Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

Orkney has always been a land of omens, where the wind whispers truths few dare to listen to. It is a place where tides do not simply rise and fall, they call and pull, dragging the past from its shallow graves and placing it at your feet. But a sage will learn the art of alchemy over time.

“ We all have experiences that seemly, seem to break us or bring us to a breaking point, when with intention people hurt us. When we are wronged or misunderstood for the wrong reasons.”  

When the weight of hurt is delivered with intent, you are left with nothing but the weight of judgment and a feeling of loss to what has been stolen from you.

“My sanity, my safety, my place in the world, I lost it all to a storm I did not summon, but one I was forced to weather. Homelessness stripped me of illusions. Grief gutted me, leaving nothing but hollow ribs where dreams once lived.”

When we are wronged, misunderstood, or cast aside for reasons that have nothing to do with truth, these wounds carve deep, not only because of what was done but because of what we have lost within ourselves.

The greatest loss is not of relationships or material things but of the self we can never return to, the person we once were. That version of us becomes a ghost, a space in time, unreachable no matter how fiercely we long for their return. And so, grief settles in not just for what was done but for who we were before it happened.

So I called upon my dear friend, whose wisdom resembles mine. She looked upon my grief and found it time to talk to the council of cards. It did not take a magician to read this fool’s journey.

Justice is standing at the heart of this storm, sword in hand, weighing the past and the present.

“She did not shield me. She did not strike down those who sought to break me. Justice is not swift, nor is she merciful. She is the great mirror, reflecting all that is.”

Justice is not vengeance, nor is it the immediate rebalancing of pain. It is the mirror reflecting all truths, not just the ones we want to see. It is karma unfolding at its own pace, delivering lessons not in punishment but in understanding. The world may never recognise the full weight of what was taken, but Justice does not deal with the world’s perception, it works in the unseen, an understanding deep within. It reminds me that while I cannot undo what was done, I can decide what I do with it. The power to move forward is mine, even if the past lingers like a lively shadow.

I have hung from the tree of The Hanged Man, suspended between what was and what will be, trapped in a liminal space where surrender was my only choice, I hung in the limbo of uncertainty. I have seen the world from that upside-down place, where nothing made sense, and everything was laid bare.

“When all else is lost, the only choice left is to let go. So I did. I let go of needing answers, let go of the past ever making sense. I turned my perspective upside down, searching for meaning in the madness.”

There, I learned that waiting is not wasted time, sometimes, it is the cocoon before transformation.

The final card turned. Death. Not an end, but a transformation.

Not in the way the world fears it, not as an ending, but as a severing of what no longer serves me. Death is the closing of a book whose pages can no longer be rewritten. It is the stripping away of old illusions, the burning of bridges to places I was never meant to return to. It is terrifying, but it is necessary.

For after Death, there is space. A vast, open sky waiting for me to decide what I will build beneath it.

We are an evolutionary miracle, capable of holding contradictions within us: anger and love, sorrow and joy, the desire for retribution and the yearning for peace. We are the storm and the stillness. We are the breaking and the healing. But healing cannot be rushed. It is a slow process that needs to be respected, a journey requiring patience, where compassion must be given room to bloom.

Forgiveness is not forgetting, nor is it absolution. It is a release, a silent acknowledgement that we will no longer allow the past to hold the pen that writes our future. It is a return to ourselves, but not to who we were. That person is gone, and we must choose who we will become in their absence.

Perception is the artist of the mind, painting the world of our choosing. Like the alchemist who turned the lead of ordinary suffering into gold, we can transform. Not by pretending the darkness was never there but by proving that light can still be found even in the shadow.

©️Elke T.B. Stevens