The Fairy Ring: On crisis, collapse, and what grows in the dark

There is a moment, or many moments, that lead you to the break.

The kind of break that doesn’t announce itself. It just arrives. And suddenly you are on the other side of a threshold you didn’t know you were crossing.

I’ve been in dark seasons before. I know what it is to move through grief, through loss, through the slow erosion of things you thought were solid. But January 2026 was different. Something in the pressure cracked me open in a direction I hadn’t gone before. 

But before January, there was 2025.

Two cats transitioned. Animals who had been family, who had known our home the way only animals do — with their whole bodies, without condition. Their absence left something tender in the house that never quite closed.

Then two family members crossed over. One in her nineties. One in their seventies. The kind of deaths that come with their own quiet weight…expected, in some ways, and still not.

And underneath all of it, the financial ground kept shifting. My husband lost his job three times in a single year. Business closures. Restructuring. Layoffs. Each time we found our footing, something else moved. Several of my marketing clients, facing their own hard realities, chose not to renew. I understood. And still… month by month, we were flying through savings, through resources, through the reserves you don’t realize you’ve been counting on until they’re gone.

It was the kind of year that doesn’t announce its difficulty all at once. It just keeps arriving.

And then January came.

Within two weeks: my husband’s job, again. A close friend — forty-four years old — died suddenly. Another friend, forty-three, diagnosed with breast cancer. My aunt, in a tragic accident, needing lifesaving surgeries. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, my own body began to give way.

Concussion symptoms. PTSD. My right foot in so much pain I could barely stand, let alone walk. And the crying… up to two hours a day, for months. Uncontrollable, unstoppable, no longer something I could manage or contain. I had to tell my marketing clients: I may burst into spontaneous tears. I’m sorry. It’s not in my hands anymore.

My nervous system had simply crashed.

There is a particular kind of humbling in that. When the body stops performing okayness. When the grief stops waiting for a convenient time.

In tarot, the High Priestess sits between two pillars. One dark, one light. With a veil behind her. She doesn’t explain herself. She doesn’t move to resolve the tension. She simply holds it. The complexity. The not-yet-knowing. The both-and.

In the Midnight Magic deck, she appears inside the fairy ring.

It’s the ring itself that draws me, that circle of mushrooms rising from the ground, ancient and unhurried, marking the place where the veil thins. A portal. That particular kind of space where the ordinary rules loosen, where something other than logic begins to move, where anything — truly anything — becomes possible.

She doesn’t stand outside it and observe.

She sits inside it.

What I discovered, somewhere in the wreckage of those weeks, was that crisis at this depth has a strange mercy to it.

When everything is falling away… and I mean everything, the financial scaffolding, the health, the sense of forward motion, the belief that you can hold it together, something underneath begins to reveal itself. The things you thought were load-bearing turn out to have been decoration. And what remains, when all of that clears, is something startlingly simple.

Just you. The very bottom of you.

The years before this weren’t me becoming her. They were me clearing everything that wasn’t her. So she could finally stand in her own light.

On the other side of that collapse, something unfamiliar arrived.

A particular way of moving through the world. A confidence that didn’t announce itself or perform. It felt new, and yet — underneath the newness — it felt like the oldest thing. Like something I’d known before the world put its weight on me. Before I learned to doubt the signals. Before I started editing myself before I even spoke.

Childhood, almost. That specific clarity before the layers.

My intuition came back online with a precision I hadn’t felt in years. And with it, a knowing I could no longer argue with: it was time to bring my spiritual gifts back into the world. Publicly. Without apology.

The High Priestess doesn’t emerge from the fairy ring unchanged.

That’s not how portals work.

I’m not sharing this so you know how much I’ve suffered.

I’m sharing it because I’ve learned, more than once now, but never quite like this… that something extraordinary lives on the other side of a crisis you cannot manage your way through. Something that only arrives when you’ve run out of ways to hold it together.

When you are that broken open, so much of what you thought mattered simply falls away. And what’s left is so unapologetically, unmistakably you that it almost makes you laugh.

Almost.

You emerge.

Not fixed. Not finished.

Just rooted. Finally. In something that was always yours.

Take what resonates. Leave the rest.

With so much love,

Natalie

And if you too are navigating challenging spaces and want to dive into your own knowing and clarity, let’s connect. My books are open. 

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