Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ruth Svelmoe. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Ruth, appreciate you joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
I’ve had many small moments that have led me to the path I’m on now. I remember asking for a journal for my 8th birthday because I wanted to start writing my autobiography. I love that I knew I had a story to tell even back then. I grew up in a very strict, fundamentalist evangelical community. It was the 80s, and my parents weren’t given many tools to deal with their own pain and so their trauma trickled down the way capitalism never did. Approximately zero of us were given the tools we needed to thrive and my little dramatic self saw all this and thought, “Ooooo, this would make a good Lifetime movie!”
In my late 20s (yes, it was my Saturn return, for my fellow astrology nerds), I had hit a bit of a rough spot – I’d been working in the service industry and was finding it exhausting, gone through a gnarly breakup and the loss of a family member, I’d been staying with friends while I pinched pennies to be able to afford to move in New York, and all that on top of deconstructing my evangelical upbringing. I was processing a lot of grief and anger and felt stuck in the ways that I had been victimized – first in personal ways, and then, by a society that doesn’t seem to much value our humanity. I was in therapy for Complex PTSD, but I felt that even though I cognitively understood my trauma, I could not emotionally get past it.
When it came to spirituality, I couldn’t even begin to entertain new belief systems for about 5 years after finally leaving the church at 24. In lieu of calling myself atheist or agnostic, I called myself an apatheticist because I was tired of caring so much. I was burnt out from the dogmatism of fundamentalist Christianity but when shit hit the fan, I felt incredibly alone and ungrounded. I realized that it didn’t matter so much if I believed in something, or even what I believed in, but that I simply needed a spiritual practice to help connect me to something outside of myself.
Around this time, a friend gave me a tarot deck, and I started to do readings for myself as an introspective practice. This quickly turned into reading for friends and experimenting with connecting my intuition to theirs as we tried to interpret the symbolism of the cards. I started to get roped into readings for strangers at bars, and that’s when the power of holding space for someone else with a divinatory tool really started to impress me. It is deeply human to want our experiences to be honored as valid and important by the people around us, but when we feel seen and valued by something that seems like complete chance? That fills us with a sense of magic and wonder and connection. We often see the symbiosis and equilibrium that exists in nature and assume we are somehow outside of it. But when I pull a tarot card that perfectly connects to someone’s situation, it’s a welcome reminder that we are in constant collaboration with nature. It’s the nature of coloniality to make us feel deeply isolated, but we are social animals! We need community. We are even connected to the rocks and the islands, Simon and Garfunkel be damned.
So clearly, I was falling in love with this magical way of connecting with people. I had found a way to use my therapeutic skills from all my years of studying counseling and working in social services that engaged my curiosity and was more fulfilling than a lot of the jobs I had been working at. I started to learn how to pay more attention to the world around me and trust my intuition. It didn’t hurt that I had started somatic therapy as well, which was bringing healing to my physical and emotional body. I moved from merely understanding my trauma to actually rewiring my physiological responses to triggering events (for us C-PTSD babes, the triggers are everywhere. IYKYK).
In late 2019, a friend of mine was throwing a party for her nearest and dearest with an astrologer and I set up a little space to do readings for folks throughout the night. I didn’t even realize that I’d been reading for about 5 hours because I was having such a blast. At the end of the night, I knew that it was time for me to start offering readings professionally. So when 2020 happened, I was ready to hit the ground running and started to offer personal readings over Zoom as well as readings for the collective on social media.
I’ve been incorporating my writing the whole time and have a few projects in the works that I’m very excited to bring to the public! Stay tuned to my Instagram. Overall it’s been a journey of incorporation – instead of believing that I was on the “wrong” path before, I now understand that my studies and experience in social work, religion, and the service industry are all able to come together to inform my tarot, astrology, and writing practices.
Ruth, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I currently offer an array of tarot and astrology readings over Zoom or in person in the NYC area, for individual, group, and event readings. With my studies in social work and counseling, I bring a trauma-informed perspective to folks from all walks of life. Coming from the world of fundamentalist evangelicalism, I welcome folks’ hesitance and skepticism around spiritual divination practices. And thanks to many years in the bar and restaurant industry, my services are infused with the wisdom of the working class, which is to say, I keep it real.
It’s important for me to connect the spiritual to the tangible, and not overemphasize the concepts that inform our physical existence. My mother used to say, “don’t be so heavenly-minded that you are of no earthly good.” And throughout many spiritual traditions, the mantra, “as above, so below,” reminds us that spiritual work is simply creating the kind of world you want to see in the physical realm. Much of my work is about helping folks connect to their deeper self so that they can move through the world with a sense of purpose, belonging, and hope.
Folks come to me with all sorts of situations – from transitions in their career or living situation, to navigating their love life, to processing existential dread, and fairly often I read for people who are simply curious about the world of “woo.”
As I’ve adjusted to life post-quarantine, I have taken a bit of a social media hiatus for some time, but I am looking forward to relaunching some of the readings for the collective that I used to do. My dear friend Sanyelle Sandusky and I have a podcast called Medusa’s Circle where we offer readings for the collective as well as musings on everything from the nature of suffering to the brilliance of the Addams Family. Once upon a time, we were roommates at a conservative Bible college in Chicago worried about getting caught sneaking in past curfew, and as each of us slowly found ourselves on the path of deconversion and deconstruction of our faith, we were able to grow into our full creative, witchy selves. Along with the podcast, we have hosted many rituals, spellcastings, and workshops, including an Unbaptism Ritual and Workshop that we host every year on Easter for our fellow ex-vangelicals (recordings are available if you are unable to make it!).
Follow me on Instagram or check out my website for more updates about events, workshops and writings, including a Tarot Cocktail Book!
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I want to help folks find the kind of healing that opens them up to a life of pleasure and wonder and joy. I want to get us away from the idea of linear growth, as if there is some level of perfection or even enlightenment that we are all headed towards. Instead I want to help people remember and realize who they really are with love and compassion for the ways that they’ve abandoned themselves. I mean, what is imposter syndrome other than believing that we are not good enough for the roles society expects us to fulfill? We live in a world of abundance and biodiversity, and I want us to see ourselves as an important and beautiful part of the whole. I’m here to help navigate the underworld of our shadow selves, subconscious, and hereditary trauma in order to genuinely experience that kind of joy.
The healing journey that I’m on compels me to bring others along for the ride. I know we don’t heal from the harmful effects of coloniality alone. I think the best chance we have at surviving the difficult transitions our society is going through is by working together.
My work often resonates with folks who feel that society is pretty dysfunctional and desperately needs change. I offer private readings as well as communal workshops and rituals in order to create spaces that help us navigate those changes on both the individual and community level. Sometimes we need that one-on-one reading, where we are held and seen and validated in an intimate way. Other times, we need to get together and share a primal scream in the wilderness. I believe our healing must happen both in quiet solitude and in our social spaces.
Autumn and adrienne maree brown talk about “learning from the apocalypse with grace, rigor, and curiosity” on their podcast called How to Survive the End of the World. My mission is first and foremost, to empower others to honestly acknowledge the gravity of our situation – the absolute wreck that colonialism has havoced on the world. Only when we are brave enough to admit that there is a problem can we properly diagnose a solution. Some folks are convinced it’s socialism or anarchism or a return to the simple life and all I know is that if we insist on theoretical purity before moving forward, we won’t accomplish much. No one knows the perfect solution to our problems, and I would argue that it’s impossible to have only one way that works for everyone.
So I’m carefully moving forward as a healer and a seer and learning how to be along the way. So far, it’s a lot of building community and trust and strengthening our abilities to cope with life’s curveballs. I know a lot of folks feel hopeless about the state of the world, but I think the ways we have continually insisted on finding love and beauty despite the oppression and subservience that so many of us face is absolutely beautiful. Humans are damn cute, and at the very least, I want to remind us of that.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
Folks who know me know that I constantly refer to Adrienne Maree Brown’s book Emergent Strategy. There are many wonderful insights from her that I could talk about, but when it comes to how I manage my business, I often think of one of her recommendations for how we shape change – to move at the speed of trust.
I have learned to trust the timing of my life and that carries over into business as well. Capitalism tells me that my business needs to be constantly growing bigger and better, because dominance of a market is the only way to experience success. But when I look to the planet and see how deeply interconnected everything is, how reliant nature is on cycles of life and death, how the moon waxes and wanes, how the mushroom feeds the tree growth and the trees feed the mushrooms – that is the way of the world, not brutal dominance and wage slavery.
I want to be a part of that kind of abundance, where there is enough for everyone. Where we hold boundaries and honor our needs with respect to the boundaries and needs of others. This looks like a different business model for sure. One where I can offer sliding scales to folks who need it, and ask that folks consider paying above my prices when they have excess funds. Reciprocity takes trust, and I know that while I am learning to trust the timing of my life, others are learning to trust me as a spiritual aide. I welcome folks who are wary about the validity of tarot or astrology, because I know that my services will reach who they are meant to reach, regardless of anyone’s level of belief.
Late last year, I felt that I had been pushing to make my business work in ways that weren’t sustainable and the message from my guides was clear: take a break. I spent most of 2023 not advertising and not pursuing connections. Under a system like capitalism, our value is wrapped up in our productivity – time is money, right? So taking this time of rest and recuperation would be deemed a “waste.” But if I’m working with the cycles of nature, I’m paying attention to what my emotional and physical body is telling me as well as what the planetary bodies are whispering to me. As the summer comes to a close, I am finding myself rested and ready to begin parts of my creative work that I haven’t had energy for in a long time. I have a stack of connections I’ve made over the years that I am ready to pursue, and I trust that the ones that will resonate with what I’m doing will work out.
So, much thanks to Adrienne Maree Brown, because the idea of moving at the speed of trust has allowed me to slow down enough to know when it’s time to push the gas or hit the brakes. I’m excited to get back on the road with y’all!
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meatsparkles/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SvelmoTarot
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruth-svelmoe-69b071136/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@ruthandsanyellemedusa4264?si=C6soWS1kYNwuVQGK
- Other: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/medusas-circle/id1573322562
Image Credits
Nicolette deLeon Ernst