May 2025: The Junk Journal
on this month's notable numerology
Happy May! Happy May Day! Happy Beltane! The beginning of May always seems to pack an energetic punch and this year is no different. I have lots of goodies for you
On a personal note, I started chemotherapy yesterday to treat my long-awaited diagnosis of Nodular Lymphocyte Predominant Hodgkins Lymphoma. It’s rare, but curable, and my doctor is hopeful I will see remission before my treatment regimen is over! This is a huge leap from meeting a palliative care team in December. For the first time in six months, a future—my future—is starting to take shape. Praise everything!
Three is the magic number, so of course I received three magical affirmations from the universe to hold me throughout the day:
A neighborhood crow friend, who we lovingly named Sheryl, dropped a single, perfect black feather on my (covered) front porch!
My contributor copy of Tarot In Other Words (out May 6th, but pre-orders make the world go ‘round), which includes an essay I wrote called “Queerness Has No Timeline,” arrived in the mail...
…as did my official acceptance into a Master’s graduate school program! More on this later, but wooo baby, I am so excited! Fall 2025!
Some day soon, I’m going to write about my outpatient experience like I did my inpatient experience, but for now, I want to extend another huge thank you for supporting my life and my work. It’s kept me alive and connected, far and wide, while enduring the hardest moments of my life thus far.
Thank you. I love you. Thank you.
ICYMI:
🌀: SPIRALING THROUGH THE WISDOM YEAR
🥚: Read the first installment of Symbols of (Our) Time - The Egg
🎧: Catch up on Call Your Coven - March 2025: Goblin Mode
MAY 2025: THE JUNK JOURNAL
On a recent trip to my parent’s house, I decided to take my high school journal home with me. It’s a medium-sized, hardback, lime green sucker, with a pink and white striped sash that loops around a pair of metal buckles to keep it closed tight, safe from prying eyes. Inside, intentionally compiled around my teenage hot takes about celebrities like Paris Hilton and Hilary Duff, and adolescent yearnings for my best friend’s boyfriend (I KNOW, I KNOW), are collages of pictures from magazines, print-outs of my favorite quotes and song lyrics, tickets from concerts I’d been to, or plane trips taken, birthday cards from friends, and more.
It’s not the first junk journal I’d ever made and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. A leather-bound tome I started working on in college had the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism next to Tyler Knott Gregson poems, and Cosmopolitan’s “25 Ways to Boost Your Kissing Game!” alongside a pencil sketch I made of a perfume advertisement that featured a model’s bust with a big bow on her head. My most recent complilations are mostly just messy writings in spiralbound notebooks, but I’ve never been able to be normal when it comes to tossing Octavia E. Butler quotes and errant musings on the latest cast of Love Island UK on the same page.
Here, in May 2025, I think I’d like to start a new junk journal from scratch.
In the May forecast of Call Your Coven, I share about May’s ruling number 5, and how when added to our 9-year of 2025 it becomes 14. In the Thoth tarot, illustrated by Lady Frieda Harris, the fourteenth card of the Major Arcana is renamed “Art,” and it is in this space I encourage us to find solace, regain our strengths, and express our truest selves this month.
Also called a “Commonplace book,” a junk journal is a method of knowledge compiling. It’s very Hierophant—the tarot card that aligns with May’s root number of 5—the act of compiling your own Bible, so to speak. A personal refuge for pep talks, reminders from Spirit, records of memories, thoughts, ideas, and inspirations, and more, let your commonplace-junk-journal-book be made again and again and again through words, pictures, drawings, found and recycled materials, and more!
This month, let’s lose ourselves in its creation, and find ourselves in its pages.
Five Quotes to Jot Down for May
Five is the act of gathering! It’s also a number of freedom and liberation, and with fascism fighting around the globe, those topics are of extreme relevance.
“[Freedom is an] unending present practice . . . a process by which you develop a practice for being unavailable for servitude.” — Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint.
“Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.” — Coretta Scott King
“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” — Nietzsche
“A will to live without rejecting anything of life.” — Albert Camus
Five Questions to Reflect On in May
Five is also a reflective energy. For only when we are able to accept what is are we then in a position of true agency and able to make change.
In what ways you are currently undergoing an alchemical transformation?
How have you grown or changed since the beginning of the year?
What bardo states are you still stuck in and cycling through?
What creative actions could you take to break free from whatever is binding you?
How could a particular artistic movement or practice offer your liberation some flair?
NOTABLE NUMEROLOGY IN MAY
MAY DAY! IT’S BELTANE!
05/01/2025
5+1+2+0+2+5 = 15/6
Whether or not you’re lighting bonfires or dancing around poles wrapped in ribbons, make some room for raucous joy today! Even if—no, especially if your motivations are purely out of spite. Make a righteous noise! Raise your arms towards the sun! Laugh in the face of despair! Drop off a bag of clothes at a donation site! Have a dialolgue with a bird! Bake cookies for the kids next door! Put on your favorite song and imagine the choreography you would slay if you knew how to dance! Whatever you do, for the love of all that is good and holy, find a moment of silly, sacred determination towards goodness (kindness, whole-heartedness, community) and love. Be love.
FIVE FIVE (NINE)
05/05/2025
5+5+2+0+2+5 = 19, 1+9 = 10, 1+0 = 1
Today is a day for truly committing to the bit! Kidding, maybe. But seriously, what is your bit? What do you want? When you close your eyes, and you really let yourself think about it (or ramble about it to a friend, stranger, or bar/bud-tender), and you start to get that fuzzy feeling in your chest, and your hands get itchy, and then ack—woah, when did it get so bright in here?—and it feels so goddamn foolish, after everything you’ve been through, to want this like this, without any evidence that it could happen... THAT. Get to that place. Stay in that place!!! Let the sun shine its light onto your deepest desires. And then spin that wheel, baby. Do something to make it happen. You deserve to get what you truly want. Unburden yourself. Be a dreamer. But get to it. No one’s gonna do it for you.
FULL MOON IN SCORPIO
05/12/2025
5+1+2+2+0+2+5 = 17/8
Last month’s new moon in Libra fell on a 16/7 day, and gave us the opportunity to lick our wounds and bury our proverbial dead after eclipse season. This month, the dark moon in Scorpio could drag us back under for another dance with the devil, or it could offer us a chance to rise from the ashes of our former lives. Or both. (Always both.) This is an intense moment for sure. One of literal and figurative shedding. Find out what makes you feel even the slightest bit better, more hopeful, more comfortable, more empowered, more in touch with pleasure, and do that. If there’s literally nothing, baby, you are not alone there either. Perhaps just put yourself to bed for this whole lunation. You were never going to get it all done today anyway. Onwards.
NEW MOON IN GEMINI
05/26/2025
5+2+6+2+0+2+5 = 22/4
Well, hello more synchronicities! This is the second new moon in a row that has landed on a 22/4 date! On the new moon in Taurus last month, we romanticized the quiet sit spot, dreaming and scheming and planting in the dark. This month, it’s time to tend to our gardens. Picture a tomato plant growing up and around a metal scaffold. What kinds of structural support do your seedlings need? Does everyone have enough room to grow? Are there any weeds, fast-growing grasses, or invasive species usurping resources from your intended plantings? If you’re not yet seeing growth, perhaps just a mantra will do: If you build it, they will come.
I would love to hear from you! Sending you love, comfort and protection in May.
I was just drawing a tarot card for today, asking what I need to commit to and go for broke, and of course I drew The Sun! Which is also my alternate year card for this year.
I’m so hype on starting my junk journal. I’ve been wanting to do this for ages and it’s just…been challenging for me to commit to the chaos. But I’m in!
Also. Thanks for highlighting the gathering of information as I go all in on testing a few knowledge management systems, it feels like good synchronicity.
Beautiful image choices this month!