If you know me a little you’ll know that the last few years have been full of change and chance and a complete reversal of fortunes.

Let’s go into a wavy screen which heralds a flashback sequence.  The music ripples as we gaze reflectively into space.

Here I am in my office three years ago, slaving over a hot PC and fighting off frequent attacks of vertigo.  See me driving the fifty minutes to work struggling to maintain focus behind the wheel.  See the doctor’s office where she tells me I shouldn’t drive.  The phone conversation with my employer where I ask to be released from my contract.

See the package arrive in the post and the excitement as I tear the shrink wrap from my first proper tarot deck.  The hours spent poring over Joan Bunning’s book and the moment of realisation, when I know I want to share this with everyone.

Three years later and I have gathered a beautiful collection of decks, studied and worked to gain skills in tarot and other magical arts, completed “accreditations” and courses as I seek to be accountable and work with professional competence.

I have experience running my own business. For the first two years after I left a paid job I ran an educational tuition and assessment service.  I had a growing client base, regular work and a good income.  This was meant to be a means to an end.  My real eyes-on-the-prize was to be in full-time spiritual service.  Not a new dream…as a teenager I longed to join a convent and for much of my adult life I intended to become a priest.  But the focus was new.  I wanted, essentially, to be a global village witch.  Via the wonder of the internet I hoped to share my work with people across the world in need of  little magic.  It might be a card reading, or a healing session, a message from their spirit guides, or a little candle spell, they might want to know which herbs to grow for healing, or how to tie their wishes into a witch’s ladder.  I would welcome them, give them the tools they needed and send them on their way.

I have followed advice in online forums, had coaching, booked readings, and spent more hours journalling and throwing cards and runes than I can count.  I did all the things.  But it didn’t grow.  Occasional heart-stopping contractions, but generally nothing doing.

And then…an epiphany.

It seemed to me, suddenly that what I was trying to grow, wasn’t playing by the rules.  And I could see it, her, clear and bold.  She is part lion and part eagle with unicorn rainbow feathers.  She likes to play in the moonlight and drink the sun kissed dew of early morning.  She chases bats at dusk and wants me to take her to the beach to sing with mermaids in the surf.  She isn’t of this world.

She will not behave like a “business” because she isn’t one.  She may help me find co-creators and those who want to join in with the magic, but she isn’t going to respond to charts and outcomes.  She refuses (stubborn creature).

She is my art.

And I will need to treat her like the fey, fanciful darling that she is.  I will need to feed her when she is hungry and leave her to sleep in a patch of sunlight when she is tired.  I will need to take her out into the wide world to see where magic grows and where it is needed.  And I will need to accept her just as she is.

And then I will see what happens when art comes to life, when it is born in and through you, when it teaches you how to sing the song of your own heart, which has been there all along, whispering your name in dreams.