Kimberly Steele

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.

Our civilization has a love/hate relationship with children that is currently listing heavily towards hate.  Children and their parents take a bad rap for being selfish in an age of overpopulation.  Long ago, in a time before the woke revolution, gay men came up with the term "breeder" to label people (typically straight ones) who wanted to conceive and/or successfully bore children.  As someone who has never wanted children of my own, I was regularly mystified by people who pitied me for not having children or who asked when I was going to have children of my own. At the tender age of 18 I already felt a great deal of pressure to have children.  The pressure did not truly subside until I reached the age of 45 (I was a very young looking 40) and it became patently obvious my husband and I had no designs on creating a child together.

My go-to line was and is "Raising a child is one of the toughest jobs in the world, and I skipped it because I didn't want to do it half-assed".  I only say this to parents who I believe are doing an excellent job raising their children.  Many people who become parents belatedly discover they don't want to be parents.  There are message boards for parents who confess that having one or more children ruined their bond with their spouse or mate.  They regale anonymous viewers with horror stories about the aftermath of childbirth-ruined bodies, isolation, depression, and regret.  Many wish they could go back in time and make a different decision.  Many feel tricked and hoodwinked.  Parenthood was glorified and its truths downplayed.  Many feel eaten alive by toxic mommy culture and to a lesser but still significant extent, toxic daddy culture.  Many suck it up and never let anyone know about their negative feelings, burying the wound deep inside where it festers and burns.  

It's a fact that many people have children merely because they are expected to have them.  Many more have them by sheer accident.  I was an accident; that's why I was adopted at the age of ten days.  When parents do regret having children, they are not allowed to say it aloud.  They are never allowed to mourn what they have lost in terms of freedom, youthfulness, autonomy, and potential.  They are handed a set of unrealistic expectations.  Nobody can have it all, yet we are told this all the time with the hackneyed term "limitless possibilities".  We are also told we should desire to have it all while being all things to all people.  There are many idealized images where one can have kids, career, a perfect house, a killer Instagram, and of course lots of money.  

Spoiled Rotten: Is There a Subconscious Backlash Against Children?

Childhood is fetishized.  Suburban childhoods like the one I experienced in the late 70s and early 80s became a trend on big and small screens when the TV show Stranger Things resurrected the packs of kids on bikes trope from Stephen Spielberg's ET.  Today's über-precious, molly coddled Gen Z child does not know what it is like to be sent outside to play and forgotten about until dinner, or the brief phone call from a friend's house to get permission to eat dinner over there.  As generations of children have become more and more materialistic, they have become more feral, either shrinking away in horror from just about everything or boldly bratting it up while posing for a mom-assisted selfie in front of a mountain of unearned toys.  As a teen, a healthy amount of my self-hatred came from remembering what an insufferable brat I had been just a few years earlier.  Maybe I'm not the only one who hates how spoiled I was.  

Instead of raising kids sensibly to do without en masse, I hypothesize that hatred bubbles up as severe and awful post-hoc punishments for children, for instance making them the subjects of mass medical experiments with various vaccines and allowing woke teachers to use them for sexual grooming purposes.  In other unsurprising news, the most draconian elements of child punishment have been originated by the most child-hating and overpopulated nation on the planet, China.  

It is the worst time in history to be a child.  The second you pop out of mom's body, you are pricked and poked with vaccines that cause learning disabilities and auto-immune dysfunction ranging from mild to severe.  If you survive, you may end up being told you are insane by the tender age of ten for maintaining an active connection to the spirit world.  If you are not a natural conformist, you will be mercilessly bullied, often by your own parents.  If your parents have any money, it is highly unlikely you will know what it is to play outside without being in constant danger of being run over by a car, if you are allowed unsupervised play at all.  Every parent I knew as a youngster dealt with depression.  Psychiatry as a profession only exists because of moms and dads who hate their lives.  This begs the question of "What's the use of a gorgeous, comfortable lifestyle if you're depressed as hell all the time?"  It's the same sort of conundrum of the very rich and very sick.  What good is the $400 bottle of wine when you cannot drink it even with the help of a nurse holding a straw to your lips?  

The MRNA vaccines were first billed as a way of keeping grandma safe from her grandchildren.  Once the optics fail of children suffering on behalf of their grandparents was perceived for the failure it was, the myth machine churned out propaganda about the vaccines being safe for the youngest of the young.  It was always clear they were not safe for anyone paying attention.  I'm not sure why it took so many ten year olds keeling over with heart attacks though.  My suspicions are that many people who claim to love children actually don't love them at all.

Misanthropy as a Function of Overpopulation

The Plandemic turned regular people into original sinners who could only get clean one way: by getting repeatedly inseminated with a DNA-modding set of machines in injection form.  The baptism rite in question was demanded by the anti-theist powers of Progress.  The children were offered up as the ultimate sacrifice on the altar, which is to say children are still the disposable cannon fodder they were in World War I.  Though some may claim they believe the children are our future, nobody has any problem with child labor as long as it is done by little Pakistani girls in sweatshops and little boys in the Congo mining cobalt for electric cars.  Children were always on the front lines and precious little has actually changed except the flavor of lies we are expected to swallow hook, line, and sinker about how much they are loved and valued.

The reason companies are rushing to get vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule is because it lifts the onerous burdens of liability in case they kill or maim children as they are already doing.  Autism is up to 1 in every 30 births.  Compare to 1 in every 2500 being diagnosed with autism in 1960.  Something is amiss, for sure, but there is no rush to get to the bottom of it.  To add insult to injury, autistic people are thrown away by the time they hit their teens. To exact revenge, many of them have become memelords on 4chan.  

Commodifying Innocence and Manufacturing Consent

In the Jim Henson fantasy film The Dark Crystal, the evil villains are a race of decrepit bird-creatures called Skeksis who spend their time and resources hunting down the last of a race of mini-people called Gelflings.  When they find a Gelfling, they hang him or her in the air and extract his or her life essence until the creature dies.  They drink the substance as an elixir and gain an addictive rush along with a temporary stay from aging.  Basically Jim Henson had his Skeksis drinking adrenochrome long before it was cool.  Right around the same era, Brooke Shields made several soft porn movies and starred in extremely mature photo shoots, many while she was still a pre-teen.  80s kids were pushed into sexuality at age 12.  Now that sexy 12 year olds are yesterday's news, mainstream media has moved on to five year olds and toddlers.

There are some teachers of the type displayed on Libs of TikTok who have the sick idea that little kids should be initiated into adult domains to "help" them figure out what they will be in terms of future sexuality.  My husband pointed out that anyone with a sexual agenda to "help" a little kid is a pedophile no matter what they believe they are doing.  Most kids are unaware of themselves as having sexual feelings until at least a few years before puberty.  Most of those feelings can easily be shelved until they grow into semi-adulthood and begin the cycle of puberty.  Sexualizing a child, ogling a child as Brooke Shields was ogled, or attempting to influence a gender decision upon a child who has not completed full puberty is sexual abuse and a breach of their human right to privacy and autonomy.  If I was Queen of the World, I would enact no punishments for thought crimes.  However, those who acted on their pedophilic urges would be put on trial and quickly executed as a matter of course, and that includes teachers who "come out" to their kindergarten classrooms.  Communists believe that turning all sex into a robotic, debased free for all is better than the opposite traditional religious obsession with sexual shame and humiliation.  Evangelists want an eternal re-run of the opening scenes of The Handmaid's Tale, with any woman who dares have a child outside the confines of marriage literally branded (preferably by cutting off a hand or putting out her eye) for life and her child taken away to be gifted to the deserving and heterosexual faithful.  Commies prefer an abyss of perversion and Evangelists delight in a morass of repression and punishment.  Either way, kids get thrown under the bus.

In Which I Propose a Ternary

I believe there is a happy medium that neither involves five year olds receiving cartoon masturbation manuals nor a pamphlet of lies about storks and mommy's tummy.  De-stigmatizing unmarried teen pregnancy would help countless generations of children from a couple of key angles.  Allowing younger people to have children outside of marriage with the expectation of being completely supported and accepted would result in healthier generations of children.  The later one waits to have children, the worse one's prospects are for having a healthy, intelligent child.  One of the reasons for the high number of autistic births is because of the general age of today's parents, not just the amount of unnecessary and toxic chemicals being shoved into baby's shoulder.  A hundred short years ago, teenagers had children on the regular and nobody batted an eye.  Women wrapped up childbearing at age 35 if they were not dead from doing it, unlike now when women don't think about having a child until they're having sporadic hot flashes.  Healthier attitudes towards unmarried teen pregnancy would mean more children and fewer abortions of the legal or illegal variety.  Considering the vaccinated are very likely to face fertility problems in the near to far future, there is haste to be made in accepting parenthood in in forms that were previously considered declassé or embarassing.

Though I am encouraged to see alternative schools springing up in my area in response to the exposé of public schools in 2020-2022, I am dismayed by the surging tide of Christian schools which seek to replace once kind of indoctrination with its equally bad opposite.  I believe children should learn that being gay is OK, just not in any graphic detail.  

I dream about cars at least once a week.  My latest car dream featured my husband.  He wanted to go for a car ride with me in a white sedan on a pond with thin ice.  I said "Absolutely not."  He decided to go anyway.  The car (predictably) sank.  He was able to escape and lift the car out of the pond with one arm.  

I know what my dream meant, and to a different woman with a different husband, the dream would mean something else entirely.  In my dreams, the car is not a symbol for status or control as some dream "experts" would hypothesize.  I know what cars mean to me because I have done a great deal of meditation on the meaning of cars.  

Bad Faith

For me, the car symbolizes a continuing act of bad faith of driving a car.  I have always feared the road.  When I was a child, I was prone to becoming car-sick.  I hate vomiting and have always avoided it at all costs -- no bulimia for me! -- but there were several times I barfed or had to swallow back vomit as a child as we were constantly traveling by car.  The stale smell of a car was enough to make me at least slightly sick until I was twelve.  I have extremely sensitive hearing.  Loud traffic noises freak me out and always have.  If I was queen of the world, I would immediately issue two hundred dollar noise violation tickets to anyone with a modded out car or truck who revved or screeched while in the vicinity of other people.  My logic is that if they can afford to mod out their vehicle with noisemakers, they can afford the ticket for making noise.

At ten, an eighteen year old boy fell asleep at an intersection and plowed into my dad's station wagon.  My family was returning from my grandma's apartment.  My mom was nearly killed.  I slammed face first into the back seat, which is why one of my front teeth is a veneer and is one of the main reasons I am almost never able to breathe out of my nose with ease. 

At sixteen, I was nearly run down by a truck in a parking lot my friends and I were crossing on foot.  It was far from the first or last time cars would pose mortal danger.

I have always known the danger of cars.  I still have panic attacks when I drive sometimes.  I have to pull over until it passes.  I will make several right turns or snake slowly through suburban asphalt labyrinths avoid a single left turn onto a busy street.  I avoid driving to new places for the most part.  I avoid driving for long periods of time.  

By the time I turned eighteen, I seriously considered moving to Europe so I could avoid driving for the rest of my life.  Were it not for my close relationship with my parents, that is exactly what I would have done.  The US is mostly built for cars, not people.  The suburbs are especially terrible in this respect.  When I started teaching piano in people's homes thirty years ago, my car was the lifeblood of my fledgling music teaching business.  I did temp work to make ends meet, and I needed the car for that as well.  A young adult can get along without a car in the Chicago suburbs, but it is far from easy.  I do know a hippie guy who sometimes goes without a car.  He's an avid biker and he has enough money to have his food delivered and to rent an Uber when he needs it.  

Dreams are very personal.  Now that you know how I feel about cars, you know what my dreams roughly mean.  Books on dream symbols are largely meaningless.  What does a car symbolize?  It depends.  Cars don't mean the same thing to me as they mean to someone else.  I mostly hate cars and I look forward to future incarnations when the fastest moving vehicle in the world is a horse drawn buggy.  I know plenty of people who love cars and driving in general.  If you love cars and never once considered abandoning your family because you hate cars and car culture so much, a random car dream won't be a bad one for you.  Maybe the car will symbolize genuine freedom or control.  Who knows?  That is why there is no reliable grimoire of omens and augurs.  When a hawk appears overhead, it doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does to you or to the guy down on eleventh street.  A symbol is only as meaningful as the brain that perceives it.

Born in the Wrong Millennium

I often dream I am on a busy corner in a bad neighborhood in the city.  The sun is always setting.  I am on foot, usually freshly out of my college class, and I must find the train depot and catch it to make the first leg of the journey home.  Often I will have to walk along live train tracks or cross a six lane highway in order to get to the mysterious train depot. 

Another scary dream features a town that is a couple of hours away.  To get to it, I must drive up or down a terribly steep sixteen lane highway with no guard rails.  I regularly careen off the edge of the road and wake up as I'm dying.

I have a recurring parking dream.  I park the car to go to my college class.  When I get out, though I made a mental note of where I parked, it is simply not there.  I have no choice but to walk an interminable distance home down dangerous thoroughfares and through sleeping neighborhoods.  

The car leitmotif for me is indicative of a larger "fish out of water" pattern, of feeling like I don't belong to this era and never will.  I never would have signed on to the suburbs as a living arrangement.  Sure, it could be worse, but it could be a hell of a lot better.  I wouldn't pave paradise to put up a parking lot if I was paid handsomely to do so.  I find the parking lot to be an obscenity and my dreams reflect it.  For many of this modern era, I fear the parking lot is their paradise.  That's why they go to Costco instead of the forest preserve and watch TV instead of closing their eyes and taking a nap.  That's why they pay so much attention to their smartphones.  They love the latest greatest i-doodad.  Their best dreams represent an immersion in techno-fun, physical comfort, and gratification.  Boredom is hell for them; to be alone with their own contemplative thoughts without distractions is to stare into the maw of a gaping abyss.  

The Auto Body

The car is a vehicle but it is also a lesson.  A car is a body we can change out when it dies.  When we do change it, it does not carry the accompanying guilt of losing our actual body.  For those who don't believe in reincarnation, or who don't take it seriously, the car is an ideal substitute body.  People love buying new cars because it is a disposable substitute body.  People who trash their own bodies often take good care of their cars.  Though they would not go more than six months between oil changes or put non-premium gas in the tank, they happily gorge on Arby's and exercise only enough to ambulate into work or a doctor's appointment.  

The car represents freedom to most but it is a trap.  It is a trap too ubiquitous to our era to notice.  Dmitri Orlov once commented that a car was part of the Iron Triangle required to live in a modern suburb.  The car is needed to get to the job.  The job is needed to afford the house.  The house is needed as a place to keep the car.  Those of us who cannot change the car at a whim or who don't want to own a car are the oddballs, the relics of another era where cars weren't a thing.  Or perhaps we are the uncomfortable reminder that cars and car culture that goes along with them are going the way of cheaply available petroleum.  

Doctors no longer heal for the most part, and when they do, they charge so much for it, it is only affordable if you have a salary class job or are willing to go in to tremendous amounts of debt or both. First and foremost, I accept my health as my own responsibility. If my health is bad, I have options, and the first of those is not running to the doctor for every sniffle, ache, and pain. There are herbs for everything. For constipation, I drink senna tea and exercise vigorously for at least five minutes. If I have a headache, I take white willow and/or drink a cup of black tea. If I sneeze a few times, I put a tiny amount of Dollar Tree off-brand Neosporin in each nostril. Neosporin and its knockoffs are essentially zinc ointment and zinc heals wounds while soothing inflammation. Sneezing often results from small stress wounds up high in the nostrils. If I am sneezing and stuffy, I do the Dr. Peter McCullough protocol that involves snorting salty Betadine (more zinc, this time in fluid form) water into each nostril and letting it pass through the back of my throat. Usually if I am taking the correct array of vitamins and exercising daily, the sneezing and wheezing does not get that far. If all of my treatments fail and I get a cold, I do the sensible thing and drink plenty of fluids and sleep as much as possible. Personally, I don't go see a doctor because I cannot afford the visit. Additionally, I don't know what they would tell me to do aside from what I am already doing. 

For me, the secret to my robust health is a triad.  One part of it is mental: I accept that I am going to die and that it will most likely be painful.  Death is no picnic and dying sucks.  Complaining about it 24/7 does not help, and the type of person who abuses his or her personal relationships by constantly serving up litanies of his or her aches and pains is annoying.  I am not about to be that kind of person.  If I die of natural causes, if I have done things right, no other human will have any idea that I have been sick.  

The second part of my secret to health is mild, daily exercise.  When I do not exercise every day (with the occasional skipped day because life does that) and go several months without my daily routine, things fall apart, I begin to gain weight, and my chronic health problems such as headaches and constipation begin their flare ups.  Every day, I either walk someplace nice like the forest preserve or I ride my foldable stationary bike for about 45 minutes.  I do not run, lift weights, or belong to a gym.  Gyms base their business model on the fact that most people buy memberships and don't show up.  There is no reason to be one of those people.  On the opposite end of imbalance, being a gym rat is unsustainable because it turns fitness into a compulsion.  Outside of training for athletic competition, daily exercise can easily be done at home or outdoors with minimal equipment.

The third secret to my health is supplements and herbs.  I take a B spectrum vitamin every day along with Vitamin D.  That's it.  I have issues with peeing a lot, especially at night, so for that I drink dandelion tea in the morning first thing.  At night, I take uva ursi (bearberry) and cranberry in pill form.  For constipation, I take the aforementioned senna.

I don't believe my cats are any different when it comes to benefitting from herbs and supplements.  All of my cats except for Ash are prone to sneezing and kitty congestion, so the lot of them get powdered lysine mixed into their food once a day.  Ash has issues with his digestive tract and gum inflammation, so he gets lysine as well as calendula oil with a little marshmallow root mixed with some liquid treat.  Unfortunately, when Kiki was alive, vets could do precious little for her. Her vet did help by prescribing a fiber supplement along with regular human stool softener that extended her life for those precious last years.  I did notice that slippery elm worked as well or better than her prescribed medicine, which of course cost 50x as much.

The Eyes

When I got a new glasses prescription in 2021, it was the first time I had seen an eye doctor in fifteen years.  I only got the strong prescription in 2021 because I needed special glasses for driving at night.  For ten years, I have been wearing the same old prescription and ordering new glasses from Zenni dot com when necessary.  My myopia is considered severe and I have been wearing glasses since age 8.  

The facts on the ground are that I cannot afford $400-$600 at the optometrist's every year.  It is the optometrist's business model to escalate my eyeglasses prescription every time I see him or her until I am almost completely blind.  The problem with glasses is they make you increasingly dependent and the stronger your lens prescription is, the more your eyesight weakens to accommodate it.  The remedy here is to use old, weaker prescriptions in small increments instead of stronger ones.  When I stopped seeing the optometrist fifteen years ago, I wore my old contacts and glasses for about five years.  Then I started getting my old lens prescriptions filled via online services, such as glasses from Zenni and prescription contacts from Korean companies.  I only wear my driving glasses at night when I am driving.  The second I am done driving, they come off.  I have two other pairs of glasses -- one weak pair for close-up work and teaching lessons and one middle of the road pair for general activities.

The Teeth

Despite having had braces for ten years from ages 10-18 as a child (the family orthodontist was a real grifter), my teeth are far from perfect.  They are stained and a young student once commented they are several different colors, LOL.  My teeth are much healthier than they were when I was young and seeing both dentists and orthodontists regularly.  I have not seen a dentist since getting a veneer on one of my front teeth in 2013.

Dental health is again a triad of secrets.  The first is I accept my teeth are never going to be perfect, Hollywood chiclet white and straight. Even if I had perfect Hollywood veneers, what would be the point of getting them?  I have a single veneer and I constantly eat around it -- it was expensive and if it goes, I'll have a hard time affording a replacement.  Having a mouthful of them makes no sense.  

The second is that I understand dental health comes from the inside, not the outside.  Bad teeth, just like bad bones, are the product of acidosis and inflammation in the rest of the body.  Unpopular opinion here, but most people cause their own perpetual acidosis by eating animal flesh and secretions and then add insult to injury by eating processed sugars.  I can eat bread, white sugar, and fat because I don't make those things the mainstay of my diet.  When I have a couple of cookies, it isn't adding to the acid-promoting meal of barbecue ribs from the night before.  Eating animal flesh and secretions rots your teeth from the inside by raising the body's acidity, period.  The bulk of my diet tends to be grains, fruits, beans, and vegetables.  

The third part of my dental health is the habit of squishing out the gooey contents of a regular, garden variety calcium supplement capsule and packing the goo into my gums and behind my front teeth every night after brushing and flossing.  This prevents rot in all the places that are prone to it during the most vulnerable time for teeth.  

Some additional notes on dental health: I do not buy toothpaste.  Instead I mix one part arrowroot powder to one part olive or other cooking oil such as coconut in to a paste.  Then I sweeten it with Stevia and put some essential oil in there, usually of mint.  I have not been buying toothpaste because it is stupid expensive and contains a bunch of sulfates that seem very iffy to ingest.  

Pineapple is an excellent food for promoting bone health of all kinds, including teeth.  Pineapple contains bromelain, which is a potent bone-builder.  I am not sure when or where I learned this, but I do remember pineapple being very helpful before and after oral surgeries in my teens.  

As for whitening teeth, I simply don't care to do it, but in the days when I cared, I would brush with a mashed up strawberry or some activated, finely powdered charcoal.  

I hope this helps you!