kimberlysteele | Recent Entries

Autism is more than just a common condition with many possible causes ranging from hormone-disrupting plastics in the environment and vaccine schedules. Autism is the zeitgeist of our time. As a high-functioning autistic who has battled the more problematic and antisocial aspects of autism, I believe I am qualified to speak on the subject.

The Girls Who Could Not Shudder

Though Temple Grandin, the high functioning autistic who figured out how to build a better slaughterhouse, believes autism grants her the ability to think like an animal, I tend to disagree. The most high functioning autistics, such as myself, have a weird and serene overview of what fear is made of. Grandin's genius where fear is concerned was to figure out how to trick animals into believing everything is OK until the last second when the bolt shoots out of nowhere and ends his or her life. Mine was to figure out that the seemingly demon-possessed masses (nobody will ever know for sure if it was demons, gods, God, or plain old human nature) reacted to a minor seasonal flu with draconian lockdowns and deadly injection regimes because at their core they were afraid of losing easy affluence and high status. My odd relationship with fear has made it impossible to get the creeps. I finally saw my first full-body apparition a couple of years ago and I had no fear reaction at all. I can watch the Exorcist or any other "scary" film and be grossed out but never scared.

Autism truly is a spectrum and most people have it to one degree or another. If I were to take a guess, I would venture that it is a Plutonian influence because it seems to have an affinity for prosthetic digital fantasy worlds, plastics, and cheap oil wealth.

Autists Love Rules

In the film Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman plays Raymond, the institutionalized adult autistic brother of a sleazy car dealer played by Tom Cruise. Realizing his deceased father's 3 million dollar fortune is held up in Raymond's institution, Charlie (Tom Cruise's character) springs his brother for an epic road trip where they get to know each other for the first time. Rain Man made a splash in 1988 because it brought autism into the spotlight as a real disorder and audiences got a fascinating glimpse into the every day world of an idiot-savant. Raymond's worst meltdowns in the film are triggered by disruptions of routines and rules. Raymond is unwilling to board a plane. His reaction is so extreme, Charlie ends up taking him on the long journey via car. Raymond loves watching The People's Court every day at the same time on television, which means that Charlie must accommodate his wishes despite being on the road.

Rain Man was based on the true story of Laurence Kim Peek, a real life savant who the character of Raymond was meant to pay tribute. The depiction of Raymond won multiple awards for its unflinching truth. For better or for worse, the autists I have known and taught all have a certain love of rules and schedules. One adult autistic student may request me to write everything she is expected to practice in a week down to the finest detail of fingering as well as how many times she is to practice at a specific time of day predetermined by me. Another autistic adult who was more severe on the autism spectrum loved the same funny demonstration of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol pentachord week after week. She loved it for its predictability and not in spite of it. When I was a child, I presumed all families gathered for supper at 5:30pm because that is what my family did. I loved order, dependability, and routine and still do. To this day, when I am forced or obliged to stay up past my usual bedtime, I get very irritable and snippy about it if I am not keeping my temper in check.

Autism can bring out the worst in people, especially the children of rich people. Greta Thunberg descended into a horrific eating disorder at the age of 11. Her indulgent parents cancelled everything for their child, including her mother's career as an international opera singer. Greta went on long campaigns of manipulative, seemingly-intentional anorexia right as her body was supposed to be experiencing maturity and a final growth spurt.

Svante is boiling gnocchi. It is extremely important that the consistency is perfect, otherwise it won’t be eaten. We set a specific number of gnocchi on her plate. It’s a delicate balancing act; if we offer too many our daughter won’t eat anything and if we offer too few she won’t get enough. Whatever she ingests is obviously too little, but every little bite counts and we can’t afford to waste a single one. Then Greta sits there sorting the gnocchi. She turns each one over, presses on them and then does it again. And again. After 20 minutes she starts eating. She licks and sucks and chews: tiny, tiny bites. It takes for ever. “I’m full,” she says suddenly. “I can’t eat any more.” -Malena Ernman on daughter Greta Thunberg

Thunberg and her equally molly-coddled autistic sister, Beata, straddled the line between legitimate disability and total brat. Both sisters clearly enjoyed torturing their parents. A part of them coolly observed as their parents indulged ever more hysterical antics in order to appease their every whim. Greta was willing to starve to death as a child in order to have her rules, her way, and her parents were appointed with the responsibility for her starvation by default.

The Motive

I think rule-following gives autistics like myself a dopamine rush and a fun distraction from the harshness of life. That is why it can be addictive to make and follow one's own strict rules. There is a vision of how proper and perfect everything would be if only the rule was followed at the same time every day. Perhaps the origin of the impulse is demonic but honestly I have no idea. Once I bore witness to an autistic child throwing a violent tantrum in a public space over a lost toy. Toys are not supposed to be misplaced; that is a breach of the rules.

Autism is in some part the indulgence of laziness. The idea behind the laziness is that the world around the autist must conform to his or her wishes. The same television show needs to come on at the same time and Raymond needs to have his butt planted in his seat in order to watch it every day. Greta needs her gnocchi a certain way come hell or high water or it's imminent death. The kid acted like the Hulk on a bender because his toy was missing.

When autists find out that the real world does not have to comport to their wishes, many of them shut down a la Greta Thunberg and would rather die or skip puberty than grow up and face the music. Depending on the autist, the determination to culminate desire can result in an idiot or a savant. In my case, my determination to understand the music that was lodged in my brain from birth led to relentless experimentation with copycatting songs on the piano and eventually provided me with a career as a music teacher. I am an idiot in many ways, including where music is concerned, but there are certain aspects of music where I lean towards the savant. Every time I used to run to the piano and force my will on my own ear, that dopamine hit gave me the impetus to move on to bigger and better harmonies.

Autistic Literalism Gone Wild

As I mentioned, we all have a bit of the autist in us. In 1995, a book called The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right arrived on the scene. The Rules for ensnaring the not-yet-born Christian Grey were grotesque and oversimplified: play hard to get, be unfriendly and standoffish, stop all communications if he forgets your birthday, yet be easy to live with. In other words, follow this impossible formula to be certain to ensnare an ideal man who does not exist.

The same large female group who fell for The Rules bought into Rhonda Byrnes's The Secret in young adulthood and Covid paranoia in middle age. "If the details of the formula are correct, my desire will manifest", they assured themselves. They were also told going to university would land them good-paying jobs in their field and that they needed a degree in order to succeed. How is that working out for them collectively right now?

Dilbert is a comic strip about formula-following, mouse-find-cheese engineers working under an evil boss. One day, it will serve as a time capsule of the years 1960 - 2040 on display. There is a sociopathic evil boss who doesn't care that he is draining the life out of his employees. Dilbert goes to a psychiatrist, who suggests he is insecure about his looks because his mother was a moth (an absurd formula) and Dilbert ends up agreeing that she was a moth because Dilbert had a sweater that disappeared as a child. In other words, no matter how insane the illogic, the formulas must work because an expert says they work. In companies like the one parodied by the Dilbert strip, consultants are hired to solve company problems, when the baseline problem is that the employees are treated like robots and not human beings. Robots do not deviate from the rules.

I still drive a car a few times a week. There are many people who drive while autistic, expecting everyone else to follow the rules and getting very upset and stressed out if they don't. That used to be me and still is sometimes. The hard facts are that driving is a sh**show and making it out alive and intact must be the primary goal, not following the rules to the letter and expecting others to do the same.

If autists of every stripe can understand that autism is neither a superpower nor a life sentence, that would be a good first step towards adjusting to a world where autism permeates almost every aspect of daily life. Autists of moderate to high function need to wake up and realize that nobody owes us our living, especially not our parents. Another realization I would suggest is that compliance with your own rules or anyone else's can dig you into a deep pit. Autistics may be plagued with literalism but we are routinely blessed with insight. Being so detail-oriented means you can see the hidden faces, if only you can overcome your fear and put your mind to it.

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. I take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Sunday night. Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

I will be taking off the last Sunday in December 2022 and the first Sunday of 2023 this year.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thanks in advance for not using profanity!

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills -- but if you want to donate for it, I'll happily buy myself a book, a snack, or a cup of tea while on the town. Please only donate if you can absolutely afford it. I've been there. Your prayers for my continued success are welcome whether you donate or not! I take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Sunday night. Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

I will be taking off the last Sunday in December 2022 and the first Sunday of 2023 this year.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Reading requests are concluded for the week of October 2, 2022. Please be patient if you do not see your reading yet as it takes me anywhere from 1 to 48 hours to get to them all. Please feel free to comment on existing threads after the deadline though. Thanks and see you next week for more free Ogham readings.

Nature may be trying to tell us something via disease. Heart disease is an interesting condition because it is so obviously symbolic: the sufferer of heart disease dies of a broken heart. The simplest way to avoid a heart attack is to stop eating animal protein. Simple does not equal easy.

When I was in my twenties and vegetarian, I foolishly volunteered to clean up the mess left from the Easter ham. The melted fat from the ham was extremely stubborn. After the ham’s salvageable fat was saved, the remainder stuck to the pan, utensils, and plates like ugly on an ape. After a solid thirty minutes of scrubbing, soaping, rinsing, and re-rinsing, I finally got on top of the cleaning job. My hands stank of ham for the rest of the day though and felt sticky and greasy no matter what I did.

It does not take a genius to figure out that a substance as sticky and greasy as ham will clog a human heart. Cheese on pizza often pools with grease and eggs are salmonella and fat bombs, yet that did not stop me from eating either of those for two decades after I quit eating meat. Health is never going to be a compelling enough reason to stop eating a certain way. As tiny-brained humans, we lack the intellectual wattage to do what is best for our bodies most of the time.

Ad Plantarum or Plants are People Too

Ingesting pain and suffering causes pain and suffering, not just to oneself, but to everyone in the continuous arc. All things are connected. Roughly 99 percent of animals farmed in the US are factory farmed. The “lucky” one percent of animals who are not factory farmed are sent to the same slaughterhouses as the factory farmed ones. Under the best of circumstances, the life of a chicken ends in a bloody ordeal in the back of a barn. Eating animal products means maximizing the suffering of other sentient beings. As a vegan, when I mention this statistic, I am often confronted by people wielding what I call “ad plantarum” or the “plants also feel pain” argument. I agree, plants do feel pain. Trees do not like to be cut down and if grass could talk, it would probably object to being mown, chemically treated, and transformed into a suburban lawn. The ad plantarum argument is defeated easily by the requirements to survive. The human body can survive without meat, but it cannot survive without fiber. Fiber only comes from plants; animal products do not contain it. There is also the hard fact that all animals farmed for meat, dairy, or eggs either had to eat plants or plant-eating animals to survive. When a human eats a piece of cheese or beef, he vicariously eats all of the plants (usually GMO soy in the US) that the animal ate to get to a size where she could produce milk for a calf or be slaughtered for her flesh. If plants feel pain, then the most sensible way to reduce their pain is to avoid eating gluttonously large amounts of plants by proxy.

Guilty as Charged

The most detrimental part of eating animals and their secretions, however, is neither the ecological impact nor the health problems incurred by the habit. The number one issue with eating animals is the place of ungratefulness and entitlement it comes from. When I ate animals, including when I consumed their lives as a dairy and egg eating vegetarian, it by default meant I placed myself above them in an imaginary hierarchy. Just as modern human slavery exists in the form of human trafficking, sweat shops, and organ harvesting, I can choose to what degree I partake in any of those schemes. There is no way I can completely free myself of my involvement: right now, I am wearing a sweat shop made polyester blend dress that I bought from Goodwill. Underneath the dress, I am wearing stretch pants that I bought new, meaning they were created in a sweat shop that I directly supported when I bought them for $10 at JC Penney. Only heaven knows in what other ways I have been complicit and complacent, supporting business practices I vehemently disagree with. Nobody is perfect. When I eat avocados, I understand perfectly that they most likely were distributed by a violent avocado cartel. When I drink almond milk, I do so knowing that almond farming is extremely destructive to the environment. I use and eat all sorts of products containing palm oil, which is egregiously bad for the environment, specifically orangutans. Much of the food I eat and products I use is besotted with plastic packaging. There are frequent occasions where the only difference between my carbon footprint and a non-vegan’s footprint is paltry and barely noticeable. That said, if I were to go back to eating chickens and their eggs, it would put me in a club of people who essentially do not care that animals have feelings, lives, and souls. When they were given a beautiful array of choices of vegetables and vegetable products to eat, they chose to enslave and kill animals instead. I see Mama Earth or whatever you wish to call her as a sentient being. When I eat her copious plants, in the scheme of things, it is easier for her to replenish and replace them. Some plants actually depend on animals eating them for survival, for instance fruit trees that need animals to eat their fruits and fly/walk/poop their seeds far away. Other plants need us to cultivate them: my Jerusalem artichokes would not exist in the area had I not mail ordered them from some woman in Idaho. When I eat her animals, I take responsibility for pain and slavery that did not need to happen. I can try to run away from the responsibility, but sooner or later, it is going to force me to face it. At every meal, I can choose to be grateful and make do with the bounty of vegetables and fruits Mama provides for me to eat. Yes, it means some slight deprivation. I firmly believe I would weigh about 50-75 pounds more (quite dramatic when you’re under five feet tall like I am) if I chose to eat animal secretions and flesh in my region of modern day America.

Johnny Appleseed is an interesting character. For those non-Ecosophia readers, Johnny Appleseed was a real person in 18th century America who got turned into a myth. He was a wandering preacher of Swedenborgian Christianity who taught people how to create apple nurseries wherever he went. He was a vegetarian, animal loving mystic who was said to be able to charm the birds off the trees. Native Americans and settlers alike marveled at his relationship to animals. He was like Dr. Doolittle with them; both respecting them and speaking their language.

Whisper

When I was a child, to say my relationship with animals was fractured would be an understatement. I loved animals like most children do but of course I was raised eating animals, and that put up a wall of dissonance of being able to feel for them but not able to reach them. A friend of my aunt’s gave me a beautiful kitten when I was about eleven named Whisper. Whisper was the first cat I had who I felt truly close to. She was very sweet and liked to ride around on my shoulder. I took her to bed every night and sang her songs. For a lonely, nerdy eleven year old, Whisper was a life-saver. She gave me a place to pour all of the affection I could not ladle on any other human being. Her presence was healing. One day, I went to a birthday party for a friend of mine and when I returned, my mom told me Whisper was dead. Our family dog, Lucky, had snapped her neck when she got too close to his food.

Whisper’s death sent me on a spiral of suicidal depression that got worse and worse until I finally sought psychiatric help at age seventeen. I don’t think it is a coincidence that my worst depression happened in tandem with being forced to dissect a pregnant cat in high school, nor was it a coincidence that I went vegetarian and began serious study of the occult at that time.

I am a product of my times in many respects and my warped relationship with the animals was not uncommon.

As long as I ate animals, I refused to see the similarities to a highly-intelligent pig and my beloved, dead Whisper. I understand perfectly why my mind nearly broke at age 16. Many parts of my world were coming to an end, including my childhood and my naivete about the world. I could no labor under the delusion that I did not know any better.

Veganism and Sensitivity

There's an argument that a vegan diet makes ritual magic dangerous because of sensitivity issues that can throw the body-mind into a hyper-sensitive state. As someone who does ritual magic every day while maintaining a strictly plant-based diet, it is my anecdotal experience that this is not true in my case. Instead, my primary issue as an animal-product addicted, severely-depressed young adult was oversensitivity. I was oversensitive in every way, from the most obvious ways in not being able to withstand hot and cold weather for very long without becoming profoundly irritated to a constant psychic state of acute over-alertness. From my own experience, it seems to be the intake of fat and calories that causes imbalance of sensitivity. Too much body fat plus caloric excess and the bodymind risks becoming obtuse and insensitive to any and all messages from non-physical entities. This is not guaranteed to happen, but it can easily happen and is likely. Too little body fat and caloric deficit increases sensitivity until one suffers the problems I did as a skinny, perpetually-underfed teen girl.

No matter what arguments I come up with, I have accepted that humans will eat animal flesh and secretions until the last hundred homo sapiens on Earth resort to cannibalism rather than give up one mouthful of precious meat. We began eating animals as a product of our own worst instincts (I have my theories that the stories of the Fall from Eden are symbolic where eating and enslaving animals is concerned) and to our worst instincts, we shall always return. I see myself as having a choice. I believe my choice matters. As usual, I could be wrong.

I will be taking off the last Sunday in December 2022 and the first Sunday of 2023 this year.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Reading requests are concluded for the week of September 25, 2022. Please be patient if you do not see your reading yet as it takes me anywhere from 1 to 48 hours to get to them all. Please feel free to comment on existing threads after the deadline though. Thanks and see you next week for more free Ogham readings.

Music is one of those basic things that ideally should be good for humans. The music that has evolved from the classical versus pop fracture and the music of advertising is not good for humans. If anything, it is anti-human. Marketing jingles and the popular songs that sound like extended versions of them are designed to implant in the brain like parasites. We call them ear worms because they burrow deep into the consciousness and the soft tissues of the brain. Once they are there, their function is to poison by immersion. Instead of being able to hear our own thoughts, we hear the pop song or the jingle’s more direct sales pitch.

Pop songs sell desire, or more specifically dissatisfaction with one’s own appearance and circumstances in order to create desire that makes the host into a good customer intent on collecting all the accoutrements of modern life. Advertising jingles do this in a straightforward way: they plant a catchy tune that lasts far longer than the appeal of the product in question, for instance McDonald’s “duh-dum-duh-duh-duh, I’m lovin’ it”. In the case of longer format jingles, try finding a hip hop song that makes no mention of the accumulation of large amounts of money or contests in which the artist declares themselves superior to others in terms of their sexual appeal.

The hook of any given hip hop tune is designed to convince young people that they need to compete with each other by becoming narcissistic, greedy copies of the artist’s image as presented in the song. In other corners of the pop music world, we find whiny It Girls and It Boys crooning about their broken hearts. The image created in this case is the beautiful martyr who struggles prettily while wearing the latest fashions and taking designer drugs. Once again, the point is to create desire to mate with the star or to be like him or her, constantly advertising one’s status on social media while looking great, of course.

Music is Prayer

Music is and always was a form of prayer. Music is holy and to use it for mass advertising campaigns or by deliberately crafting ear worms to pimp commercialized images defiles it to some degree. This is not to say that all pop songs or even advertising jingles are inherently bad. They’re not. The point is that music has become degraded and debased like many other parts of modern life.

Science has shown that music uses more parts of the brain than any other human activity. Music is a way of accessing parts of the brain and improving them via exercise. Merely listening to music has been shown in studies to improve overall cognition; performing it and improvising it take brainpower to whole new levels of achievement. In other words, music often acts as a highway to the divine.

Nevertheless, not all prayer is good. Prayer is a means of contacting and communicating with incorporeal beings. There are many, many incorporeal beings who are not gods. Praying to them as if they were gods is what most people do, like when I was a child and prayed to the Christian God and Santa Claus at once because I was confused and spiritually illiterate. There are also the ethical issues of praying for someone else, and music can easily become part of that mess. When someone forces you to listen to loud music, whether this is the blaring commercials of a TV program or the twenty-something in his car with a modded out stereo system blasting autotuned swear words to thudding bass, they are attempting to drag you into worshipping what they worship. This practice is not exactly the same praying on someone else’s behalf without their permission, but it is well within the ballpark.

Music is powerful because it is a connecting force or a bridge. Music conjures up a state of mind, for better or for worse. I can no longer bear to watch Midnight Diner, a TV series from Japan that got popularized on Netflix, because of a song played at the beginning and the end of each episode. The song is a plaintive, sad number called Omoide by Tsunekichi Suzuki. I watched the first couple of seasons of Midnight Diner when my cat Kiki was in her last few weeks of life and the song viscerally puts me back in that time. I become overwhelmed with emotion as if I have traveled through time.

Music: The Best Part of Church

Religions have known the power of music for a very long time. Many Christmas songs are Gregorian chants that have been with us since the Dark Ages. The Hagia Sophia, built over 1500 years ago in the city of Istanbul, was clearly designed at least partially to provide beautiful acoustics for singers and perhaps instrumentalists of old.

Music creates structures within the imagination. The imagination is one and the same as the astral plane. I have a peculiar predisposition to synesthesia, or “seeing” sounds and music in my imagination as a series of colorful lines and shapes. The truly odd part is that I believe I can teach other people to be synesthetes and that becoming a synesthete helps singers especially to improve their vocals. Visualizing a pitch as a color makes me far more likely to hit the pitch accurately, especially if it is extra high or low or embedded in a difficult passage of music. When I tell my voice students to do the same, it works like a charm. It is as if the structure of the music exists on a plane other than the one where the sound is heard and that by paying attention to it (by colorizing it within the imagination) we can capture it and hit it like an expert marksman shooting a target.

When I listen to music, I see all sorts of artistic representations of it in my mind’s eye. If the music is crap, such as a commercial jingle, a pop song, or any form of atonalism, it is extra irritating. The shapes are ugly and they linger for a long time as earworms. It is for this reason I rarely attend concerts, and that includes “classical” music concerts. Much of classical music is garbage, especially when listened to as recordings. Mozart, in my opinion, was nowhere near as perfect as his fans presume. I find that much of his music, especially from his early periods, is trite and syrupy. When I listen to music, it is well-chosen and curated. Beautiful music creates kaleidoscopes of color, pattern, and structure and uplifts my imagination often for days afterward.

When a Bach chorale is sung inside a church, it creates a structure within a structure. Astral structures are amplified and reflected by similar astral structures, but can also be affected by physical/etheric structures. Beautiful churches attract and amplify symmetrical, beautiful, harmonious energies. Ugly churches do the opposite. Most religious buildings in the US are hideously ugly and badly designed, so often the music is the only thing redeeming the structure of the building. When a psychically sensitive person walks into such a religious building, he or she will often be deluged by the conflicting and dissonant currents of astral energy pervading the building, not the least of which come from the parishioners and clergy themselves.

If occultism is to experience a renaissance, I believe it will happen largely because of a resurgence of folk music and the study of astral shapes. There isn't much I can do to affect an entire musical and magical renaissance as an individual. Nevertheless, I can at least attempt to play my part (ha ha) by performing and in my case, writing religious music and by teaching others to recognize a musical shape when they see it in their mind's eye.

I have been very busy improving my new music site, Queeniesongs.net and I have been adding karaoke versions of the Orphic Hymns!

The idea is that other musicians learn to sing the Orphic Hymns. I don't copyright them, so if you are a musician or a music hobbyist, please use the Orphic Hymns I have penned music for in any way you like.

Hestia, Aphrodite, and Athena karaoke versions are available now at my Queenie Songs Youtube channel.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Reading requests are concluded for the week of September 18, 2022. Please be patient if you do not see your reading yet as it takes me anywhere from 1 to 48 hours to get to them all. Please feel free to comment on existing threads after the deadline though. Thanks and see you next week for more free Ogham readings.

I don't get involved with politics because I think my time and effort is better spent elsewhere. Though I have been told from near-infancy that my VOICE MATTERS, do-gooders who utter that line fail to say to whom it matters and if it will change things if it is perceived as "mattering".

Right now, Illinois is a few weeks from enacting the Safe-T act, which removes all bail requirements for second degree murderers, rapists, trespassers, drug dealers, and thieves. What this means is that my neighborhood could very well look like a live action RPG of The Purge, except the guns and knives will be 100% real. I had many chances and plenty of desire to move out of Illinois, but I remain here for my elderly parents.

Back in the day, I worked as a shelver in my local library. That library has become insufferably woke. Not only have they been enforcing masks and MRNA vaccines FOR CHILDREN long after it has fallen out of general popularity, but now they have decided to go the full monty by hosting a drag queen show for tweens and teens.

The library is no longer a refuge for intrepid nerds as it was in my day. Instead, it is a salaried office plankton class indoctrination camp. How sad that one of the few accidentally holy places in our atheist culture has gone the route of Progressive mental illness. The library is now toxic virtue signaling narcissist utopia.... great.

Here is a letter I wrote with them in mind:

Dear Library Board Members,

The Public Library is not the appropriate place for a drag queen show. I once organized a drag queen show to benefit a downstate animal sanctuary. I have nothing against drag, despite it having problematic implications for feminism as it is in essence a minstrel show with women as its subject of parody instead of blacks. Look up the origins of drag if you doubt me. The issue is not drag, it is drag at a publicly funded library marketed to a child audience.

Despite the cost of the performer being donated, the Library must still put taxpayer money into hosting any and all events as it provides the space, the employees, lights, gas, and electricity required to host events. If only fifty percent of taxpayers who bother to voice their opinions approve of a drag show in the library, that means the event has received a failing grade.

The Library seems absolutely determined to politicize itself via virtue signaling. Hard evidence was the extension of masking and vaccination mandates within the library’s walls well beyond January 2022. Discrimination against LGBTQIA+ earns finger-pointing and scowls yet if the unvaccinated so much as walked in the door, it was open season for discrimination of the kind not seen since blacks had separate drinking fountains. Shame on you all, especially in light of recent information coming to light about the horrible side effects (including death) of the MRNA vaccines that people were tricked or forced into accepting into their arms. You played right along while an entire generation of young children was robbed of normal human experience and apparently their future fertility. There is a meme going around that we now know who would have played along if the 2020s were 1930s Germany, and to quote a children’s game that was not allowed to be played in the year 2020-2021, “You’re it”.

Please, for the love of taxpayers, renege on your public funding. The Library is no longer problematic the second it becomes a private library. Since it has become unthinkable to give up the woke agenda, it’s time for you to have your cake and eat it too. Become a private library and this all goes away — you can insist on masks and vaccines for everyone in perpetuity, you can include openly pornographic LGBTQIA+ books in the Junior Room collection, you can beg for funds for an array of woke events, and you can virtue signal to your heart’s content.

Kimberly Steele

Scathing, isn't it? There is so much more I could say. I wanted to mention the woke pushing the envelope and listening for the sound of tumbrils and the creak of approaching guillotines. You DO NOT piss off momma bear, and that's exactly what they've put most of their efforts into: indoctrinating, grooming, and attacking children.

I feel hatred towards these people. I have the extra brain cells it takes not to turn my thoughts into concrete action, otherwise I would have worded it differently. Hating them may not be productive or helpful but I am honest about it. There is no point in lying to myself or papering over my hatred. In a slightly different universe, my alternate self would usher them to the grisly fates I believe they have earned. Plus, even if I send this letter to them, it is pretty much guaranteed it will go in one ear and out the other. I suggested a private library in their case, but until certain heads land on pitchforks, they won't consider it and I know that. I was being sarcastic.

Truly the only thing I can do is to focus on my own projects, my garden, my friends, and my family. Voting doesn't change anything for the better, especially not in corruption-ridden Illinois. I'm not even sure I'll vote for governor this primary -- why? I would put a large amount of money of Pritzker winning because Bailey (Republican candidate for governor) is looking more and more like controlled opposition. The whole reason I will go to the polling station at all is to vote in conservatives for seemingly insignificant positions such as school boards and judges. Those are the positions it isn't so easy for Democrats to cheat and they are the ones that actually matter. Until then, my energy is better spent putting on gloves and boots so I can go outside and dig.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Reading requests are concluded for the week of September 11, 2022. Please be patient if you do not see your reading yet as it takes me anywhere from 1 to 48 hours to get to them all. Please feel free to comment on existing threads after the deadline though. Thanks and see you next week for more free Ogham readings.

Beauty is an industry and more specifically, a racket. One of the primary goals of mainstream media is to make people feel insecure about the way they look. Especially funny is how the same media extols the virtues of being beautiful on the inside while blatantly overvaluing youthfulness and attractiveness in every frame, billboard, and song.

Being beautiful on the inside and the outside are far from exclusive conditions. Consider the late George Michael of the 1980s musical duo Wham! who kept several charities alive via anonymous donations, worked in a homeless shelter and begged other volunteers not to reveal what he was doing, and secretly paid for a woman's IVF treatments so she could realize her dream to become a mother. Michael, who died of cancer at age 54 in 2017, gave away a $200 million dollar fortune and may have done so undiscovered had it not been for his untimely death.

Though I would argue it is far more valuable to be like George Michael than to look like him in his prime, spiffing up what you've got on the outside is a good idea. As in all things, moderation is key. The trouble with our modern age is the drive to physically resemble one's own version of perfect. "Perfect" can be extremely warped. Nowhere is this more tragicomically demonstrated than the plastic surgery addict who refuses to let go of his or her youthful self and winds up as yet another slightly ghastly clone as if that younger self had a love child with a Madame muppet. Far better to let the hair gray, the jowls emerge, and the crows feet to spread, I think. There's something about the natural aging process that makes humans resemble ancient trees in their grandeur. They are big, old, and gnarled with complex networks of lines. One can only imagine the tangled complexity of their roots. The last thing I would want to do would be to zap that complexity into oblivion with a surgeon's knife.

Starting From the Bottom with Footwear

I used to wear heels as a young woman. I associated them with classiness and adulthood, plus they made my short legs look a bit longer and my big hips appear to be more narrow. I no longer wear heels, though I would consider it for a special occasion. I have never had a problem with buying gently used shoes, and this has saved me a fortune over the years as I tend to beat my shoes up fairly badly. The main secret to shoes looking good for short people is to create a solid monochromatic line from the waist down. When socks match shoes and shoes match pants or skirt, the effect is very pleasant to the eye. Contrarily, pairing chunky, white or multicolor athletic shoes or sandals with shorts or too-short pants and further breaking the visual line at the waist can make a person look slovenly or careless. If you want to instantly look saner and more put-together, think monochrome, baby.

Clothing

According to valuepenguin.com, the average cost of clothing per month is $120. This is absolutely absurd and unnecessary. I rarely spend $120 on clothing in an entire year. The number one inflator of clothing costs is buying new. The second is buying too many clothes.

When I was in college in the 1990s, I thought I had a fairly large amount of clothes. I had 4 pairs of jeans, 4 skirts of various length, and about 20 tops. I had at least 6 dresses. Then I met my roommates. My roommate had 50 pairs of jeans. I have no idea how many tops she had. She had dresses, T-shirts, and a trunk stuffed with accessories. She had a leather bomber jacket that got left in someone's car and was ruined with mold. Most of my roommates had similar amounts of clothing.

I visited Antioch College in Ohio (where I did not attend) to see a friend of mine in the 90s. Antioch was woke before it was cool. Back in the day, Antioch was the school that started the whole trend of forcing young men to ask permission at every phase of mating in order to avoid nonconsensual acts that would otherwise immediately be construed as rape. Antioch was a rich kid utopia where children decided exactly what activities made up "class" half of the school year. The other half was spent on campus doing drugs. Once every few months, every dorm student would convene in the center of campus for a makeshift parade/freakshow, with young adults doing whatever came to mind, such as riding tricycles. Antioch collegiates did not bother with laundromats. Instead, they bought any clothing that fit from local thrift stores, wore the clothing until it was stiff with bodily excretions, and then either threw it away or let it accumulate in piles in the hallways of the co-ed dorms.

When well-cared for, thrift store clothes can last much longer than the paltry few months they would spend on a faux-bohemian at a party school. I have had a few of my thrifted items for two decades. They are usually nicer items than anything I can afford to buy new. I have somewhere between 8-10 skirts, five pairs of pants, 25 or so tops, one blazer, one winter coat, one spring coat, two bras, other assorted underwear, a dozen scarves, and about 25 pairs of socks. My entire wardrobe fits into 3 large pull-out drawers and half of a small clothing rack. 80 percent of it, excluding socks and underwear, is thrift and the rest was Christmas gifts. I have not bought a new item of clothing for somewhere going on fifteen years.

Hygiene

I am lucky that my Japanese genetics took over my bottom half and I never grew much hair at all on my legs. Shaving sucks and personally I wouldn't do it to my legs even if I was paid to do so. That said, the secret to a great shave is hair conditioner. Once you have used hair conditioner as shaving cream, you will never go back.

Isn't crotch funk a fun human predicament? Crotch stench is usually the result of not wiping thoroughly enough or not bathing frequently enough or both. I have never been able to grok people who have access to perfectly luxurious baths and showers who go without for days or weeks like a medieval European serf. Another issue is many cannot smell their own body odor. Please, for the love of Pete, take frequent baths or showers. It's really not OK to stink. Body odor is its own form of perfume. Just like department store perfume, I don't want to smell it on someone from a few feet away, and I'm going to be super-grossed out if I can smell it across a large room or coming at me down a hallway from 30 feet.

I have mentioned in past articles about calcium packing teeth at night. Calcium packing is where you squish out the contents of a gelcap calcium supplement and rub the white goo into the cavity prone parts of your mouth at night. It works very well and done regularly enough, can combat halitosis and prevent tooth decay.

I wear regular antiperspirant/deodorant from the dollar store in the warm months and deodorant only in the cool months. Deodorant can easily be made with one part arrowroot powder and one part coconut oil with a dash (anywhere up to a teaspoon) of baking soda. A few drops of essential oil of lavender or tea tree oil can be added for scent.

Plucking hairs makes them grow back more slowly. Native Americans in Thomas Jefferson's time hated facial hair and plucked theirs out without mercy. Pluck enough times and the hair will not grow back at all. Keep this in mind when you pluck your eyebrows!

Body Butter

Just as conditioner is better at being shave cream than shave cream, body butter is better than lotion at being lotion. Body butter is one part coconut oil, two parts shea butter, and one part olive or jojoba oil. Melt all of the oils together for about ten minutes on a low heat stove or double boiler, pour into a large bowl, mix with essential oils if desired, and then sit the bowl in the refrigerator for two or more hours. When the oils have semi-hardened, take the bowl out and whip it as if it was whipped cream. The resulting butter is absolutely amazing.

Hair Care

I feel like I have some expertise where hair is concerned because I have always had a ton of hair. I was born with a full head of black hair. My hair is very coarse and thick. It wasn't always fun to have this hair -- it can be extremely crazy and it requires much care and handling. Believe it or not, I used to have three times as much hair on my head as I do now. I believe my insane hair is an indication of my weird etheric body, which is excessive in its own way.

It's just not necessary to spend a ton of money on hair. I have not had my hair done in a salon for fifteen years. One reason is I don't like to be fussed over as I sit in a chair. I find it very weird. Salon styling is also way, way, way too expensive for my budget. I don't dye my hair. Dye and bleach are both very harsh and strangely addictive, but if you like dye and bleach, whatever, you do you. My natural hair color is dark brown shot through with gray. When I finally start having big gray-white spots near the scalp, I plan on removing most to all of the brown with bleach and going completely silver.

Long Versus Short

I have had short hair and medium length hair. Ironically, long hair is easier to maintain and takes less time to style than short hair. I believe long hair is appropriate for men and women of all ages. Long hair is great for everyone except for people with the thinnest of hair. There is often no way to hide a pronounced cowlick with short or medium length hair. If you have long hair, all you need to do to erase the cowlick is to put your hair up or in a ponytail.

My Hair Routine

I wash my hair every two days. After washing with normal cheap $3 shampoo (right now I'm halfway through a bottle of Suave Ocean Breeze) I condition with whatever conditioner I have on hand. Suave conditioners are particularly nice but I like anything with a pleasant smell. After rinsing out the conditioner, I spritz my hair at least ten times with a mixture of one part vinegar to three parts water. I towel dry my hair by daubing, wrapping, and squeezing, but not rubbing. Then I rub a small amount of coconut oil into the ends of my hair and at the nape of the neck where it likes to get frizzy. I put a turbie twist towel on my head and then sleep with it on all night. I do not own a blow dryer. I style my hair in the morning by using a straightening iron to flatten out my bangs.

Cutting Hair

I have cut my parents hair for years. Both of them have thin, short hair. I cut my father's hair with an electric razor and my mom's with a combo of electric razor and scissor. They both get hair cuts about every eight weeks. I also cut my own hair using the Unicorn Horn method. This method is where you put your hair in two ponytails, one at the top of the head near the forehead and one at the back of the head like a more traditional ponytail. You then pull both ponytails in front of your eyebrows and cut a straight line. When the ponytails are loosened, the result is extremely flattering layers. People with thinner hair can do the unicorn method with a single ponytail. I use two because I have too much hair to get it done in one.

Overall, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. When I look at an Instagram model, often all I can see is thirst and Photoshop. I don't understand the appeal of Kim Kardashian at all and I think she was much cuter before she went whole hog on lip fillers and butt implants. There used to be a makeover reality show I watched called What Not to Wear. What Not to Wear nominees were recommended to the show for a $5000 wardrobe, makeup, and hair makeover by their friends and family. Though sometimes the show genuinely improved the appearance and the pride of its nominees, it was far more common for it to strip the nominee of her individuality. The show was proficient at turning biker babes, anime princesses, and amateur street walkers into posh suburban mom clones in kitten heels and tasteful blazers. In short, sometimes ugly is beautiful. If I don't like your tattoos or your neon bustier, no one is making me look at them. Somebody likes it, and if that somebody is you, all the better.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Reading requests are concluded for the week of September 4, 2022. Please be patient if you do not see your reading yet as it takes me anywhere from 1 to 48 hours to get to them all. Please feel free to comment on existing threads after the deadline though. Thanks and see you next week for more free Ogham readings.

Pictures of various gardens in my area (not mine!), some of the garden harvest, and kitties!

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills -- but if you want to donate for it, I'll happily buy myself a book, a snack, or a cup of tea while on the town. Please only donate if you can absolutely afford it. I've been there. Your prayers for my continued success are welcome whether you donate or not! I take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Sunday night. Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

I will be taking August 28 off, so please keep in mind I will not be reading the last Sunday in August. I will be back the following week.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

New reading requests are concluded for the week of August 21, 2022. Please be patient as it takes me anywhere from 1-2 days to get to your reading. Thank you for your interest in my Ogham readings and see you in two weeks!

Prayer has been unfashionable among Davos wannabes and TED Talk hipsters until recently. Memes about the uselessness of prayer used to dominate Facebook along with legions of angry atheists always at the ready to chime in on comment sections of bereaved parents or videos of natural disasters, laughing at the faithful while likely crying inside. Something changed because Facebook/Twitter/Youtube (which will be referred to from now on as Twitboob) started including "Pray for Ukraine" with its buffet of multicolored virtue banners such as "Marked Safe from Whatever Hideous Tragedy Occurred This Week" and "I Got My Covid Vaccine".

Prayer isn't always good. Prayer is non-physical communication between a human and another entity. Usually this prayer is mental but there are some who choose to conjure up the entity they are praying to by force, which is kind of like when an obnoxious drunk friend wants to talk at 3 in the morning, but instead of just calling you, they parachute onto your lawn, break into your house, hog tie you, and drag you back to their basement in order to talk to you. Some prayer is good and some prayer is bad. Some entities are good and some entities are bad. When I was a kid, I confused praying to Santa Claus with praying to Jesus and once I prayed to both in the same night. Anyone can be prayed to. People can pray to Kimberly Steele -- I sincerely hope they don't, but they can. There are several Etsy vendors who make celebrity novena candles. In an episode of Orange is the New Black, two characters fervently pray to Beyoncé. It is my opinion that the MRNA vaccines of various stripe open a direct channel to certain demons of the Goetia, and that is why so many of the vaxxed end up with possession-like symptoms such as tremors and projectile vomiting. To make a long story short, not all prayer is good or consensual, and when prayer is directed at a non-human entity, it is very easy for it to become rude. It is also very easy to pray to a demon when you think you're praying to an angel, or to be praying to a minor spirit when you think you or praying to a god, or to be speaking with a nasty trickster spirit instead of your dead father through a medium or Ouija board.

Backward Christian Soldiers

Christians often pray as a form of war. Their God is often mistaken for a cosmic vending machine as well as a vengeful punisher who inflicts pain like a mafia boss. The sort of Christian who prays for the punishment of others (often in secret but sometimes right in the open) imagines himself and his team as Right and all others as Wrong. Bible literalists take a statement like "preach unto all nations" as a direct imperative to force-infect the rest of humanity with the Yahweh-virus at all costs.

Songwriter Happy Rhodes has a song called "Save Our Souls" that captures it perfectly:

We think that we're superior
To every living thing
It can be lonely at the top
So we look for higher praise to sing
Won't you just say hello
We'll give you a cable show
We have weapons to intimidate
You if you look afright
Come on down and see our
Zoos and refugee camps
Ain't it worth your time

Pity our emptiness

The Gentleman Preacher

A few weeks ago a Christian pastor from a church down the block showed up at our doorstep. I wasn't home. My agnostic/atheist husband was home and he got into a short conversation with the gentleman preacher, who actually asked permission to pray for my husband. My husband said "No thank you", however, he was very moved by the man asking for his consent instead of blanket presuming and steamrolling on through. If more Christians start acting like the Gentleman Preacher of Kimberly's Neighborhood, churches will start filling to the brim and doing the good works of Jesus. I am not holding my breath for that to happen.

Non-Christians and various stripes of Twitboobers have turned to prayer because it has been revealed as a blunt battle axe that can be swung around in the china shops of social media. That is to say prayer can be weaponized as nasty Christians realized long ago. Twitboob has only recently caught on, hence Pray for Ukraine. They espouse Praying for Ukraine because it is the Latest Thing. They want carte blanche to jam the Latest Thing down collective throats with constant reassurance from experts (kind of like a Girlfriend Experience) that they are strong and wonderful. They don't care if the reassurance is fake.

Europeans are in a real pickle right now as they face the prospect of mammoth utility bills this winter while having to get scrappy when it comes to food. I think middle class Americans are more used to scrounging and seeing red rectangles on our late and unpaid utility bills. We already were deplorable Walmart, GoodWill, and Aldi shoppers back in the Obama era. Being demi-poor like me isn't so bad but you do have to get used to it. Going demi-poor or straight up poor is hard to do overnight and the higher they sit, the harder they fall. I don't give a rat's behind about my gym membership, my cable subscription, my Adobe software suite, my hundred dollar restaurant meals, my underground parking, or my museum patronage because I don't have any of those things.

There is a teeming class of people who are not ready for what they gleefully signed up for in 2020. Neither can they handle the responsibility for what they've done to Western civilization in general nor can they cope with the physical demands of poverty after quaxxing themselves and their children. The shots are in the process of establishing an underclass of handicapped, dependent, and mostly infertile adults whose families face bankruptcy or homelessness because of repeated trips to ERs and medical clinics for the rest of their lives. When they land in those ERs and clinics, they will be gaslighted that it couldn't possibly be the MRNA vaccines. Throwing money at the Ukraine is yet another mask to hide the emerging truth of what they have done to themselves and everyone else. Feel-good, "We're All in This Together" rhetoric is a favorite shield for karma-avoiders.

Pray for Ukraine is a veiled ask to support the US's current proxy war with Russia. It took me way too long in my life to understand how leaders of countries quibble for resources and dress up their resource grabs with a thick frosting of ideology. Don't pray for Ukraine. Pray for yourself and for those whom you've asked their express permission to pray for. Pray to the spirit of the land where you are and give thanks compulsively. Pray to the real gods and don't broadcast your private conversations with them; we wouldn't understand anyway.

I will be taking August 28 off, so please keep in mind I will not be reading the last Sunday in August. I will be back the following week.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

New reading requests are concluded for the week of August 14, 2022. Please be patient as it takes me anywhere from 1-2 days to get to your reading. Thank you for your interest in my Ogham readings and see you next week!

I have always been oversensitive. At nearly half a century old, my hearing is still good enough to require earplugs when I sleep. When I was a child, I was plagued by oversensitivity. Overstimulation with too much loud noise or stress causes me to break down or have a panic attack. This happened reliably in episodes throughout school and young adulthood. When I am in crowds, I am bombarded by the moods and thoughts of those around me. I cannot read them exactly, but I can get a fair enough idea. This phenomenon used to make any public school or crowded shopping center into a living hell, depending on the day. I say "used to" because approximately six years ago, I took up the Sphere of Protection as a daily practice. At the time of this writing, I have missed doing the SoP only one day, and that was the day I rescued my deceased aunt's cats from her home. I have no problem with commitment; if anything, my tendency is to overcommit, which is why I refused to have children in this lifetime.

A Dime a Dozen

Oversensitivity may make me sound as if I am a special snowflake but actually it is as common as dirt. Lots of people dress up their oversensitivity by calling themselves empaths, star children, sensitives, or psychics. The only difference between a self-professed empath and the average Jane is awareness of the condition. Many people refuse to acknowledge their own psychic tendencies as a matter of pride: there are plenty of religious people who close themselves to any messaging from the subtle planes with the enthusiasm of a hack plastic surgeon wielding a liposuction cannula. They do this so they can practice idolatry and stuff themselves to the gills with holy book quotes to use in imaginary and real debates. Even more common are the people who embrace addiction in order to escape awareness of the spirit worlds. The resulting imbalance is a shift from the pole of oversensitivity to the equally bad opposite of undersensitivity. Lepers are undersensitive. The nerve damage caused by the mycobacterium leprae dulls the senses until the extremities such as fingers and nose become useless and fall off. To be psychically oversensitive is like having no skin and to be psychically undersensitive is like having leprosy.

The Age of Ick

For me, the Sphere of Protection, along with discursive meditation and daily divination, creates a thick and formidable barrier between me and the psychic onslaught of our demonic age. As I have mentioned in a previous essay, we live in an era that Incans tried to deliberately take an incarnation hiatus from. Our materialist era is ruled by demons and overrun by them: they're having a field day. There are an uncanny number of leaders from major religions who give lip service to fighting demons while taking every action to be exactly like them, from Joel Osteen in his mega-mansions shutting out the flood victims from his mega church to the local Buddhist center that forces little kids to wear Satanic symbols on their faces so adults can soothe themselves with fear porn fairy tales that MRNA clot shots are safe and effective.

The Physical

The first line of psychic self-defense is physical. Psychic balance is often dependent on a stable blood sugar level. Just as I become hangry (portmanteau of the words hungry and angry) and lightheaded when I skip meals, my oversensitivity gets out of whack. I am much more likely to have an overstimulation panic attack if I have not eaten well or if my blood sugar is too high or too low. For this reason, becoming a vegan in 2010 helped me balance out much of my oversensitivity because it stabilized my digestion and regulated my blood sugar. When I was a child, I often went without eating until I was lightheaded and dizzy, especially in the mornings because my body does not do well with breakfast. I get nauseous if I eat a large meal within two hours of getting up and I become ravenous by 1pm regardless of whether or not I have eaten breakfast. My blood sugar was a roller coaster ride by the time I was sixteen, so it is no wonder I was suicidally depressed by that point. The cure for me was regular small meals and loads of fiber from fruit and vegetables.

Physical surroundings absolutely affect your psychic state. If your living space is cluttered and trashed, your brain just might reflect the same conditions. Making my bed and straightening my living quarters goes a long way in pushing the chaos of modern life to a distant periphery. At least once a week I try to spend some time at the forest preserve. The Japanese call this practice shirin-yoku or forest bathing. Just as the term would imply, forest bathing removes lots of psychic gunk and gives you a fresh, clean astral body. As a native Midwesterner, I find great solace from prairies and woodlands. The spirit of the land here is among my greatest comforts. For others, the best places on earth may be mountains, lake shores, or oceans.

The Astral

At the risk of being too obvious, I'll make mention that the people around you affect your psychic state. If you have no choice but to be around toxic people -- say you live with your parents and they're awful but you love them because they're your mother and father after all -- the next best alternative to moving out is to refuse to react to any drama they throw at you. Relentless positivity and humor is kryptonite to narcissists and drama queens. If they cannot get a rise out of you, they soon implode because it forces them to look at themselves instead of fixating on what you are doing wrong.

There is great power in shutting up. You are the ruler of the kingdom yourself; don't abuse your power. Gossip is entertaining, I get it. It can feel like medication when you're wounded. Schadenfreude is addictive -- if it wasn't, tabloid magazines would not be a thing. But here's the thing: people who have active and meaningful lives do not gossip. It's a weird aspect of having meaning in your life that the urge to gossip just falls away.

When I say you do not owe anyone anything, I mean it. It's not my fault if someone is looking for advice that I don't feel fit to give. I no longer make conversation because someone else might feel silence is awkward. My company is pleasant enough I think, and if it isn't, I don't give a rat's derriere. I know I have the ability to make conversation: I have conversations with trees, for Pete's sake! But it isn't my job.

Another thing I no longer do is explain. Less is more. People don't need to know why all the time. It's not their circus and not their monkeys. People usually have more than enough to worry about without being burdened of a detailed explanation of my modus operandi. The easiest way to win friends and get people to like and respect you is by shutting up and asking them something about themselves.

There are things that my closest family members will never know about me. I like my secrets. I am taking them to the grave.

The Mental

The final wall of psychic self-defense is the creation of magical shapes inside and outside of the mind. If the average, ignorant media slave's signature is a hot mess of violent crayon scribbles, the well-defended psychic's trademark is a complex symphony of beautiful and symmetrical shapes not unlike an unfolding kaleidoscope. In my case, the Sphere of Protection, musical Orphic hymns, and geometric gardens provide an intensive shield against modern manias and agendas that would otherwise warp and twist my efforts. Of course there are other ways to eke out one's own magical shapes -- in the old days, that's why churches were so beautifully and carefully designed and took centuries to build.

I realize these notes may raise more questions than they answer. That's both good and bad, I suppose.

I will be taking August 28 off, so please keep in mind I will not be reading the last Sunday in August. I will be back the following week.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

New reading requests are concluded for the week of August 7, 2022. Please be patient as it takes me anywhere from 1-2 days to get to your reading. Thank you for your interest in my Ogham readings and see you next week!

Profile

Kimberly Steele

Buy Kimberly a tea

December 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Dec. 29th, 2025 05:18 pm

Kimberly Steele

Recent Entries

Autistic Literalism

Ogham Readings on Sundays

Open Post

Ogham Readings on Sundays

Broken Hearts: On Eating Animals and Responsibility

Ogham Readings on Sundays

The Shape of Music

3 New Orphic Hymn Karaokes!

Ogham Readings on Sundays

Wasted Words

Ogham Readings on Sundays

Living With Less, Part Two: Beauty

Ogham Readings on Sundays

Open Post

Some Savage Memes!

Ogham Readings on Sundays

Don't Pray for Ukraine

Ogham Readings on Sundays

Some Notes on Psychic Self-Defense

Ogham Readings on Sundays

Profile

December 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags