JenWReeve

A few years back, a friend of mine co-created the Tarot Life Card deck that employs a simple numerical system using your birthdate to identify your personal life Tarot card. The deck also offers a card for each year of your life. For 2022, mine is the Wheel of Fortune. Essentially, the Wheel of Fortune card advises me to expect the unexpected and to face whatever that is head-on. Whether I’m showered with good fortune or struggling with adversity, it behooves me to stay in the center of the wheel and connected to my heart. My first reaction to this […]

Today is Winter Solstice, the day of the year with the most hours of darkness and first day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Translated from Latin, solstice means “sun stand still” because at Solstice time, the sun’s path across the sky appears to freeze. This perfectly reflects how I’ve been feeling as well as what nature mirrors for us. I crave rest. I don’t want to be doing all the things I’m doing. I don’t really even want to think. I want to be still like the sun, nestle in the comfort of darkness, and just be. Maybe you […]

When I was a teenager and young adult, I lived in West Texas, a part of Tornado Alley. Every late spring to early summer, I lived in constant dread of the tragedy that ripped through the South and Midwest last week. Several times I witnessed the tell-tale green sky and even a funnel cloud once, but gratefully, I never experienced the devastation of an actual tornado. My heart aches for all who have. That witness role feels important to me at the moment. As I enter the darkness of winter, and heed nature’s call to go inward, I’m noticing some […]

I’ve been feeling a bit raw lately. Worry has taken over. I won’t go into detail here because others’ privacy is at stake. But I will say that it has crossed my mind that the gurus reported to have attained inner peace must not have had children. Peace is a practice, and we have to keep at it. And children or not, we all have things we worry about. The break-neck pace of world disasters constantly running in the background like a software program is enough to make anyone anxious, not to mention our individual challenges. Staying centered takes work, […]

Last weekend, I was struggling to roll up a garden hose for storage when I thought of my dad. I remembered watching him so many times cuss and fight to try to force his hose into a neat circle just like I was doing. I had to laugh. He was either delivering a message to me from the other side about a lesson he didn’t really learn while he was alive, or it was the Universe speaking.  Either way, I got it. Relationships are like garden hoses. You can cuss and fight to try to shove them into the perfect […]

A couple of months ago, I read a collection of essays called Erosion, by Terry Tempest Williams. An image from the book still haunts me–a statue of the goddess Kwan Yin that Williams visited at a shrine to the Divine Feminine in Yunnan Province, China. Here’s how she described it: “Kwan Yin’s right hand was raised upward with palm closed at shoulder height; her left hand protected a bowl resting on her lap. I raised my heels to look inside the bowl–it held her heart. I wept over what every woman knows. We give away our hearts daily. What remains is […]

I host a women’s new moon circle on Zoom every month and at our last meeting, we had a gratitude ceremony. As we traveled around our virtual circle each naming what we were grateful for, one woman noted that she was thankful for breath. Breath, I thought…so simple, yet so profound. That was last Monday, and I’m still sitting with this notion. Interestingly, just before I was to open our Zoom circle, my daughter had a mini crisis. She was leaving for the airport to fly back to college when she realized she had lost her driver’s license, most likely […]

I was born at full moon time on Día de Los Muertos, Day of the Dead, two days after Halloween. So, this time of year generally has me thinking about both birth and death.  Día de Los Muertos is a holiday celebrated in Mexico (and other places) to honor departed loved ones. It is said to have originated some 3,000 years ago from practices of the Aztecs. Back then, people had a more cyclical view of the universe and saw death as a fundamental part of life to be celebrated rather than mourned. Therefore, contemporary Day of the Dead gatherings are […]