About
I'm Carrie. I live in Scotland, in a landscape the Cailleach is said to have shaped with her hammer, the mountains north of here still carry her name.
I work with tarot, shadow, and old Scottish stories, for women who already know what they need to do and are looking for something more useful than reassurance.
How I came to this Work
My mother died of cancer in 2006. I was the oldest daughter, so I became the strong one ~ the caretaker, the one who did not fall apart. I pushed the grief down. I did not know I was doing it.
I ran on that pattern for fourteen years. In 2020, lockdown forced me to stop. Everything I had refused to feel arrived at once.
Before my mother died, she had given me her tarot deck. My sister found the box during lockdown and passed it back to me. I started reading again ~ first the way I had always read, and then, slowly, differently. I began asking the cards what I had spent years refusing to see.
The reading pulled me further back than I meant to go. Back to childhood. Back to what I had inherited. My grandfather wrote poetry about Scotland. He wrote about Robert Burns. He directed the Scottish Civic Trust. He loved this country in a way that shaped the whole family. When I started reading Scottish folklore, I was not discovering it. I was returning to a language that had already been in my house.
The Cailleach, the Bean Nighe, the Selkie ~ these figures are not decoration for me. They are old relatives.
The work I do now grew out of this. It is not a method I was taught.
What the Work Is
The work is slow. It is not decorative. It ends when the crossing is made, not before.
It draws on three lineages: Jungian shadow psychology, Scottish folk myth, and tarot read as mirror rather than prophecy. I use all three, not because they add up to a system, but because between them they hold what one alone cannot.
Why this Folklore
The folklore I use is Scottish and specific. Not folklore-as-atmosphere. These are old stories about what women do at thresholds ~ about staying too long, about crossing anyway, about the cost of both.
The Cailleach shaped the world. She is the winter woman, the hammer-carver, the one who does not soften and does not apologise for what she made.
The Bean Nighe stands at the ford where the crossing happens. She washes the shrouds of the dying. She does not speak, and she does not stop.
The Selkie hangs her skin on the rocks and forgets, for a while, to take it back.
These figures are older than the vocabulary most contemporary spiritual writing uses. They know what they are talking about.
A Final Note
If you have found your way here, you probably already know what you are being asked to do.
I know how long a woman can stand at a threshold pretending she does not see it.