Hello, dear ones -
Who else’s inbox has them feeling like a spinning piñata, sales and ads left right and center, all hoping if they hit you enough, money will start falling out of you?
Well… I’ll be honest, this is also sort of a sales email. But it’s not selling you stuff so much as offering some opportunities to engage with the season in what might feel like a more meaningful and nourishing way. I’ll explain:
See, I actually kind of grew to hate the holidays. I’ve yet to encounter one where I didn’t end up overstimulated, overwhelmed, feeling a lot of pressure, and having at least one meltdown. While there are little traditions and little moments I enjoy with my family and friends, for the most part, I find the socially-accepted "normal" approach to these moments in the year to be spiritually and meaningfully anemic. I’m left feeling sort of empty and like my body’s a bag, holding everyone else’s stress and spiritual malnourishment, too.
But part of the job and role of a medicine person is to see where there’s illness, disorder, and imbalance and to seek to return the people and situations involved into a state of Beauty.
While the specifics differed based on location and culture, many Old Ways practicing cultures around the world seem to have shared a common thread of understanding that left to their own devices, humans have a tendency to fall out of alignment with their own humanity (and thus with the land, their ancestors, and the Holy - however they defined that).
Humans might give in to greed, or laziness, or insatiable hunger and consumption. But humans were also capable of crafting great Beauty - of singing and dancing and shaping the world/ Holy in ways that mirror it back to itself. And so it was this Beauty that the Holy loved them for - that the Holy felt fed by and therefore would be more likely to stick around and grant favors or respond with the Beauty of its own.
But in modern times, many of us don’t come from intact lineages who teach and practice that. Most of our ancestors, over time, have fallen prey to the larger forces that undercut animist culture and relational commerce in favor of empire, capitalism, “whiteness” (ie “no culture”), fragmentation, disconnection, stolen focus, stolen land, stolen community, and spiritual anemia.
And our holidays - the moments in time that were meant to be part of maintaining our own connection to Beauty, the Holy, and our relationships with each other and the world around us, both tangible and less tangible- became what they are today. Stressful, extractive, overstimulating, and superficial.
So here I come, wondering: what if that didn’t need to be the case? What if celebrations could be more like ritual or ceremony? What if they could nourish us more than deplete us? What if they could be less about performance and ticking boxes, and more about presence and tending relationships?
What would we have to do to restore Beauty to the center of our celebrations?
Although I didn’t have this exact language for my enquiry until the deeper initiation I’ve been on in the last few years, uncovering deeper layers of what it means to return to a more "indigenous soul of the world" (as Martin Prechtel calls it)…in many ways I’ve been on a journey of asking this question and refining my own practice of a more beautiful, nourishing, land-based, and connective season for almost ten years now.
And the offers I have going right now are a reflection of that journey and also act as my own humble offering in service to the bigger dream of humans coming back into coherence with Beauty.
And our coherence matters.
This quote from Ilya Prigogine has popped up in a few different places in the last month or so and it feels deeply relevant to me in this larger time cycle we’re in, with the holiday season being one moment we can put it into practice: “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system into a higher order.”
In the coming weeks, I’ll send a few more emails continuing to follow this thread, offering my perspective in what I mean by Beauty and how I imagine you can start to invite more of that into your holiday celebrations, whether you join me for an offer or not.
But for now, I’ll close this one with letting you know a quick overview of what I’ve got going on as we move towards Winter Solstice and the solar and Gregorian Calendar New Year. I’ve got two online options and an in-person one in Winchester, VA.
ONLINE:
Insight 2026 is back!
This is divination through intuitive cards to invite “More Magic, Less Pressure” into your New Year celebrations, altars, and rituals; and offer you a theme/ image to orient you in this next phase of your own becoming.
Part of what makes this awesome is there's no scheduling needed. You register and within 72 hours you get an email with a channeled voice note from me and a PDF with an image of your card(s), as well as some suggestions for how to engage with the process in a self-inquiry and ritual way.
This could be a great gift for yourself or another, too. (Someone - I’m not saying who! - is purchasing one as a White Elephant gift, in case that feels inspiring...)
Also included is some gentle accountability prompts through the year on solstices and equinoxes, as well as a live (on Zoom) retrospective gathering in early December of next year to integrate and prepare to move into 2027.
Available through Jan 6, 2026.
https://www.wildsacredjourney.com/tarot-for-2026
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Our final Sun, Moon, Fire, & Soil call of 2026 is happening on December 20th at 2pm ET.
This is on Zoom and a beautiful way to pause, grab a cuppa and put your feet up, and actually reflect some on the season so life doesn’t feel so much like it’s rushing past you. We notice what’s happening in the natural world and I tell a seasonally-appropriate story which we then explore, as if it were an ancestor with it’s own wisdom to impart to us (because it is).
**Note: these calls splintered off from what my original Sanctuary offer was. After the first few rounds of Sanctuary, I felt called to break it into two distinctive parts but am feeling they want to reweave themselves next year into something less formal. So though these seasonal calls will come back, they’ll probably be called something else and run a bit differently - more like a discussion group.
https://www.wildsacredjourney.com/seasonal-roundhouse
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IN-PERSON:
I'll be bringing one of my developing "signature" ceremonies to Daydream Studios in Winchester, VA - a three-hour ceremony to honor the winter solstice and rest in the beauty of winter on Dec 21st, at 9:30am ET.
This ceremony is rooted in something akin to the Old Ways of our animist ancestors and is also an attempt to breathe some life back into the embers of a more nourishing culture.
It’s an invitation to weave together spiritual practice and our creature bodies. It’s an invitation to bring offerings, bring your heart, bring your sense of confusion or emptiness.
Around altar and flame, we’ll start with opening to and tending our relationship with the Otherworld, then we’ll explore our relationship with darkness, feed the Holy, and honor and call back the Light.
And through story; ceremony; and animist, shamanic practices we’ll listen for whatever guidance the Otherworld has for us as we find our way back towards the vibrant-and-cyclical aliveness available to us in each moment.
It’ll be a slow, deeply contemplative time together. Perfect for resting into the beauty of the season.
Registration closes Dec 18th so we can all prepare properly.
https://www.wildsacredjourney.com/ceremonies
I'll leave it there for now, but look forward to sharing more of these thoughts about meaningful and beautiful holiday celebrations with you in the days and weeks to come.
And if this inspires any of your thoughts, I'd welcome hearing 'em (thought I may not be able to respond to all comments).
May you be warm. May you find moments of rest.
Here's to being "islands of coherence".
Kate
