Written by I want to talk about the move.
Not the logistics of it – the boxes, the drive, the way you have to leave a place before you understand what it was to you. I want to talk about the months before it, when I already knew and was still pretending I didn’t.
Colorado was good to me in the ways that places can be good to you. The mountains were real. The altitude changed something in the way I thought. My practice deepened there in the specific way that happens when you have enough space and enough silence – there was room for it to expand into. But somewhere in the middle of 2025, something started to shift. The land that had felt like it was speaking to me started to feel… quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Finished quiet. The quality of silence you get when a conversation has run its natural course.
I didn’t want to hear it.
I pulled cards about it over and over (even the morning before I got into my car to leave) before I trusted the answer, which tells you something about where I was.
The first pull was the Tower. I put it back and told myself I’d shuffled wrong. I know. Very witchy of me.
The second pull was the Eight of Cups. A figure walking away from eight perfectly good cups, toward something in the dark distance. Classic. Unambiguous. I journaled around it for weeks without actually writing down what it was clearly saying, which is the thing we do when we’re not ready to receive the message that is sitting directly in front of us.
The third pull was the Six of Swords. The card of passage. Of the difficult but necessary crossing, of moving from turbulent water toward calmer shores with whatever you could carry. That one I couldn’t argue with.
What strikes me now, looking back, is that the cards weren’t telling me something I didn’t know. They were confirming something I already knew and was refusing to act on. That is most of what divination actually does. It doesn’t reveal hidden information so much as it gives you permission to trust what you already sense.
The decision to come to Washington felt different from ordinary decisions. There was a quality of rightness about it that preceded any rational justification I could build for it. The Pacific Northwest called in a way that was more felt than thought. Something about the water. Something about the specific quality of green that happens in places where it is overcast most of the year – darker, more saturated, more alive than the scrubby mountain green of Colorado.
As a Scorpio, I’m a water sign living in a body that spends a lot of time too far from water. I’d been in landlocked places for a long time. The pull toward the coast, toward the clouds, the rain, toward the grey-green light that is so different from Colorado’s relentless blue sky – it was physical before it was anything else.
I landed here and the land immediately said something back.
That’s the thing I was looking for and didn’t have a word for until I had it: reciprocity. The sense that the land you are in is in some kind of dialogue with you, rather than simply hosting you. Some places host you tolerantly. Others actually engage. Washington engages. The Douglas firs are enormous and old and entirely unimpressed with human concerns, which is exactly the quality of non-human company I apparently needed.
I don’t think magical decisions look different from ordinary ones most of the time.
You still have to pack the boxes. You still have to find a place to live and work out the finances and navigate all the ordinary infrastructure of changing your life. The magic isn’t in the absence of the ordinary difficulty. It’s in the quality of knowing underneath all of it. The felt sense that this is the right direction, even when everything about it is hard.
The cards said go. The land said come. And I, eventually, listened.
That’s usually how it works.