On my morning walk with my hound, beneath the overwhelming heat of this Grecian island, I found an unexpected peace. Music moved softly through my headphones while the trees offered their quiet companionship, and the dusty footpath beneath my feet began to feel like a threshold, a new way of living.
Ahead, in the distance, stood my cottage: crooked little walls, a weathered wooden-beam roof, imperfect and entirely beautiful. It had become my safe haven. A place where perfection was no longer required.
Yet the pull remained.
The urge to check social media still surfaced, subtle but persistent. I had chosen to step away from it all, to turn from the constant projections drifting through the digital ether and return to what my soul had been quietly asking of me. But any addiction, however ordinary it may appear, is difficult to release. The hand remembers the habit long after the heart has chosen another path.
When I removed myself from those endless streams of images, opinions and carefully constructed lives, I began to notice something. I had been searching for signs everywhere ; looking through screens for confirmation, validation and meaning, when all along I only needed to look up and around me.
At the sky.
At the sea.
At the vast and breathing cosmos around me.
All I had to do was become still enough to listen.
Whether I will ever return to those pages of digital entertainment remains to be seen. For now, the absence has been liberating. My days have become fuller, not because I am doing more for the sake of doing, but because my attention has returned to me. I no longer feel quite so vulnerable to the invisible chains that once limited my expansion.
This is not the first time I have tried to cleanse my life. I have removed possessions from my home, released things I no longer needed, and experimented with fasting and other forms of spiritual discipline. Not every attempt brought the transformation I had imagined, but each one revealed something essential. Each stripping away brought me closer to understanding who I am, and what I truly need for a peaceful life.
I realised that the desire for validation is deeply human. We all want to be seen, understood, chosen. Yet when that need becomes the compass by which we navigate our lives, it can become a ball and chain.
In the quiet, I began speaking more honestly with myself and with the cosmos. And in that silence, what I can only describe as messages and energetic impressions began to arrive in abundance. The cards seemed clearer. My feelings became more pronounced. The energies around me felt less clouded by the noise of other people’s expectations.
Like mist lifting from the ocean, something began to clear.
The seas within me became calmer.
The truth became easier to see.
And perhaps that was the lesson all along: I did not need to force so many things into my life. What was not meant to be held had to be released. What I had mistaken for part of my energetic blueprint may simply have been temptation; a familiar pull, inherited from old patterns, old wounds and old versions of myself.
So I stopped.
And in stopping, I learned.
I said goodbye to the past and began to understand the pull.
Not every pull is guidance. Not every desire is destiny. Some forces draw us backwards simply because they are familiar. The greatest act of freedom is sometimes not to resist with violence, but simply to become still enough to recognise that we no longer have to follow.
Now, with the solitude and quiet strength of the Priestess, I move forward through this cosmos carrying my lessons gently. I do not wish to preach them to others, only to live them. And perhaps, through my own healing, those who cross my path may find permission to release something too.
To let go.
To become still.
To listen for their own truth.
This seat in the cosmos is my new understanding of The Pull—not the call of distraction, validation or the ghosts of centuries past, but the quiet magnetic force of the soul guiding itself home.
And above me, each night, Venus offers her light.
She has always been there.
Perhaps I am only now learning to see her.
So I look up.
And I let her everlasting light guide me.
SANCTUM 