In country living news, we’re currently down a bathroom because it’s housing a shell-shocked chicken. Said chicken was apparently traumatized by a possum in the chicken coop which we fortunately heard the chickens making a ruckus over at about 2 a.m. before it could eat any of those chickens. I don’t think she’s hurt but I want to look her over more closely here in a minute.
Miraculously, Mike was not bitten while getting the damned possum out of the coop.
Roo helped. Her version of helping mostly consists of her getting poised to pounce and us saying “leave it” and her sitting down again, repeat ad infinitum. But it was still quite exciting for her, I think.
I saw her catch a rat once. She didn’t know what to do with it after she made it squeak and she kept looking at me to tell her, I guess, but we don’t have a command for “for the love of God, kill it quickly and put it out of its misery” worked out yet.
So she was a little puzzled/confused about how much fun it apparently wasn’t after you bit it; the rodent was probably in agony; I concluded that Roo is many things but a ratter is not one of them; and I decided that I don’t want her scrapping with rodents and vermin unless it’s truly an emergency. She loves to chase them; she just generally doesn’t catch them. She’s a big, heavy dog. Her mama was definitely not a terrier.
Roo, all 70+ pounds of her, perched on the back of the sofa like she’s a kitten, which…she’s definitely not. Pictured here with Eevee-Bug, who now runs the woods in Louisiana with my cousin and friend Julia, whom I’m dying to interview for this blog one of these days soon.
Believe it or not, this was once a reasonably nice sofa
Aaaand here we go again, folks. Some of this is part retread, but since the two-blogs thing is confusing AF and I probably need to edit and consolidate comments on the Big Lucky Hoodoo blogs (plural) and then just post the edited updates here as new posts…, I guess I might as well just answer some of these again lol
But the first ones are new.
Q: Are you going to have _______ for sale soon?
A: I am still just going one thing at a time as I locate, clean or dispose of, and set up or replace one batch of ingredients at a time. Turns out I do have a few candle-making supplies still. The issue there is not even knowing where to start. Should I pick a formula out of a hat or should I wait until somebody asks for something in particular? (I’m pretty much waiting until somebody asks for something in particular lol)
It turns out I have *way* more materials to make bath/floorwash crystals than I even imagined, though, as I discovered today, so some of those will be going up at the seraphinstation.com shop soon. Which ones I post first, though, could be up to you if you have a preference.
I do have a few chicken feet. Later this summer, I’ll have some more that I am *very* excited about, because they will be coming from a source I know firsthand to be cruelty-free and devoted to humane practices. I know for a fact these chickens have as good a life as it is possible to have as a chicken bred for meat. And I know they are slaughtered cleanly and quickly with skill and compassion. They do not spend their final moments in terror. Matter of fact, they are *individually prayed over,* I shit you not, and individually thanked for the gift of their life that in turn sustains other life. This is no assembly line anything. These birds’ lives are not taken for granted.
And while I totally get that not everybody is comfortable with materia magica like that, for those who do participate in the carnivorous economies and want to use these quite traditional curios, this is the most ethical way I can even imagine to obtain these things. And I am really, really grateful to be able to source them from a place like this – from someone i know to be a person of real compassion who is powerful in prayer and deeply, deeply connected to the life around her and the land under her feet. (I actually want to interview her for this blog one of these days when some of the dust has settled around here. She’s really, really freakin’ cool and she has taught me *a lot* about living life “out here.”)
Q: Are you taking clients for spiritual work?
A: Apparently I am. I hadn’t planned on hanging the shingle out just yet, but someone wrote and asked, and it was the kind of case you help with if you can. So I kind of took that as a sign. It may well be one client at a time for a while, though. Not all services require that formal situation, though. Light settings, e.g., you can just book. More info’s available on the Services page of the shop.
Q: Can I burn frankincense and myrrh together?
A: Yes. What are you thinking here that makes you question whether you can do this? I worry I’m not understanding the real question.
Q: I read that Black Arts oil is used for karma. Can it cleanse my karma?
A: OMFG. No. The short answer is no. If you do traditional Southern spiritual rootwork, you just take you a big old marker (mentally) and mark out the words “karma” (mentally) and anything that suggests karma can be “cleansed”- esp. with something you buy. Cross ’em out real good, okay? There. Now try to forget you ever heard ’em. And think about who you want to be giving your hard-earned money to when you’re reading crap like that on the internet. You deserve better.
New page on St. Anthony, how to work with him, and where to find resources up at the Karma Zain blog site, which seems to be holding the “deeper dive,” rootwork-specialty, theory-and-practice type of information while this Seraphin Station one seems to be… mostly about chickens and me screaming at HTML so far (grin). But we are working on some new/different things, too, a couple of which *might* be ready soon…
Anyway, the St. Anthony post is part of what I was calling “FAQ Index by Topic” but was really more of a directory to where to find collected posts that serve as a primer on various common spiritual work concepts. I need to update it with links to the WordPress URLs instead of the old Livejournal URLs, but that’s on my extremely long list of things to do. In any case, it’s on the Karma Zain blog and might be worth a look if you’re new to all this.
In store/stock/the future news:
I’m about ready to place an essential oils order and start making and stocking some oils again. So now I just need some money to fall out of the sky somehow so I can do that. That’s what hot honey jars and St. Expedite are here for, though.
So if you have a preference for formulas you’d like to see first, speak up!
I found a lot of the 2015 records for customers/clients whose stuff got caught in the cracks. I believe I found the last chunk of physical product ones a couple of hours ago. It’s pretty bad, and in a few cases it’s especially godawful. I’m really sorry, y’all. I’m gonna start with the smaller amounts, get in touch to confirm address, and refund as soon as I’m able to manage the amount. Yeah, this means that people who placed larger orders get repaid last. It’s not fair and I’m sorry.
We were able to rehome one of the white roosters (Carl Jr.), which was messy, loud, complex, and slightly traumatic but ultimately a relief. No more roosters fighting – well, not much/badly anyway, and now Joe will be king of the coop again (for teh most part – Glenn has a run at him every once in a while but overall seems uninterested in doing all the work a rooster has to do to be king of the coop.)
Dickhead Joe, who is actually not a dickhead at all. We like him very much.
This means once we rehome Pretty Boy, though, white feathers will be harder to come by around here. I have not had anyone express special interest in them, just black ones, but on the off chance you do have a use for white feathers, now would be a good time to say something so I can be setting them aside!
Oh, and if you are interested in black feathers, I have plenty of those – let me know how you want them (one or two or a bag full? small ones or large ones?) and I can get them listed for you.
Remember, if your stuff got caught in the cracks in 2015 but you do still want any of that stuff, or if you don’t want the old stuff but you think you might want something in the future, we can apply any of the previous order amount to store credit and you can get first dibs on whatever new creations hit the shelves.
Or I can make you something custom/bespoke. I’m working on a rosary for that kind of situation now. I’m also making some customized protection door rosaries with certain patron saints to suit a given family’s particular situation. I love to do this kind of work and I’ve really missed it, so I’m really grateful for the opportunity to do it again.
Edit 5/19/20: I’ve updated this a bit and turned it into a page so it would be easily navigable in the sidebar, and I’ll be updating that page in the future rather than this post.
I’m putting something here because I need to address this up front, but this is still a draft/work in progress right now and progress is slow. One of the many things that’s changed pretty drastically for me over the past few years is that I now live in the absolute middle of nowhere, no kidding, just outside a small fishing village on the bayou at the Alabama/Mississippi border. You can get exactly one brand of internet out here, and it’s DSL, and it’s slow as shit, and it regularly goes out when it rains, when a truck drives over a cable that an animal dug up, or when you don’t hold your mouth right. So getting all this going has been painfully, glacially slow, and I can spend days at a time with no internet, worst case scenario.
Throw in a little global pandemic and the concept of schedule starts to look kinda meaningless after a minute. But I will come back to all this, for those of you it might have some bearing on.
What happened?
A bunch of things, kind of all at once, that completely overwhelmed me and my ability to take care of myself and my family, never mind take care of my clients and customers. I’ll add some detail but try to do it succinctly in the coming days/weeks, but in the meantime, this post pretty much covered everything, though I have a few insights to add from just the last few weeks, too (warning: it’s very long). Might make for an informative “how not to run a business” or “how to crash and burn as a single parent” series down the road? Heh.
So the worst part of all is that some of you had orders and/or services in the queue when I had to pack everything up and move. And it was all packed up a lot longer than I could *ever* have imagined. I not only didn’t have my own roof to work under for a while – I didn’t have any roof at all. At least not until we literally built one with our own hands.
And this was it – our roof, over a one-room cabin
Losing my house and being homeless was ugly and awful and it kicked my ass and did a number on my head. And I was already feeling pretty done for after two years at that disastrous teaching job where they worked me to death, didn’t pay me enough to pay my utilities, and threw me under the bus at the drop of a hat.
I hadn’t found a magic bullet to raise the funds back up to refund you folks who had services pending, and I no longer teach or tutor or work in academia, and I’d convinced myself I could never show my “face” online again after everything exploded. But there aren’t a lot of jobs out here in the middle of nowhere, teaching or not, and you don’t usually get recognized and promoted posthaste to the C Suite with full benefits based on how well you dazzle with the broom or calculator or whatever, so I ultimately worked my way around to something like this:
Yes, maybe absolutely every single customer you ever had hates you now. Or maybe your perception and thinking have been skewed because you’re massively depressed because of numerous major life upheavals all kinda happening at once and things aren’t quite like you’ve made them out to be in your head. But you’re miserable hiding under a bed out here not doing work that feels particularly meaningful or that you’re particularly good at. And you aren’t coming up with the funds to pay back what you owe doing it.
So you should probably just face the music and let them tell you if they hate you and are coming by to throw rocks before you just decide that for them. And if Martha Stewart can get out of prison, do her mea culpa interview tour, walk out onstage onto a brand new show with an audience packed to the rafters, joke about being in prison, and start hanging out with Snoop Dog, well, you didn’t screw up **that** badly and you should really just suck it up and get back out there. (And as a friend pointed out, if somebody owed me something and disappeared, I’d rather dislike them while knowing they’re trying to do something about it than dislike them and feel like they crawled off the face of the earth and aren’t aware/don’t care that they owe me something.)
Y’all that i owe something to? I’m aware. I’ve thought about it at least twice a week for the past 3+ years. It weighs on me very, very heavily as the biggest professional failure I’ve ever managed. And I’m not even close to having it all sorted out, all the info located, and any means by which to wave a wand and fix any of it. But I’m going to even though it might take even longer than it already has, which is a really, really long time. I can’t live under that weight anymore and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna risk getting taken out by some global supervirus and never even managed to make it out from under the bed before I croaked. Going out with a whimper is just so not my style.
But there is a lot of paperwork to go through. I have only just now climbed out from the under the bed, so to speak, to start going through said paperwork, too, so I don’t even know the extent of it and how jacked up the records are.. It’s going to take time to get all the records straight. Beyond that, it’s going to take time to generate the funds to be able to pay back everybody I need to pay back, but I’m going to make it as right as I can make it and keep apologizing ’til I do.
In the meantime, if (for some reason I cannot fathom) you still want any of the products or services you’d wanted before or anything , I’ll bend over backwards to get you whatever you need, as that will be the fastest way for me to get right with you. Otherwise, there’ll be a plan and a timeline coming and I’m so very, very sorry and embarrassed.
EDIT: you can keep up with updates on my reparation plan at the Karma Zain blog. Just follow the 2015 reparations tag to find the relevant posts.
What the heck is a Seraphin Station?
Seraphin Station is our farm / studio / workshop / home. A sketch of what we do out here will be emerging over the coming days and weeks as I populate this site and various platforms.
Are you still doing business as Karma Zain Spiritual Supplies?
I’m not sure about Karma Zain – somebody in Malaysia or something appears to have bought the domain name since it expired when I was broke and still hanging out under the bed. Plus I’d really rather not run that name up the flagpole until I can hold my head up and say I fixed my messes and made them right, even though it took me a few years.
I do still have a few things with Karma Zain branding, like some oils and incense powders that do not go bad in storage lol, and that’s the username on some old seller accounts that I’ll keep because why not, but Seraphin Station is the official deal these days. That’s the best email to contact me, too. (I didn’t check the Karmazain at gmail account for three years. Anything you send me there could get lost pretty easily! It’s total chaos in that account, really.)
Are you still making formulas/oils/etc?
A very few. As to how many more I may add back to regular rotation gradually as I can afford to buy the ingredients, I don’t know. I was carrying too much inventory for stuff I didn’t make very often before. I gotta cut down and not have so much money just sitting on shelves, and that means narrow narrow narrow.
For starters that means sticking to the basics, which for me are gonna be traditional rural Deep South bayou conjure, including work with the saints, and remembering the whole point was what made sense to use regionally and seasonally and wasn’t fancy stuff you could only get mail order. That means some of my Biblical oils with more obscure ingredients, like Song of Solomon, are probably off the menu for now.
It also means soaps and candles are probably off the menu, too. The costs of the ingredients have gone way up since I last bought them, I’m not sure I can purchase in the quantities I’d have to to be able to recover my costs yet, never mind make a profit, and anyway, when I started making them it was really damned hard to find them. You couldn’t go just anywhere and get a Road Opener soap or poured candle (not just a fixed vigil but a poured Road Opener candle.) But now you can swing a cat and hit a bunch of ’em — in fact, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a shop selling hoodoo stuff these days, seems like – so I’m not going to rush on getting them back on the virtual shelves.
And with bath crystals, if you have the oil, you can really make your own. And few people used powders all that regularly that weren’t raised with them, so they did not fly off the shelves. We’ll just see, I guess, as things unfold.
Can you make X formula still?
If it’s not listed yet at one of the shops, I probably don’t yet know or it’s in the “can’t afford to make it yet” pile. But if you have a request for something you’d like to see come back in rotation, by all means, please say so. If I’m not sure whether I can make it, I can move it to the top of the list to investigate. If I can make it and just need to order an ingredient, I can move it to the top of the list for ordering. Otherwise I might just throw darts to make up my mind what’s next, so speak up 🙂
Seraphin Station 