tadpoles-and-daydreams

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

Reblogging for reach because these rune readings are always wonderful!

We are in a tumultuous period of time. We are so overwhelmed by the work laid out before us. Even small victories can feel pointless at times. Remember to recognize the victory that is not only behind you but the one that is ahead. Visualize this victory. Feel the immense satisfaction of having achieved your goals and doing the work, fighting the good fight. When you tire, remember that victory is already yours so long as you keep fighting. Rest when you need to, of course. Wars are rarely over after one battle. Pick up the battles you can and leave the rest. There are others fight beside you. When we work together and trust and believe in one another to do their part, we win. We cross the finish line. Appreciate the victories of the battles won. Celebrate all our efforts no matter the outcome. Anticipate the victory that is yet to come and let that anticipation fuel you when the fight becomes so draining you don't wish to carry on. Every effort is a victory in and of itself. Keep building upon it until the war is won. You can do it. We can do it. Together.

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

Op thank you for this. Bc fun fact, to all who remember that we were in such active communication with our deities that we enjoyed channeling them for writing and whatnot bc we could get specific words and such from them-

That's rarely happened since we realized we were plural. We were so overwhelmed with rearranging how we think, parsing whose thoughts belonged to who, learning to trust our own perception of our thoughts and recognize when a new member of our system is being discovered, etc. etc. Having to literally change how we thought was pretty damn intense for obvious reasons, especially because it involved learning to TRUST our reality; something we've struggled with a lot. So our deities, our practice, everything witchy just stepped to the side while we figured that out.

All our communication to our deities was abruptly cut off. We still don't feel quite right about where we're at- we distrust the communication we get, still, and we don't get much. Likely DUE to the distrust. But we're slowly getting back into it, I think. We feel better about it. We're not working on our practice quite as much, but it's because we have other projects to work on that our deities are helping us with- not because we're neglecting it and feel bad.

Sorry for hijacking your post OP, I didn't mean to- I feel very strongly about this since it's something we're currently experiencing.

-Phoenix

For those of us who have active communication with our gods, it can be unsettling when we go through long periods of time with little or no contact. We may feel tempted to think we have been abandoned, or that we’ve done something wrong.

When this happens, remember that the gods are very old, and have a very different experience with time and reality. Take a good look at the things that have been happening in your life recently. Chances are, you’ll begin to see traces of the gods’ influence, like an artist’s signature scrolled very subtly at the corner of a painting.

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

a reminder to honor aphrodite by maintaining your boundaries and self respect. don't let people walk over you, don't stay in relationships (both romantic and platonic) that aren't bringing you joy. learn to love yourself before worrying about being loved by others.

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

Tarot: "feel the fear and do it anyway!"

Me, eye twitching: "I'm gonna bite these cards."

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

Hate how lighting a candle does wonders to my mood. Like wowwww. Grug like fire? Grug not sad anymore because Fire in Cave? Wow. Real predictable of Grug.

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

touching grass isn't enough some of y'all need to drive out to the countryside and look at the stars

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

This might be an odd request, but hear me out. Anyone on witchy/spiritual/whatever Tumblr have any experience with like. The concept that places can be alive? Like animism, but in particular our interest is in the idea that a soul just like any person can have a lifetime spent as a place.

Yes I'm aware this is fucking weird. We are fucking weird. We're gonna start posting our practice as it goes from "general witchcraft" to "weird little witches in their corner" so I figured just asking if anyone has any input on this idea is a good start. If anyone has input that they don't feel comfy reblogging that won't fit in a comment, feel free to DM or send an anon!

-Local birb (not Crow, I don't have a sign off and am too lazy to come up with a good code name.)

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

thank you to every single fucking person on this god forsaken site that has ever posted your own art or writing. You really put a vulnerable, important part of yourself out in the open on the hellscape that is the internet and if that isnt an act of bravery and a labor of love I dont know what one is

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

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[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

What now? On destruction and reconstruction, and Loki's hand in our syscovery

This post is long, as it's both about our spiritual practices and our plurality as a whole. I wish I could chop it up but each aspect is too important to the other. We want our blogs to help normalize plurality, and show people what it's like for us, so I suppose this does that.

CW for a brief description of memory loss.

We've been asking ourselves "what now" for some time, regarding our spiritual practices. We have no answer. Recently, we were asked to chat about our practices- and we were thrilled! We love infodumping about our craft. Which is why we were surprised when... it's taken days to figure out what to say. We still haven't answered, in part because we're busy but in part because it brought us to the realization that we haven't touched our practice in so long that we barely remember it.

Our memory has always been questionable at best; but this was... bothersome. Sad, at first. It just... slipped away. Such a big part of our life, gone almost entirely from our memory. Our life as "just Frog" was a blur of dissociation and masking. Our practice was loved, but ultimately, it was a blur.

As I'm typing this I'm (affectionately) cussing at Loki, because I've just put it together; this is, albeit not entirely, his work. We view Loki as destruction for the sake of reconstruction; He tears things down to build them anew better. Chaos can be destructive, but chaos is undeniably an element in which anything can happen. To say our life has been chaos since we realized we were plural is a fucking understatement.

We had to reorganize how we think. Thinking, for lack of a better way to say it, is what we view as the most private, intimate expression of self- it's what you do constantly, all the time, like it or not. Even if you're a singlet (non-system) and reading this post, which means the world by the way, I'd like you to imagine this. Imagine if you had to take thoughts you had always thought of as your own, and assign them to the correct other people in your head- who it had actually been all along. And then imagine you have to consistently figure out which thoughts are yours, and which are those other people. Admittedly, some of our followers who get more direct communication from their deities may already have a bit of insight into what that's like. We had a lot of work to do, and that was just the beginning of it.

Traits had to be sorted out, then. Do I like tardigrades, or am I just going off of memories of liking them that belong to someone else in our collective? I feel no emotions when I think of them like I expected to. Do I like the clothes we wear? What would I wear instead? Shit, what are my pronouns? It was, admittedly, a lot. Our altar sat, untouched, because... just like everything else, our practice was something we felt needed to be sorted out. It's overwhelming to look at an altar for so many deities and know that you're not sure if you yourself work with all of them, or any of them. It's overwhelming for something you once took great comfort in to suddenly become drastically unfamiliar, because you and who you are has changed in a very literal way.

But back to the fact that we don't remember our practice as "Frog and only Frog." This was devastating, at first. I felt it was a loss of sorts.

I don't think it is, anymore.

Like I said; Loki is destruction for the sake of reconstruction. The Tower, or at least how we tend to interpret it. Everything in our life got turned upside down, and lately we've been feeling like we're picking up the pieces of our practice. Or more accurately, like we lost the whole fucking thing. So... We make a new one. We rebuild. That's where we are, now. Typing up this post, with Loki sitting beside me, giving off the vibes of someone very proud of himself. Our practice was built on what the community gave us- which was wonderful, and we still appreciate it and are likely to use it. But what we need now is... something else. Something more personalized to us. So we'll make our practice anew, with our guides and deities by our side, and it'll look completely different than before. But hopefully, it'll be a lot better for us in the long run.

I guess my hope that some people enjoy reading about it as we begin anew, and maybe we can help some people learn more about others or themselves. We are The Haven Keepers, and I think we're starting over in a way.

-Rayne, he/they/it.

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

i think a big part of expanding your intellectual curiosity and trying to learn new things about the world is to abandon the shame of not knowing things. don't blame "the US school system" (which US school system????), don't blame your teachers, don't blame society, but embrace the fact that you are going to be learning new things constantly, throughout your life. practice saying "i really need to read about that" or "does anyone know of any good sources to learn about xyz?" or "hold on i gotta go check wikipedia/a world map/the dictionary/the news." every single day, there will be something you don't know already. that something doesn't have to be embarrassing. instead it can be an opportunity to learn something new

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

This belongs here too. We haven't been talking much on this blog, but we're starting to take steps towards beginning our practice again. This^ was a step in that direction. There will be another post about our experiences of our headspace/innerworld, and how our spirituality effects that in particular.

-Still Rayne, lol

How our plurality has become spiritual

Lately, the way we view our plurality has changed. We never did view our plurality as purely psychological- it just didn't feel right. We have a headmate of spiritual origin, a past (parallel? Time is weird) life of ours, who apparently just pops into our headspace to say something every once in a while. He mainly shows up to correct misinformation about himself amongst our collective, which we think is funny as hell. We don't view ourselves through the typical medical lens either. Our stance, in regards to origins, is the same stance we take on "how did earth come to be?"

Dude, fuck if I know, why do I care? All I care is that right now, we need to learn how live in it!

So our origin wasn't a priority. Still isn't! We just... stumbled upon a way to articulate how we feel our collective works. We'd only ever heard of spiritual plurality in relation to systems who are more than one soul, inhabiting the same body. This makes sense to us! That... never felt true for our collective, save for our one walk-in headmate. We believe in the multiverse theory; that a lot of fiction is just reality somewhere else. But some of our fictives from a shared source- myself included- don't really feel that way about our source. At one point we thought about it, and simply decided... it doesn't matter. It's real to us. That's what matters. Whether our exomemories are truly another reality, or our brain explaining our existence, or whatever the fuck... It's real to us and that's all that we care about. But it still leaves us in a rather confusing place:

If we aren't separate souls, but feel very strongly that our plurality is somehow spiritual in origin... where does that leave us? Plus, at one point we felt really icky because if we aren't separate souls, it felt like we were invalidating ourselves as separate individuals. Ultimately, the conclusion we came to was that we do have one soul. We are still more than one individual.

We believe in reincarnation, for context. We believe it works... like whirlpools (individual incarnations) in a river (someone's soul), in a way. Each incarnation is its own thing, and describing it as a shard of a soul implies a sort of "shattering" or "breaking" imagery that we don't like, but every incarnation is still part of that soul. We view our plurality as... sort of a small-scale version of that. Like a fractal, when you zoom in- it all looks the same eventually. Our soul just decided "what if I do that, but as much as I can in one life? That'd be interesting!" and now here we are with a bunch of fictional characters in our head going "dude, what the fuck?"

So, there's a long-winded explanation of how we view our plurality, for fun. Also, since we're going to be reblogging this one on our witchy/spirituality blog, I'll be signing off with the name I use there instead. At this point our practice as witches goes beyond what people typically associate with witchcraft, we just still call it witchy because... well, that's what our witchcraft looks like. Eh.

-Rayne

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

There will be a lot of posts soon from people sharing how much they achieved in 2024. But in case someone needs to hear this, it's okay if the only thing you did this year was just get through it.... It's ok.

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

it is past time we jettisoned the useless false dichotomy of introversion vs. extroversion and just accepted that everybody has a minimum amount of social interaction, failing which, they get really weird. and everybody has a maximum amount of social interaction, exceeding which, they get really weird. these levels are different for everyone, for a variety of reasons, and have no moral dimension. and that is all.

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

me: haha let’s do some readings

me, four hours later: wtf man

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

Aphrodite loves sex workers and victims of sexual assault and intersex people and people who are insecure about their body/self harm and nonwhite people and queer people and fat people btw. pass it on

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

“Don’t Work with Death!”

“Don’t work with death, because then you invite it into your house.”

Death is already in my house. Death is everywhere. Death is what decays the plant matter that feeds my garden. Death is what feeds the herbs I use in my spells, for each grows from what died before it.

Death is what feeds my family - death of plants, the death of animals. I would not disrespect the spirits of that which feeds us by ignoring their sacrifice. 

Death is the veil between my ancestors and myself, keeping them at rest and then acting as the gate for them to step into their next life.

When I do hospice work and sit with someone who is accepting their approaching death, I don’t tell them death is something to fear or avoid. I tell them death is the friend that walked beside them, every step of their life, maintaining the balance of the world, and waiting for them with open arms, to escort them to rebirth. 

“Don’t work with death!” 

I would not ignore life’s partner, not for arrogance or fear or ignorance. When I go to my own, I want to greet death with respect, acceptance, and gratitude.