I'm waiting for the call.

But I'm not sure if it's coming.

Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place for the woo curious to explore spirituality, culture, and humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…

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This essay is a bit of a continuation of last week’s post on the absence of peace.

I heard it while waiting for the light to change at the intersection of Mackenzie and Chippewa.

I was in autopilot mode, my head tangled up in the clouds overhead, my eyes sliding out of focus as time stretched out on the sun-warmed pavement in front of me. But his voice brought me back—a steady, choppy beat that pushed past the wall of my thoughts and slowly seeped into my consciousness.

He stood on the corner right in front of the McDonald’s, a white newsboy cap on his head and a megaphone in his hand. A strap that held a small speaker in place crossed his chest like an undecorated military sash of a new recruit, but his impeccable posture was that of a general calling his troops into battle.

He was screaming. But his words were lost in translation, a broken-up radio transmission swallowed up by static.

As the line of cars began to inch forward, he started his crescendo, pitching his shoulders forward ever so slightly to punctuate each syllable of words that no one understood. His grip tightened on his megaphone, and he raised his other hand, clenched it in a fist, and began to punch the air in time with the beat of his sermon, his manifesto, his diatribe…whatever it was.

I never figured it out because the light turned green. As I rolled past where he stood, I imagined him as a town crier, a newsboy holding headlines aloft. A relic from the past, desperately trying to get us to listen to his message.

But his words skimmed over the hoods of our cars and dissolved into the warm, late summer air around us. And we drove on, none the wiser.

I am no stranger to men yelling guidance at me. After all, I grew up in a Baptist church.

It wasn’t the sort where people spoke in tongues or held snakes, but once every few years, after things had gotten a little stale and membership had dwindled, our pastor would stand in front of the congregation and tell us all that it was time for a revival. It was time to shake things up.

And revivals definitely meant Revelations.

The last chapter in the Bible is terrifying. Filled with fire, brimstone, demons and bloodied skies, it’s easy to see why, as a child, I curled up in fear against my mother’s side when our pastor waved his hands and made his lapel microphone sizzle with feedback as he spat out and spelled out exactly what would happen to the world when it all ended.

One day, he said, there would be the blare of a trumpet. It would be so loud that the whole Earth would tremble. So loud that the dead would rise from their graves and stand up.

Judgment Day | Aaron Douglas, 1939.

But only those who believed would hear it. Only those who believed would answer the call and be swept up to heaven.

As a child, this terrified me. The random blast of a horn or the sudden scream of a weather radio in the middle of the night caught me off guard—was this it? But more troubling were the sounds that I did not hear. What if everyone but me heard this mythical trumpet? What if I was left standing alone, surrounded by empty graves and vacant houses?

I feared that there would, indeed, be a call. But I wouldn’t be able to hear it.

I lived the first thirty years of my life in a tiny room that I carefully soundproofed. I didn’t want to take any chances. If, in life, there was a trumpet-like sound that told believers exactly what they were meant to do while on this Earth, I didn’t want to risk being one of the ones who was deaf to such an invitation.

So I kept my life small. I drew a tight circle around myself and said, “that’s it.” I loved the control of it all—I got to decide what was allowed in and what was not.

I had few friends who orbited in and out of my life at random. I distracted myself with a scattershot of hobbies that were really just thinly-veiled consumerism: I bought makeup I didn’t need. I wandered up and down the aisles of a discount store and purchased clothes that I would wear once. I threw money and myself into decorating the empty house I shared with my husband.

Even if a call of purpose had come, I had my fingers jammed into my ears. I feared what it would mean to step outside of the circle, to open my arms and to say, “I hear it. I’m ready.”

But most of all, I feared that this call just wasn’t coming for me.

School started last week. And I wasn’t there.

I felt strange as I slept in, taught yoga, and started the arduous process of paring down my belongings by throwing away expired makeup and old bottles of shampoo.

I answered, for the thousandth time it seems, the question that everyone keeps asking me: what are you going to do next?

My answer is still the same. I don’t know.

A part of me hoped that, in these last few weeks in St. Louis, that I would hear the call. The metaphorical trumpet would blast in my ears, the light bulb would illuminate above my head, the aha moment would arrive.

But it hasn’t. Or, if it has, I haven’t heard it.

Instead, I’ve spent my time hopscotching from one thing to the next. Some days, I am showing a group of middle schoolers how to position their feet for warrior 2. Others, I am sitting cross-legged with my cards spread out in front of me, sharing ways to connect with the tarot with a room full of other curious souls. I write a lot more naturally now, without the pressure of a fixed schedule.

In between these moments of creation, I listen intently. I wait for the call.

I’m still waiting.

A few nights ago, as the new moon in Virgo perfected in the early hours before dawn, I woke up suddenly with a heaviness in my chest and a restlessness in my body.

I got out of bed. I fed my cats. And, strangely, I decided to clean my door.

In the days prior, I had become increasingly annoyed at how dirty the threshold of my entryway had become. It was covered in strange splatters and a thin layer of cat hair. For whatever reason, in the dark of my apartment, I decided that now was the time to finally wipe it clean.

I grabbed my supplies, pulled my wooden door open, and squatted in between it and the storm door in front of it. With no lights on and no moonlight to help me, it was difficult to check my work, but I scrubbed, wiped and cleansed the narrow strip of sealed concrete that marked the first steps into my household.

As I worked, I thought about the new moon, still burning brightly though I couldn’t see it. I thought about the halo that I see sometimes around it, a harbinger of a coming disturbance. I thought about the small circle I had drawn around my body for so many years.

With each pass of my cloth, I imagined wiping this line of demarcation away. I imagined clearing out the stale energies of the past. And I imagined a fuzzy frontier, the sort that moves farther away each time you step towards it. A boundary that grows with you, not one that holds you in.

I stood, my work completed. I returned to bed and fell to sleep immediately. And I dreamed of the earth shaking. The sky above me blazed in tones of orange, red and purple. My body vibrated as a sound that I could not hear passed through me.

But I was not afraid.

I woke up to the sound of a gentle ringing of a bell¹, the memory of the dream still burned into my mind. The earth was still whole. I was, too.

But something in me had shifted.

Answering the call doesn’t involve directions screamed from a megaphone or the brassy declaration of a trumpet. Maybe our guides are more like the soft, hopeful tones of bells that are much quieter. And maybe, when we reach our hands outside of the small circles we have drawn and run our fingers across their fluted edges, we find the place where our agency and our purpose meet.

We hear that quieter call to let the circle widen. And we answer it.

What calls have you heard in your life? Do you think that there has to be a defining moment that spells out our purpose, or is it more subtle?

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✨Cards for Humanity: Judgement ✨

Whether you’re into tarot or not, here’s a few things to consider about this weird thing called life.

When I first started reading tarot, I didn’t realize how helpful my Bible-thumping background would be in understanding the major arcana…but the 20th card, Judgement, is a perfect example of places where religion and the metaphysical realm overlap.

An angel (probably Gabriel) appears in the sky with his trusty trumpet and says, “TIME TO GET UP, Y’ALL!” And the dead snap to it, standing up, raising their arms and fixing their gaze on the source of the call. Their reverent postures show just how meaningful this moment is: they have experienced Death, the 13th card, and are now ready to step into a new, ascended reality…quite literally. If we continue the biblical perspective of this card, the next stop in this journey would be heaven.

I don’t see this card as a “separating the wheat from the chaff” moment, to offer up another biblical phrase. Judgement is not just about being judged and being found worthy. And it’s also not really about someone or something else judging you.

As the penultimate card in the major arcana, Judgement presents a choice: everyone on the card has heard the call of the trumpet. But hearing it and choosing to receive it are two very different things.

In life, there come moments where we are urged to level up, to step into a new version of ourselves. The process that begins with Death takes time. We must be buried and lie dormant for awhile in order to truly be ready to rise again. And, trumpet or not, the choice is ultimately ours: we get to decide when we want to allow the sometimes-quiet voice of the universe nudge us forward.

Judgement can feel loud, incisive, and direct, a very salient moment where you know, without a doubt, where you’re meant to head next. But I’d argue that it doesn’t have to feel that way. Judgement can be simply choosing to listen closely and to be receptive to the loud or soft calls that come through.

The next card, the World, leads us to the portal that, when we step through it, opens us up to a new cycle. And the circle grows even wider.

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✨Prompts | Judgement ✨

Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.

☀️ Where am I being called to be more receptive to growth in life?

☀️ What nudges, big and small, am I receiving from the universe?

☀️ What postures, textures or phrases embody openness of the heart and mind?

☀️ What moments of stillness and rest have helped me arrive to this point in my journey?

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✨Weekly Mantra✨

Write it down. Say it out loud. Share it with a friend.

I do not stand still and wait for the call. I set out in search of it.

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✨Upcoming IRL Ways to Connect✨

I’m workshoppin’ it up around St. Louis before I leave. Here are a few ways to hang out with me:

✨Tap Into Your Intuition Yoga + Tarot Workshop: 9/18 at Offbeat Yoga

✨An Embodied Understanding of the Cards: 9/22 at Joy of Yoga—details coming!

✨Tarot Readings at May’s Night Market: 9/23 at the City Foundry

✨Fall Equinox Acupuncture, Yoga + Tarot: 9/24 at Joy of Yoga

If you have questions, well…you know where to find me. Probably hunched over a computer somewhere, typing away.

1. I have an art piece on my wall that has a few bells dangling off of it. Pretty sure I can blame this one on my cats, not something more woo, but it did feel quite meaningful all the same.