doesn’t quite know where to go. It’s awake and ready but doesn’t have direction.  

So before we even get to the tarot, the message is taking shape. Something feels unsafe, we do not have all the information, and the instinct to protect ourselves has already kicked in, even if we aren’t sure what we’re protecting ourselves from or what the hell we’re supposed to do about it.

Under all of that sits the Nine of Wands. This is someone who has fucking battled and survived the fight, but their body is still in fight mode. It doesn’t yet feel safe, or that the battle has ended. Battle wounds are closing, the threat is gone, but we’re braced for the next shoe to drop. Our eyes are watching the door, waiting for the next fucking problem to walk through, the next betrayal, the next bit of bullshit to come crawling out of the walls.

There is strength to be found here. You don’t get to the Nine of Wands by being a fragile little snowflake flower. The problem is that when we’re constantly in survival mode, it can start to feel like our entire fucking personality. Constantly being on alert can look and feel like wisdom. Hypervigilance? Intuition. Isolation? Discernment. Don’t fool yourself. I understand how keeping everyone at a distance can seem like a smart move, because at least nobody can get close enough to hurt you again, but you’re only hurting yourself.

The Nine of Wands asks whether those defenses are still protecting something alive, or whether we are just standing guard over a life we are not actually living. It also speaks to how hard it can be to receive what we have earned. When a person has spent years waiting for disaster, success can feel ultra fleeting. Rest feels irresponsible and selfish. Pride feels dangerous. We all know that pride comes before a fall, right? You accomplish something and immediately start looking for the catch. The struggle becomes easier to trust than the victory and we become VERY comfortable in it, while simultaneously bitching about it.

Boggart Posy and Larkspur stand on either side of the Nine of Wands, and together they say a lot about what put us in that guarded position in the first place. Boggart Posy brings in gossip, embellishment, careless speech, and stories built from scraps and passed around like fact. It asks us to pay attention to what people are saying, what we’re repeating, and what happens when speculation starts wearing the costume of truth.

Talking about harm isn’t necessarily gossip. We need people we can trust enough to process what happened, understand our own reactions, figure out where a boundary was crossed, and decide what to do next. Silence isn’t always advised or noble. Sometimes silence just protects the person who caused the damage and leaves the injured person alone with it.

The difference is purpose. Are we speaking to understand, heal, protect, or create accountability? Or are we turning someone else’s life into entertainment because we enjoy having something dramatic to say and nothing interesting about ourselves to talk about? The antidote here is not silence. It is responsibility.

Boggart Posy also asks us to stop giving authority to every person who tells a story about us. Some people know us. Some have only seen a piece. Some have invented an entire character, attached our name to it, and now feel very confident about their creation, mischaracterizing us at every step like the ignorant petty bitches they are. People who are very certain of themselves can carry an air of authority but don’t believe it unless that authority is actually earned. Their certainty doesn’t make them right. Some people aren’t perceptive; they’re just loud.

Larkspur brings a different poison. This is the urge to disappear after being treated as strange, too much, difficult, intense, or fundamentally other. Repeated rejection teaches us that visibility is dangerous, so we start shrinking before anyone else can do it for us. We become quieter, smaller, easier to digest, less inconvenient, and less alive. Eventually, we help erase ourselves. With all seriousness, fuck that shit.

Larkspur isn’t asking for reckless vulnerability. There is no virtue in walking back into rooms committed to misunderstanding us. Some rooms are full of assholes. Some spaces are hostile. Some people have already shown us exactly what they are prepared to do with our openness, and we should believe them. FUCKING BELIEVE PEOPLE WHEN THEY SHOW YOU WHO THE FUCK THEY ARE.

Together, Boggart Posy and Larkspur give us the social lesson of this reading: other people may distort who you are, but absolutely do not finish the job for those fucks by abandoning yourself.

The Three of Pentacles reversed sits directly beneath the Nine of Wands and brings the whole thing into the world of work, skill, recognition, and what happens when a structure isn’t capable of holding what we bring to it.

This card can describe dysfunctional collaboration, unreasonable employers, hidden obstruction, poor workmanship, lack of recognition, or the sense that our skills are being wasted in a system that doesn’t know what the fuck to do with them. It can be the experience of bringing care, competence, and effort into an environment that either can’t recognize it or has no interest in rewarding it.

This card also asks us to look at what this discouragement has done to our own relationship with our work. When effort goes unrecognized for long enough, we can stop refining. When the environment feels pointless, we start rushing, delaying, avoiding, or disengaging. We tell ourselves the structure is the problem, and it may very well be, but sometimes fear and resentment have also entered the work.

The structure may be failing us. We may also be failing to protect our own standards. Both can be true. Annoying, and perhaps hard to hear, but true. Returning to self requires a recovery of craft. Not productivity for its own sake. Not obedience. Not perfectionism. Craft. Doing something well because it reflects who we are, whether or not the surrounding institution has earned that level of devotion. Remembering what our work looks like when it belongs to us and is not just another performance for people who’ve already decided not to see us for who we really are.

The Queen of Cups begins the lower row. She is emotional depth, intuition, imagination, care, and the ability to bring dreams into form. In this reading, she feels like the part of us that has remained alive underneath all the armor. The Nine of Wands guards the door. The Queen of Cups is what is behind it. She is the part that can still feel, still imagine, still love, still create, still make something meaningful out of what we’ve survived. She is hope. She reminds us that our sensitivity isn’t weakness. Sure, it’s painful when other people treat it like an unlimited resource they’re entitled to consume or as a way to disregard us, but it absolutely is not weakness. The Queen of Cups doesn’t need to harden. She needs boundaries strong enough to protect what remains soft.

Then we have the Five of Pentacles. This card is loss, exclusion, instability, and disillusionment. It can be financial hardship, work loss, relationship change, or the collapse of a structure we once mistook for security. There is nothing abstract about material fear. It affects the body, the future, the choices we can make, and how much risk we can afford to take. I am not going to dress that up and call every loss a blessing. Some losses are just fucking painful.

The Five of Pentacles also carries the alchemical movement of solve et coagula: dissolve and re-form. Sometimes a life comes apart because the existing arrangement can no longer hold us. That doesn’t make the dissolution pleasant. It doesn’t mean it was destined, fair, or good. It means destruction and creation can occupy the same ground, and we often don’t know which one we’re looking at until down the road. The old form breaks before the new one is visible.

That is the part people tend to skip over when they talk about the alchemy of transformation. They want the rising phoenix, but they don’t want the pile of ash. They want rebirth without the stage where everything is gone and nothing has taken shape yet. Returning to self isn’t restoration to a previous condition. We are not rebuilding according to an old blueprint. We are not trying to become the person we were before the wounds, because that person no longer exists and did not know what we know now. We are becoming whole again, but in a different form.

The High Priestess reversed warns that this process requires actual discernment, not just spiritual aesthetics. Withdrawal, silence, dream work, and attention to the unconscious can deepen our understanding. They can also become hiding places. When we stay inward for too long, intuition becomes harder to distinguish from fear, projection, desire, or fantasy. When we ignore intuition entirely, we remain trapped in relationships and structures our deeper knowing has already rejected.

Not every impression is revelation. Not every fear is foresight. Not every coincidence is a message. Sometimes the nervous system is activated. Sometimes we are projecting. Sometimes somebody is simply a fucking asinine dick. Spiritual maturity requires us to question what we feel instead of treating every internal response like sacred truth.

The task isn’t to choose between intuition and reality. The task is to build a relationship between them. Listen inwardly, then test what you hear. Pay attention to the pattern, but don’t abandon evidence, experience, or common sense just because something felt mystical.

Then we come to the Two of Cups. This card closes the spread with the possibility of meeting, connection, and reconciliation. It can describe romantic love, friendship, creative partnership, or any relationship rooted in mutual recognition. It stands in direct contrast to the failed collective of the reversed Three of Pentacles.

The whole group may not understand us. One person might. We may not need the room. We may need one real ally. One relationship where we aren’t constantly translating ourselves, defending our existence, or wondering which version of us is being discussed when we’re not there.

The Two of Cups also feels internal here. The survivor meets the creator. The guarded self meets the self that still wants connection. Intuition meets action. Grief meets possibility.

It bears repeating again that this isn’t a return to who we were before the wounds. That person is gone. This is a return to what remains: to our authentic self. Returning to self doesn’t require softness toward the people who harmed us. Actually, fuck those people. It doesn’t demand forgiveness, endless vulnerability, or the abandonment of boundaries. It doesn’t mean pretending the wounds didn’t happen or thanking the people who caused them for helping us grow. Fuck that. It means we stop constructing our identity around the people and events that taught us to hide.

The wound belongs to our history. It doesn’t get to become the whole fucking story.

This is a community reading, which means it is speaking to the collective. If you want me to look at your situation specifically, I offer private, personalized readings. Bring me the question, the mess, the crossroads, the relationship, the work problem, whatever the hell is keeping you up at night.