#and i asked about each section (hermes -> commute question re-do -> the Bad Times questions)

[coriander-candlesticks]

Note to self: word prayers better when doing divinatory sessions

I think I've mentioned this before, but I do yes/no stone pulls on Sundays to ask for guidance about maintaining my health re: my commute because it's 2-2.5 hours each way via public transit if everything runs on time. It's rough on me in multiple ways and can lead to even more migraines than usual or being too fatigued to work at all, and it can be difficult to tell whether I'll have the spoons to go in person.

This past Sunday I was exhausted & stressed because of, you know, the horrors, and said my initial prayer a little differently than I usually do. I still invoked Apollo and Hermes as always, as both of them cover divination by lots, Apollo's domain covers health & disease, and he's the one I turn to for divination by default.

Now, the vast majority of the guidance and lessons Apollo has given have had to do with recognizing my physical & mental limits, especially around this issue. The answers I was getting this time around were...odd but not quite in the way they have been with just dud pulls, so I started asking clarifying questions to figure out what was going on. After a few - establishing that there was a reason for the answers but it wasn't a test or punishment or Apollo messing with me (which would have been. odd) - I realized that while I'd invoked Hermes as a god of divination by lots alongside Apollo, I had not explicitly asked him to act as a messenger and aid in communication this time around, nor had I asked Apollo to guide the divination session with the wording I usually use.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

I re-said the prayer (correctly this time) and confirmed that it was, in fact, Hermes at first while re-doing the initial set of questions (which were much more consistent in the usual way), as well as confirming that the issue was the prayer wording. Lesson learned lol