The Swallow’s Nest was literally a vision.
The Swallow’s Nest was a twinkling image in the mind of me, Katy Swallow, during the early days of that awful pandemic, in 2020. I wasn’t sure how it was going to happen, exactly, after all, stores were closed, it seemed like the world was ending, and nobody was leaving the house. I had been working at other mystical shops in the region, and another reader told me, “you’re going to have your own shop.” But shops were closed…so I continued to build my clientele, online, and what a time, to be fielding the worries and questions everyone had. What was going to happen to all of our jobs? Our families? Were we all going to die? Or only some of us…and what would the rest of us do, in the wake of that?
This time brought a further deepening of my connection to the energies of transformation, and death. Which took me deeper into the ancestral energies of my own ancestors, and the ultimate ancestor, Earth, and the absolutely cosmic realities at her core. The ones most mainstream, “spiritual” folks turn away from, through “New Age practices,” and patriarchal ceremonial practices, both religious and not. And through client readings, they kept sending me deeper, and more thoroughly, into all of these layers of time, clearing paths and helping people sort through ancestral energies.
Ironically, a lot of spiritual folks run to spiritual things as an escape, or for some kind of control. And I get it…after all, we all went through 2020, didn’t we? And a lot of us went through a lot of other things, even before that. A lot of trauma that a lot of us hadn’t unpacked yet…and a lot of ancestral trauma that we carry in our bodies, because our ancestors didn’t know how to do this, either.
For 10,000 years, amid the rise of agriculture and patriarchy, we’ve been running from our own humanity, on an ironic journey that we’ll insist is toward ourselves…but for many folks, it’s been a hard run away, an escape, from ourselves and from the planet we stand on.
Are you ready to stop running? I know I am.
Animism, the idea that spirits are everywhere, in everything, seems to have been the default setting for our way back ancestors. Humans knew that trees and water and mountains have energy and consciousness. We still do, but so many of us live in environments where we’re told it’s not true, not real, or “demonic.” And that’s why The Swallow’s Nest is here. That’s why they brought me to this place, to do this work, in this shop. To unravel the violence of all of this disconnection.
To facilitate reconnection of humans, to the rest of the spirit world.
Since 2018, I’ve done this work professionally, and for many years before, I was honing the broad collection of skills, that I was going to need, to do it. The skills I would need, to curate this shop and connect people to the messages and the spirits, to move energy and make connections.
I’m the shop reader, energy worker, and animistic spiritworker (or feralmonial magician, as I sometimes say), and herbalist, here at the Swallow’s Nest, and I do a lot of work with the weird stuff. The uncomfortable stuff. Ancestral healing. Death. Intergenerational trauma. Exorcisms. I’ve seen a lot. And what it’s taught me is that the only way to get through life without leaving a load for others to deal with later, energetically…is to deal with your own shit. Deal with your part of the ancestral cleanup. Make space for your own healing, which means looking at the hard stuff, too. We don’t do love and light, here. We do love and rage, and light and dark all the other stuff. The human stuff. The wholeness stuff. The parts of us that have been cut off or turned away from, for a long, long time.
We prepare for rebirth, for creation, for flight, by resolving and processing the past. Ancestral work isn’t about the past, it’s about the past, and the present AND the future. It’s at it’s best when it’s preparing us, to move foward.
If that’s what you’re ready for, you’re in the right place.
If you’re not ready to give up your “twin flame/divine feminine/new age/crystal hoarding” frameworks, you may be in the wrong place. I also enjoy deconstructing neo-paganism that relies on Victorian folklore, anything that emerged from Theosophical traditions, and I think patriarchal magical “orders” are hot trash, so again, if you’re not ready for that…I’m not going to be a great fit for you. But if you’re ready to get back to basics, and learn solid intuitive skills for real magic, here on Earth? OR JUST GET A REALLY BADASS READING? I’m ready for ya.
And if you just need a quick reading for life’s ups and downs and dramas? I love that, hit me up.
I also offer subscriptions for those who want resources and community for their developing spiritwork practice. The button below will tell you more about all of it.
More about my own villain origin story…
Ironically, or…maybe not…a lot of my best mystical skills are the result of having a mother who was a social worker, when I was a child.
She worked in geriatrics, so we had books about death, and dying, on the bookshelves, along with stuff about reincarnation and the Roman Catholic Bible. We liked ideas, in our house, and we talked about them, a lot, and mom taught me cool stuff, like progressive relaxation, visualization, and self-hypnosis. I had psychic and mediumship abilities as a kid, but it wasn’t loud because I wouldn’t allow it. It made me nervous. And I just want to be clear…I don’t consider this a gift. I consider it a normal human ability that everyone can develop, in varying ways and to varying degrees. Everyone’s got a thing or two that maybe comes a little bit easily to them. I just didn’t like this one, very much.
My Tools
As a teenager, I got more interested, and we had a family friend move in, who brought a lot of fun things with them. Oracle cards. Very 90s books about “the Goddess,” and “Celtic paganism,” and “shamanism,” all of it written in ways that make us roll our eyes now, and rightfully so, but we all start somewhere, and that opened some massive doors, for me. I started experimenting with journeying and frankly, scared the pants off of myself. I like to say, I was not a good reader, when I was young. There were a lot more experiences that I needed, and more emotional maturity I needed, in order to fill the role I fill now. So don’t ever feel like there’s a certain speed, you have to move at.
I started learning tarot in college, and over the years, kept at it, on and off.
As a professional reader, I’ve expanded my skills, at the request of my own ancestors, so I also now read bones, and tea leaves, as well. I also, finally, allowed my psychic senses to do what they’d been trying to do all along. It’s easy to understand why I didn’t like that part, as a child. When spirits come to you to tell you how they died, it’s not the gentlest of introductions. But as an adult, I found it deeply interesting, and no longer scary. I immersed.
My Path
The final nail got kicked in on this journey of mine, several years ago now, after a traumatic experience. In reiki practice, folks talk about “attunement” as the experience which clears your internal energetic obstacles out of the way, and increases your ability to channel healing energy and psychic data.
That traumatic experience acted as an attunement, turning up the volume on my pre-existing abilities and their relationship with all the skills I’d cultivated. I started as a professional reader in 2018, and have been immersed in this work, full time, ever since. But it took me what checks watch 30 years to get there?
Never doubt your journey, just keep at it.
As an astrologer said to me, a while back, “oh, I see you were incubating for 23 years.” Yeah. Something like that. And now I’m here…and I love what I do.