My brain has been racing 1000 miles an hour. It is actually comical the variety of thoughts that can pass through my head in rapid sequence. It will go from: oh shit authoritarianism is upon us, to hmm I need to paint my nails, to death is inevitable and life is chaos, to I’m excited about the progress on my latest cross stitch. Being sentient is a trip.
Anyways…we are doing tarot from the heart today, with the Wild Unknown. I’ve done this many times but in case you are unfamiliar: tarot from the heart is an approach introduced by Mary K Greer. You start by grounding yourself and stating where you are (as I did above). You state an intention for your tarot session. Mine today is simply to receive a few cards that may help myself, or you, find some reprieve from our busy minds. Then, you pull a card and express whatever it brings up for you, and repeat until you feel the session is complete.
First we have the Six of Wands reversed. The butterfly yearns to transcend the muddled darkness below. But the reversal shows the difficulty in this. Martha Beck has an affirmation I often turn to: “I am meant to live in peace.” I believe this, yet I also find it so elusive. How to live in peace when everything around us seems to transpire to pull us into conflict?
Maybe it does start with reminding yourself that you are meant to live in peace. And extending that same belief to those around you. We are all meant to live in peace. Not just those of us with the right political affiliation or tax bracket or skin color. At the risk of sounding like John Lennon, imagine if we all believed that we were all meant to live in peace? Is it possible? Probably not. But is it something to keep believing despite all odds? I think maybe so.
I drew another card and it is a really fun one just kidding it is the Five of Cups.
Instead of moving up into the light, the horse hangs their head into the darkness. You can’t force levity, yet you also can’t dwell in despair. Maybe true transcendence is a combination of these two cards. You go down, down, down into the shadows. And then you go up, up, up into freedom. And the cycle repeats. You can’t have one without the others.
Living in peace does not mean ignoring all the very real horrors in this timeline. Indeed, one of the few life lessons I’ve managed to learn in this lifetime is that accepting sadness is completely necessary if you want to experience any real joy. Ignoring suffering isn’t it. Neither is spiritual bypassing (“everything happens for a reason”). Sometimes you just have to be able to acknowledge: wow. What’s happening is really sad and fucked up.
Living in peace is not the same thing as living in bliss or ignorance. Feeling the full weight of sadness is part of a peaceful existence. But how to feel that sadness without succumbing totally to despair or nihilism? That’s an ongoing journey, for me at least.
The Daughter of Swords appears in reverse.
The imagery here reminds me of the Hanged One. Perhaps she asks us to surrender attachment to our thoughts. Sometimes it is necessary to wield your opinions with brute strength. But there can also be value in holding your opinions lightly. An opinion is not an identity. Becoming defined by an ideology can be really dangerous and fucked up, actually.
Same goes for defining others by their perceived ideologies. Every time a person commits an atrocity people are falling all over themselves to establish what that person’s ideology was and therefore anyone holding a similar ideology is also to blame. And in a way, this can be important. Understanding how beliefs spread and the real world impact of those beliefs is valuable.
But when you get into the murkiness of it, many people who commit atrocities have unclear and inconsistent ideologies. And even when a person very clearly does fit into an explicit political or religious affiliation this does not mean anyone else associated with that ideology is also dangerous.
Sigh. I’m getting in over my head here, which is exactly what the reversed Daughter of Swords warns me against. So take that worth a grain of salt, and I’ll leave it there.
I’ll turn to one more card and here is the Two of Swords.
Rachel Pollack writes “the swords remain ready to strike anyone who tries to come close. They represent anger and fear creating a precarious balance, the one wants to strike out, the other wants to hide, and so the person remains tensed between them.” Damn! Raise your hand if you’ve ever personally been stuck between the urge to strike out and the urge to hide.
But in the imagery of the Wild Unknown, the eclipse in the background feels like a secret third thing. Neither lashing out nor hiding feels like living in peace. Can we envision possibilities for ourselves beyond these two default reactions? It’s tricky but we can do it, I think.
Thanks for being here and godspeed my friend.