On Reading the Year Ahead: Frightening Future Omens
Year ahead divination is one of my favorite practices. I do it twice a year at least, for my solar return in September and for the new calendar year in December. But not infrequently, I end up saddling myself with a frustrating burden: a difficult omen that I’ve got to sit around for six, eight, twelve more months to see come to fruition. How is that productive, to have that sitting over my head when I could have, you know, just not looked? What do I do now the cat’s out of the bag?
One year I feared a dangerous pregnancy complication, and instead got blindsided with the death of a pet (that I had to deal with while, indeed, 8 months pregnant). Another year it panned out to a not-unexpected, and not-insurmountable, but still-devastating career shift.
I’ve learned that the first thing not to do is to try to pinpoint exactly what the something will be. That way lies madness. I did that the year I steeped myself too deeply in fears around pregnancy, got myself an extra upfront few weeks of anxiety I didn’t need, and still left myself just barely prepared to lose my little guy to a surgery in the end because of how I’d misdirected myself.
I prefer to see preparatory divination of this kind as something that supports acceptance, rather than avoidance, but that’s all well and good until I or my clients uncover something we really would rather avoid. So what do we do?
Never have I seen a year-ahead reading be entirely, thoroughly unproductive and terrible. There are beautiful glimmers to be had even in the toughest years and the glimmers are always the place to start. They will either be unrelated to the area where difficulty will be experienced, and give us a place to turn for a break, or they will be in a space that might later turn sour, and allow us to build up resources and resilience and keep our options open ahead of time. The latter is what happened for me in my year of career foibles (lesson learned from the year before) and when the blow came down, it fucking sucked, and I had contingencies.
(It also fucking sucked. lol.)
Even in Tower moments, by the time an omen is about to pass, I find that the blow is rarely a true shock. If you give your full attention to the things that are good when they are good, it becomes simpler to open yourself up to signals and sense the changing winds. This isn’t easy! But to engage in long-term divination at its strongest, it’s a useful muscle to build.
(for more on this, I love Kira Ryberg’s introductory Threads of Fate episode “Amor Fati… Or Whatever”)
Divination can be wrong. But for the sake of our nervous systems, I think it can actually often be best to not hang ourselves up on hoping that The Something doesn’t happen after all, and to try instead to prepare for either outcome so that we don’t leave ourselves hanging.
And life’s most defining, shaping events can show up in year-ahead divination in the strangest ways. For the month that my daughter would actually be born, I drew a mere 7 of Cups and spied a local hawk — very beautiful and/but completely ordinary — sliding in to hover over a pond. It was in no way the most remarkable omen of that year. Where was the Major Arcana? The bomb drop? The event itself was in fact so foundational to the bedrock of my life since that it barely bore defining ahead of time, and it was developments after the fact that were more surprising and necessary to prepare for.
As I’m floating around for the way to tie this up for you, the why would we do this in the first place, I’m remembering something I heard about how humans’ capacity for anticipatory grief and worry is unique among animals. In addition to learning how to hold fate lightly and prepare what we can, could we also teach ourselves more appreciation for the present? Even a frightening year-ahead omen can increase our joy in understanding that what will come will come, and we can sink more deeply into the moments where we are sated.
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Photograph: a mother Bald Eagle caught mid-blink in Isle Royale National Park, June 2022
