Seven Stones: A Practice to Bridge the Worlds

The Seven of Stones (or the Seven of Pentacles, in traditional Tarot decks) is a card of gardener wisdom. It tells us that growth can’t be forced out of its pace or its season–but we can tend with patient care to what we’re growing. The Seven says that the magic we need, the enduring kind, the kind that keeps us fed, always starts with what’s under our feet.

A well-tended garden is a living bridge–what’s harvested in the fall is what carries us across the cold hard months to come.

The Seven is also a card of webs – the artful patience of the spider weaving a home from a slice of air. It is an altar-building card, a card of careful attention to figure and form and feel. It says that what we touch is sacred, and how we hold it matters.

My own history of tending gardens is spotty at best. As of this writing, the garden plot in our yard is overrun by giant, flowering kale and an arugula forest my roommate and I planted then forgot to tend last spring. The bees are happy, at least.

Altar-making comes more naturally. I gather stones and place them in patterns. I pull cards and arrange them where they seem to want to go, then listen to what they might have to say. It soothes me, and it reminds me of the little shifts that we can always make, even when so much of life shifts in wild ways beyond our control.

Altars are bridges too, of course. Between ourselves and what we pray for, between the spell and the future it’s cast into.

This site is an altar-space. It is offered for those casting forward into the next world while rooting themselves in this one–for those who choose to imagine what is possible without turning away from all the painful, rending beauty of our world as it is, and has been, up til now. It is a prayer to help us find the bridge from there to here. It is a web of words, pulled from the body and woven to trace the spaces in between.

This space is for those who know the next world is the same world we’re in now–the only one we’ve got. It’s for those who know that the distance between this world and the next is measured in choices made across time, and that the bridge is the land we stand on, carefully tended.

So – seven stones, for the careful tending of the land. Seven stones to maintain this sacred bridge of time. Seven stones for the little shifts we make to rework old patterns and open new spaces, as our bodies learn how it feels to unfold towards freedom. Seven stones to unlearn entitlement and relearn curiosity, to uproot the colonizer’s greed and find a worthy love to plant in its place.

Seven stones to mark the circle we are casting, seven stones to weave the web. Seven stones to start from where we are while crossing through the fire to what comes next. Seven stones to hold us in the crossing.

Place them on your altar and join me in the prayer.