Just before Solstice I was debating taking part in my good friend Hawk’s Omenwalk practice. For 12 days leading up to the new year, or over the 12 days of Christmas, you collect an omen each day for the upcoming 12 months of the year. This seemed like an excellent way to get stuck in deeper with incorporating omens and augury into my personal practice as well as improve my relationship with year-ahead divination. I find myself getting too hung up on details and accuracy in ways that get me in my own way, and I was spinning hard on this one. Like, what if I did a stupid thing one day and collected a stupid omen? I contemplated the idea of collecting all my omens in a single walk but hadn’t quite committed to a date yet.
My rule of thumb for divination of any kind is that I need to have a good question, or at least some kind of dialogue that I want the cards or signs to participate within. Then I can assess if the something I am seeing has answered the question. I have also decided that it is okay to miss things, which then makes me less hung up on the question of whether I’ve missed something. If I think I have, of course, I can always ask. This is the beauty and, I feel strongly, the importance of having more than one method of soothsaying at your disposal if you’re going to go about saying sooths.
But sometimes depending on the nature of the work, signs will need to come through of their own volition and start the dialogue themselves. On a walk on one of the less-used trails at Treefriend’s Marsh they did just this. I slipped down a knoll covered in a solid foot of dead leaves, and landed at the bottom to find a shiny nickel sitting perfectly atop the leaves. Obviously, this was January, and I’d need to collect eleven more omens while I walked.
Omen excerpts
I wrote these down in a note on my phone as I walked. I’m keeping some omens to myself just ’cause.
[January:] I found a nickel. It told me to start. I can hear what I think is a Downy [Woodpecker].
10 ducks fly west. Wood Ducks I think? I can only hear their wings. Maybe Mallards. Bat Pendulum says they’re an omen for March. I am still hearing what I think is a Downy, and have not seen yet.
April: a dead leaf smacks a branch with the cadence of a slow woodpecker, and a bird to my right beep beep beep.
A Blue Jay is yelling for May. I can still hear the Downy.
I approach the knoll and see the woodpecker! For June! A male Downy, low to the ground.
A Northern Harrier for October. It’s getting a bit chill now as the sun goes back in. I’m standing and wondering.
November: A distant unidentified woodpecker whinnies behind; another hammers ahead.
Conversing with the gut
Over the years I’ve come to recognize an intuitive gut sense for divining versus a stray thought or anxiety in the tummy. They all feel completely different, and when I have this gut sense it’s critical that I trust it and either decide to follow it, or consciously say, “this is what my gut is saying but I am going to choose X instead for Y reason.” If I don’t give it that acknowledgement, I risk letting it fall back into the sensation soup. When the nickel told me to get started, I know that because it did.
I can confirm my gut sense with a pendulum or cards, which is what I did on this walk as I moved along, but if I do this too much too quickly it’s very easy to fall quickly away from my gut and get ansy about listening to it, which I also did as I moved towards the end of this walk and next winter’s omens. I’m choosing to take this as an omen in and of itself regarding the trust-fall nature of what might come my way.
Trust! Trust! Trust! cheeps the Chickadee as I fasten my pendulum back around my neck.