Jim: Was it horrifying or magical to be in the middle of a hurricane?
Katie: Yes, it was both.
Katie: It was horrifying to be inside the house in the hurricane, somehow slightly less terrifying, although a different type of terrifying to be in the hurricane. Like when I had to take the dog out to pee a couple of times and was literally outside like I was reporting the weather in the hurricane
Katie: But because I was out there and could feel what was really happening instead of just making up how bad it sounded in my head somehow it wasn't as scary, even though I was always worried I was gonna get hit in the head.
Jim: Ugh.
Katie: Yeah.
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Jim: Did you collect rain water?
Katie: I didn't because I was afraid that anything I put out there was going to definitely come back and hit me in the head or break a window or something.
Katie: I was like, No, I don't have that kinda luck. Everything could be a weapon out here. So yeah, that's, I did not, but I got a lot of branches and stuff that I brought in the house and made like little ornaments and things.
Katie: I thought that was kinda appropriate.
Jim: Talk to me about that. You made things from the branches that were down.
Jim: So when we think about magical making, what power do you feel like is captured in storm detritus, especially tree, fall or whatever.
Jim: Certainly wind energy. Just energy in general. I feel like they were super power. They were so supercharged, they blew off of the thing that was originally giving it energy. It felt like a wand.
Jim: Maybe that's the point.
Jim: And that's a lot safer than like being out in the middle of a storm and being like, I'm trying to catch rain in this jar.
Jim: Yeah, I just have seen too many news crews who get off on that kind of stuff, and I'm like,
Jim: That's not safe. Don't do that.
Jim: Don't show that to people. It's not okay.
Jim: How people have died taking a selfie. I think it's under that same umbrella category.
Katie: They take it just in time to see the sign that's about to hit them from behind in the picture. That's my kind of ironic death.
Jim: So there was a tree that got struck by lightning in a park near my house. And that tree basically exploded and there were shards everywhere.
Jim: To see a tree that exploded like fresh, Tree splinters with sap. We went there to this park and we're lucky enough to collect some of the shards of wood.
Jim: Oh. And so it's called lightning wood. To just have a piece of that wood that has been energized by the lightning strike. Yeah, that's pretty powerful.
Katie: That's interesting.
Jim: If you collect wood from a tree, or from, something like that. I have dust that was collected from the derecho that happened in Iowa.
Jim: Oh, which is like a inland tropical storm or typhoon type of thing. Oh, it happened in 2021, I think. There was a huge storm in Iowa. It was pretty outrageous. And they collected in little jars, some of derecho dirt. So that's really powerful.
Jim: So what did you use your storm? You said like a wand, but what did you use it for? You said an ornament, but what magically would you use it for?
Katie: I thought more of an element of protection. I really wanted to do enough for wreath, but I ran out of time, so they're still there waiting for me.
Katie: There were also a couple of feathers. I really thought protection, especially from all of these oak trees because they were right outside the house. Before the hurricane happened I went out to each one and said, Hey, we really appreciate you standing strong here.
Katie: And where other oak trees fell down. All of our, while they lost a lot of small branches, stayed strong. No problem. So coincidence? I don't think so personally.
Jim: It's interesting how the ancient Greeks often used the thing that was the instrument of destruction as protection from that thing specifically.
Jim: It seems counterintuitive, for us in modern society. But a lot of times it's the tree that was struck by lightning is protection against lightning.
Jim: We would think, Oh no, I want something, different than that.
Jim: But it is very common in magical practice to do something like that. To carry as a talisman, piece of a tree that was or something that was fell by a storm as protection against the storm.
Katie: It makes sense in a way if you think , Oh, lightning never hits the same spot twice, so maybe by caring part of it with you, it won't hit around you.
Jim: Sure. Yeah.
Katie: Is that part of the sympathetic magic of thinking family?
Jim: I suppose so. It's interesting logic, isn't it? .
Jim: Yeah. I love that.
Jim: I had to know, so when you're standing out there, is it just wind like we've never experienced? Is it just nuts?
Katie: It was more than even a rain experience.
Katie: There was surprisingly little rain, at least in my area, because it was so windy. It just was like blown everywhere. It didn't even have the time to collect in one spot for long before it was being pushed somewhere.
Katie: If you look up the reports at the Tampa Bay during this, like right before it came through, all of the water got sucked out.
Katie: So it was like a super low tide, plus all the wind and everything just sucked all the water out to where you could walk across the bay!
Jim: Don't worry, we saw that on the news like crazy. No one would stop showing us Tampa Bay. And none of us had seen Tampa Bay before, so we didn't have a before picture.
Jim: We all assumed that was just normal. But then I realized probably the water is up to that wall. Yeah. And so the fact that there was no water. It must have just been a trip.
Katie: I'm sure the locals, like the people who really lived there all the time were mind blown. The reports on the news will tell you that.
Jim: The news, of course, was like, Please do not walk out into the bay. It will come back. They'll die.
Katie: Yes. It will come back angry, my friends.
Jim: You cannot outrun the tide coming back in.
Katie: That's right. Too little water will kill you and too much water will also kill you.
Jim: Will also kill you. Funny that.
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Katie: I feel like you were involved in a similar hurricane. A people hurricane, a convention of people.
Jim: Oh yeah. So thanks for talking to me about the hurricane. That's really cool.
Katie: Anytime.
Jim: Let's talk about the Northwest Tarot Symposium. Also known as: NWTS. It's so cute because there used to be this tarot symposium called Bats, and that was in the Bay Area, was the Bay Area Tarot Symposium, and that was called Bats. So Clever.
Jim: And then when they started the Northwest Tarot Symposium, they realized NWTS newts. And so their symbol is the newt and the one in the bay areas symbols the bat.
Jim: And I'm like, Oh, they need to start like the Chicago area and call it Cats!
Katie: Now and forever, baby!
Jim: Wouldn't that be cute?
Katie: I'd join.
Jim: The Northwest Hero Symposium has always been fantastic. It has always been an amazing event. It has grown and become the imminent West Coast event for divination, of course, it's focus has always been terror, which as a poem reader, I have only slight umbridge about.
Jim: I say that just poking with love.
Jim: That's right. You need to flip a tarot card around, in most cases, a hand. It helps.
Jim: So the rest of the people who do other forms of divination.
Jim: There are already astrology conferences that are well established and enormous. There's a huge astrology conference in the Seattle area that's really big and very well known. People come from all over to attend.
Jim: It's like the rest of the divinitory practices and they're not popular enough to command their own ah, but tarot is popular enough that it can command its own conference.
Jim: I think what happens is all of the rest of the diviners tag on to tarot and it works out.
Jim: So Newts is awesome. It was an even better year than previous years. I guess I'm biased because I was presenting quite a few things this year. The caliber of people who were presenting was really high.
Jim: We had people like Mat Auryn who is soon to be like an all time bestseller author. His brand new book that just came out and his previous book, Psychic Witch. I have on the shelf somewhere. Oh yeah here. Is this book, Psychic Witch.
Jim: So he was a keynote speaker. And his book just happened to come out while we were at conference. His book came out like that Saturday. So Wow. It was really cool.
Jim: And, he's just brilliant and so he spoke. We had Benebell Wen, who's a deck creator and author, and she's just absolutely brilliant.
Jim: We had Barbara Moore, who is a deck creator and writer, and she works at Llewelyn , but she's also an author as a keynote speaker. We had Andrea Furtick, who's a toy creator and a debt creator and an author, and just wow. Generally a really brilliant hoodoo practitioner. She had some really great theories.
Jim: We had just so many other presenters there. Jen Sankey Pamela Chen. So many people I can't even name them.
Jim: You can't go wrong. Oh. Tara disassembled people that we had on our podcast. Oh yeah. Jennifer. Yeah. Jennifer Steidley was there and she did her signature workshop.
Jim: You know who I hung out with a lot and got to meet in person was also on our podcast Thomas Hermit's Mirror. Yes. And his new deck just came out the Seaborne kiper?
Katie: Yes. On Kickstarter.
Jim: Yeah. So his Kickstarter just successfully completed, so that was really great to hang out with him.
Jim: He didn't present, but I hope he does in the future. But he was just such a love to hang out with and what a wonderful, person.
Jim: Yeah. I really like talking to him.
Jim: He's quite tall. I didn't expect him to be tall as he as tall as me. Yeah.
Jim: Oh, I wasn't expecting that either. No, me neither.
Jim: Yeah, so that's what's fun to meet people in person and be like, Oh, wow.
Katie: Can just never tell when you're only seeing people from like the bust up. Yeah. Okay. Questions for you? Yeah. All right.
Katie: Were there more or less people in attendance than you expected?
Jim: It's hard to assess because there was never a time when everyone was in one room. Thankfully the organizers are going to switch hotels. There were good things about the hotel because the food was probably the best food you would ever have in a hotel ever. Wow.
Jim: The rooms are sad and pathetic. And the remodel that they did made it so that you couldn't combine the rooms into a grand ballroom very easily. Because of the way they organized it, you could no longer have three rooms together. I see.
Jim: You could do that at the beginning, at the keynotes, but not everyone paid for the keynote presentations. And it was a little bit crowded the way that they had set up the lunch. It created a lot of congestion, so it was hard to get a sense of how many people were actually there because you didn't have a grand ballroom with everyone in the room to get a sense of this is our community.
Jim: That was something that I missed. I was hoping that we would have one or two plenary sessions or grand sessions where everyone was there. Yeah. But we didn't really have an opportunity for that.
Jim: So that's what I'm looking forward to next year, is that they would have a different hotel where we would be able to all be together in one room and get a sense of like how many people. Gotcha. I was thrilled that my class was packed.
Jim: Yay.
Jim: We had to turn people away.
Katie: Awesome. So that's good. How many classes did you teach?
Jim: So on day one, it was the co-creators day. I impromptu helped them out, a little co-creative 15 minute thing that I did for them.
Jim: Day three is when I did two things. So that was the lunch panel witch is which. And then Studio 78, which was a fun disco party with Madame Pamita.
Jim: And then Sunday day three, I presented my workshop. Palmistry Reveals Your Tarot Significant card. That was super popular.
Katie: Fun. That sounds like a newer one.
Jim: It is. I just wrote it and it went over really well.
Jim: And I was also presenting at a second conference the same weekend that was online, so I was double booked.
Jim: That morning I had presented Unblock Your Magic. Which is also a new workshop. And that was at the Astromagia Conference, which I recommend everybody check out because Astromagia is fantastic, but those happen to be on the same weekend, which was Wow.
Jim: I didn't realize that was happening until I had already been accepted to both and written a thing for both.
Jim: And then they both announced their dates and I'm like, Hey. Wait a minute. Oops.
Katie: So nice for one to be exclusively online so that you could be from anywhere.
Jim: I didn't have to back out. That's right.
Katie: Sometimes the universe just works out like that, Jim. How was the turnout at the party? Were they good party people?
Jim: So there was two events going on at the same time. Three events going on. There was speak easy, which was part of the hotel's offerings. They had a speakeasy room, which is really cool. It was 1920s Flapper era that's open all the time. And then the middle was a bingo thing going on, and then it was studio 78.
Jim: So we had a good turnout and it was a lot of fun.
Jim: They did sell out. They got their max.
Katie: They gotta make use of those three rooms, right? Yeah. That's great.
Katie: Who surprised you the most, like of meeting all these people? I'm sure you met a lot of new people or people you've only met online. Other than Thomas being taller than we expected.
Katie: Were there any other interesting surprises?
Jim: I had a really good connection with a guy named Angelo Nasios. He's Greek. He's from New York. He did a presentation called Divination in the Ancient World that I wasn't able to see, but I'm watching the recordings. And he has a really great perspective.
Jim: If you are using the Greek deities, that's fine.
Jim: If you are identifying or calling yourself a helenist or helenistic that you be aware that people are still Greek today. The ancient Greek religion is ancient, but it still has heritage. And to be aware that, this ancient Greek religion doesn't exist outside of an ancient and a modern Greek culture.
Jim: And that those things go together. And when you have people that are just Grasping at these sort of ideas and they don't have some of the cultural context of Greek life and culture that it can be a little interesting and odd. But it's okay. He's very clear.
Jim: He's an American. Sure, but he's first generation Greek. And it's just something to honor and think about. There are actual Greek people from Greece.
Katie: It's a good thing to make aware. Like you said, they're not two different things. Yeah. They're a more modern version because time. But that would be like anything else.
Jim: Yeah. So we had really fascinating conversation about that. Because I do really love ancient Greek culture and religion. And I studied it in college and I've never stepped foot in Greece, and so I. I don't consider myself a reconstructionist or a helenist. I know what I know from here and my desire is to go to Greece and to have that, but I will always be a tourist.
Jim: I will not be Greek. And to honor and respect that from my perspective.
Katie: Yeah, exactly. Which is good practice appreciating it appropriately.
Jim: That's good practice to respect all other cultures.
Katie: Yep.
Katie: So NWTS would do again? This isn't your first year going anyway.
Jim: Yes. I will definitely do NWTS again, it's just in Portland, Oregon.
Katie: And it sounds like they're going through growing pains, which always means progress.
Jim: So many people said it was so much better. It's just gotten better every year. People said that it was just like the best year ever.
Jim: I'm excited for next year. I'm definitely always gonna go to NWTS. It's just a fantastic event. And Mary Kay Greer is sitting there all the tarot luminaries are gonna be there.
Jim: You love tarot or divination in general, it's definitely worth going. People fly in from all over the world.
Katie: Hey, maybe next year we'll do a live episode as a panel or something. That would be fun.
Jim: Yeah, definitely. People were into the podcast, so it was fun to pass out the postcards and talk about it.
Jim: Oh, good.
Katie: Yay. Yeah. We're coming after every convention next year, or at least more than the none that I went to this year.
Jim: I don't even have a book out yet and I'm getting off first to be keynote speaker.
Katie: You don't even need a book at this point. It just will be a bonus when it happens.
Katie: I know that I'm a kick ass presenter. It's so fun to like present and do those things.
Katie: And you know you're shit, Jim. It's so fun.
Katie: Your tons of fun. It's so much fun to learn from you. So well congratulations. It's so exciting.
Katie: We'll put all sorts of notes and everything for people to catch up and yeah, learn more as is appropriate.
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